Conference paper abstract, A. Theodore Izmaylov, 2024.
Keywords: thought experiments; Conway’s Game of Life; real patterns; determinism; reductionism
An increasing number of fundamental and methodological arguments in the reductionism-emergentism debate in the philosophy of (social) science(s) refer to and rely on mathematical models, simulations and computation (Putnam, Bedau, Sawyer). Conversely, intuitions about their properties and philosophical implications often remain unelaborated, naive or mistaken, even among philosophers. Even their status and function are unclear: some consider simulations a kind of or a part of theories and explanations (Joshua Epstein), and others treat them as empirical experiments producing data relevant to the real world (see Risjord).
Taking a middle path, I will show how Conway’s Game of Life (GOL) – a simple yet Turing-complete cellular automata mimicking biological life and similar to agent-based social simulations (Schelling) – can be used as a philosophical experimental tool for testing the consistency of sets of intuitions. I will probe (anti)reductionist arguments in three experiments:
Dennett – who considers GOL to be an essential philosophical tool – insists that higher-level rules of a chess computer realised inside GOL are ‘real patterns’, i.e. as real as the lower-level basic rules of GOL, and even more informative relative to chess-science research interests. The counterargument says these patterns are epiphenomenal since the casual powers are exclusively in lower-level rules (Kim). The first experiment will be treating GOL as a timeless block universe to show that we either need to have a direct cognition of how the world functions (as we do have in the case of GOL, but just because we made it up) or that higher-level patterns are indistinguishable from lower-level laws.
Another reductionist argument states that lower-level laws are strict while higher-level patterns are predominantly not. The second experiment – by tinkering with gradual, partial and local causal determinism – will show that we either claim to have scientifically dispelled the Humean doubt about strict laws or that higher-level patterns are no less strict than lower-level laws and are scientifically as relevant.
The third experiment will deal with the incoherence of intuitions about reduction and common ontological and epistemological commitments: defending reductionism, we either make metaphysical claims irrelevant to science or rely on the existence of epistemic subject with unlimited cognitive resources and direct access to the world.
These thought experiments help to critically revisit the leading (anti)reductionist arguments in the philosophy of social sciences. Such an experimental approach using GOL as a tool might break the stalemate between individualists and emergentists, nonreductive physicalists and reductionists by turning murky distinctions and commitments into clear formal junctions with demonstrable and examinable effects and implications.
Currently, it is a theoretical study, but it suggests a fruitful method that can be useful in experimental philosophy. It evades the issues with the difference between lay and expert intuitions by shifting from studying subjects’ intuitions to empowering subjects to experiment with (their) sets of intuitions and study their coherence. It also mitigates the problems of context sensitivity and ambiguity of words by substituting formal experimental machinery of GOL for interviews and surveys or supplementing them.
The 4th European Experimental Philosophy Conference, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, 30 May — 2 June, 2024. (Not presented due to health reasons)