I agree that a lower-level model doesn't mean more relevant. Also, I think that reductionism is a tool that can be relevant in certain contexts, as any other tool. In some others, it may not.
The latter may seem a bit rude, and I apologize. But it actually aims at what I see as the problem here: you started a human communication, then you restricted it from the start, and then generalized your observations while not being able to grasp anything about liking a beach at least. Looks like rationalization to soften your failure to understand another human.
I guess you are aware of what is called emotional intelligence. Every piece of experience we have can start a plethora of processes in our mind, many of them can be understood not through reduction and plain axiomatized logic, but through emotional attuning to your interlocutor, using some intuition and "fuzzy thinking". Then you would be able to understand what really means for your mom through a bunch of metaphors, stories, and reflection upon it. And you could do some accurate predictions about your mom! From the start, it was a matter of communication and sharing experience, right? Humanity mastered that art, and it obviously not restricted to a reductionist way of thinking.
To me, it seems not really rational to omit a wide spectrum of human knowledge from different areas of life just because "you want to believe". You could have thousands of more points of view that are more relevant to address the phenomena of liking a beach. How can you possibly make an inference about reductionism is still can be applied to replicate "the beach experience" for your mom without even being exposed to any other point of view out of the reductionist's worldview box? There is plenty of knowledge on different levels of system description and you are not even trying to connect your ideas with existing knowledge.
What we do know is that there is no computationally possible way to simulate large ensembles of elementary particles. Now, if one day there will be known that we can not fight combinatorial explosion efficiently by growing computational power (and it looks like just that), how practical will be this fully "theoretically working reductionism"?
Ultimately, your reasoning looks great just because it is reduced by itself. For example, you reduced your possibilities to understand "why mom likes a beach" from many accessible ways of doing so (emotional intelligence, deep conversation, reflection, study of psychology) to just down the reductionist way, and then you concluded that it was a matter of the wrong application of the reductionism, and NOT a matter of lacking knowledge on the subject of communication.
No worries at all about sounding rude! I was a kid at the time I had those conversations with my mom and overall your reply sounds like it is good-spirited :)
I'm a little confused about what the crux of your point is, and about where, if anywhere, we disagree.
Okay, now I feel like I understand your main point better.
I think I have just another point of view on the example. My point is that the example itself seems a bit artificial.
The human brain still is not conquered by reductionist modeling. So we don't know yet if there is a possibility to reduce consciousness (we are talking about the feeling of joy, that means about brain and consciousness) to some systems and parts without losing crucial properties of consciousness. At any level.
Bearing that in mind, the example seems a bit meaningless in both cases:
I think it's too theoretical to say what you actually did wrong if you don't know how to do the same thing right (that is if you tried to apply reductionism in the very same conversation but in the right way).
With that said, it looks to me like you could just omit the example from life and all the context as poor evidence, leaving the statement about low-level modeling alone.
I've been becoming more of a nature person recently.
However, all of this has been making me feel some sort of dissonance. I think of myself as not a nature person. There's a particular story that comes to mind.
Growing up, my family would go to the beach once in a while during the summer. I thought it was alright. I liked to dig big holes, go boogey boarding, and maybe play catch if I had someone to play with. But after a few hours of that I'd be ready to go home. My parents on the other hand liked to get there early and stay the entire day. Just sitting there in their chairs doing nothing.
I couldn't understand this. How can you not get bored sitting there all day? I spent the day running around doing various things and even I got bored of that and was ready to go home!
So I would ask my mom: why do you even like going to the beach in the first place? The conversation would go something like this:
I made a big mistake here.
I was trying to understand what it is she likes so much about being at the beach, so that perhaps we could replicate it at home. I was trying to do this by breaking it down into it's component parts. We made a little bit of progress there, identifying the sound of waves, the sight of waves, and the feeling of warm sand between your toes as components that she sought. Think of this as a model of how joy is generated:
joy = sound of waves + sight of waves + feeling of sand. With this model, I was able to formulate a situation where the inputs would have the same values at home as they would at the beach, so I felt that the output should be the same amount of joy.How reductive of me, right? How dare I try to reduce down the subtleties and complexities of taking joy in a beautiful summer day at the beach. Reductionism can't explain such a phenomena. Right?
I don't think so. I don't think this demonstrates any problems with the idea of reductionism. I think it demonstrates problems that arise when you try to apply reductionism poorly.
If, hypothetically, I was able to model my Mom's neural circuitry incredibly well, and figure out a setup at home that would output the same amount of joy as she gets at the beach, well, then I think I'd be justified in my claim that she can get the same joy at home. But that's not what happened here.
Here I tried to build out a low-level model, barely made any progress (
joy = sound of waves + sight of waves + feeling of sand), and despite this, argued that it makes sense to go off of what this shitty model outputs. That's not how reductionism works. Just because it's lower level doesn't mean it's better. Lower level models can be highly incomplete. They can also just be flat out wrong.I don't want to hate on low-level models though. They do allow us to dig into the nuts and bolts of how things work, build a more complete picture, and ultimately, make more accurate predictions. There is definitely a time and place for pursuing that. However, I think the point I'm trying to make is that in the process of doing so, you have to ask yourself how reliable that low level model actually is. Being lower level doesn't automatically make it better.