IMO, a "holistic" philosophical view or analytical approach
'makes more deliberate use' of cross-correlations and implicit associations
(and is an intellectual attitude that pays greater respect to real-world
interdependencies and complex causations) than a "reductionistic".

Apropos which: A "Tolerance Principled" intellectual attitude (an
extension/extrapolation of
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) is a necessary thinking/grasping tool to
be used when reaching for a philosophically ultimately unifying (i.e. *also*
anthropobiologically relevant) rational-philosophical understanding of "What
Is going on".

In such a (only rarely realizable!) quest, generalized reductionistic
attitudes needs to be restrained and replaced by hole-reductionism (i.e. a
"hole reduction strategy") in order to reduce the risque of philosophical
failure caused by falling into "holes" in the form of our
inevitable lack of
knowledge in potentially knowable areas of, and ultimately-to-remain lack of
answers to distinctly NON-answerable (~'reductio ad absurdum') questions
about, What Is going on.

P

"Michael Ragland"  wrote in message
news:asqk5g$n4j$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
>
> I think this argument is based on a misunderstanding of what holism is.
> If I understand it properly, just having a property which cannot be
> discussed without being at the higher level does not make it an emergent
> property. It has to be unpredictable in principle from knowledge of the
> lower level.
>
> So if I have a lower level of particles, and then I predict from their
> behavior how atoms will behave, and we look and find that atoms don't
> behave that way, that unexpected behavior would be an emergent property.
> But just saying that lots of different structures at the lower level
> would all lead to the same prediction about the atoms does not make
> these properties emergent. They would all be predicting behaviors that
> are *not* emergent.
>
> There's plenty of reason to stop reducing at some level, so as not to
> waste time. We do it all the time in chemistry, where we stop at the
> atoms and don't worry about lower levels. As long as we are not required
> to assume that atoms' behavor cannot be predicted from the next lower
> level, we are not in any way being holists.
>
> All the cases Guy has mentioned are not cases of adopting a holist
> position, and not one of his cases comes up with a truly emergent
> property. Offhand I don't know of any emergent properties, anywhere.
> Certainly not in population biology.
> --
> Joe Felsenstein joe{at}removethispart.gs.washington.edu
> Department of Genome Sciences, University of Washington, Box 357730,
> Seattle, WA 98195-7730 USA
>
> _____________________________________
>
> I don't think holism in biology is necessarily synonymous with
> emergence. You state, "If I understand it properly, just having a
> property which cannot be discussed without being at the higher level
> does not make it an emergent property. It has to be unpredictable in
> principle from knowledge of the lower level." That is my understanding
> as well regarding the phenomenon of emergence.
>
> Here are a few points I think are relevant to a definition of what
> holism 'is' and 'isn't':
>
>
> (a) Generally speaking, the essence of holism is captured by the
> statement that "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts." This
> leads to several points:
>
> (I) Holism is not the same thing as complexity. Just because a system
> has many parts does not necessarily mean that one cannot understand it
> by understanding the parts (i.e. reductionism).
>
> (II) Holism is not the same thing as interconnectedness. One can have
> a system with many parts that have complex interconnections in which the
> behavior of the system can nonetheless be understood, mechanistically,
> by understanding the parts and their interactions.
>
> (III) Investigating holism is almost by definition outside of normal
> scientific procedures. Our scientific methods are so thoroughly
> dominated by reductionism that we study parts and interactions, but we
> don't really have clear methods for studying "wholes."
>
> (IV) Then there is the problem of determining exactly what the
> "whole" of holism really is. We can define parts readily enough (we
> think), but what are the boundaries of a "whole" ecological system?
>
> (V) Some have also claimed that holism is just a coverup for
> ignorance. That is, if we don't understand how a system works, we are
> likely to see emergent (i.e. "unexplained") properties and
conclude that
> it is holistic. As we undertake further reductionist investigations, we
> may begin to understand the workings of the system better, and the
> properties that seemed emergent no longer seem so.
>
> (VI) Despite all of this, a holistic philosophy may lead one not to
> forget that the parts we study are in fact parts of some larger
> "system," whether or not that system really has emergent
properties. It
> is worthwhile to remember that there are forests, even if what one
> studies are trees.
>
> In the most basic sense Holism in biology is merely the acknowledgement
> the parts we study are in fact parts of some larger "system". This can
> be asserted without any reference to emergent phenomena.
>
> There is no question, however, that in the literature holism and
> emergence are often presented as being synonymous with each other. Why?
> I think part of it may be due to our lack of knowledge regarding the
> relationship between constituent parts and the whole they make up. This
> is most clearly revealed in emergence where a property is unpredictable
> from knowledge at the lower level.
>
> It's my own belief the strongest area of emergence in biology is human
> consciousness. As stated above, investigating holism is almost by
> definition outside of normal scientific procedures. Our scientific
> methods are so thoroughly dominated by reductionism that we study parts
> and interactions, but we don't really have clear methods for studying
> "wholes."
>
> Hopefully, as advances are made in the many fields of biology they will
> gradually coalesce and enable us to begin to develop methods for
> studying biology holistically. Ironically, emergence is something of a
> stumbling block to this. As long as properties are unpredictable from
> knowledge at the lower level this will prevent us from having a true
> holistic understanding of our biology.
>
> Michael Ragland
>
>
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