I don’t believe that the whole is different from, or greater to, the sum its parts. I think that whatever characteristics an object has comes only from the parts it is composed of.
Hi Shredderbeam and AnAtheist,
It looks like the conversation with Tonyrey is dieing down, so perhaps you will be willing to continue discussing some of these issues with me. You probably know that I will not take any lack of material explanation for such questions as have been posed in this thread to be proof a supernatural reality that stands appart from the reality of our experience. An inadequate explanation is just one that needs suggests we need a better explanation. It isn’t proof of some other explanation. Supernatural explanations need to be defended, not fallen back on as default positions when the current scientific explanations are insufficient.
Anyway, I wanted to take issue with a couple of things you guys have said such as what is quoted above. I think that such reductionism will always fail to give adequate explanations. While understanding of phenomena at one level are often aided by explanations at lower levels, if we always give such lower level explanations primacy, we wind up with absurd conclusions such as that all the information needed to create New York City must be contained within atoms. Whether string theory works out or some other approach to physics, once we have a so-called Theory of Everything, we won’t have a set of physical laws that will be at all useful for telling us what form of government is best or
Ideas are contained within brains but are not properties of brains just as a novel can be stored as voltages on a computer but the novel is not a property or expresion of the voltages. Turn off the computer and the novel is gone. Turn off a brain, and we can only guess. But we have some idea of what that is like when we consider patients with brain injuries and notice that they are no longer cabable of thinking certain thoughts and doing a lot of the things that tonyrey says can only be explained by appeal to something supernatural. It seems entirely reasonable to think that thoughts are entirely dependent on brains, but not so reasonable to think of thoughts as properties or possessoins of brains.
Ideas evolve and are maintained within culture based on rules that are in many ways independent of physical matter. We will never be able to explain the world of ideas or the values that hold a society together through organic chemistry or physics though the production of new ideas could never happen without brains and cells and chemicals and atoms.
In short, the whole IS greater than the sum of its parts. If that were not so there would only be one branch of science rather than physics, chemistry, biology, zoology, anthropology, and psychology. If the characteristics of the whole were always best explained by the parts it is composed of a Theory of Everything in physics would replace all these other sciences, but of couse we would never expect it to.
It may be helpful for some purposes to think of human beings as machines, but they are not
just machines. A molecule is a collection of atom, but it is not
just a collection of atoms. It has properties that atoms don’t have and that are not best understood by thinking of it as a collection of other things but rather as a thing itself. Living beings are not
just collections of molecules. They are collections of molecules, but if they were *just *properties of these molecules we would need no science called biology to talk about them.
Finally, I would suggest dropping all talk about what a thing REALLY is (as in “a person is really just a machine” or “a molecule is really just a collection of atoms” or “an animal is really a collection of molecules.”). There are inexhaustible descriptions of a thing that can be used for different purposes, but there is no good reason that I can think of to take any one of those description and call it the essence of a thing. I think materialism or physicalism is often used as a version of such essentialism though it doesn’t have to be. It is essentialism that makes people want to ask such questions as “what is the essence of a person?” and cause them to posit such entities as souls and such questions as “what is the essence of Truth?” and cause them to posit such entities as God, so I think essentialism is something that atheists should try to avoid if they want to continue the Enlightenment project of de-divinizing their thinking without merely creating new replacement Gods such as Reason, Reality, Human Nature, and Truth.
Best,
Leela
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