Reductionism, Emergence and Levels of Reality: The Importance of Being Borderline

by Sergio Chibbaro

Preface.- A Galilean Dialogue.- A random journey.- History.- the philosophical point of view.- Reduction in physics and philosophy.- Emergence.- A first attempt to tame complexity.- A short history of statistical mechanics.- Towards a systematic theory.- The paradigmatic Brownian motion.- Critical Phenomena.- Discussion.- From microscopic to macroscopic realities.- The problem of irreversibility.- Irreversibility and emergence.- From microscopic to macroscopic equations.- From atoms to cold fronts.- Concluding remarks.- Determinism, chaos and reductionism.- General remarks on determinism.- An excursus on chaos.- Chaos and complexity.- Chaos and probability.- Quarrels on chaos and determinism.- Concluding remarks.- Quantum Mechanics.- Classical versus quantum mechanics.- Chemistry vs applied Quantum Mechanics.- Summary and conclusions.- Some conclusions.- Unity of science beyond reductionism.- It from bit?.- Concluding remarks.

Genres: Philosophy, Physics

178 pages, Paperback

First published May 13, 2014

Reviews

[Stefan Gugler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not super appreciate the Galilean dialogue in the beginning. I understand that they were about to throw some questions up but it felt quite disorganized. After that, it was a really good and interesting read talking about Monism and the Unity of Science (where I think their explanation of Emergence by Kim was not really good but secondary-secondary literature helped) followed by 4 applied chapters and rounded off with concluding remarks. In the applied chapters, I liked the last one of the classical/quantum limits most, especially because the Born-Oppenheimer approximation took such a central stage together with the EPR paradox. Warms my heart every time. The chapter on chaos was a bit hard without prior knowledge on it. Stat mech, chapter 3, was too much of stuff I've already heard.

I'm glad they finished with some perspective on data, i.e. Jaynes. I think they are too rough with the MaxEnt principle but there was not enough space, I guess. Similar for Solomonoff induction but maybe that's for another book.

What I really liked was that on one hand they were physicists talking in a language I understand but importantly, on the other hand, they weren't conceited or dismissive of philosophy but rather humbly pointing out their epistemic weaknesses when talking about stuff outside their expertise.

All in all a nice book on the issues with reductionism in the hard sciences, albeit a bit meager in explaining emergence.