Can Biology Be Reduced To Physics? 

Where from is this accent? Germany? (currently I am learning english, so I can't recognize accents)

Thanks! Fair enough, reductionism is a super useful tool too, not denying that. But I just dont think it will ever get us a complete picture. We’ve been trained to be Cartesian reductionists for 400 years so of course its very counterintuitive to do anything else. Glad I made you think though!

​@@SubAnimaI feel like (as far as I understand) reductionism and anti-reductionism are both just different perspectives, both useful in their own rights. And while they are not mutually exclusive (in the sense that they can both be equally correct and true in the real world), what isn't mutually exclusive in this conversation is determinism and non-determinism. From a bottom-up perspective it certainly would seem that everything is determnistic more or less (quantum mechanics does throw a wrench in the cogs here and there), yet from a top-bottom perspective non-determinism would seem to be true.

@@SubAnima If that's your view of physics, you have over a century to catch up.

@@ohauss Lol that was my first thought too! He's only 336 years behind. "Biology in nondeterministic therefore it can't be physics".... Uh -cough- quantum mechanics -cough cough-.

@@phyricquinn2457 So you're telling that quantum mechanics is what caused the world war one. Thanks! That's very useful

That is the general take. I would take the counter point even further than the video does: you say ‘there’s no reason we couldn’t in principle calculate everything’ - yes there is. Beyond obvious pragmatic limits, there is the fact that recursive systems have intrinsic computational irreducibility. This is made manifest in Gödel’s work in formal logic and Turing’s halting problem in computer science. These are proven facts - some questions have undecidable answers, and related directly to systems which process themselves.

@@anywallsocket Good point

Did you have it on 2x speed?

@@peytonhanel7059 I think I had it on 1.75x speed

I don’t know that this is actually true. Fundamentally, the best we know about the atoms of our world is that they follow the laws of quantum mechanics, which are probabilistic. So if we had knowledge of all the atoms, the most we would know (given our current knowledge) is the wave function which describes the possible states of the system, and even then it would be some likelihood of happening. That seems actually impossible to know, especially when we consider that there are wave functions which we do not know, such as entangled states.

Totally. “What is life?” is still a mystery, what a great time to be a biologist though!

​@@SubAnima"What is life?" isn't a mystery. It's a semantic discussion. "Life" is whatever we decide is the most useful definition for didactics and scientific progress.

So the quantum physics.

According to who and by what metric. I am in immunology and can guarantee we know masive amount but the general public is incredibly ignorant. This video is trash.

So we can help scientists by processing data from boinc distributed computing software to understand better ❤

1) Biological systems don't even have an infinite phase space, but an *indefinite* one that is constantly expanding. We could never write it down. That was the idea I wanted to convey but it may not have been clear. I made a follow up video exploring this idea further here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oDG_7Ame0m0.html 2) Right, but that still requires a programmer to modify things. The program/computer can't do it itself whilst biological systems can (unless you're a creationist that believes that God must intervene to tidy up organisms).

​@@SubAnima"biological systems have indefinite phase space." Not exactly still sure what makes the word "phase" and "space" work together.. autological? But being indefinite, well on reductionist point of view things will be viewed more of an "chaotic system" than "simple A → B" A pattern always follows up at macro level but that doesn't nullify the interactions that make it up there, given the supercomputers computing, arguably all particles information and interaction, will end up yielding most accurate and near perfect calculation (not perfect maybe due to quantum mechanics, not exactly sure from this position tbh.) The argument of screwdriver being used as a function to serve some other structure, is but not accurate. A specific rule like Newton's law of motions will not bend due to a "choice" unless you believe in God but that's still out of context of science for it runs over naturalism, not with other domains involved with God or smth. "The argument is there is still a programmer." This is another mistake, according to how you attempt to put it. For example simple to put forward, a virus or worm are malicious programs that can self replicate. Arguably nothing truly "self" replicates except just binding structure around it just like it's own GIVEN it has resources to do so. The organism fades out of exists if there are none. The example I gave may truly not look correct for its a program, not hardware. But that's what I like to put lights on (_drumrolls??_) everything here is hardware lol.. Take those transistors and mechanism that just pull out in just the right way for logic gates to work so to make storage for information and retrieval of it so possible for the very mechanism. Then let the mechanism run on the information it can modify. Arguably who put this mechanism is still a programmer, but the problem is there was always this chance to make it actually true as well. this leads to some arguments relating "chaos leading order." But that is now separate discussion, for what is to be known is "physical laws themselves coded by randomness" is but at least much tangibly holdable argument. And about creationism, idk if that's how fancy God _must ought to be_ for its arguably more like "game theory" than just science now. Which is why it's better separating answering "how" of what science (scientific method) ends up tackling with brilliance for human intellect and "why" by some religious beliefs of moral side support, cause reductionism like this one, always bleeds to some consequentialistc ideas often exploiting and robbing humans out of their deontological beliefs. All sides have a certain threshold, name it any profession. I see biology better at understanding complex interactions between macro organism. Physics will actually do a terrible job by jumbling it like bad cable maintenance of some super computer.

A correction for the correction: While the self-modifying Turing machine is indeed one type of Turing machine, it has nothing to do with the Von Neumann architecture. The latter is just a model of computer that differs from the Harvard architecture by using the same memory for instructions and data. While this fundamentally allows self-modifying code (because the shared memory has to be both readable and writable), it is not a requirement, and its use is strongly discouraged. The Von Neumann architecture just makes it very easy to accidentally overwrite instructions or execute data, leading to huge security issues (buffer overflow). While the Harvard architecture allows to use a ROM as instruction memory, making self-modifying code impossible, instructions can (and usually are) also stored in RAM that just doesn't share the same address space with the data memory, but still can be written, allowing self-modifying code.

@@SubAnima This is silly. You could certainly define the phase space of a biological system. Here is one (classical, not quantum, but a quantum one exists as well): {(x_1, p_1) x ... (x_j, p_j) x ... x (x_N, p_N) | where j is an index that labels all particles in a cat} where x symbolizes position and p symbolizes momentum. Then you can run through Hamilton's equations for the equations of motion for the cat. The problem is that no one has (and likely no one ever will have) the computational resources to solve such a system of equations. It can be done in principle, but never in practice. But my point is that it is simply wrong to say the phase space is constantly expanding. It has a finite dimension: 6*N, where N is the number of particles in the cat.

@@eljeorgo Ah, now I understand how the name of von Neumann ended up here! :D Von Neumann simply was the guy who first used the concept of a "singularity" in a technological concept. It has nothing to do with the "von Neumann architecture", which really just describes the physical layout of a computer. The underlying idea of a "technological singularity" is that a program on a fundamental level is nothing else than a set of instructions that receive some input and produce some output. This output can of course also be another program. So if one could write a program that is smart enough to write an even smarter version of itself, that smarter version could write another, even more smarter version, and so on. Even more so, such a smart program could also design faster computers, so with each iteration it would take less time to create the next iteration, causing an "explosion" of intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that soon would surpass all human intelligence and - from our perspective - could be seen as "god-like". This is what von Neumann called a "technological singularity". Whether this would be good or bad is a matter of discussion. Every tool can be used to do something productive or destructive, and an artificial superintelligence would be the most powerful tool imaginable. It could be extremely good, as such a superintelligence could probably easily solve problems that otherwise would require thousands of years of research when done by human scientists, but it could also end up extremely bad, like ... the destruction of the human civilization. 😆 Should we be worried? I'd say: No. Currently we don't know whether it's even possible to create an AGI (artificial general intelligence), let alone a runaway reaction that results in a superintelligence. There might even be fundamental limits, like the overhead of communication in parallel systems that eventually causes computers to actually get _slower_ when additional CPUs are added instead of faster. So if people are talking about the dangers of a technological singularity, they usually want to distract from actual real-life problems caused by comparatively dumb systems, like privacy issues caused by ubiquitous surveillance using facial recognition.

What he means there're more dimensions to the things we need to describe about biology if we wanted understand it just from pure physics (how hard would it be to deduce and articulate mathematically). It's imcomplete, you can't explain concepts like agency with the strong nuclear force or a Lorentz transformation! Let's say, how and why a 'self-sustained' system has to seek and find other system to keep sustaining itself? Why does it do that? How that comes to be?

@@m3rify The last question u put is a Turing machine like behavior. This channel purposefully avoids many such paradigms. His criticisms are as though we're stuck to Rene Descarte's defination of Machine!

@@m3rify Because entropy.

@@aniksamiurrahman6365 Would you want to elaborate why is a 'Turning Machine like' behavior?

It's not just complexity (which makes the system just immensely difficult to reduce), it's recursiveness, which makes the system essentially irreducible. As someone stated in a comment above: "Beyond obvious pragmatic limits, there is the fact that recursive systems have intrinsic computational irreducibility. This is made manifest in Gödel’s work in formal logic and Turing’s halting problem in computer science. These are proven facts - some questions have undecidable answers, and related directly to systems which process themselves."

Thanks for your comment and well-reasoned critique, I genuinely appreciate it :) 1. What do you mean by 'all natural phenomena are ultimately apart of physics'? Do you mean to say that everything that happens in the universe can ultimately be expressed in the language of physics, and really at the smallest level, quantum mechanics? If so, I will disagree on the principle that we are limited beings not Laplace's demon. Maybe in a few centuries time we could build a computer to simulate organisms using the Schrödinger equation and perfectly predict what happens to it, up to quantum randomness. But we don't have such a tool. We need a philosophy of science that can work right now - one that can be used to make scientific progress with the tools we actually have. There is no point pondering about supercomputers or trying to be Laplace's demon. More importantly, there is still no organism in this picture. Predicting where atoms end up is not doing biology, like I said in the video. 2. I wasn't just picking on Newton, although I didn't have time to articulate the full argument. Lee Smolin argues quite convincingly in Time Reborn that the Newtonian paradigm still dominates physics today even in GR and QM. We still have (probabilistic) state spaces, (probabilistic) laws that govern the system and boundary conditions are required to make any sense of experimental data. This picture is still very similar to Newton's. Plus there are some questions we cannot answer with QM that we do seriously want to answer in biology - namely 'why these laws?' In biology, we ask all the time why an organism is the way that it is (e.g. why does a newt look the way it does). But you can't explain why the Schrödinger equation exists in the first place with QM alone. You need something else. Quoting Smolin (p.250, Time Reborn): “Cosmological questions such as 'Why these laws?' and 'Why these initial conditions?' cannot be answered by a method that takes the laws and initial conditions as input [like QM or GR]. The remedy must be radical, involving not just the invention of a new theory but a new method and hence a new kind of theory.” See also: arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378 3. The reductionist approach is anachronistic, we agree on that. But physicists are still spouting it today. Sabine's book was published just this year, which I quoted at the start of the video. Sean Carroll argued much the same in The Big Picture (2016) basically saying everything is physics, and the rest is just our imagination. But a useful imagination - he calls it 'poetic naturalism.' This is not a good approach for doing science, as I already said in point 1. Sure it might not have an all-pervasive presence as much as it did, but it still exists, hence why I made the video.

@@SubAnima 1. This point is largely about semantics, but what I mean is that everything happening in the Universe is ultimately a physical phenomenon, from elementary particles scattering on each other to a newt crawling on a shore and thinking newty thoughts. But this doesn't mean in any capacity that the former (elementary particles scattering) necessarily implies the latter (the newt and its newty thoughts) or that it would even make sense to attempt doing that. A large part of the mechanics and functions of biology really boils down to quantum mechanics, electromagnetism and thermal phenomena, but it is nowhere implied that the way we understand these fields today can explain the whole picture of a living organism, or that they will ever be able to do so. Uncovering the whole picture is the point of research and of the scientific method, but it is nowhere implied that the tools and methods we have developed in the present day are sufficient, just as the tools and methods of the XVIIth century weren't adequate for the discoveries of the early XXth century. The only thing that can really be done in this regard is to keep trying different things and see what eventually works. 2. Clearly some of the simpler aspects of reality can be approximated sufficiently well through differential equations subject to boundary conditions. I wouldn't necessarily call this a Newtonian paradigm outside of the specific fields that are "classical". Differential equations and boundary conditions can mean very different things in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics itself is presently understood as an approximation of a broader theory, namely quantum field theory. The latter is quite powerful in some specific regards, but is still very far from answering questions that are much, much simpler than the origin of life or really the physics behind many aspects of biological organisms, specifically the newty thoughts. Some physical theory will one day encompass the phenomenon of life as well, but that day may well be very far away and that theory might very well look as strange to our present minds as the squiggles of today would look to a scholar of the 1600s. 3. Everything is indeed physics, but I think that one of the points Sean was trying to make in that book is that you cannot reduce all of physics to elementary particles and their interactions. It's also really dependent on what crowds you hang out with. In condensed matter physics, nuclear physics or really any situation where you have many bodies undergoing strong mutual interactions, you won't make it very far with a reductionist approach.

Any argument that poses biology and its electrochemical nature as 'beyond physics' in any way other than as a delineation for the sake of linguistics just doesn't seem grounded to me. If your point is that the two shouldn't be used interchangeably in conversation that's fine, but the study of biology as it exists today wouldn't exist without advanced physics research over the past 300 years if not more. The study of electromagnetic fields is almost solely responsible for our knowledge of medical imaging, bio-electric interactions, and molecular biology. Cells dividing is easily explained through molecular physics, specifically M Phase and mitosis, which we again would not know about without the atomic and molecular physics research that came before. So much medical tech was basically happened upon because of either atomic or astronomic research, for example research into EM fields has helped us understand HOW BIRDS NAVIGATE for migration. That is something we NEVER, not in a million years would have figured out if we didn't have advanced knowledge of how individual electrons in a molecule can affect its behavior and alter the entire system its interacting with. As others have said, its a valid difference to defend in the sake of conversational communication, but thats as far as it goes. @@SubAnima

​​@@roughlyadequate6165You didn't touch any of the fundamental parts of biology. Physics didn't create biology btw. Chemistry and biology existed way before physics did. Physics didn't change anything fundamental about these things at all. It simply boosted it's understanding through making the reason behind physical phenomena be examined.

@@WeebSlayer27 I don't think you understand the conflation between language and the actual physical truth of reality. None of these physical structures rely on our nomenclature to define them, they exist without us. 'Physics' is just the words for our study of the FUNDAMENTAL building blocks of our universe. There is no biological structure that isn't comprised of particles, and we are not capable of truly understanding the concept we define as 'biology' without understanding the underlying structures that make it possible. Your assertion that physics isn't the oldest form of science is debatable, as most of the oldest ruins found on this planet are calendars that perfectly track the sun and moon. Babylonians are known to have heavily studied the stars, there was also Pythagoras in Mesopotamia. Even before that was the study of math and physics in the Indus Valley 4thM BCE. Most of the greatest medical research advancements right now are powered by atomic levels of understanding in protein acid interactions. “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Thanks for your well-reasoned comment. I still disagree with “every aspect of the game is dictated by those fundamental rules” because: The laws of physics may dictate how all the atoms in universe bump around, but that does not mean that all the causes of the system are from the bottom alone. The phenomena of biology disappear if we just track atoms. Particularly the phenomenon of how things get that way: “why is organism the way it is? Why does the chess board look the way it does, what caused it to get that way?” These do not merely emerge from the ‘fundamental’ level. They need us to look to relevant higher level causes (e.g. development/evolution and some humans programming/building the computer in the first place) Physics typically ignores these questions by sidestepping “why these laws?” But biologists deal with them all the time. Physics (in principle) could give us an explanation of how all the atoms move, but it won’t be able to explain why things are the way that are or how the initial conditions came to be in the first place. Take a look at this blog post too by Kevin Mitchell: www.wiringthebrain.com/2022/08/getting-to-bottom-of-reductionism-is-it.html?m=1

@@SubAnima I don't understand what you're saying about causes and where they originate or that the phenomena of biology "disappear". Emergent properties are the result of interactions. A single atom does not have a state of matter, but states of matter can be understood as interactions between many single atoms. Why questions are tricky, I think Feynman does a good job of explaining what I mean in this video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-MO0r930Sn_8.html I think any closed system can be described by describing it's component parts. The appearance of the chess board in an instance of the game can be fully derived from the program. Why a person wrote the program the way they did is still subject to the physical laws that govern their brain and how they interact with their environment. Kevin Mitchell says the alternative to reductionism is holism. I can't really wrap my head around holism. My day job is a biologist, though my degree is in molecular, cell, and developmental biologist so maybe I'm more sympathetic to the reductionist, physicalist explanations than an ecologist.

I'm saying that biological phenomena and their corresponding causes not only have little to do with the laws of physics, but that they cannot be derived from them (hence they disappear if we only take the low level perspective). Michela Massimi outlines it quite nicely with the example of water (global.oup.com/academic/product/perspectival-realism-9780197555620 , p.285-286): "Laws of nature are not ‘ladders’ to access different domains of inquiry in the hope to reduce a plurality of phenomena to a set of essential properties regarded as metaphysically explanatory. If anything, laws or lawlike dependencies are tied to specific phenomena. The engineers of Alhambra [a medieval sophisticated water supply system] could succeed without any knowledge of chemical laws about water being H2O. ... Water concerns all these phenomena at once: ground-water motion no less than droplet formation or chemical bonds. Some of the laws involved-like Darcy’s law for ground-water motion-are not reducible to, say, the Navier-Stokes equations in fluid dynamics. Laws are not ladders. A phenomena-first approach is congenial to the pluralism inherent in perspectival realism, and is anti-reductionist in denying any foundations. ... Insisting that water is H2O, while true, does not begin to answer the question as to why all these phenomena have historically been grouped together under the natural kind concept of water." This kind of "who cares if organisms have atoms in them, there's so much more stuff going on that has nothing to do with the physics" mindset emerges once we place process, not substance, first and foremost in our ontology. I made a video on that here (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vaJcmWjMNwo.html ) or you can check out the brilliant book Everything Flows (doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.001.0001 ). And emergent properties are not simply the result of interactions of their parts - in that we can't derive the higher level laws from the smaller ones (due to 'broken symmetries' as argued beautifully in P.W. Anderson's classic 'more is different': cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf ) Yeah I would also say that modern biology (perhaps minus ecology) is deeply steeped in reductionism, perhaps leading to your current worldview. I made a video on a brief history of the reductionist/organicist debate here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YV5ZjAZGw4Y.html

The thing is that organisms are made of atoms, not the other way around, organisms make atoms move because the chemical energy inside their cells allows them to. You can't predict how organisms will move their atoms because of the quantity of internal processes ( composed of atoms and energy ) and the variety and complexity of its molecules, on the other hand you can predict more accurately how materials and pure chemical substances will behave because all or most of it is made of the same molecule or chemical element The bigger the scale, the more irrelevant are the properties of the constitutents of its constitutents, example: When you're making a bulding the quantum properties of the atoms or moleculles of the concrete hardly will make a difference. Taking it a step further: On the cosmic scale our existence as species or even the existence of life in this planet is pretty irrelevant both in space ( we're a tiny fraction of the matter in the universe ) and time ( our existence has been and will be a blink in the scale of the universe lifetime ), suddenly a meteor strikes the earth and we're gone, the laws of the universe govern us.

@@GabrielMartinez-zm9dg Cells are made of atoms, the energy is contained in the chemical bonds (or elementary particles). Whether organisms move atoms or the other way around is purely a semantic argument, not a testable claim. I agree predicting the behavior of an organisim from first principles is not a tractable problem. Just because we don't have the ability to do something currently doesn't mean it can't be done. It was always physically possible to land on the moon, but it was only achieved in 1969. The nature of the problem has been the same for millennia, it was our technology that made it possible. As I stated in my first comment, understanding the smallest components of a system is rarely an effective way to understand a system. So I agree a construction worker doesn't need to think about quantum mechanics, that doesn't mean that the concrete is not governed by those laws. Relevance is subjective. My life is relevant to me and people that know me regardless of the fraction of the universe that my atoms represent. What fraction of the time or space of the universe does an entity need to occupy to be relevant? 1%? 10%? 50%? It's not a testable question, it's a personal one.

Based

I would rephrase it to: "It's not practical to reduce biology to physics." Actually it's not even practical to reduce chemistry to physics, because every system of more than a few atoms takes like forever to calculate. That doesn't mean though that it is not possible. We _know_ that every chemical process can be described using quantum mechanics, we just don't have the computational power to actually do it. Behind all the gobbledygook anti-reductionists basically claim that the standard model of particle physics is incomplete, that it doesn't describe all interactions that happen on energy scales that are relevant for biology and other higher level sciences. The problem is that they have zero evidence for this claim and also do not propose any extension or alternative that goes beyond magic. It is pseudo-science at best and mysticism at worst. I think many anti-reductionists do this because they are overwhelmed by the exponentially growing complexity when going from physics to chemistry, from chemistry to biology, and from biology to social sciences, which admittedly also hurts my brain when just thinking about it. Some may even believe that opposing reductionism will safe the idea of free will. This video actually borrows one argument from the free will debate by claiming that the inability to predict decisions is proof that it is fundamentally impossible. PS: I actually had to laugh at the example with the movement of atoms, as to completely ignore that the box also is made of particles (and hence must the part of the model) in a way is quite similar to how quantum physicists tend to ignore that a measurement device also is a quantum object and thus should be part of the model. xD

I think clarifing what we mean by physics is important here. If we just mean 'reality' then the matter becomes tautological: of course biology, a part of reality, is encompassed by the whole of reality. But if we mean a particular science that generates a set of descriptions of certain phenomena, then there is space for many questions. I think the point of the video is to challenge, the attitude that the descriptions, methods, and assumptions brought about by physics as a science can be applied to biology, it being a different phenomenon than that studied by physics.

​@@doctorinternet8695This issue would make sense, but I would say physics, by definition, is the science studying the most fundamental phenomena of reality, therefore as you say it encompasses biology. The "certain phenomena" that physics studies are just literally all phenomena. If there was any phenomenon in biology that can't be reduced to physics, this would mean that the physical theory is incomplete and this new phenomenon would have to be added into it. But there is no evidence at all for such a phenomenon to exist.

​@@doctorinternet8695 By "physics" I mean the fundamental mechanics or particle interactions as described by the standard model and QFT. That is the only 'reality', everything else emerges from it. Systems larger than a few atoms will indeed start getting out of hand and become too complex to simulate as mentioned by @NeovanGoth making other perspectives much more practical. I think the video does know this (from remarks such as "there are no new forces involved"), it's just a bit misleading is all. It doesn't clearly acknowledge that all biological phenomena are emergent from the fundamental laws of physics, and that it's just a matter of extracting meaningful top-level explanations for us humans to learn from.

@@japar107you fail to realize chemistry causes physics just the same way physics causes chemistry. Physics is not by definition the study of the most fundamental, it is concerned with a specific set of simplified system dynamics. Fundamental is not actually meaningful if you read up on the philosophy of fundamentalism.

Thanks so much John!

Hey thanks for the response and the nice words, even though you disagree. It makes me smile to get well-articulated critiques compared to heated polemics. First, I disagree that the space is just 'very large.' There is a large amount of literature defending my claim that it can't be pre-defined [given in the sources doc in the description; see Kauffman (2014), Cortes et al. (2022) and Roli, Jaeger and Kauffman (2022)]. The problem is that the configuration space is always expanding, even at the quantum level - see section 4.1 of the Cortes paper (arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378). More pragmatically, we can see that the 'space the organism lives in' could always expand. Perhaps an insect starts its life in some tree, it might then hop to a new tree, or get moved to another country by us humans and for all we know could get sent into space, possibly even to another planet. You'd have to include the whole universe in the model to get *all* possibilities, and at that point the organism has disappeared entirely as your model is too big to be useful and you are no longer doing biology. Even then, we'd have no explanation for why those states were chosen over others. This is a question we like to ask in biology but not so much in physics. We are constantly asking "why do insects have feature X, why do they live in habitat Y, how did it get to be this way?" Physics cannot answer the question of "why these laws?" which is why I lean on the side of drawing a line between the questions physics (in its current form) can answer and the questions biology is interested in. Distinctions are arbitrary yes, but there are right and wrong tools for the job. See chapter 4 of Lee Smolin's Time Reborn for discussion on this. Second, agency sounds spiritual because teleology was jettisoned from 'science' during the scientific revolution particularly by Newton and especially Descartes. See my video: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-YV5ZjAZGw4Y.html It need not be so spiritual-sounding (if that's how it came across, apologies) and can be easily naturalised. See Chapter 12 "Naturalised goals" in Organisms, Agency and Evolution by Denis Walsh (doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316402719 ) And yes, agency exists from cells all the way up. No consciousness required. Walsh defends this quite well in my opinion, it is a great read, even if you still disagree afterwards. Nonetheless, thanks for watching and commenting!

@@SubAnima Many thanks for taking the time to respond and pointing me to more cool resources! The concept of an expanding phase space making it undefinable is very intriguing - my only immediate worry is that such an expanding problem would apply to explaining non-living things, too? The self-organisation feels like a stronger argument than the phase space. You've also made me think more about teleology. My background is funnily enough going from physics to neuroscience research, so I've been primed to be extra sceptical of the "why these laws" question. I can now see what you meant a lot better! My final qualm is about the importance of "the organism" as a unit of analysis. I agree in a final analysis the whole universe would need to be included from a physics point of view, but don't see that as an immediate fundamental problem. However, if as you say we are to explain biology - and hence organisms - you're right physics may not be the right tool, giving us either "basic blocks only" or "literally everything there is" as explanatory levels. Thanks again for your work and pushing me to consider things from a different point of view!

@@marcosamuelfabus1044 Great to hear I've at least got you thinking! 1. Yes you make a good point on expanding phase spaces outside biology. It could well be applied to physics and I imagine that the case of the organism may be applied in many new ways outside its original domain. Perhaps even physics might rebuild itself inspired by biology. Crazy I know, but it is what Smolin says could indeed happen in light of Physics' inability to answer "why these laws?" In that case, the boundaries of physics and biology may blur in a new way with biology actually being the more 'general' science. I don't think I'll make just that claim as this video is controversial enough, but it's interesting to think about. 2. That's interesting you have a physics -> neuroscience background. I would highly suggest reading Evan Thomson's work on of all of this then - particularly embodied cognition and enactivism. Might ease you into the idea of non-spooky teleology. psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-19965-007 3. Throughout the 20th century, biologists stopped studying the organism - we reduced it down to genetics and biochemistry. Some, like nobel prize winning biologist François Jacob said that: "On n'interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires" (we no longer study life in our laboratories [just chemistry basically]) Many are now calling for a "Return of the Organism" into biology. There is even a very cool group called ROTO-RUB after this: rotorub.wordpress.com/ And here is an intro to what their group does: www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contributions/putting-the-organism-back-into-biology/

@@SubAnimaIMO the problem is that you basically introduce magic just because calculating quantum mechanics is really hard. If I'm not mistaken, this is based on the idea of string emergence; that complex systems somehow can develop behavior that by any means cannot be described by looking at a more fundamental level. As far as I know, there is zero evidence that strong emergence exists, and not even a proposal of how it could work. It's easy to say "WWI cannot be explained by the movement of atoms", because the movement of atoms clearly would be no practical or even remotely sensible way to do this. It's much harder though to explain what else is required, so it always ends up at magic.

​@@NeovanGothYou're the only one who brought up anything magical here my guy. Read the linked paper instead of drowning in ignorance lol.

Physics cannot explain state transition at the fundamental level nor at complex macroscopic levels sufficiently. For microscopic phenomenon, quantum uncertainty becomes a problem. For complex macro phenomenon, computability becomes a problem. Someone might make the case but in principle complex systems are deterministic, but that's a stupid argument. No computer other than existence itself can simulate such a system given the time and space constraints. In other words, to simulate what a bunch of house flies will do, it's easier to just observe rather than compute every molecule of the house flies + environment.

@@abhishekshah11 I agree. That’s why biology is very useful. We take the computation that the universe (or in the way you put it “existence”) is, and then compress it. These compressions are abstractions and they work for making calculations. However they are subject to chaos and don’t predict perfectly accurately forever. These compressions are depended on scale for sure so that is why they break down when the scale changes and why it’s not useful to know quantum mechanics if your trying to do heart surgery. Biology must be just physics… but we still must study biology ofc

@@abhishekshah11 also there are two modes of thinking here. I’m assuming that “physics” is the study of what is. So there is a separation between “what is” and the models we use in physics to define “what is”. Our models break down but “what is” is still just “what is” operating however it does. In this sense biology must just break down to “what is”, which is my definition of physics

Physics can explain something up until the point where it becomes alive and determines its own function. After that the topology of the landscape is no longer static and it becomes very hard to reduce things to laws. Biology and maybe psychology can explain this stuff from a top down perspective while physics and chemistry can help from a bottom up perspective, but I don't blame him for being annoyed by reductionists who value their perceived superiority over making actual progress. I'm sure physicists find the same reductionist argument from math reductionist tedious so it's always bewildering when they make it themselves.

@@juliawilliams1355 I think that physics can explain even the most complex of phenomena such as life. However it’s not useful with current technology because it’s incomputable. Imagine a computer powerful enough to simulate some creature to the most fundamental physical unit. The biological behaviors exhibited could be explained by the physical laws that govern those units. However, our understanding of these laws at a macroscopic level is still called biology, but can definitely be reduced to physics (even if the physics is unknown). The idea that there is some emergent force that has influence on macroscopic phenomena directly would suggest some sort of “god-like” intervention the top down explanation might make more sense to humans but doesn’t necessarily mean it is the cause behind the effect.

Thank you so much, it means a lot! Next video is about halfway done, but im taking a break for the holidays. Should be up mid-Jan :))

@@SubAnima wow , can't wait to watch the new video . I am sure someday the youtube algorithm will work in your favor .

Thanks, glad it at least made you think! I'm sure plenty of people are gonna disagree with it and that's fine :). Just wanted to articulate the anti-reductionist point of view and put it out there.

Correct. Anti-reductionists basically introduce magic because quantum mechanics is really hard to calculate.

​@@NeovanGothExcept his position is even more strange since apparently he doesn't even do that, as he does not want to argue for any "other force". This leaves a completely contradictory position, where he says that biological organisms are entirely composed of particles described by physics, yet the organism as a whole can not be explained by physics.

@@happyduck1 That's exactly what I meant with "magic". ;) They are basically proposing the existence of _something_ supernatural that _somehow_ gives certain complex constructs of particles (like living beings) properties that can't be derived from laws of nature, neither known nor unknown. In Judaism this is called "rûaḥ" (רוּחַ), which translates to "breath of life" or "spirit of life", as in Genesis 2:7, which says: "And God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." This "rûaḥ" isn't a physical thing, it's some kind of divine force that can have an effect on the physical world, but is not part of the physical world. Of course modern scientists wouldn't call it "supernatural" or a "divine force". Instead, they don't define it _at all_. They just claim that not everything we can observe can be reduced to laws of nature, and that's it. Don't ask, just believe! ;)

Physics is useless when reduced to math. And math is useless when reduced to logic. And logic is useless when reduced to philosophy. I wounded not only your pride, but your life. Stop making non-sequitur arguments in scientific discourse, you genious.

​@@NeovanGothI would like to hear what you have to say about quantum decoherence? Is it still magic? Do you put the word magic to everything that is counter Intuitive to you?? Does reality care about if you like it being computational, determenistic and reductionalistic?? You absolute fool... If no entirely new laws can be introduced you wouldn't have your beloved classical physics and locality so stop the reductionalistic bullshit.

Thanks! Been tossing up whether to do a video going into the details of Rosen’s argument. It’s definitely on the list. Hopefully I get around to it ;) If not, there are some brilliant interviews about Rosen on the Dialectical Systems RU-vid page, you should check out!

Thanks! I'd pass it back to you and say that I'm not completely fond of your attempt to say that physics is more fundamental than biology. What do you mean by 'more fundamental'? Sure it deals with smaller things but why should that make it the more fundamental science? Surely we agree that there are phenomena in biology that can't be explained with the tools of physics (as the video laid out, e.g. self-organisation) and there are phenomena in physics that can't be explained by biology (e.g. quantum mechanics). That's totally fine and is why we have multiple sciences. But one cannot be reduced into the other. They're complementary tools, which *together*, give us useful insight into the world. Responding to my alleged contradictions: 1. I never claimed that organisms are separate from their environment, I believe quite the contrary, the environment plays a huge role. But organisms clearly have a self-producing aspect that is not explored by DEs. That is the point I was trying to make. 2. I never said organisms do not obey "entropy" (I suppose you mean the second law of thermodynamics?). Again quite the contrary, organisms have very interesting thermodynamic properties, which are being still being explored e.g. arxiv.org/abs/2204.09379 Perhaps you are referring to the title where I said biology 'can't be reduced to' physics. I meant that in a knowledge-making (epistemic) sense - physics cannot be used to explain biology completely. Of course, organisms still obey the laws of physics. No-one is claiming that they don't (at least, I don't know any modern day vitalists).

@@SubAnimaLove a theory of knowledge rebuttal to the claim that you were “degrading” physics. There is a bizarre chauvinistic impulse in science and certain science enthusiasts to declare physics (or math) the only “real” field, and thereby claim that all others are mere offshoots. I really appreciate how clearly you articulate the foundational differences in how the fields approach knowledge, and that all of them learn from each other but are not “mere derivatives” of each other. Except, of course, philosophy is the only *real* field, since all others are mere splinters. That’s why it was titled the Philosophy of the Natural World! (/s)

​@@SubAnima Us being unable to map out and properly describe the phase state of an organism and declaring of this, that biology can't be reduced to mere physical properties is kind of a logical fallacy. That the phase space is indefinite and thus can't be described is not true, because at every given moment it turns definite due to collapse of the wave functions of every atom being observed by it's neighbours. It is self containing and self limiting. Saying, that a function chart is impossible to be described, because it contains an indefinite amount of possibilities to be formed, looses it's meaning, once the function manifests out of its input values. Even if chaotic interferences and the movement at the edge of chaos can lead to vastly different results, it still stands, that it could be described and replicated. It's just very hard and unlikely. You are confusing ability and possibility. Our current we is unable to do it, thus declaring it impossible is not the right way. Even the top down self organisation aspect of life follows thermo dynamic laws. Organisms are kind of an "energetic-loop-bug", constantly sacrificing energetic values and creating entropic compensations for the amount of information and order that is stored in the organism. We can track the amount of energy going into an organism, how it is distributed, stored and used. We can observe the properties of proteins and how they function. (In one of your videos you claimed, that machines have to have "solid parts" and because proteins can be flexible and have different configurations they shouldn't be considered machine like seems like a wrongly applied axiom, that messes up the conclusion) It is possible to observe the genes, how they are translated and result in a cellular structure (I didn't say a specific) and how they add up in the complete organism. It could be possible to calculate the entropic and energetic gains of the DNA being unfolded etc. That we are not able to do so, doesn't mean it's impossible. In this we are forgetting, that everything, that describes natural laws is inherently physics, because physics just describes matter. The blood flow can be described by physics. We can see how fast it's moving, with which rhythm it's coming, the pressure it has. Why the body is doing with the blood what it's doing, is a different question, but even that can be described by physics, if you look at the correct places with the correct equipment. We can measure the amount of adrenaline. We can see how the g-protein changes its configuration, we can measure the phosphorylation states, we can measure the Ca2+ influx, we can measure the change of potential, we can see the heart and vein cells contract, we can see how the angiotensin is released and so on. If necessary we can even go further back than the adrenaline release, the light stimulus being received and translated into a picture, the areas where the picture is interpreted, a reaction is formed, the Sympathicus gets activated and so on. Only, because we are unable to fully grasp and describe it and thus replicate it, doesn't mean, it is impossible to deduce biology to physics. But nice video anyway.

Wouldn't the dependence of living organism to the laws of physics (or as you put it, it's obedience) make physics more fundamental than biology? I mean of course, one can debate and philosophy about what is meant and understood with any word under a given context (that's part of the fun of dialogue in the end), but I believe that the common connotations of the word are pretty clear thou. @@SubAnima

@@SubAnima Physics are more fundamental in the sense that physics can exist separately and independently from biology, though biology is dependent on more fundamental areas of science such as physics and chemistry to exist within our universe. If physics ceased to exist, biology would. If biology ceased to exist, physics would carry on in a lifeless universe.

Yet anti-reductionists believe that life isn't just atoms moving according to the laws of physics, but that there is (to take the example from the video) a box that for some reason isn't made of atoms and hence can't be part of physical models. What this box is made of then and how this helps to do science, they do not explain. It's basically magic. Which is why anti-reductionism IMO is pseudo-science at best, and mysticism at worst.

Forget it, it was a silly question. Great video!

I think the halting problem ia definitely an argument against reductionism. As well as the greater concept that is godels incompleteness theorem. Both pojnt to the limitations of our description of reality, and therefore, our ability to reduce one phenomenon to a set of descritions The problem of immanence states this in a more phylosophical way: we assume we a but a part of reality, embeddes in it. We are immanent beings, as opposed to transcendent ones. So our perspective will always be limited, and no set of descriptions will apply yo everything

@@doctorinternet8695 An undecidable problem can emerge from a system that operates according to deterministec rules, and there's no contratiction with that. If the system is large enough, it can have a non-deterministic "feel" at the macro levels. On the other hand I'm not familiar with the problem of immanence. I'll look into that.

Bottom-up and top-down causes are both important, I'd agree with that. But in terms of the role of time, I'm not so much an expert and many physicists debate about it. I've read Time Reborn by Lee Smolin which argues that the orthodoxy of "time as a stubbornly persistent illusion" is wrong and needs to be overturned placing time as fundamental, not emergent. More interesting for a biologist like me, is that Smolin also argues that the laws of physics change over time, and therefore we need to have a theory that explains 'why these laws?' It's a good read, i'd recommend it. Again, not an expert. Thanks for watching!

Thanks so much for the ongoing support! The Rutherford quote is indeed a classic (anti-classic?) :)

I recommend The Dialectical Biologist by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levin

It's a great book, I might make a video on dialectics specifically in the future :)

@@SubAnima wow, I'd love that!

Thanks so much!!

What do you mean by we could "theoretically"?

@@SubAnima any biological process can be theoretically be explained through biochemistry (of how compounds interact with each other), then we can theoretically explain that chemistry with physical chemistry (of the different molecules & atoms/elements) then we can explain that with physics so therefore you can theoretically explain biological processes through physics.

The point SubAnima makes that it is fundamentally impossible to explain say animal behavior even with the most complex physical model, perfect knowledge of each particle, and practically infinite computing power. It sounds ridiculous, and srsly, I think it is. It is the needless introduction of magic while completely ignoring the knowledge that even small sets of simple rules can create staggering complexity given the right initial state.

And the "self revolution" of DNA is also possible to simulate. DNA is made of atoms. in order to simulate it evolving accurately you would need a lot more simulated then just the organism.

And that is exactly the argument Stuart Kauffman has been making with his “TAP equation” arxiv.org/pdf/2204.14115.pdf See also links in the sources doc :)

@@SubAnima Wow, thank you for the link! I will look into this; however, already from the start, I am a bit sceptical, because (while writing the first comment) I already thought to myself: That can probably not be shown rigorously, because life can go extinct or go through very narrow bottlenecks, where the number of possibilities to arrange matter into living beings (and "things") decreases instead of increases. Therefore, monotony can probably only be demonstrated within some rather strict boundary conditions... But I'll definitely look into the paper! Thanks a lot!

Exactly. There are bottom-up processes that aren't caused by top down processes. But there is no top-down process that isn't caused by bottom-up processes

The possibility of "supervenience without entailment" or "supervenience without reduction" is contested territory among philosophers. - Copied from Wikipedia In principle, if you could perfectly predict the most fundamental units of reality, then its all deterministic and everything is reducible. But I believe physicists have demonstrated that there is true randomness at the quantum level. I think this randomness is a good argument for non-reducibility. If that randomness has effects on higher orders of matter that those higher orders can themselves change, then your argument holds true. But I don't know that kind randomness has effects that are relevant for chemical reactions which is what biology is directly built upon. I hope I'm not too incoherent.

Well that's the big question isn't it: how do living things organise their own matter? Perhaps that is precisely the central question of developmental biology. I wouldn't say that the matter is itself alive in some kind of panpsychist/animist sense, but rather shift the attention away from substance to process: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vaJcmWjMNwo.html

This is now a purely religious claim. If it is impossible to determine that the universe is a machine, yet we still hold to the unwavering assumption that the universe is a machine, then we are not doing science anymore. Moreover, we should embrace considering other ways of looking at the universe that are non-mechanistic.

@@SubAnima I'm just not sure what a "non-mechanistic" view actually is supposed to mean. You seem to agree at multiple points during your video that the only thing standing in the way of mechanistic perspectives are the physical limitations of observation and calculation. See user @DANGJOS, their comment sums my own perspective exactly. And so do your own comments at multiple points, specifically after 8:40. I'm not saying that the only tool we need, as humans, to understand the universe, is Physics. Like you say, we are just apes. We can only physically construct a finite amount of computers, and we can barely keep them cool enough to simulate astrophysical phenomena, relatively simple and reduceable compared to biological phenomena. But that isn't the claim of mechanistic reductionism. The claim isn't that physics, an earthly/human/academic/scientific institution, is a tool we should be able to expect will emergently recreate and perfectly explain every higher order scientific discipline one day, and so therefore those disciplines are of no real utility, mere abstract thought games or something. The claim is that the processes that physics attempts describe are at the root of all other higher order scientific disciplines. That, given a hypothetically infinite resource of correct observational data about each particle in the universe and well cooled computational power, they *could* be emergently reverse engineered by brute force from lower order laws. It is understood that those conditions are a fantasy, and that in order to understand life on earth we are going to need to look at it from every level of abstraction available, I'm certainly not disputing that at all. Just... the universe doesn't care about our models, or our limitations that prevent us from producing perfectly accurate models. In fact, I don't necessarily believe such perfectly accurate models can possibly exist. I think it's reasonable to assume that the only thing capable of perfectly modeling the universe is the actual, totally unreduced, universe itself.