Emergent property

Just watched the first part of Atom - Clash of the Titans on BBC4

Do atoms make the world? Some believe that because all things are made of atoms then all things can be explained by atoms.

As mentioned in this blog before, if phenomena can be replaced by atoms then what are the atoms explaining but themselves, which is nothing; this is the SRH. The very motive to explain something is born of the awareness that what we are witnessing has a cause which we are not witnessing and which needs investigation. Thus at the start we know that the explanation and the phenomenon are different; to then go and research the cause of this difference is self defeating! "Emergent properties" are presumed by experimental science itself so it cannot explain them. Phenomena are facts that are irreducible. Another way to argue that is: if it were possible to replace phenomena with explanations then why not start with the explanations in the first place! Why not start with atoms? Atoms are thoughts, features of our sixth sense (if you take the Eastern system), and the other phenomena are features of our other senses. Why put one sense above another?

Thus we have 2 paradigms in science: that of parts which interact, and the whole itself. It is fashionable in science to be reductionist (like it seems universally the guys at M.I.T.) and to seek explanation of the "human world" by referring to mechanisms defined by interacting parts. It is not that there is not a correspondence, that is what there is: theirs is the job of translation from one language (human language) into another language (maths) not the replacement of one "reality" with a more truthful "reality". To say that a human is actually the result of interacting neurons in some kind of mechanism, no matter how you twist through Hofstadter strange loops, is to say that the theory is just software of that mechanism. The stronger we make the claims of the theory the weaker me make the theory! This is the inception of the SRH that a theory can't make claims about itself (even obliquely) like this.

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Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. I had this explained in a much simpler fashion than the program: to measure anything we use photons which interact with their object and so change it. Thus measurement changes the situation. The uncertainty principle gives exact quantification of the uncertainty: to work out the momentum (combined mass and direction of speed) we must change the position and vice versa. Philosophically it is interesting that this theory arises out of a model which is Newtonian and exact, presupposing that things have exact position and momentum (just as Newton, Rutherford and Einstein), so the theory is not limited in its assumptions but proves limitation if you accept those assumptions... Hofstadter notes this also (but offer no explanation) that when theories speak of themselves they limit themselves (this is what SRH is trying to explain). If you accept Nietzschian thinking then actually Heisenberg's theory doesn't do away with exact simultaneous Position and Momentum because you need to assume them to produce the theory! All he has done is show a contradition in these assumptions, but we are already, ironically, within the old familiar hermaneutic circle/paradigm!

I wonder however if SRH is applicable here. Let us create a phrase such as "Quantum World" which would be the whole paradigm of bizarre phenomena, descriptions, names and explanations that go together to make this ultra-minature world... but we won't try and rank the theory side by side with the macroscropic theories on some measuring scale as in "one theory about the small and one theory about the big" because which theory is going to provide us with the meauring scale! Is the measurement a result of the micro or macro theories? Paradigms can't be ranked any more than languages can be ranked (doesn't that apply to my multiculturalism argument?) because we have no meta-language with which to rank all languages... and if we did how would it rank itself (Russel Paradox)?

So taking the "Quantum World" idea we can say of Heisenberg's Theory that it is the result of considering what happens when the Quantum World tries to measure the Quantum World... now that runs up against the SRH. What happens when the Macro World tries to measure the Macro World? ok shall return to this have something else to write first...