Need I remind you: the human race now sends robots to Mars. That is a thing we do! We derive that absurd capability from generations of previous e

AndyMatuschak. square signals

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2021-05-23 13:00:12

Need I remind you: the human race now sends robots to Mars. That is a thing we do! We derive that absurd capability from generations of previous epistemological revolutions which we compound and extend to create new marvels.

I like to picture the tower of abstractions that enable this kind of progress. If you looked closely, you’d see its struts form an intimidating (and not altogether reassuring) lattice. Rocketry builds on chemical engineering and relativity but not pharmacology; flu vaccines build on chemical engineering and pharmacology but not (directly) relativity.

Now, we could examine the same data or questions from any position on this tower. One fun example: why is your hair the color that it is? Because you have a certain gene which expresses that phenotype! Or… because of the cellular machinery which expressed those genetics? The electrochemistry which drove those interactions? Optics? Cultural tropes influencing the mating habits which favored those genes?

One approach suggests that the observer can best understand a complex system by breaking it into composite parts, until she trips upon axioms, which are (perhaps temporarily) where truth lies. This is sometimes called reductionism. This word has other—incompatible!—definitions, but this is the one I’ll reference.