Okay really weird to see this come up because just a few days ago I saw a video about reductionism in science and free will, I think it was a John Searle lecture.
I find the idea of life as an organizing force that locally reduces entropy and 'offloads' disorder on the environment deeply compelling, and what I wondered was, does this not put a pretty big nail into reductionist scientific worldviews that argue purely in terms of bottom-up physical explanations?
Is there some account of life at the level of particles that could ever give a reasonable description of the behavior we observe, or is the existence of living organisms evidence of some sort of genuine top-down causality?
The reason why I was looking into this was the TV show Devs that toys with the idea of determinism and the idea that even though someone could look at a prediction of their future, they could not change it, and to me this made sense if the world could be purely explained in terms of bottom-up physics, but I started to scratch my head if decision making could actually go top-down.
Anyway slightly rambly post but if someone has a book, or essay or some other reading recommendation on this I'd appreciate it.
>does this not put a pretty big nail into reductionist scientific worldviews
It's just generalized enough to be vaguely descriptive, not prescriptive, at least not yet. And I don't think it ever will because just as we have biologists, we still need medical professionals that can diagnose and understand more specifically the bottom layers.
Second question, someone mentioned Into The Cool, a book I'd like to also read that seems to take on this question.
Third question... to evoke the previous answer, why not both?
I find the idea of life as an organizing force that locally reduces entropy and 'offloads' disorder on the environment deeply compelling, and what I wondered was, does this not put a pretty big nail into reductionist scientific worldviews that argue purely in terms of bottom-up physical explanations?
Is there some account of life at the level of particles that could ever give a reasonable description of the behavior we observe, or is the existence of living organisms evidence of some sort of genuine top-down causality?
The reason why I was looking into this was the TV show Devs that toys with the idea of determinism and the idea that even though someone could look at a prediction of their future, they could not change it, and to me this made sense if the world could be purely explained in terms of bottom-up physics, but I started to scratch my head if decision making could actually go top-down.
Anyway slightly rambly post but if someone has a book, or essay or some other reading recommendation on this I'd appreciate it.