Re: inequivalent complmentary models

[Howard Pattee <***>]

Tim,

I am sure our views here depend on what our concepts of the keywords are. Words like 
objective, natural laws, state-determined, reduction, etc. even with our best definitions 
still retain connotations that depend on our individual experiences.

Tim wrote:
A world in which the laws would rest on "the ideal of objectivity" such that
these laws "do not change when the observers change, nor can they be changed
by the observer" is a world in which there must be the physical ability to
completely and universally fractionate the subjective from the objective.

HP: That is the ideal because it is really a definition of what I think most physicists 
and even normal people mean by objective. If you mean something else by objective you 
will have to tell me what you mean. Of course we agree that the ideal is not attainable. 
That is now an empirical fact. But now we are talking only about physical laws. Laws are 
only a very restricted type of model aimed at universality and inexorability. We think of 
laws as if they operated before there was life (and observers) and as if they will 
continue to operate after life has been atomized, sooner or later, one way or another.

The cost of aiming at universality and inexorability is that physical laws can be only 
models of those aspects of the universe over which living systems have no influence or 
control. Obviously, living systems do exercise control over many other aspects of the 
world. Maybe too much. Much of the energy and chemistry of the biosphere is under the 
control of enzymes, organisms, and their artifacts. The fact that organisms must also 
obey natural laws does not mean that from the laws we can derive a complete or 
reductionistic model of organisms or what organisms control. That is why multiple, 
inequivalent, complementary models are necessary. There are no largest physical models. 
Reality is Rosen-complex, and as he says, we need more than one model. There is no single 
comprehensive model of even the electron.

Physicists have emphasized these limits for at least a century. For examples, a Beethoven 
symphony can be described by chronicles of air pressures, but that does not adequately 
model a Beethoven symphony (Einstein?s example), quantum theory does not adequately model 
tea parties (Bohr?s example), and about thought Eddington said, ?There is nothing to 
prevent the assemblage of atoms constituting a brain from being of itself a thinking 
object in virtue of that nature which physics leaves undetermined and undeterminable.?

TIM: Such a world is the reductionistic world, which is also a mechanistic world.

HP: I think that physics is telling us quite the opposite. Because of experiments 
interpreted under these epistemic principles physics has discovered that the objective 
world is different from anything that our evolved senses and brains could have ever 
imagined. Reductionistic, deterministic, and mechanistic models faded out early in the 
last century and no longer trouble the minds of physicists.

Tim: If it is not actually possible to completely and universally fractionate the 
subjective from the objective,

HP: which we have determined empirically is not possible, especially for very small sizes 
and very high energies,

Tim: then the laws or epistemic principles for such a world must forego the 
aforementioned ideal of objectivity if we expect these laws to be comprehensive of 
physical phenomena in such a world.

HP: For the questions we ask of these models they are incredibly accurate, although 
admittedly not comprehensive. Why would we give up such a successful ideal because it 
doesn?t answer all possible questions? Rather we settle for universality at the cost of 
giving up comprehensiveness.

Tim: This would results in the creation of a broader set of fundamental laws to physics 
(where current laws become a subset of these). This is a primary
theme and conclusion of Essays ch. 5 "Drawing the Boundary Between Subject
and Object".

HP: You can?t have it both ways. Complementary models cannot be subsets of each other. 
That is why Rosen used the term inequivalent to describe the multiple models necessary to 
describe complex systems. If in principle, or by definition, physical laws are about only 
those events in the universe over which individual organisms have no control, and if 
exerting controls over metabolism and replication is the way that organisms survive and 
evolve, then it would follow that there can be no unified logically consistent 
?comprehensive? model of universal laws and the local behaviors of organisms.

Rosen agrees that physical laws are inadequate to explain life, and we agree for 
essentially the same reasons. What puzzles me is why in LI (not in AS) Rosen charges that 
theoretical physics has ?beguiled itself? and ?shirked its task? when I know of no 
evidence that shows any basic disagreement.

Howard