Relation to the world· Nature and the livingdifficulty
Wholes and parts
Can a whole be fully explained by its parts, or does it have irreducible properties?
Is understanding always a matter of breaking things into simpler elements, or do some realities, life, mind, have properties that vanish the moment we take them apart? If everything reduces to its parts, physics may one day explain it all; if wholes are irreducible, biology and psychology study something real that the sciences of the small miss. To take a position is to say how far explanation from below can reach.
Reductionism
3Every complex phenomenon is explained, in the final analysis, by its elementary constituents and their interactions: there are only atoms and void. To explain is to break things down to their simplest elements.
Explore this position →Lucretiusexplicit
Sensible qualities are not primary: colour, heat, taste, even life and sensation, arise from the arrangement, motion and collisions of atoms that themselves have neither colour nor heat. The whole therefore adds nothing to its parts: it is only atoms variously disposed, and it is their configuration that explains the world's variety. This bottom-up explanation, in which the higher reduces entirely to the meeting of the smallest, is a that continues the line of .
On the Nature of Things, II, 730-864 (atoms are colourless; colour arises from their arrangement) · On the Nature of Things, II, 865-990 (the sentient arises from the non-sentient)
Descartesexplicit
The living body, the human body included, is fully explained as a machine: circulation, digestion, and the motion of the limbs reduce to the sole laws of shape and motion, with no superadded vital principle required. Life is reduced to mechanism, the soul belonging to another order entirely.
Discourse on Method, V · Treatise on Man
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Epicureanisminferable
Since everything, the soul and thought included, is but an aggregate of atoms and void, Epicureanism tends toward reductionism: the properties of compounds are explained by the shape, size and motion of their constituents. Lucretius nonetheless grants assemblages secondary qualities, which tempers the reductionism without abandoning it, hence a marked but not extreme position.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, book III (the atomic soul) · Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus, 68-71
Emergentism
5The whole is more than the sum of its parts: organization gives rise to new properties, such as life or thought, that no analysis of isolated components can predict. Complexity demands a way of thinking attentive to relations and levels.
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Aristotleinferable
The soul is defined as the form of an organized body, its first actuality, neither a separable substance nor a mere aggregate of matter. Living beings and their functions thus do not reduce to their components: an emergentist reading of is warranted.
On the Soul (De Anima), II.1 (412a-b)
Charles Sanders Peirceinferable
, the principle of continuity, commands in Peirce a refusal of sharp breaks and holds the continuous to be primary: between matter and mind, between the levels of the real, there are transitions, not jumps. Nature evolves by forming habits that bring forth new orders, irreducible to the mechanics of their elements. Against atomist reductionism, this is a metaphysics of emergence and growth, where the whole is more than the sum of parts that are, besides, never truly separate.
The Law of Mind (1892)
Romanticisminferable
The whole precedes and overflows its parts: an organism, a poem, a people are not the sum of juxtaposed elements but a living unity from which each member draws its meaning. Against the analysis that decomposes and the mechanism that reduces, Romanticism thinks in organic totalities, where the higher is never explained by the lower.
Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature · Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
Aristotelianisminferable
The soul is defined as the , or first actuality, of the organized living body: a living thing is not reducible to its material parts, for it is its form that unifies it and makes it what it is. The whole is thus prior in nature to its parts, aligning Aristotelianism with a kind of emergentism avant la lettre.
Aristotle, On the Soul, II, 1 · Aristotle, Parts of Animals, I, 1
Leibnizinferable
For Leibniz, perception cannot be explained by mechanics: were one to enter a thinking machine enlarged like a mill, one would find only parts pushing one another, never anything to account for a perception. The life of the soul is thus not reducible to the motions of bodies; it belongs to an order of its own (final causes) harmonized with the mechanical, which leans to the emergentist side.
Monadology, §17 (the mill argument)
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Related problems to broaden toward other axes
- Descriptive Thought experimentDoes the world's order have an author?
Do the order, complexity, and fine tuning of the world call for an author, or can they arise from blind processes such as natural selection?
the order of the worldExistence of God - DescriptiveDoes the substrate matter?
If the exact organization of your brain were reproduced by a whole people passing messages, would that crowd really think, or do only certain materials yield a mind?
the substrate of thoughtCan a machine think
Supposing there were a machine whose structure made it think... on visiting it one would find only parts pushing one another, and never anything to explain a perception.Leibniz · Monadology, §17