The reductionist blunder

There exists a notion in the public eye that science is inherently reductionist. It's espoused that the pattern of scientific progress is taking complex systems and reducing them to its fundamental level, traditionally subatomic particle collisions. To hold reductionism as a principle is to deny the existence of emergence. Emergent phenomena are when high-level simplicity manifests from low-level complexity. When looking at a complex system such as a human body, a reductionist believes to understand it we must reduce it to the underlying laws of physics and initial conditions which led to this situation. This is an intractable problem, one would need to explain the individual's DNA, evolution, and the initial conditions that preceded it with infinite accuracy. Consider radiation from another galaxy hitting this particular human resulting in a genetic mutation. How would the reductionist theory account for this, what formulation would you make? The problem is intractable.

Now imagine this human also got exposed to radiation in Chernobyl. Our reductionist theory must now account for the knowledge of both past and present humans. Is the reductionist going to explain the human phenomenon of nuclear reactors, construction, culture, or employment in terms of particle interactions? No. It’s explained only through emergence, high-level simplicity coming from low-level complexity. Practically all fields of science barring fundamental physics are emergent. Darwin recognized the high-level simplicity of evolution by natural selection that arises from the low-level complexity of this system. He did not derive his explanation of species from partial collisions, the initial conditions of the universe, or anything of the sort. The prediction of the content of future theories is inherently impossible, the people who try we call prophets. If you knew what knowledge future theories would hold, they'd become current. By definition, we cannot possibly know or predict the content of future knowledge.

A beautiful and far-reaching symmetry emerges in our best theories of epistemology, knowledge, and life. Knowledge is created through a process of conjecture and criticism. The enlightenment is a culture of criticism, an error-correcting mechanism. Our best explanation of life: evolution by natural selection is an error-correcting mechanism, and so too is the growth of knowledge. Darwin described the process of variation, mutation, and selection of the genome. Knowledge creation is the process of creative conjecture of explanatory theories that are hard to vary while criticism chisels out the falsehoods, and a better approximation of the truth remains. This emergent phenomenon of trial and error has such a large scope since knowledge can be created in any particular domain. The science is never settled, we are always using our best explanatory theories at the time. We are resigned to following our best conjecture. Guesswork followed by fixing errors. Certainty is an illusion, an emotion present solely in the individual.