This is either pseudo-mystical nonsense or a simple category error, depending on charitable you care to be.
The charitable interpretation is that the authors think an argument for interdisciplinary research must begin by disparaging one of the parent fields--sort of an academic analog of negging I suppose. But the argument could easily be extended ad absurdum. Physicist don't study X, so they are "missing something", and we needed a new subject X-Physics, but this didn't fix the problem because "mainstream" physicists still don't study X. For any X you want, no matter how silly.
The less charitable assumption is that it's yet another attempt to sneak vitalism back in via complexity theory and emergence.
I do think it's the playbook: accuse science of ignoring or underappreciating something, portray it as being in a crisis that you are rescuing it from by restating familiar facts as if they were revolutionary.
I think Stephen Jay Gould, for as much of a brilliant and gifted writer as he was, and someone who truly rose to the moment to smack down intelligent design and, separately, the bell curve, was nevertheless borderline fraudulent in characterizing punctuated equilibrium as a revolutionary upheaval of Darwinism. I think it's a familiar model. I wouldn't quite say grifter but dangerously close and with all the familiar hallmarks.
It really feels like this article is trying to force the narrative that "reductionism"(a few simple rules) and "emergence"(complicated results) are oppositional and expects its wordiness to be convincing.
This is why I think Conway's Game of Life is beautiful, as a toy model of simple rules giving rise to spectacular complexity. And how the "resolution" at which it's able to achieve replicators and factories is impressively basic, and if you grant that you can scale up several orders of magnitude from the game of life to entire systems of interacting "factories", it's not a stretch to see how those mechanisms can make up something like cells that drive biology.
A Conway "glider" has been found in nature(!!) [1], and if you combine that with an intuition from the "Size of Life" model also recently posted to hn [2], it's easy to get an intuition for how simple principles can lead to astonishing complexity. Even just scaling from DNA to Mitochondria is scaling up in size 200x. An amoeba is another 300x scaling up and if my chatGPTing is right, scaling up to a mouse is like 63,000x larger than a mitochondrion.
If you imagine zooming out from a grid of dots, like zooming out from Google Maps from a street level to planet level, there's plenty of room for physical interaction to work its magic. You just have to have to be able to comprehend the staggering scales. I worry that the "more is different" crowd haven't really appreciated the staggering scales involved or get lost in the act of romanticising it that "it can't be reductionist" is a lost persons way of saying they appreciate complexity.
Edit: Conway's glider was not found in nature, my mistake. But for a different example serving the same purpose, cellular automata modeling a "triforce" pattern of repeating triangles has been found in nature, off the top of my head.
I do not grasp the spite put forth whenever a LLM is used for a non-critical point in an argument.
1) LLMs have the potential to, on the whole, raise the base "correctness" of people's opinions. (Ex: asking Gemini flash why seed oils are unhealthy begines with "that's a highly debated and complex topic." Which, is infinitely better than believing some short form shopping channel)
2) They offer a softer emotional impact when it's inevitably corrected, making for a less toxic environment, and increasing the odds a topic will be discussed and possibly an opinion corrected.
3) more often than not, I've found them to not only be correct- but they'll offer nuance in the answer. Ex: mitochondria aren't the same size across everything that has them.
We should be pointing out flawed usage, not a wholesale assault on all usage.
I'm perfectly comfortable saying that I don't have an intuitive grasp of the conversion between nanometers, micrometers, and inches, which represent length according to different units, across different magnitudes, and especially in a context where I'm switching between talk of scales in terms of orders of magnitude and in terms of multiples (e.g. 100x is also just two orders of magnitude).
Honestly I find it kind of nuts to insist that knowing the difference in size ratio between a mitochondria and a mouse off the top of your head and to convert between them in different units is something the average person knows but whatever, maybe everyone knows that.
You're right that I was wrong about the glider but it's kind of a pennywise, pound foolish argument in this case if you think the upshot is supposed to be a blanket denial of cellular automata ever being reflected in nature. Off the top of my head I know the triforce repeating triangle pattern, perhaps the most famous cellular automata model, is found on seashells as one of many examples, so the point stands that we find in nature remarkable similarities to structures modeled in cellular automata.
"Professor Frank's research is in the general area of Theoretical Astrophysics, and in particular the hydrodynamic and magneto-hydrodynamic evolution of matter"
In other words, not a biologist, not a chemist, not a geobiologist.
My hackles go up on this kind of article because the central mystery of alive/dead is what drove all the research and all the experimentation that got us to where science is on the issue.
Beyond that, "hidden mysticism that scientists ignore" is almost always a Creationist foot in the door.
I'm not saying this guy is a Creationist, and this article is an opening for the introduction of fundamental Christian creationism, but that's the way to bet.
I thought the same thing! The way I would put it, is creationism is a cautionary tale for what concepts are most ripe for exploiting by pseudoscience. Which should be a lesson for all of us about not being fast and loose with "more is different".
>> How could the discipline’s highest award go to research about machines designed to mimic human brains?
AI is not designed to mimic human brains, it is absurd to even pretend that activation functions emulate neurons in any sense at all, this is pure rhetoric and nonsense. This can be learned with a simple visit to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron). At best we might say artificial neurons were "loosely inspired" by a very simplistic model of biological neurons. EDIT: reflexively, since some people are unaware of how complex even single neurons are, see e.g. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jn.00360.20.... The comparison of activation functions in neural nets to actual neurons is absurdly cartoonish and needs to stop.
>> But today, many of my colleagues in physics no longer agree with such dismissals. Instead, we have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human—one that challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries, and could answer essential questions about AI. It may even help redefine the field for the next generation.
Classic weasel words ("many of my colleagues"), no citation, pure, unfounded speculation.
>> Beginning in the 1980s, physicists (along with researchers in other fields) began developing new mathematical tools to study what’s called “complexity”—systems in which the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. The end goal of reductionism was to explain everything in the universe as the result of particles and their interactions. Complexity, by contrast, recognizes that once lots of particles come together to produce macroscopic things—such as organisms—knowing everything about particles isn’t enough to understand reality.
>> From a physicist’s perspective, no complex system is weirder or more challenging than life. For one thing, the organization of living matter defies physicists’ usual expectations about the universe. Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year. That means you and every other living thing aren’t an inert object, like a rock, but a dynamic pattern playing out over time. The real challenge for physics, however, is that the patterns that make up life are self-organized.
Sorry, but this is pure nonsense, literally incoherent. "Self-organized" is undefined, and any sensible reading of the phrase is wrong by modern biology (selfish genes, e.g. mitochondria symbiosis, and dysfunctions and diseases like cancer strongly contradict any coherent "self" is organizing things).
> To truly understand living systems as self-organized, autonomous agents, physicists need to abandon their “just the particles, ma’am” mentality.
The article rails against "reductionism" in other points, but, ironically, clearly has an incredibly reductionist (and wrong) view of physics and what exactly may or may not arise from unified field theory.
Thank you for posting this, as I find it to be a very stimulating article on account of how maddening I believe the core argument is (but that's by some metrics a sign of a great article or at least a great hn post). Right off the bat, the charge of "hubris" in physics feels like a cheap shot playing on an equivocation of what "fundamental" means. It can mean "look at what I study, it's more important than what you study!" But I think the charitable reading of physics as "fundamental" is not that it's self absorbed hubris but that it's, specifically, attempting to discover our universe's most basic ingredients whatever they may be. Reductionism isn't a lessening of significance of living creatures, unless, I think, you have a challenged imagination. This was the central point of Darwin's Dangerous Idea which if it were up to me would be required reading.
I think the claim that modern physics has not "born significant fruit" is ridiculous, we're practically in a golden age of explosively exciting research on holography, borne from the toolkit of string theory and now emerging as the new most promising direction for a possible conceptual revolution of spacetime. That's a grab people in the street and shake them "it's happening" level of exciting! I will keep banging the drum that holography is in need of a Brian Greene style public ambassador, it's now the BFD that string theory used to be.
>The end goal of reductionism was to explain everything in the universe as the result of particles and their interactions. Complexity, by contrast, recognizes that once lots of particles come together to produce macroscopic things—such as organisms—knowing everything about particles isn’t enough to understand reality
I find this to be mind bogglingly nonsensical and disappointing, and a reminder that for a much maligned discipline, we still badly need good philosophy and good philosophers. Complexity research is built on the infrastructure of physics and reductionism is fully compatible with understanding systems in terms of dynamic interactions. Those are an explanatory layer rather than a displacement of the basic physical elements making up systems. The problem, I think, is not that reductionism doesn't contain the possibility of conceptual infrastructure necessary to understand complexity, it's that it contains that and much besides. It's like the Library of Babel, effectively.
Perhaps the strongest warning sign here is how closely it mirrors arguments for intelligent design, which serves, I think, as a helpful museum of philosophical errors one can try to exploit to insert pseudoscience, and therefore as cautionary about the conceptual infrastructure from which "more is different" borrows.
There are philosophically consistent and clear eyed characterizations of the problem out there, using such language as emergentism and supervenience, that are at least alert to the fact that they have to specify what exactly the "more" is and how exactly it's "different" in ways that get around the causal closure principle. But the most frustrating errors in this space involve mistaking processes, behavioral dynamics, or certain thresholds of conceptual abstraction for refutations of reductionism as an account of causation. It's the same mistake critics of AI made in insisting that the complex logic of human grammar was impossible in principle to model on symbol manipulation because minds have magical ephemeral concepts in them like "insight", or "tacit knowledge". I would say no, it's not that, its an inadvertent confession of a limited imagination not appreciating how small systems based on simple elements can achieve staggering complexity, which reflects more reference and respect for their complexity than insisting they run into hard limits.
the real truth is that there is a high probability that as was stated long ago, "it's not that the universe is stranger than we understand, it's that it is stranger than we can understand"
and at this point it is very clear that the whole can not be understood from the parts, which the article underlines by pointing out that some of the parts are black holes, and others are orangutangs.
This is either pseudo-mystical nonsense or a simple category error, depending on charitable you care to be.
The charitable interpretation is that the authors think an argument for interdisciplinary research must begin by disparaging one of the parent fields--sort of an academic analog of negging I suppose. But the argument could easily be extended ad absurdum. Physicist don't study X, so they are "missing something", and we needed a new subject X-Physics, but this didn't fix the problem because "mainstream" physicists still don't study X. For any X you want, no matter how silly.
The less charitable assumption is that it's yet another attempt to sneak vitalism back in via complexity theory and emergence.
A more realistic assumption is that the author is a cynical grifter trying to sell his book to gullible fools.
I do think it's the playbook: accuse science of ignoring or underappreciating something, portray it as being in a crisis that you are rescuing it from by restating familiar facts as if they were revolutionary.
I think Stephen Jay Gould, for as much of a brilliant and gifted writer as he was, and someone who truly rose to the moment to smack down intelligent design and, separately, the bell curve, was nevertheless borderline fraudulent in characterizing punctuated equilibrium as a revolutionary upheaval of Darwinism. I think it's a familiar model. I wouldn't quite say grifter but dangerously close and with all the familiar hallmarks.
I'd buy everything but "borderline".
Yup, I don't disagree with anything you are saying here.
:face-palm:
Much better than either of my theories.
It really feels like this article is trying to force the narrative that "reductionism"(a few simple rules) and "emergence"(complicated results) are oppositional and expects its wordiness to be convincing.
This is why I think Conway's Game of Life is beautiful, as a toy model of simple rules giving rise to spectacular complexity. And how the "resolution" at which it's able to achieve replicators and factories is impressively basic, and if you grant that you can scale up several orders of magnitude from the game of life to entire systems of interacting "factories", it's not a stretch to see how those mechanisms can make up something like cells that drive biology.
A Conway "glider" has been found in nature(!!) [1], and if you combine that with an intuition from the "Size of Life" model also recently posted to hn [2], it's easy to get an intuition for how simple principles can lead to astonishing complexity. Even just scaling from DNA to Mitochondria is scaling up in size 200x. An amoeba is another 300x scaling up and if my chatGPTing is right, scaling up to a mouse is like 63,000x larger than a mitochondrion.
If you imagine zooming out from a grid of dots, like zooming out from Google Maps from a street level to planet level, there's plenty of room for physical interaction to work its magic. You just have to have to be able to comprehend the staggering scales. I worry that the "more is different" crowd haven't really appreciated the staggering scales involved or get lost in the act of romanticising it that "it can't be reductionist" is a lost persons way of saying they appreciate complexity.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137253 [2] https://neal.fun/size-of-life/
Edit: Conway's glider was not found in nature, my mistake. But for a different example serving the same purpose, cellular automata modeling a "triforce" pattern of repeating triangles has been found in nature, off the top of my head.
> if my chatGPTing is right, scaling up to a mouse is like 63,000x larger than a mitochondrion
You have access to the two sizes, and you used ChatGPT to get the ratio? Is your brain an amoeba?
Also your link isn't to a glider found in nature, it's to a particular glider found within the normal GoL.
I do not grasp the spite put forth whenever a LLM is used for a non-critical point in an argument.
1) LLMs have the potential to, on the whole, raise the base "correctness" of people's opinions. (Ex: asking Gemini flash why seed oils are unhealthy begines with "that's a highly debated and complex topic." Which, is infinitely better than believing some short form shopping channel)
2) They offer a softer emotional impact when it's inevitably corrected, making for a less toxic environment, and increasing the odds a topic will be discussed and possibly an opinion corrected.
3) more often than not, I've found them to not only be correct- but they'll offer nuance in the answer. Ex: mitochondria aren't the same size across everything that has them.
We should be pointing out flawed usage, not a wholesale assault on all usage.
I'm perfectly comfortable saying that I don't have an intuitive grasp of the conversion between nanometers, micrometers, and inches, which represent length according to different units, across different magnitudes, and especially in a context where I'm switching between talk of scales in terms of orders of magnitude and in terms of multiples (e.g. 100x is also just two orders of magnitude).
Honestly I find it kind of nuts to insist that knowing the difference in size ratio between a mitochondria and a mouse off the top of your head and to convert between them in different units is something the average person knows but whatever, maybe everyone knows that.
You're right that I was wrong about the glider but it's kind of a pennywise, pound foolish argument in this case if you think the upshot is supposed to be a blanket denial of cellular automata ever being reflected in nature. Off the top of my head I know the triforce repeating triangle pattern, perhaps the most famous cellular automata model, is found on seashells as one of many examples, so the point stands that we find in nature remarkable similarities to structures modeled in cellular automata.
https://archive.is/tR60x
"Professor Frank's research is in the general area of Theoretical Astrophysics, and in particular the hydrodynamic and magneto-hydrodynamic evolution of matter"
In other words, not a biologist, not a chemist, not a geobiologist.
My hackles go up on this kind of article because the central mystery of alive/dead is what drove all the research and all the experimentation that got us to where science is on the issue.
Beyond that, "hidden mysticism that scientists ignore" is almost always a Creationist foot in the door.
I'm not saying this guy is a Creationist, and this article is an opening for the introduction of fundamental Christian creationism, but that's the way to bet.
But as Faraday said, "Nothing is too wonderful to be true."
I thought the same thing! The way I would put it, is creationism is a cautionary tale for what concepts are most ripe for exploiting by pseudoscience. Which should be a lesson for all of us about not being fast and loose with "more is different".
Complete and utter drivel.
>> How could the discipline’s highest award go to research about machines designed to mimic human brains?
AI is not designed to mimic human brains, it is absurd to even pretend that activation functions emulate neurons in any sense at all, this is pure rhetoric and nonsense. This can be learned with a simple visit to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neuron). At best we might say artificial neurons were "loosely inspired" by a very simplistic model of biological neurons. EDIT: reflexively, since some people are unaware of how complex even single neurons are, see e.g. https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jn.00360.20.... The comparison of activation functions in neural nets to actual neurons is absurdly cartoonish and needs to stop.
>> But today, many of my colleagues in physics no longer agree with such dismissals. Instead, we have come to believe that a mystery is unfolding in every microbe, animal, and human—one that challenges basic assumptions physicists have held for centuries, and could answer essential questions about AI. It may even help redefine the field for the next generation.
Classic weasel words ("many of my colleagues"), no citation, pure, unfounded speculation.
>> Beginning in the 1980s, physicists (along with researchers in other fields) began developing new mathematical tools to study what’s called “complexity”—systems in which the whole is far more than the sum of its parts. The end goal of reductionism was to explain everything in the universe as the result of particles and their interactions. Complexity, by contrast, recognizes that once lots of particles come together to produce macroscopic things—such as organisms—knowing everything about particles isn’t enough to understand reality.
Completely wrong and/or an unproven open question. See e.g. superdeterminism as a serious challenge to this mystical woo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism).
>> From a physicist’s perspective, no complex system is weirder or more challenging than life. For one thing, the organization of living matter defies physicists’ usual expectations about the universe. Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year. That means you and every other living thing aren’t an inert object, like a rock, but a dynamic pattern playing out over time. The real challenge for physics, however, is that the patterns that make up life are self-organized.
Sorry, but this is pure nonsense, literally incoherent. "Self-organized" is undefined, and any sensible reading of the phrase is wrong by modern biology (selfish genes, e.g. mitochondria symbiosis, and dysfunctions and diseases like cancer strongly contradict any coherent "self" is organizing things).
> To truly understand living systems as self-organized, autonomous agents, physicists need to abandon their “just the particles, ma’am” mentality.
The article rails against "reductionism" in other points, but, ironically, clearly has an incredibly reductionist (and wrong) view of physics and what exactly may or may not arise from unified field theory.
Stopped reading at this point.
Thank you for posting this, as I find it to be a very stimulating article on account of how maddening I believe the core argument is (but that's by some metrics a sign of a great article or at least a great hn post). Right off the bat, the charge of "hubris" in physics feels like a cheap shot playing on an equivocation of what "fundamental" means. It can mean "look at what I study, it's more important than what you study!" But I think the charitable reading of physics as "fundamental" is not that it's self absorbed hubris but that it's, specifically, attempting to discover our universe's most basic ingredients whatever they may be. Reductionism isn't a lessening of significance of living creatures, unless, I think, you have a challenged imagination. This was the central point of Darwin's Dangerous Idea which if it were up to me would be required reading.
I think the claim that modern physics has not "born significant fruit" is ridiculous, we're practically in a golden age of explosively exciting research on holography, borne from the toolkit of string theory and now emerging as the new most promising direction for a possible conceptual revolution of spacetime. That's a grab people in the street and shake them "it's happening" level of exciting! I will keep banging the drum that holography is in need of a Brian Greene style public ambassador, it's now the BFD that string theory used to be.
>The end goal of reductionism was to explain everything in the universe as the result of particles and their interactions. Complexity, by contrast, recognizes that once lots of particles come together to produce macroscopic things—such as organisms—knowing everything about particles isn’t enough to understand reality
I find this to be mind bogglingly nonsensical and disappointing, and a reminder that for a much maligned discipline, we still badly need good philosophy and good philosophers. Complexity research is built on the infrastructure of physics and reductionism is fully compatible with understanding systems in terms of dynamic interactions. Those are an explanatory layer rather than a displacement of the basic physical elements making up systems. The problem, I think, is not that reductionism doesn't contain the possibility of conceptual infrastructure necessary to understand complexity, it's that it contains that and much besides. It's like the Library of Babel, effectively.
Perhaps the strongest warning sign here is how closely it mirrors arguments for intelligent design, which serves, I think, as a helpful museum of philosophical errors one can try to exploit to insert pseudoscience, and therefore as cautionary about the conceptual infrastructure from which "more is different" borrows.
There are philosophically consistent and clear eyed characterizations of the problem out there, using such language as emergentism and supervenience, that are at least alert to the fact that they have to specify what exactly the "more" is and how exactly it's "different" in ways that get around the causal closure principle. But the most frustrating errors in this space involve mistaking processes, behavioral dynamics, or certain thresholds of conceptual abstraction for refutations of reductionism as an account of causation. It's the same mistake critics of AI made in insisting that the complex logic of human grammar was impossible in principle to model on symbol manipulation because minds have magical ephemeral concepts in them like "insight", or "tacit knowledge". I would say no, it's not that, its an inadvertent confession of a limited imagination not appreciating how small systems based on simple elements can achieve staggering complexity, which reflects more reference and respect for their complexity than insisting they run into hard limits.
the real truth is that there is a high probability that as was stated long ago, "it's not that the universe is stranger than we understand, it's that it is stranger than we can understand" and at this point it is very clear that the whole can not be understood from the parts, which the article underlines by pointing out that some of the parts are black holes, and others are orangutangs.