Reclaiming our Experiences

Breaking the Galilean Spell

At the beginning of the modern period, thinkers in the lineage of Descartes and Bacon developed a set of new tools to think about the nature of the world. They took objects or processes and imagined toy models composed of discrete parts that, through their interaction, would generate the final results.

This approach - since called reductionism - has been incredibly powerful for explaining how things work. It has driven significant scientific and technological advances as well as enabling tremendous economic expansion through applications to processes like factory lines. 

This success has meant that the reductionist approach has in turn recursively transformed from being a tool we can use to think about the world to the basic approach for how we consider all of the things around us, including ourselves. We now navigate a physical and social space that we believe is constructed out of toy mechanisms (literally machines) that we need only take apart to understand what they are truly made of.

This view, of course, has some problems. At one level of analysis, it turns out that there are - or at least appear to be - some hard limits to reductionism. We, for instance, appear unable to derive the operation of fluid mechanics from underlying particle behaviours.

On a secondary, but perhaps more profound front, there are certain parts of our lives that seem fundamentally important: the form of our relationships with other people, the joy felt during a road trip, or the way our values interact with our economic decisions. Reductionism leaves us unable to adequately defend these experiences as meaningful in-and-of themselves.

To see past these toy models of the world we can consider the operation of emergence. Emergence occurs when a system has properties at a certain scope of analysis that neither exist nor are predictable at a smaller scope of analysis. 

For example, you could imagine a grocery store and the kind of decisions that people entering the store make. 

At our grocery store we sell blueberries. In isolation, these blueberries could be something that a person decides to eat based on their enjoyment of the taste and desire for their nutritional properties. You might assume that this leads to some base rate of blueberry buying in the population, and that the packs will be purchased from the store at an even cadence. 

However, when we scope out to view the whole system we can see that next to the blueberries we have a pancake mix on a shelf in the same aisle. Suddenly our whole understanding of how the blueberries fit into this system changes. The base rate shifts as each person considers not only blueberries in isolation but a stack of blueberry pancakes. The behaviour that occurs is an emergent property of the whole, the blueberries and the mix. The actions, and their reasoning completely unpredictable from the blueberries on their own.

With emergence we can, as Stuart Kauffman says, break the Galilean spell¹. This gives us a way to move past some of the issues of reductionism. With emergence we can understand how the complex behaviour of fluid mechanics emerges from the interaction of particle behaviours, even if no direct outcome can be calculated mathematically. Moreover, taking this step leaves open the door for our more qualitative categories to represent themselves as irreducible realities. 

Once we see that our lives in all their complexity can contain properties not reducible to their parts, we can be freed from imagining that we are composed of the same kind of toy systems that we have used to simplify and answer questions about the world. Such a move means that we may reaffirm the reality of our experiences and their irreducible meaning.

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Hi all, as you may have noticed, I haven't posted a new essay since July 24th. Given that the advertised aim of this newsletter was to create a weekly email this seems like a pretty poor showing. It's no excuse but I was travelling at the tail-end of Summer which threw me somewhat off my game. However, I am now back and situated. So, you can expect to once again see this domain in your inbox each week. 

At the beginning of this year I had planned to write 50 essays for this newsletter and I still want to get there. It's been 8 weeks since my last newsletter so to catch up, for the next 8 weeks I will be sending two essays a week. I'm aiming to have one as usual on Saturday morning and the other maybe halfway through the week, though they may not be perfectly lined up to schedule. 

I can understand that many of you may have signed up for only one email a week and for you this may be a bit much. If that is the case I wouldn't hold it against you at all to unsubscribe! However, if you are interested in returning when we are back to one per week feel free to shoot me a note and I can re-add you to the list when things settle down a bit.

Photo by Shirqille Tisi on Unsplash

1. Kauffman calls this the Galilean spell after Galileo, as he puts it: "Galileo rolled balls down incline planes and showed that the distance traveled varied as the square of the time elapsed. From this he obtained a universal law of motion. Newton followed with his Principia, setting the stage for all of modern science... The Galilean spell that has driven so much science is the faith that all aspects of the natural world can be described by such laws." (emphasis mine)