
Tom Stoppard's Hard Problems - jeffreyrogers
https://evolution-institute.org/article/tom-stoppards-hard-problems/
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PeterWhittaker
An excellent, thought-provoking read. The clay Vs sculpture discussion should
be immediately meaningful to all of us: Just frame it as electrons Vs packets
Vs Facebook. Every one does reduce to the one below, eventually, but one can
neither predict nor explain properties "above" based on properties "below", no
matter how complete one's understanding of each layer.

After all, while electrons are our dominant signal carrying medium, they are,
once you get high enough up the stack, just one medium among many, just one
possible way to carry information. Likewise, packets: Get enough network
applications and services going, and packet switched network just become YAM
(yet another medium).

Scientists work at all levels, and some work to link the levels, but that is
(and may always remain?) at best incomplete at this time. Artists, and to a
lesser extent philosophers, are impatient with this reductionism and
layering... ...some go so far as to assert that <insert Big Messy Problem
(BMP) here>, e.g., consciousness, can NEVER be explained via methodological
naturalism, i.e., scientific theories of nature, well, just because.

Eventually we may/should catch up, with enough layers linked well enough to
explain many of today's BMPs - and we will appear no further ahead, at least
to some, because we will simply have discovered more BMPs....

Clay, electrons, packets, tablets (Sumerian or Samsung), are all so many media
for expression and conveyance of meaning imperceptible within a layer,
inconceivable below that layer, and salient only well above (and often in
hindsight).

