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YawnTractor_1756 t1_j73aze0 wrote

Reply to comment by Coomb in What makes humans unique is not reducible to our brains or biology, but how we make sense of experience | Raymond Tallis by IAI_Admin

>In what sense is the wave not reducible to the physical motion of the molecules?

Generalized enough everything can be described as a transfer of energy. If you accept that 'transfer of energy' can serve as the definition of any process (wave, fire, typing comments on Reddit), then we are on the same page, and we now have universal and useless theory of everything.

But if you insist that we cannot generalize like that because it omits important differences, then I repeat again: physical motion of the molecules is not a wave. Wave is a physical motion of the molecules in a pattern of wave.

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Foxsayy t1_j73dnv7 wrote

>Wave is a physical motion of the molecules in a pattern of wave.

Yeah. If I wave my arms in the air, it's just a blip. If I'm in a stadium and raise my arms in sync with others so that we create a wave around the arena, that's a wave. The wave is not any one of us, but a collective effort of individual parts orchestrated in a particular way.

Can we reduce the wave to a single, immutable part? No. But we can't even do that for atoms. The whole being the sum of its parts does not mean that the whole has features that are mysterious or inexplicable in parts.

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YawnTractor_1756 t1_j73eu1w wrote

>Can we reduce the wave to a single, immutable part? No

I'm glad we ended on the same page.

>The whole being the sum of its parts does not mean that the whole has features that are ... inexplicable in parts.

It can have features that are inexplicable in parts. Subatomic particles are a great example of that.

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Foxsayy t1_j73gny0 wrote

>It can have features that are inexplicable in parts. Subatomic particles are a great example of that.

Potentially. But before recent times, entire sun was inexplicable. The human heart was inexplicable. The motion of the wind and waves was inexplicable.

You're putting forth a modified God of the gaps arguement.

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Coomb t1_j73m957 wrote

>>In what sense is the wave not reducible to the physical motion of the molecules? > >Generalized enough everything can be described as a transfer of energy. If you accept that 'transfer of energy' can serve as the definition of any process (wave, fire, typing comments on Reddit), then we are on the same page, and we now have universal and useless theory of everything. > >But if you insist that we cannot generalize like that because it omits important differences, then I repeat again: physical motion of the molecules is not a wave. Wave is a physical motion of the molecules in a pattern of wave.

What about "wave" is not reducible to the motion of the fluid particles?

Are you just saying that we have an abstract concept of a wave? Because that's true but pointless in the sense that we can't interact with abstract concepts, only physical realizations. There is no real wave which can be described exactly using abstract parameters associated with a general wave.

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