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+--- Thread: Article Yes, reductionism can explain everything in the whole Universe (/thread-19003.html)
Yes, reductionism can explain everything in the whole Universe - C C - Oct 18, 2025
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-reductionist
KEY POINTS: Recently, many scientists and philosophers have championed the idea that reductionism can’t explain all of reality, like chemistry, biology, life, and consciousness. But in order for that to be true, there would have to be some sort of “new fundamental interaction” that only appears on larger, non-fundamental scales. As far as we can tell, the Universe is truly 100% reductionist in nature. Our ignorance about why certain emergent phenomena exist and how they behave is no excuse for magical thinking... (MORE - details)
RELATED (scivillage): Emergence explains nothing and is bad science
RE: Yes, reductionism can explain everything in the whole Universe - Syne - Oct 18, 2025
Not a “new fundamental interaction," but until we can demonstrate a working theory of quantum gravity, we already have a longstanding interaction that "only appears on larger, non-fundamental scales."
RE: Yes, reductionism can explain everything in the whole Universe - Magical Realist - Oct 19, 2025
“It is very easy to claim a theory of everything if you get to decide what that everything is. It is very easy to explain everything on the table if you have put everything you cannot explain underneath it in the wastebasket.”— Whitley Strieber
Interesting treatment of the reductionism vs emergentism debate also from Big Think. There are also links in this article to other articles on this same subject that are worth checking out.
https://bigthink.com/13-8/condensed-matter-physicists-reject-reductionism/
"Another Nobel Prize winning condensed matter physicist Anthony Leggett has also weighed in on this question, writing:
'No significant advance in the theory of matter in bulk has ever come about through derivation from microscopic principles. (…) I would confidently argue further that it is in principle and forever impossible to carry out such a derivation. (…) The so-called derivations of the results of solid-state physics from microscopic principles alone are almost all bogus, if ‘derivation’ is meant to have anything like its usual sense.'
Leggett goes farther:
'I claim then that the important advances in macroscopic physics come essentially in the construction of models at an intermediate or macroscopic level, and that these are logically (and psychologically) independent of microscopic physics.' "