for - paradigms - science - gene centrism - critique - reductionism - behaviorists

paradigms - science - gene centrism - critique - reductionism - behaviorists - One of the problems of the behaviorists back in the 1960s and so on was that - to some extent they unrooted organisms from their environment and - put them into boxes and tested how they behaved under these extraordinary artificial circumstances - You you cannot understand intelligence by doing that because - intelligence is how we respond to the niche that we're involved in - People are increasingly aware of just how extraordinarily intelligent in the moment organisms are the decision making process even of the tiniest organisms

comment - see Michael Levin and problem solving spaces of organisms at different scales

for - individual / collective gestalt - gene centrism - paradigm shift - adjacency - mistake of 20th century biology - reductionism - separating organism from environment - individual / collective gestalt, individual / environment gestalt - quote - mistake of 20th century biology - Ray Noble - key insight - mistake of 20th century biology- Ray Noble

quote - mistake of 20th century biology - Ray Noble - (see below)

• I think one of the other mistakes that have been made in biology of the 20th century
  • was to treat organisms as if they existed within an environment that was sort of like some nebulous box as it were
  • and you could study the organism by taking it out
  • and you study it in isolation
• It's the beginning of reductionism in a sense because
  • you taken it away from the environment but the organism has an intimate relationship with the environment
• It's feeding both
  • to the environment and
  • from the environment
• What is that environment?
  • That environment in large part is
    • other organisms of the same species but
    • other organisms of different species
• and it's in a continuous bubble of change
• It's like a cauldron of change
• So the big question for life is
  • how do you maintain yourself in this cauldron of change?
• You cannot do it by standing still
• You have to respond to it
  • so it's not surprising therefore that you find that you know organisms have mechanisms for responding to those changes

adjacency - mistake of 20th century biology - between - reductionism - separating organism from environment - individual / collective gestalt, - individual / environment gestalt - adjacency relationship - The mistake that 20th century biology has made is in - ascribing too much power to the gene, and - minimizing the role of epigenetics - Focusing the majority of attention and resources on the genes of the organism, and - defocusing attention on the organisms (epigenetic) interactions with the environment, including both - biotic elements and - abiotic elements - It's not the case that the genes are the major determinant factor and the epigenetics play a minor role - It IS the case that epigenetics play an equally important role in transmitting and assimilating features into the genome - The individual organism is intertwingled with its environment and with other living organisms - The individual / collective gestalt and the individual / environment gestalt is the appropriate unit of study

for - quote - reductionism has failed - Denis Noble

• for: Moloch, definition, definition - Moloch, trancontextual decontextualised reductionism, Nora Bateson

• comment

  • those is similar to Nora Bateson's description of decontextualised reductionism
    • https://hyp.is/vS3QOm49Ee69E8e7ZWchKg/docdrop.org/video/j44AVKgdORs/

• for: reductionism, emptiness, Nora Bateson, complexity, reductionism - Nora Bateson, adjacency, adjacency - reductionism - emptiness

• quote -“If you can’t read or understand the ‘peer-reviewed science’ then you are open to being intimidated into fearful silence by those who can, or claim they can. And those people - drawn, as all green ‘thought leaders’ are, from the upper strata of society - will bring with them a worldview which treats the mass of humanity like so many cattle to be herded into the sustainable, zero-carbon pen.”

• comment

  • The problem can be extrapolated into language itself
  • Any word is just an abstraction and oversimplifies a complex reality
  • if we generalize this argument, it leads to the general claim that
    • abstraction leads to harmful conclusions as well

• Fixating on only the easily quantifiable
• at the expense of a planet full of things
• that are inherently resistant to reductionistic measurements
• is the same industrialized, monoculture thinking
• that got us into this climate crisis in the first place.

• Title
  • What gets measured, gets…manipulated.
• Subtitle
  • The impossible business of quantifying a planet resistant to quantification.
• Author
  • Meg Chatham

If you use LLMs to improve your mediocre writing it will help. If you use it to outsource too much of your own cognitive work it will get you the bland SEO texts the LLMs were trained on and the result will be more mediocre. Greedy reductionism will get punished.

Algogens are disconnected from reality. And, seems a key point, our own cognition and relation to reality is not just through language (and by extension not just through the language center in our brain): spatial awareness, embodiment, senses, time awareness are all not language. It is overly reductionist to treat intelligence or even humanity as language only.

Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of other simpler or more fundamental phenomena.[1]

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy suggests that reductionism is "one of the most used and abused terms in the philosophical lexicon" and suggests a three part division:[2]

Ontological reductionism: a belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of parts. Methodological reductionism: the scientific attempt to provide explanation in terms of ever smaller entities. Theory reductionism: the suggestion that a newer theory does not replace or absorb an older one, but reduces it to more basic terms. Theory reduction itself is divisible into three parts: translation, derivation and explanation.[3] Reductionism can be applied to any phenomenon, including objects, explanations, theories, and meanings.[3][4][5]

For the sciences, application of methodological reductionism attempts explanation of entire systems in terms of their individual, constituent parts and their interactions. For example, the temperature of a gas is reduced to nothing beyond the average kinetic energy of its molecules in motion. Thomas Nagel speaks of 'psychophysical reductionism' (the attempted reduction of psychological phenomena to physics and chemistry), as do others and 'physico-chemical reductionism' (the attempted reduction of biology to physics and chemistry), again as do others.[6] In a very simplified and sometimes contested form, such reductionism is said to imply that a system is nothing but the sum of its parts.[4][7] However, a more nuanced opinion is that a system is composed entirely of its parts, but the system will have features that none of the parts have (which, in essence is the basis of emergentism).[8] "The point of mechanistic explanations is usually showing how the higher level features arise from the parts."[7]

Other definitions are used by other authors. For example, what John Polkinghorne terms 'conceptual' or 'epistemological' reductionism[4] is the definition provided by Simon Blackburn[9] and by Jaegwon Kim:[10] that form of reductionism concerning a program of replacing the facts or entities entering statements claimed to be true in one type of discourse with other facts or entities from another type, thereby providing a relationship between them. Such an association is provided where the same idea can be expressed by "levels" of explanation, with higher levels reducible if need be to lower levels. This use of levels of understanding in part expresses our human limitations in remembering detail. However, "most philosophers would insist that our role in conceptualizing reality [our need for a hierarchy of "levels" of understanding] does not change the fact that different levels of organization in reality do have different 'properties'."[8]

Reductionism should be distinguished from eliminationism: reductionists do not deny the existence of phenomena, but explain them in terms of another reality; eliminationists deny the existence of the phenomena themselves. For example, eliminationists deny the existence of life by their explanation in terms of physical and chemical processes.

Reductionism does not preclude the existence of what might be termed emergent phenomena, but it does imply the ability to understand those phenomena completely in terms of the processes from which they are composed. This reductionist understanding is very different from emergentism, which intends that what emerges in "emergence" is more than the sum of the processes from which it emerges.[11] Some physicists, however, claim that reductionism and emergentism are complementary: both are needed to explain natural processes [12].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

As I begin to read this (as I did back in 2000 when I was introduced to Doug) I begin to think in terms of reductionism as a practice in the face of problems which are highly complex, nonlinear, and which do not submit to chunking.

This reminds of the constant attempt of Complexity Theory to push for Systems analysis and Synthesis in contrast to Newtonian, reductionist analysis.

This is a poignant description of what happens when an academician attempts to reduce the ethereal to the mundane and somewhat visceral. Whether quantitative or qualitative it just doesn't matter - reduced to jetsam at the hands of statistics.

There’s a lot in STS (Science & Technology Studies) to challenge linear thinking about inexorable series of outcomes. Given a technocentric tendency to extrapolate from perceived trends, this kind of foretold consequence is at the very core of much #transhumanism.

Pithy, but potentially misleading.