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Originally Posted by Robert Tulip
Warren
Bohr’s idea about complementarity in biology makes sense, and not only as an analogy. Just as quantum waves and particles are complementary – ie they cannot be explained in terms of each other – so are organisms and molecules complementary – in that explaining biochemistry or biophysics goes only a small way to explaining the reality of the organism. This illustrates the philosophical weakness of the reductionist theory that in principle biology could ultimately be explained by physics. Niels Bohr effectively claims the whole is more than the sum of the parts, whereas traditional physics, including visions of a unified field theory, is reductionist, seeing nothing more in the whole (eg the organism) than can be explained by its physical mechanism.
I am sympathetic to the idea of complementarity in biology because phenomena such as intentions are features of the dynamic organism and its ecology and are not helpfully explained by physics.
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Originally Posted by Ken G
And of course one must not forget cognition, a later stage still. For even life is somewhat empty and uninteresting in the absence of all cognition.
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If complementarity is merely a restatement of the commonplace that wholes have properties that their parts do not, then what's the use of calling that "complementarity"? (I would have thought for something in biology to count as partaking in complementarity, it would have to be something really crazy-making, like cats that are both dead and alive at the same time.)
For example, a bomb has the property of being dangerous, but its parts taken separately are comparatively harmless. But is that complementarity?
What about the angle of repose of a mere sand pile? The angle of repose is a property that only the pile as a whole exhibits--individual sand grains don't have an angle of repose--so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Yet it's equally clear that the angle is determined by the properties of the parts: sand consisting of unweathered, angular grains produces steeper angles of repose than does sand consisting of worn, round grains; i.e., the angle of repose is easily reduced. So is that complementarity, or would that be more of an example of something that's non-complementarity?
But even for more complex phenomena like higher life forms, if intentional behavior cannot be reduced to the behavior of atoms and molecules, then how else is it supposed to happen? We all agree that it doesn't happen by magic, yet I suspect that you are prepared to import something into the scene that sand piles and bombs do not have. A G-d-given soul perhaps, or an entelechy, or maybe a
sui generis consciousness. After all, wasn't it Bohr who said that consciousness is necessary to round out the theory for at least some quantum phenomena?