You can agree the mental events are made up of the same stuff as physical events, without believing that they can be fully explained in physical terms. https://www.iep.utm.edu/anom-mon/
The claim is that mental events are supernatural?
It's like saying you can't model a football game in terms of the behavior of proteins. Sure there are proteins, and there is no magic anywhere, but the conceptual gap is just too vast.
In which case it sounds like there should be some mental events or experiences that are impervious to physical interference. So for example there is no conceivable physical intervention that could affect them. Do you believe there may be mental phenomena that are not causally related to physical processes in that way? It sounds like this should be testable.
I think he is only saying that an empirical language alone will not be enough to relate mental processes to physical ones. You have to define what a mental event really is before you can properly test anything about it, and depending on what definition you choose it might be inherently un-testable. If you define a mental process as being composed of physical processes from the start then of course you will conclude that all mental processes are influenced by physical ones. There are other possible definitions though such as physical processes being composed of multiple mental processes (the opposite of the last) in which case no physical test could be performed to verify a "change" occurred in the mental subject (but a "mental test" of sorts might still be able to tell us)
It's also not just about adding more variables because "it's complicated". Biology for example seems to be highly reflexive, that sort of behaviour can't really be accounted for in basic causal models. At best we have models which resemble fluid dynamics, and fluid dynamics is only as good as it is because we don't reduce the phenomena down to every molecule.
Heck below atoms, which lend themselves most strongly to the reductionist intuition, we have quantum waves. The wave-particle duality should at least simultaneously give reduction and non-reduction some credence.
Maxwell's Demon is new to me, and I'm not quite sure how to interpret it in this context. At first read, the claim that the observing, calculating, acting Demon, manipulating a physical trapdoor is not part of the thermodynamic system seems... laughable.
That's the immediate refutation a lot of people propose, but then to model that demon plus the system is to also become another demon. So you can't escape this problem as long as you are not an abstract ideal observer, which none of us are in practice.
(The fact that it's laughable is correct, because it could never happen, including to us.)
You don't have to posit the supernatural. People conflate believing in a single objective reality with having to believe in strong materialism (or worse, atomic materialism, when QM goes deeper), when all you have to do is believe that reality is consistent. You might not be able to create a total consistent model of reality, but if reality is consistent then you don't have to propose extra-physical forces due to conservation of energy or other such constraints. You can exclude contradictory hypotheses even if you can't settle on the "actual" one, even in-principle.
In which case you can have models in one domain of science, and models in another domain, which may not connect with each other, but they don't have to contradict each other either, and you can do this all while not believing in the supernatural or denying an objective reality.
"More is Different: Broken symmetry and the hierarchical nature of science" http://robotics.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72mo...
Science divides into different disciplines precisely because the units and laws of one model do not close over the phenomena of another.
Anderson is right to point out that reduction is easier than construction. I deny him the implication that construction is fundamentally impossible, only that it is out of reach of current human knowledge.
Nothing prevents a Demon from starting with first principles of natural laws and matter, sitting and pondering for infinity, and writing a treatise on any number of emergent phenomena, say: realpolitik between countries made up of parties made up of people made up of organic matter made up of atoms made up of...
We know this must be possible because it must have happened at least once, in the mind of the demon we call reality.
I get the distinction you're making between in-principle and in-practice, but this is an accident of our capabilities. Any gaps between the sciences is due to our ignorance. Sadly it seems human scientists desire to claim their corner of science is strong, independent and just as "fundamental" as any other's, and like playing up these gaps in our knowledge. I don't understand this desire to draw permanent boundaries based on arbitrary human limitations, and so quickly declare non-overlapping magesteria.
If it's a matter of the framing that makes you sombre, consider the alternative where being a finite observer with the capacity for self-reflection such as ourselves is put in a situation where we can navigate alternative descriptions of reality, never having to terminate with a final explanation, yet always growing in personal understanding... this is what your Demon would actually be doing, for if it were as powerful as you imply, it would not be a scientist at all. It would simply be reality, with these observers the lesser of it.
A for loop in a computer program is a property. It causes a behaviour. It can only do that because it is encoded in the materials of the computer. The question is, are there any properties a biological system can have that are not encoded in its physical constituents? Anyone answering ‘yes’ to that question really needs to provide a very clear answer as to how they think that might be possible and how else that property might arise.
I would expect the answer would be "no". You would have to know about the environment that trained them, which blows the door open for something which is irreducible without knowing about environmental conditions, and biology having too rich of an environment to be as precisely reducible as computers might ever be without them being also a computer system.
In my other posts in this thread I emphasize the "in-principle" and "in-practice" distinction because I don't believe it is the "in-principle" part of reductionism that ought to be at stake. It's if we can actually do it in a way that doesn't invite approximations.
I believe the answer is that there are properties which only come into existence once you have the right physical arrangement, but these properties can't be predicted in advance from the physical constituents.
As to how it could be possible that truly novel properties come into existence, that's not really different than how it can be possible that QM can have indeterminate properties, or anything that's physically fundament for which we have no explanation. Something happens to exist, and we don't know whether there is answer to why anything exists.
There's also other possibilities, like the existence of abstract and universal entities, such as numbers or universals. How is it that every electron has the exact same charge and mass? Is electron a universal? Why does math work so well for physics? Are there laws of nature that govern the world (make it be a certain way as opposed to just being regularities)? That sort of thing.
In order for such properties to not be predictable from the physical constituents, they must not be encoded in the physical constituents. If they are encoded in the physical constituents, then they must be predictable from them.
If these properties are not encoded in their physical constituents, where does the information come from and where is it represented?
Suggesting that the natural laws are such that all behavior must be entailed by "lower level" natural laws, is a stronger position than stating that all things follow natural law. I think it is hubristic to think that somehow our understanding of natural law is exempt from the same issues that are raised by the incompleteness theorem in math.
The individual mind is far more complex than any existing programs. We are certainly not aware of all of the aspects of the world it is responding to. Furthermore, the diversity of those responses across the population is staggering. 'Irreducible' seems like the right adjective at present.