Reductionism porn

The main thrust of the consilience world view  is that culture … will make complete sense only when linked in causal explanation to the natural sciences.  … I know that such reductionism is not popular outside the natural sciences. … The difference between the two domains is in the magnitude of the problem, not the principles needed for its solution.

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience (1998), p. 267

There are not “two” domains, but a couple of bunches;  set that aside.  Even within the natural sciences -- nay  let us further even restrict ourselves to physics:  there are several domains within physics, each with its own principles and techniques.   Those of thermodynamics were developed in their own realm, quite apart from the details of each atom.  (Later, a certain reduction to statistical mechanics was achieved -- indeed, one author cites this as the only completely successful instance of a broad reduction, within physics or indeed science at all.)  Quantum mechanics notoriously is a world apart.  String theory, yet another world, straining for any contact with this one.    Crystallography, cosmology, planetology, low-temperature physics, materials science  -- each boasts a clique of adepts  initiated into the Masonic mysteries of their own particular discipline (which alas, by its very success and progress, threatens to fragment further),  no one of whom could explain the principles and techniques of any other.  Which principles did the professor have in mind, for, say, the analysis of the Elizabethan theatre?  Heisenberg Uncertainty?  Maldacena duality?  Allopatric speciation?  (“Certain memes play out upon the stage, in full sight of the audience.  We call these the ‘observables’; they are given by Hermitian operators.”)

Each new horizon of science has brought with it  a new problematics, evoking new principles and new tools  not remotely to have been anticipated.  Some things now taken for granted, such as spacetime, and curved spacetime, and the various possible geometries for the universe as a whole, would previously have counted as analytically false  by the Kantians, space and time and Euclidean geometry being categories that were unquestionable and simply given.  It would be surprising if, say, a unified theory of the forces of nature turned out to consist of the old horse of the hyperweak simply hitched up to the wagon of general relativity and off you go.   Nor is a deeper understanding of free will or interpersonal communication or our emergent intellectual resonance with the most abstract mathematical principles imaginable,  likely to just fall out of the petri slime and the endless button-pushing experiments of the neuroscientists -- though they try, O Lord, they try.