Cosmologists Hauling Heavy Speculative Baggage Sure Are Not Reductionists

The "Big Think" site at www.bigthink.com is a materialist propaganda site. The Big Think site likes to have philosophical essays such as a recent essay arguing that life on Earth has no purpose (one that absurdly offers the extinction of dinosaurs as its main evidence). The site is at least good for a few laughs, such as when we come to a page claiming in big bold letters that its articles (often very poorly reasoned essays) are written by "the world's greatest thinkers." Sometimes the site has essays that are unintentionally hilarious. An example is a recent essay by cosmologist Ethan Siegel, one entitled "Yes, the Universe really is 100% reductionist in nature."

Your first chuckle should come after considering that title. Reductionism is a tendency in philosophy or science to try to explain complex things only by appealing to simpler things. A philosopher or scientist can be a reductionist, but a universe cannot be. Claiming that the universe is reductionist is as laughable an error as claiming that the universe is atheist, theistic or agnostic.

Your second chuckle should come after reading Siegel's bad definition of reductionism. He states, "This simple idea — that all phenomena in the Universe are fundamentally physical phenomena — is known as reductionism." That is not a correct definition of reductionism. The claim that all phenomena in the Universe are fundamentally physical phenomena would be one way of definining materialism, a particular philosophical doctrine. Reductionism is not a philosophical doctrine, but merely a kind of strategy or tendency when dealing with scientific or philosophical questions: the tendency to try to explain complex realities by appealing to known simpler realities. 

But your biggest chuckle in reading the essay should come from reading Ethan Siegel try to sound like he supports reductionism. For many years Siegel and many other cosmologists have been operating in a way that is the exact opposite of reductionism. 

Reductionism involves trying to explain some complex reality by appealing only to a much simpler reality or much simpler realities. An example of reductionism is when neuroscientists try to explain human mental phenomena by saying they are caused only by chemical activity in the brain. You can write a kind of generic schema for reductionism (using algebraic placeholders) by saying that reductionism involves claiming that complex realilty X can be explained by a much simpler known reality Y (or maybe much simpler known realities Y and Z, or maybe much simpler known realities Y1, Y2, Z1 and Z2). 

What has gone on in cosmology and theoretical physics during Siegel's career is the opposite of reductionism. Some of the main events were these:

(1) After pondering a nice simple Big Bang as the origin of the universe, cosmologists were very bothered that this mysterious event seemed to require extraordinarily precise fine-tuning at the very beginning, with the expansion rate being fine-tuned to one part in ten to the fiftieth power.  Cosmologists responded by creating a theory called "cosmic inflation" that postulated an exponential expansion in the universe's first instant. Before long, they found that the theory didn't work in its simple initial form. Cosmologists then began advocating multiverse versions of the cosmic inflation theory, which postulated innumerable unobservable universes, or innumerable unobservable events like the Big Bang. This was all the opposite of reductionism. Reductionism is when you try to explain some complex reality by saying it is explained by known simpler realities. When you try to explain some complex reality by speculating that there exists some other vastly more complicated unobserved reality, that is the opposite of reductionism. 

(2) Finding that galaxies do not seem to rotate at the observed rates given only the amount of matter observed, cosmologists invented a theory of dark matter, speculating that dark matter makes up most of the matter in the universe. The dark matter theory required all kinds of very specific speculations about the distribution of dark matter, such as the claim that galaxies are surrounded by halos of invisible dark matter. Speculating about unproven unobserved realities is not reductionism, but the opposite of reductionism. Reductionism is when you try to explain a complex reality by appealing to observed  simpler realities. 

(3) Finding that the universe does not seem to expand at the rate predicted by theory, cosmologists invented a theory of dark energy, speculating that dark energy makes up most of the mass-energy in the universe. Just as dark matter has never been observed, dark energy has never been observed. Speculating about unproven unobserved realities is not reductionism, but the opposite of reductionism. Reductionism is when you try to explain a complex reality by appealing to observed  simpler realities. 

Throughout his career, Ethan Siegel has been an enthusiastic pitchman for the theory of cosmic inflation, the theory of dark matter and the theory of dark energy. Nowhere on the Internet can you find a more dogmatic and partisan apostle of these speculative theories, all of which involve the opposite of reductionism. So now Ethan Siegel is trying to make it sound like he favors reductionism? That's hilarious. 

It is also very funny when Siegel evokes this principle: "The fact that 'There exists this phenomenon that lies beyond my ability to make robust predictions about' is never to be construed as evidence in favor of 'This phenomenon requires additional laws, rules, substances, or interactions beyond what’s presently known.' ” For many years Siegel has been a dogmatic pitchman for the now-floundering theory of dark matter, which very much involved postulating a never-observed substance beyond what's presently known.

Siegel has very often spoke as if dark matter is fact, and has repeatedly made misstatements claiming that the theory of dark matter is well-established. It's becoming increasingly clear that he has misspoke on this topic. For example:

(1) A recent news story entitled "No trace of dark matter halos" quotes a scientist saying that "the number of publications showing incompatibilities between observations and the dark matter paradigm just keeps increasing every year."

(2) There recently appeared another science article with a headline of "Dark Matter Doesn't Exist."  That article (by an astrophysics professor) says there are multiple observations showing that dark matter cannot exist. The article says, "We need to scientifically understand why the dark-matter based model, being the most falsified physical theory in the history of humankind, continues to be religiously believed to be true by the vast majority of the modern, highly-educated scientists." This suggests all those dark matter stories we have read for so many years were just ivory tower tall tales. 

Scientist specialists such as cosmologists and cognitive neuroscientists are members of  belief communities involving very strong groupthink tendencies, in which "follow the herd" is the supreme rule. In such communities (resembling little sects) the members follow speech customs when they keep parroting dubious unproven claims, regardless of how much evidence has accumulated against such claims.  

After describing a doctrine of materialism, incorrectly referring to that as "reductionism," Siegel ignorantly states this: "There is no evidence for the existence of any phenomena that falls outside of what reductionism is capable of explaining." There is a mountain of evidence for very many phenomena that fall outside of what reductionism is capable of explaining, much of it undisputed biology and psychology such as ordinary mental capabilities, and much of it in experiments and human observational reports that materialists such as Siegel refuse to study.  A person who makes a statement as dead wrong as the one I just quoted will tend to be either a very big liar or a non-scholar of human mental phenomena.  Since Siegel has never shown the slightest sign of being a scholar of human mental phenomena in any of the many essays of his I have read, I will assume he is a non-scholar of human mental phenomena. 

But when Siegel ignores his own frequent explanatory appeals to never-observed dark matter (involving no discovered particle) to explain galaxy behavior, and also ignores his own frequent explanatory appeals to a never-observed dark energy (involving no discovered particle), and also ignores his own frequent explanatory appeals to a never-observed "inflaton field" force, and states that "the combination of the known particles that make up the Universe and the four fundamental forces through which they interact has been sufficient to explain, from atomic to stellar scales and beyond, everything we’ve ever encountered in this Universe," we have a statement that is both dead wrong and extremely inconsistent with its author's frequent statements. After reading so huge a misstatement, refuted by endless facts and observations I list in the post here and the dozens of posts here, you may stop laughing and simply cringe. 

The runaway boastful hubris of such claims matches the runaway boastful hubris of the large-type boldface claim on the Big Think site that its authors are "the world's greatest thinkers." An exponential expansion in the first instant of the universe is doubtful, but it sometimes sounds like there's been an exponential expansion of the egos and boasts of some scientists.   Meanwhile with each passing year humans discover and observe more and more huge mysteries and spooky anomalies and glaring defects of prevailing explanations and not-yet-materially-explained fine-tuned biological complexity and hierarchical organization that all make such boasts sound ever more hollow.