by glenstein | 2025-12-15 17:00:02+00:00
Thank you for posting this, as I find it to be a very stimulating article on account of how maddening I believe the core argument is (but that's by some metrics a sign of a great article or at least a great hn post). Right off the bat, the charge of "hubris" in physics feels like a cheap shot playing on an equivocation of what "fundamental" means. It can mean "look at what I study, it's more important than what you study!" But I think the charitable reading of physics as "fundamental" is not that it's self absorbed hubris but that it's, specifically, attempting to discover our universe's most basic ingredients whatever they may be. Reductionism isn't a lessening of significance of living creatures, unless, I think, you have a challenged imagination. This was the central point of Darwin's Dangerous Idea which if it were up to me would be required reading.

I think the claim that modern physics has not "born significant fruit" is ridiculous, we're practically in a golden age of explosively exciting research on holography, borne from the toolkit of string theory and now emerging as the new most promising direction for a possible conceptual revolution of spacetime. That's a grab people in the street and shake them "it's happening" level of exciting! I will keep banging the drum that holography is in need of a Brian Greene style public ambassador, it's now the BFD that string theory used to be.

>The end goal of reductionism was to explain everything in the universe as the result of particles and their interactions. Complexity, by contrast, recognizes that once lots of particles come together to produce macroscopic things—such as organisms—knowing everything about particles isn’t enough to understand reality

I find this to be mind bogglingly nonsensical and disappointing, and a reminder that for a much maligned discipline, we still badly need good philosophy and good philosophers. Complexity research is built on the infrastructure of physics and reductionism is fully compatible with understanding systems in terms of dynamic interactions. Those are an explanatory layer rather than a displacement of the basic physical elements making up systems. The problem, I think, is not that reductionism doesn't contain the possibility of conceptual infrastructure necessary to understand complexity, it's that it contains that and much besides. It's like the Library of Babel, effectively.

Perhaps the strongest warning sign here is how closely it mirrors arguments for intelligent design, which serves, I think, as a helpful museum of philosophical errors one can try to exploit to insert pseudoscience, and therefore as cautionary about the conceptual infrastructure from which "more is different" borrows.

There are philosophically consistent and clear eyed characterizations of the problem out there, using such language as emergentism and supervenience, that are at least alert to the fact that they have to specify what exactly the "more" is and how exactly it's "different" in ways that get around the causal closure principle. But the most frustrating errors in this space involve mistaking processes, behavioral dynamics, or certain thresholds of conceptual abstraction for refutations of reductionism as an account of causation. It's the same mistake critics of AI made in insisting that the complex logic of human grammar was impossible in principle to model on symbol manipulation because minds have magical ephemeral concepts in them like "insight", or "tacit knowledge". I would say no, it's not that, its an inadvertent confession of a limited imagination not appreciating how small systems based on simple elements can achieve staggering complexity, which reflects more reference and respect for their complexity than insisting they run into hard limits.