The terms “higher” and “lower” here indicate that you’ve smuggled in metaphysical assumptions. You’ve assumed reductionism before you begin.

The question is not what is “higher” or “lower,” but what is the fundamental nature of the reality/phenomena in question? If you’re going to say that QM is fundamental, then I want to know, what is the nature of QM? Is it formal or material? Extended or abstract? And if you cannot adjudcate between those terms, then your “reductionism” is no such thing, but merely interesting data that you’ve decided to describe with metaphysical terms that don’t apply, at least not to the data at hand.

But now that you’ve pushed the question from one of the definition of materialism to one of reductionism, could you cash that out, i.e, reduction to what?

Anyway, I’m well aware that materialism doesn’t have to be reductionist. In fact, as I mentioned in my previous comment, nonreductionist materialism is the rule, rather than the exception, in most of the cognitive sciences (including large swaths of cognitive neuroscience).

It might be better to distinguish physicalism from materialism. Even in the philosophy of science and mind literatures, these two tend to be lumped together, so that materialism no longer refers to the belief that all that exists is matter (if it did, then even in non-quantum physics, we’d have all sorts of things that didn’t exist, because they are not matter). Of course, I’m a philosophical dilettante, so perhaps there’s some other distinction not found in the literature that you, in your infinite wisdom, are aware of.

Anyway, my point from the first post still stands, even if you dissociate physicalism from old-school materialism. QM, as far as discussions of the mental is concerned, is a strict reductionism, and one that is even more reductionist than the reductionism found in most of neuroscience. For neuroscience, the mental can be reduced to the physical interactions of neurons (and perhaps at a lower level, electrical and chemical interactions within neurons). When one argues that we cannot understand the mental at this level, but instead most go to a more basic physical level (that of QM), we are being even stronger reductionists! We are saying that the interactions at a higher level (the neural) can only be understood using principles from a lower level (the quantum level). Perhaps QM is not a reductionist theory as a physical theory, but as a theory of mind, QM is extremely reductionist, by any definition of the term, and it is a non-dualist, physicalist, and in the contemporary sense of the term (the sense in which neuroscientists use it), a materialist view of the mental.

But hey, since you’re not a philosophical dilettante, I’m sure you knew all that.

A few questions:

What in the blue-green world can these concepts possibly mean? If you’re not Baconian materialist then what are you? And don’t start citing “quantum physics” and “string theory” or Dennett or Penrose or Philosophy of Mind anecdotal stories that point to “non-reductionist” views. What specific metaphysic do these “non-reductionist” sciences point to, if not to a mechanistic view on the one hand, or a transcendant, mystical view on the other?

Why should we not view these semantic shifts as simply fudges designed to postpone the conclusion that science itself is pointing (and has been pointing) to a natural world that strict reductionism (the great hope of the Enlightenment) cannot account for?

We’re playing semantics now, and apparently with some philosophical dilletantes who don’t realize how close to giving away the store they are. Let’s get a couple of things straight:

1) A robust non-reductionist worldview does not need dualism.
2) A “non-classical” materialism is actually no such thing, if materialism is understood in mechanistic terms pace Bacon and Descartes. These “non-classical” characteristics of the physical world are interesting from the standpoint of ID because they challenge reductionism, properly understood. Simply claiming quantum phenomena for the “material world” is a semantic move that changes nothing, and doesn’t make quantum mechanics any less problematic for LaPlacian reductionism. Bohr, Whitehead, Jeans all understood this. You should too.

What exactly is a “non-classical physicalist naturalism”? You seem to be implying that anything short of full-on Cartesian or Platonic dualism would be dissapointing and irrelevant to ID. It is precisely the “non-classical naturalism” that makes it interesting to ID. Also, I’m not sure that a “non-classical” materialism is even a coherent concept, if material is understood, the way it has always been understood, as extended matter.

It was precisely Bacon’s (and before him Lucretius and the atomists) rejection of formal and final causes and reduction of all of physis to efficient and material causes that got us here in the first place. St. Thomas understood design as a feature of nature without recourse to dualism, so why should present-day ID advocates need it? When you say “non-classical” don’t you really mean “non-Newtonian/Baconian,” and isn’t that precisely the aspect of the argument that makes it interesting, from the standpoint of ID?

How does this help ID? It seems to be at the very least a challenge to the dogmatic materialist reductionism (properly understood) that underpins the definition of science that is so often used to rule ID arguments out of court before they even gain a hearing. Moreover, both the paper and ID argue that intelligence is scientifically detectable as a feature of the natural world.

Also, what relevance is it to ID that the paper doesn’t lead to dualism? First of all ID is agnostic as regards the metaphysics proximate to the substances it inspects. It discovers or rules out design as a feature of a particular natural object, and no more.

I think, that he is not the same Kenneth de Jong.

Kenneth de Jong, (ISCID fellow, Assistant Professor of Linguisitics): http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/pe.....ejong.html
Kenneth (A.) de Jong (head of the Evolutionary Computation Laboratory, and a research faculty member of the Krasnow Institute): http://cs.gmu.edu/faculty/dejong.html