 Okay, we're rolling again. Welcome back to Beyond Networks, the evolution of living systems. The last time we talked about perspectival realism, and I'm just going to repeat some of the main points that came up during that lecture. The first one is that as limited beings, that's very important. We can't have a God's eye view of the world. We step out of our own heads and sort of see the universe from outside, a view from nowhere it's been called as well. Our perspectives are more than just opinions or subjectives point of view though. Within those perspectives, we can use methodological naturalism, which means that the perspectives, the scientific perspectives we have, can be pragmatically justified. You know, kind of like science works better than other things for practical matters. The claims one can make from any one perspective are limited though. Okay, so we have limited access to the universe, we have limited experience, we are limited by our senses and we are biased by our assumptions. By comparing perspectives, we can learn something about these limitations. So we can do that by comparing perspectives between individuals, but also across times or maybe even rivaling perspectives in science that existed any one time. So it's really interesting to examine controversies or famous scientists, geniuses that hold completely wrong beliefs and we can learn something from those sort of instances as well. So science isn't progressing as smoothly and asymptotically towards truth as naive realism would like us to believe. So but the problem is sometimes you can get stuck in a perspective and that's a real problem and one of the best examples for that we have in modern science is biology. Biology more than any other science I know is massively stuck in one single perspective. You could sort of illustrate that with the streetlight effect also called the drunkard search principle. It's typically a man, could be a woman, who lost their keys in the dark but are looking for them under the streetlight and when a passerby is coming and asks them, what are you doing here? I see no keys, they say I'm looking for the keys here where there is light. Okay so that's what happens when you're stuck in one single perspective. You might be finding all kinds of interesting things within that cone of light but not really what you're looking for and that's really important. The perspective we're stuck in in biology of course is that of genetic reductionism. Reductionism is funny in particular because it comes from physics and sometimes biologists as biologists we have a bit of physics envy because they have it easy. Traditionally physics is the subject in science which shows all the problems that were ready to tackle hundreds of years ago. So they really chose the easy problems and we're stuck the complicated sort of questions about life and ecosystems and things like that. So it's a bit ironic that we use a very simplified reductionist approach predominantly in biology today while physics has a hundred years ago already moved on from that simplifying view. So let's have a quick look at how this happened and it all goes back to a medieval monk called William Ockham and his famous razor in latin it's called Lex parsimonia the law of parsimony and I'm sure you're familiar with Ockham's maxim and he said if you're a scientist and you have difficult different hypotheses about the world then you should choose the one with the fewest assumptions okay and that works fine in a lot of different contexts. Now if you're studying something incredibly complex like the evolution of living systems this may not be a good thing and indeed it isn't so we need to step out of the reductionist perspective urgently okay it's hindering progress in biology it's time to move on and a little bit this is happening with systems biology but we're going to discuss how how that progress is very limited so far and we're not going far enough. So what happened is that is that Ockham's razor in the case of biology and of course the social science has become Ockham's eraser it has gotten rid of too many things because what it does is it basically gets rid of superfluous ontological apparatus to say it in philosophy speak what does that mean what is ontological apparatus just very briefly we're going to switch in this lecture from epistemology look at that in the last two lectures to the topic of metaphysics okay and the metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things including abstract concepts such as being knowledge identity time and space in particular we're going to use ontology which is the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being it tells us or it makes us think at least what exists what are the entities in the world that are real and what is not real of course that's an important question for a scientific realist and what happened is that from physics what we got is a sort of a you could call it a desert ontology sort of an Ockham's razor ontology reductionism tells us that only sort of the bottom layer of the universe we're bottoming out only the you know fundamental particles are real and those physicists like Steve Weinberg who are looking for this final theory they are trying to derive a theory that explains everything in the universe from those fundamental particles and the forces that connect them now this is a very sort of peculiar point of view of course it's been massively successful not only in physics also in molecular biology but it's been criticized especially by one of the most underrated philosophers of science and philosophers in general today Bill Wimpsat he's still alive and kicking he came up with this term desert ontology and he said and I'm going to give you a wonderful Wimpsat quote to introduce him and his writing style so he said this sort of simplification of the world down to its fundamental particles he calls this ontological genocide and this genocide he says was practiced upon whole classes of upper level or derivative entities in the name of elegance and we were secure in the belief that one strayed irremediably into the realm of conceptual confusion and possible error the further one got from ontic fundamentalism what on earth does that mean ontological genocide is sort of the elimination of entities that are not fundamental and that is what's called ontic fundamentalism if you believe in this desert ontology if you believe that you can derive everything from particle physics then you're an ontic fundamentalist that's not a form of terrorism but a philosophical stance okay so Wimpsat is saying it was wrong to throw all the other stuff out and he has this wonderful drawing in his book that I heavily recommend it's a complicated and long book it's called re-engineering philosophy for limited beings if you only read one philosophy as a biologist I hope is this one and this illustration tells you that our world consists of many different levels of complexity of scale also time scales so what we're seeing here is sort of levels of spatial scales it starts with the atomic level on the left side and as we go up the space scale we see there's a molecular level macromolecules unicellular level and then it gets a bit more messier up there so you have smaller methozoans and larger methozoans and then social cultural and ecological organizations you see that the ants they span different levels so as you go up this sort of hierarchy it gets more and more complicated and this is a wonderful picture so basically Wimpsat is telling us all these entities at all these different levels are real okay and we're very familiar as biologists with pictures like that but we sort of rarely think about them this is from a textbook a general biology textbook from 2010 and how many textbooks have you seen that have this sort of diagram you know atoms at the bottom and then ecosystems at the top so it sounds sort of natural for biologists to think in terms of levels of organization but funnily enough very few people think about what those levels really mean and what they imply there's a bunch of philosophers that I know that work on this and it's a very interesting topic what's important here is that we should question this idea that only fundamental entities are real and this gives us a much more a richer picture of the world compared to the desert ontology Wimpsat has this beautiful picture of a rainforest ontology a lush rainforest that's thriving like the one on the picture here our world is not like a desert he writes but has the interdependent ontology of the tropical rainforest so it's a sort of ecological view and our focus is on the interactions between entities within levels at different levels this is a perspective that is much more appropriate to modern cosmology than this desert level okay so there's much more to the world than physics and this idea that all the science is rest on physics and can be reduced to physics we have to revise that if you think about it biology is richer there are things in biology that you cannot only explain through the laws of physics like natural selection it requires additional principles it doesn't sort of violate any physical chemical laws but physics and chemistry alone will not be able to explain all the biological phenomena it is also profoundly evolutionary this forest is constantly growing and changing so this is not a fixed picture levels of organizations are like ecosystems they evolve as a product of the evolutionary trajectories of the entities that compose a level and they provide selection forces that guide their evolution in terms this is beautiful because this provides a very fundamental principle that's going to come back over and over again in this lecture and that is it's not only the parts of a bigger system that influence the system but it's also the system that influences the parts in this case the level of organization can constrain and thereby guide the evolution of the entities at that level and at the same time the level is made up from those entities themselves so in this sense levels define co-evolving niches for their composing entities they provide a home for those entities and I find is a profoundly fascinating concept that is only now being explored but what that means in particular is that we should not reduce everything to the bottom we should not bottom out not to atoms and also in biology of course for genetic reductionism this means we shouldn't try and explain all the phenomena in biology at the level of the genes that just won't work there are many different phenomena different levels that are important and have causal agency but we're going to come back to that in a later lecture so we cannot just shut them out and think once we read all the genes in a genome we have a program that makes an organism that is a fallacy of genetic reductionism so let's take this a bit further because what I've shown you before this levels of organization diagram was only a very small part of WIMSAT's drawing which is wonderful so WIMSAT after drawing these levels of organization starts to wonder what do these levels actually mean and so we have two axes here on this graph one is we've already encountered that is an increasing size so a logarithmic scale of sizes okay so we go up the size scale but here and that's interesting on the vertical axis you have what he calls regularity and predictability so whenever you have a peak here there is some sort of level at which you can formulate models maybe even laws of nature we'll come back to that probably later on and so WIMSAT starts wondering how does our world really look like does it look like this regular neatly spaced levels and everything is very cleanly separable this was the traditional view of this hierarchy of sciences you know physics is busy with the atomic level chemistry with the molecular biochemistry with the macromolecular and the biology the life sciences and the social sciences come out come up in these levels it's much more complicated and that already gives us an indication that these levels aren't as cleanly separated and as regular as in this picture so it could be if we're really unlucky that the regularity in the universe looks like this it's totally random across levels so this would be there's no order in the universe and he writes here well is that that would probably indicate that we have the wrong choice of variable when modeling or looking at the universe so so if we detect the universe like this either we should just give up because there is no order to the universe at all or we have to sort of seriously rethink how we are carving up reality maybe we just have the wrong kind of variables for our model another sort of terrible possibility is that there's nothing at all right everything's the same again it'll be very difficult to figure out how this works it's funny he calls this nature as an invertebrate excuse me this is just a uh uh poll analogy no viruses okay so this is sort of a worst-case scenario as well right so it's it's totally flat there's no structure no vertebrae to this this is a metaphor of course another sort of option is that the universe looks like this so we have cleanly separated and clearly defined levels up here and everything is a bit wishy washy here but as i just said before it seems like it is exactly the opposite our world which is here looks like this so as we go down into the realms of the atoms the molecules everything is clear and you can clearly separate laws that operate at different levels but if you come up here into the biological the social realm it becomes much more complicated and it's not quite as easy to separate everything clear well and this is why it's much harder to come up with general theories in biology than it is in physics of course we'll come back to that topic as well this is my second most favorite drawing in the book my most favorite drawing is this insane phylo ground here which depicts sort of the causal structure as it could be in the universe and it's illustrative of course phyloimsa doesn't claim that he knows how the universe is structured but it seems from that other diagram that it's a bit like this you can see that the atomic level is here at the very root of course there's this connect to cosmological large-scale objects appear so there's in physics still a disconnect between the very small uh described by quantum mechanics and the very large as in relativity theory but it's not it's very straightforward okay so they're clear sort of causal connections and it's not too complicated but it's if you move up here to organic molecules macromolecules and then up into this it becomes really complicated and he calls this area of reality here the bio-psychological thicket this is where all the phenomena we're dealing with and the life sciences and the social sciences are happening and this is why it's so much harder to do biology than it is to do physics the problems that the theories that they have in physics may be uh sophisticated very formal and you need to learn a lot of math to understand but the problems we're dealing with in biology are much more complex than the ones uh physicists outside of condensed matter physics are traditionally dealing with so this is not clearly structured into levels or anything else it looks like a hairball something your cat pukes up um and we need a sort of a different strategy obviously to cut through this and the physicists need to have to cut through these much more cleanly and more simple or you know organized large scale organized or small scale organized parts of the world so how do we do this and this is exactly where these perspectives become so important and why they weren't picked up by philosophers who dealt with physics um whimsad has his own definition of perspectives he says they are intriguingly quasi subjective or at least observer technique or technology relative cuts on the phenomena characteristic of the system which needn't be bound to given levels they cut through this hairball and they don't care about levels so a lot of the theories the perspectives the models we have in biology they go across levels and one of the main characterizing features of life of course is that it's a phenomenon that's coherent across so many levels and that's why reductionism doesn't work or is very limited in the biological realm so what's more important even is that each system can be characterized by multiple perspectives especially if it is a complex system in fact rimsad's definition of complexity that's also mirrored by other people like richard luentin and others is that assist what makes a system complex is the number of perspectives that are valid and that you can take on it so complex systems can be looked at from many different perspectives and they're all good or something perspectives cannot be ordered hierarchically they don't just add up in this very clean way because of the structure of reality it's not clearly structured so they they're messy they intersect they complement hopefully they don't contradict each other too much but they do sometimes and so they don't add up to a complete or a clean picture of the system they just give you different answers to different questions you have about the same system whether or not you have the right perspective and that is very important i'll say that again but then crucially on what your question your problems what your take is on reality so it depends crucially on how you as a person or as a community or as a society interact with reality so that's very a very important aspect that we're going to come back to in the next lecture keep that in your mind so this leaves us with a huge problem that we've already had at the beginning we're back at square one how can you justify scientific knowledge in this view of the world everything is just your own perspective what is real what is trustworthy we need as Wimsat says to secure the reliability of our conceptual structures what does he mean by that well the first thing he says is there is no privileged level of organization so if you look at the world if you look away from this desert ontology where everything that was real was was these fundamental elements of the world now you have this amazing changing evolving structure of different levels okay and there is no privileged level of organization so there is no philosophical reason why you want to explain everything in terms of fundamental particles or genes or or whatever okay so especially if you look at a very complex part of the world you need to look at it across levels and Wimsat's fundamental criterion for trustworthiness which also will bring us back to the question of scientific truths is a criterion that he calls robustness and his definition of the truth and how that sort of plays into this discussion of how perspectives give us access to this reality that is there that will be the topic of the next lecture that i'm going to record right away so tune in again when we talk about perspic dipole truth thanks for watching bye now