# How the Big Influences the Small - [ ] 🚧 In Progress 🚧 Reductionism is the concept that all things and all behavior fundamentally reduce down to the very smallest properties, for instance particles and their motions, quantum fields, etc. While it is likely true, almost tautologically, that things are fundamentally made up of their very smallest components, it is incorrect to assume that the direction of causation is always from small to big. That the behavior of a system, and thus the atoms in that system, can always be described atomically. Instead, there are very obvious examples of reverse causation as it were, where effects at the largest of scales bring information down to affecting particles and their motion. For example, this article itself will have influenced the reader at least to read it. Their body will stay in such a shape as to read an article, hopefully relaxed and thoughtful. It will not have been the atoms in my laptop affecting this person, nor could any description of atoms sufficiently describe the behavior, only the concepts of the activity of reading, the concepts present on the page, interacting with the concepts in the readers brain, can causally explain the behavior. The significance of this is the reification of macroscopic systems, including our selves and our every day world. Things such as concepts themselves exist embodied and causally contingent in the world coequally with atoms rather than being reducible to them. I say embodied to point out that they have a material base, even words have ink on page, air and sound to transmit them, and brains to think them. But a word is not merely ink. > Are we not dealing here with the ==analytic assumption that any reality is reducible to a sum total of elements==? Now, though analysis may be the instrument of science, it is also the instrument of humor. If in describing a rugby match, I write, “I saw adults in shorts fighting and throwing themselves on the ground in order to send a leather ball between a pair of wooden posts,” I have summed up what I have *seen,*but I have intentionally missed its meaning. > > [[An Explication of The Stranger by Jean-Paul Sartre]] ## References * [[What Emergence Can Possibly Mean]] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.15468 * [[Mereological Fallacy|Mereological Fallacy]]