Foundational Papers in Complexity Science pp. 1191–1205
DOI: 10.37911/9781947864535.39
Rise of Complexity Sciences in a Reductionist World
Author: Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Santa Fe Institute
Excerpt
The human mind has, for ever, reduced the entirety of its perceived regularities into a small number of comprehensible theories. For most of history, these theories have stayed distinct, with their unique aims, epistemology, and vocabulary. The scientific revolutions of the last millennium, however, would not let this be: the same reductionist principle that led to the invention of the individual sciences now felt the need to coalesce all such knowledge into one connected framework (Stein 1958). And, this framework was naturally structured by attempting to explain the less understood—usually more complex— sciences “mechanistically” in terms of the better understood ones (Sarkar 1989). As a result, today, one can arrange the sciences in a rough linear hierarchy—such as of particle physics, solid state or many-body physics, chemistry, molecular biology, cell biology, ..., physiology, psychology, social sciences—where the phenomena described at each successive stage can be described mechanistically in terms of the former, as in Philip Anderson’s foundational 1972 paper. But, should this methodological (Ruse 2005) reductionist view also entail a replacement of a theory by its reduction?
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