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something I gotta work out w/ antireductionism

If reductionism is false, then there must be a way in which any whole transcends the laws governing its parts.  That's not big news: Polanyi says something like that in the Tacit Dimension (great example of using human agency as the basis for a broader ontology), as does Aristotle, I think at the end of book I (?) of the Physics.

The point that's crossing my mind right now, however, is that folks tend to talk about this world being driven by physical necessity except for cases of free-will.  Now I certainly am convinced that free-will and intellection are exceptional in comparison with the rest of the world.  But I would be careful about how I would affirm this.

Let's take an animal acting on the basis of desire as a test case, knowing that my point might even be applicable to lower levels.

My claim is that if reductionism is false, then imagining an object of desire and desiring said object are acts that, while having as necessary conditions for their occurrence lower level processes, are not merely the sums of those lower level processes.  Imagining might (provided we make a ceteribus paribus background assumption) in some sense necessitate desiring.  But if reductionism is false, then this necessitation is not reducible to the sum of the relationship between the underlying processes identified with each (imagining, desiring) of them.  A scientist looking at the molecular processes involved might see a correlation between the two (imagining and desiring) but would not be able to infer the processes underlying the consequent (desiring) from the processes underlying the antecedent (imagining) simply on the basis of the laws of physics... nor would the scientist be able to do so on the basis of organic chemistry (understood here as a discipline that recognizes only laws common to both animals and non-animal organisms.

In other words, there is a kind of "freedom" from the limitations of the lower.  That is not to say that the higher level breaks the lower level laws.  Rather, higher level laws are kind of free floating.  Not in a dualistic way (instead of ghosts inside the machine, we would have puppy ghosts?), but rather, a higher level state of affairs X can be instantiated by more than one lower level state of affairs Y1, Y2, Y3. 

.......... I am not sure of whether this is going anywhere...gotta think about it more.

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