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

Re:Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology t... by simonh on Sunday September 30, 2018 @05:33PM (#18108550)

>I believe the answer is that there are properties which only come into existence once you have the right physical arrangement, but these properties can't be predicted in advance from the physical constituents.

In order for such properties to not be predictable from the physical constituents, they must not be encoded in the physical constituents. If they are encoded in the physical constituents, then they must be predictable from them.

If these properties are not encoded in their physical constituents, where does the information come from and where is it represented?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology t... by jchrisa on Monday October 01, 2018 @05:45PM (#18117100)

Supervenience is the relation of being made of a substrate, but not predicted by its laws. Supervenience is distinct from entailment, you are conflating the two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience

Suggesting that the natural laws are such that all behavior must be entailed by "lower level" natural laws, is a stronger position than stating that all things follow natural law. I think it is hubristic to think that somehow our understanding of natural law is exempt from the same issues that are raised by the incompleteness theorem in math.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology t... by bordercases on Sunday September 30, 2018 @06:27PM (#18108775)

Can you always recover all physical information?

[ Parent | on HN ]