Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology to Physics (1994)

Re:Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology t... by karmakaze on Sunday September 30, 2018 @02:25PM (#18107514)

The reason reducibility wins is because 'physics' is a moving target. Imagine that The Milky Way is an organism and in the process of understanding it through physics, we discover that our laws and theories are unable to explain it--e.g. dark matter. That is now part of physics too. So if we did discover some kind of irreducible biological cell, we'd just name a new area of physics yet to be understood.

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Re:Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology t... by goatlover on Sunday September 30, 2018 @02:37PM (#18107608)

> So if we did discover some kind of irreducible biological cell, we'd just name a new area of physics yet to be understood.

But what if the irreducible cell is made up of normal matter, but it has strongly emergent properties that can't be explained simply in terms of structure and function of it's physical properties? That's what would make it irreducible, if such things do exist.

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Re:Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology t... by XaspR8d on Sunday September 30, 2018 @06:50PM (#18108886)

We would probably change our model of physics to accommodate the emergence of those properties?

I suppose there's a scale at which the "gap" becomes too large to call it "physics," but the larger the scale, the stranger it would be to find something irreducible across so many levels.

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