There you go. Loving one’s mother is clearly genetically driven (given that puppies and kittens love their mothers too) and DNA is made of atoms. Obviously It is more convenient to move up the hierarchy to discuss such things at the genetic or protein or even brain levels, but the underlying structure is there. We don’t discuss computer architecture in terms of transistors (or atoms!) but the transistors are there.
I was actually guessing where X in the OP was coming from. In my experience, most people attacking reductionism are coming from the position that there is something that can’t be explained by physical elements and their interactions.
I suspect that no one denies biochemistry is involved - the question is whether only biochemistry is involved. I don’t understand what you mean by “subjective” - a reductionist view doesn’t deny consciousness. The only think I could see someone objecting to about reductionism is that it denies anything not tied directly to the body.
Right, but you still wouldn’t describe the transistors in terms of their constituent elements. It would be quite tedious. I think it all hinges on the word ‘JUST’, which seems to imply that metaphysics is unimportant. Identity is metaphysical. The connection between the word used to describe an empirical partical is metaphysical in nature and cannot be described in atomic terms. There is the atom and then the idea of the atom.
(I am not coming at you as though you automatically disagree with what I am saying, just in case it sounds that way.)
Perhaps, I don’t know X. It seems to me that people think that there is value in something being irreducible. Certain things are irreducible. I am greater than the sum of my parts, because my personality is not ‘JUST’ a property of my atoms, but also of experience and descriptors, thoughts, ideas. The process that conveys the thoughts may be described biochemically, but as yet we cannot isolate particular thoughts by their constituent waveform/particle. For instance, what chemical/force makeup does the thought, “I like cheese”, have?
Subjective are all the personal identifiers one uses to describe their experience from their particular perspective. The perspective can be described by time and space, and given complete knowledge of the positions of atoms in space, it may even be possible to recreate a reasonable facsimile of the sequence of events, but that doesn’t mean that the experience of the observer is any way reproduceable for another person. By virtue of having a different chemical/force makeup, with different spacial/temporal coordinates your perspective is different and thus you cannot hope to approximate the experience had even if you were capable of reproducing a localized facsimile of biochemical events down to the placement of individual atoms within the person and their immediate environment. So there is something intrinsically unique about the experience of that observer that cannot be described in terms of ‘JUST’ atoms.
Well, my semiconductor physics friends do kind of describe transistors in terms of atoms, especially as signal layers in advanced processes are getting to be a few atoms thick. But, being fallible and limited humans, it sure is tedious and impractical. But we often lose something by describing it at the high level. I know of many bugs that could have been caught if we were able to simulate a processor at the transistor level, which is still impractical.
Let’s take water. Can you take hydrogen and oxygen atoms and predict water will emerge from a certain combination? Is water more than the sum of its atoms? I think you can argue that it is, but water has nothing in it but its atoms and their interactions. It is the interaction that changes everything. I think we could understand thought if we had access to all our neurons and their chemical interactions. I doubt this will be practical in the near future, since probing change things. That’s true when we probe inside a chip also.
Just atoms over simplifies things. Our personalities are affected by thousands of input parameters, including our genes, our chemical makeup, our hormones, and our experience. So if by subjective you mean we can never reproduce someone else’s experience and personality, I totally agree. I don’t think reductionism implies that something is deterministic. I also don’t think it implies that you can predict what someone or something will do. I think it does imply that if you had perfect knowledge, you could play the tape backwards and understand the non-metaphysical why of why everything happened. It’s just like evolution - we can say why an animal has the characteristics it has, but you can’t even in principle go back in time and predict that’s how it will turn out.
It would be grossly inefficient if you spent the power of your transistors on modelling themselves. It would be a neverending recursive loop of externally imposed solipsism on the machine you have made.
That is true of water, but not true of the ocean. An Ocean has a discrete identity, based upon location and other such things. Sure it can be described atomically, but I can’t see any way you would describe the sense of ‘foreboding’ that comes when the swells stop and the sky clears before a big storm. You can describe the conveyance of the emotion in terms of impulses between the sensory neurons to the limbic system on to the cerebral cortex, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the sense of foreboding. You can describe the physical reactions, the bile rising in one’s stomach, the tension in one’s myofascia, the increased sympathetic response, but that doesn’t distinguish foreboding from fear, anger or any other property. You are simply describing the causes and effects of the emotion, but not the emotion itself.
Here’s where I get irreducible. A person’s identity is defined by it’s place in the ENTIRE Universe. I am the perspective that is typing it’s experience into a machine to convey a thought to another perspective similar enough that it has a high enough probability of understanding that which is being transmitted, to make my expenditure of energy worthwhile. Even if you described the position data of EVERY atom in the universe in relation to EVERY other atom in the universe, you still would not convey what it is like for me to be expressing what I am expressing to you right now.
I don’t think there is such a thing as a non-metaphysical ‘why’ of things. We exist entirely within our model. The model is a representation of reality based upon external stimuli, but the data is input and goes through a series of interpretation processes, from the external stimuli like light entering the eyes, being converted into electro-chemical impulses, being routed to different parts of the brain, stimulating different centers from emotional centers, to autonomic centers, to language and speech centers, until the data is interpreted by a whole host of molecular reactions within the stimulated organism. The interpretive map that is created from a host of different forms of interpretation in different brain centers is not the territory. It has sensory, emotional and symbolic information that renders the landscape into an image that we hold inside of our brain. All of this info is completely extraneous to the interaction of the forces that we call ‘atoms’. Atoms themselves are not solid, but are nexuses of energy, that we provide with positional data. Not only that, but observing the atom at the subatomic level affects it changing the data that apply to it, in a dynamic give and take between perception and empirical existence. (With this paragraph I am about at the limit of my scientific understanding of Quantum Mechanics.)