
Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology to Physics (1994) - Osiris30
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-8106-6_10
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neonate
[http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8106-6_...](http://sci-
hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8106-6_10)

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Upvoter33
Sounds like Bohr doesn't believe the "astonishing hypothesis". As stated on
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astonishing_Hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astonishing_Hypothesis):
The Astonishing Hypothesis posits that "a person's mental activities are
entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions,
and molecules that make them up and influence them."

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jchanimal
You can agree the mental events are made up of the same stuff as physical
events, without believing that they can be fully explained in physical terms.
[https://www.iep.utm.edu/anom-mon/](https://www.iep.utm.edu/anom-mon/)

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sooheon
> although mental states, events and processes have genuine causal powers, the
> causal relationships that they enter into with physical entities cannot be
> explained by appeal to fundamental laws of nature

The claim is that mental events are supernatural?

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jchanimal
No, the claim is that an explanatory framework limited to physical terms is
not complete enough to encompass mental events.

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simonh
I’m not sure if I’m reading you right. You seem to be saying some mental
events don’t have physical causes, or maybe that some mental properties are
not encoded physically.

In which case it sounds like there should be some mental events or experiences
that are impervious to physical interference. So for example there is no
conceivable physical intervention that could affect them. Do you believe there
may be mental phenomena that are not causally related to physical processes in
that way? It sounds like this should be testable.

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mike741
"You seem to be saying some mental events don’t have physical causes, or maybe
that some mental properties are not encoded physically."

I think he is only saying that an empirical language alone will not be enough
to relate mental processes to physical ones. You have to define what a mental
event really is before you can properly test anything about it, and depending
on what definition you choose it might be inherently un-testable. If you
define a mental process as being composed of physical processes from the start
then of course you will conclude that all mental processes are influenced by
physical ones. There are other possible definitions though such as physical
processes being composed of multiple mental processes (the opposite of the
last) in which case no physical test could be performed to verify a "change"
occurred in the mental subject (but a "mental test" of sorts might still be
able to tell us)

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aaronblohowiak
Monism is on the retreat in many, many fields “lately”. We still haven’t
really understood all the implications of post Newtonian determinism, and
thermodynamics isn’t super useful here either because most of the systems we
care about are “open”.. also, models (even those with high predictive power
locally) don’t compose in a way that allows for predictive power of emergent
phenomena. A hierarchical mutual-causality framework (a la Ascendency) will
likely get us where we need to go to understand things more better. This is
all being actively discussed in philosophy of science circles, iirc

Edit: am just a hobbyist at this stuff, I’m probably wrong ;)

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dwaltrip
Any good resources to read about this?

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aaronblohowiak
I came to learn about it through Ecology: The Ascendant Perspective, which is
a very fun read in general. If you want harder to read stuff, you could go to
Popper or more contemporary, Eric Hochstein.

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dwaltrip
Thanks!

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rusanu
Isn't this 'the argument of personal incredulity'?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_fallacy)

> I cannot imagine how P could be true; therefore P must be false.

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goatlover
No, the argument is that we can't see how P could be true, even though plenty
of people assume that P is true. But P could also be false. It's questioning
the assumption that P is true because nobody has succeeded so far in showing
that it is. It might or might not be. We don't know.

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sofal
Are you talking about the argument outlined in the article? I don't see where
you're getting that from.

The article in the OP is about the argument that the explanation of
characteristic biological functions by physics is _impossible_. Niel argues
for epistemological anti-reductionism. It's not about throwing doubt on the
assumption that reductionism is true, it is specifically arguing that it is in
fact false using the analogy of the complementarity that governs the
explanation of the stability of atoms.

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goatlover
More so a response to the parent that the article in the OP was an argument
from incredulity. Still not convinced that arguing for impossibility is the
same as arguing form incredulity, if you have a good argument for
impossibility.

So for example, Chalmers arguing that consciousness can't be reduced to
physics is not an argument from incredulity. Rather, it's an argument that
it's conceptually impossible. People might disagree with either Bohr or
Chalmers arguments, but that's different from them committing this particular
fallacy, unless it can be pointed out how Bohr or Chalmers were arguing from a
failure of imagination.

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simonh
Ok, I’ll try to point that out.

Charmers argues that quaila cannot be reduced to physical causes. However we
know for sure that any conceivable information or process that can be
performed on information must be tractable to physical encoding.

It seems to me that qualia are simply information, or a process performed on
information. If so, clearly they can have a physical cause. To refute this,
Chalmers would have to show some property or characteristic of qualia that is
not information or a process performed on it. But this is impossible. Any such
explanation would by definition have to be encoded in information or a process
performed on information.

Therefore if it is even possible for Chalmers to explain or adequately
describe his thesis in a complete and consistent way, it must be true that his
thesis is false.

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goatlover
> It seems to me that qualia are simply information, or a process performed on
> information.

Not all information has a subjective component to it, so qualia can't be
identical to information, unless one is a panpsychist.

Moreover, information can be seen as an abstraction from experience that
humans create via cognition and language. One might respond that all physical
processes involve information, but physics is itself an abstraction. It's our
attempt to create a map or models of the world. It's not the world itself.

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simonh
>Not all information has a subjective component to it, so qualia can't be
identical to information, unless one is a panpsychist.

Doesn't that just make qualia a subset of information, not distinct from it?
Even metadata is still just a form of data.

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eternalban
The opening paragraph is puzzling as it breezily mentions that NB, "even in
his youth", was familiar with deep questions regarding the relationship
between biology and physics. Neil's Bohr's father was an accomplished and
famous physician [1][2]. No doubt father and son had quite interesting
discussions over dinner regarding this very topic.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Bohr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Bohr)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_effect)

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deepnet
Conversely, Jim Al-Khalili on the role of quantum physics in biological
mechanisms.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgQVZju1ZM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgQVZju1ZM)

and his BBC version

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4ONRJ1kTdA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4ONRJ1kTdA)

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raverbashing
Can I reduce what I see now on the screen of my computer to physical
phenomenon that has happened in a finite amount of time? Yes. Is it practical
or treatable? Probably not.

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hyperion2010
My gut reaction to these arguments has always been to disagree, however I
think that I have been missing the more nuanced interpretation, with which I
actually agree.

Of _course_ biology won't be explainable using just the mathematics for basic
physics. Quantum physics and classical physics are able to account for an
enormous amount of the complexity of in the universe. However, their
representation is so compressed, and has been developed and tested on such
'low dimensional' system, that there are surely mathematical laws that they
simply cannot encode, nor should we expect them to.

The number of stable combinations of fundamental particles and the number of
different orbital configurations etc. etc. are a set of rules with which
everything 'must' be consistent (unless there is a major shift in our
understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe). However, they give us
little to no insight into what other constraints might be imposed on systems
where the phenomena they describe are merely parts (yes I know that I have a
wave function).

All this to say that it seems to me that there must be other mathematical laws
that do not follow directly from 'basic' physics, that also constrain the
behavior of more complex physical systems. The answer is not therefore that
biology irreducible to some mathematical description, which is how I usually
interpreted these arguments, but rather that there are additional mathematical
laws that are needed. Perhaps that rather than despairing at the
'irreducibility' of biology to physics, we merely need to extend our notion of
'physics' to include the mathematical laws that constrain biology.

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JPLeRouzic
I like the list of keywords that were generated automatically, particularly
one that looks like coming straight out of Iain M. Banks' "Culture" :

 _" Emphasis Mine"_

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zmix
Obscene prices...

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zadler
I dont understand this, life is already quite well explained by thermodynamics
and the second law, which i also find to be a quite underappreciated concept.
Physical processes at the quantum mechanical level are reversible, but at the
macro level they do not reverse. Life is a process which is able to adapt to
changing and irreversible circumstances. It does not seem to make sense to
explain life in terms of quantum mechanics.

