Day 10: Basic Beliefs Challenge

Claim:

Reality is best described as an ordered hierarchy with distinct levels of organization.

Expansion:

Reality consists of an ordered hierarchy of distinct levels of organization, each with its own patterns and regularities, yet all fully grounded in the physical. Higher levels emerge from and depend on lower ones, but can display novel properties and causal powers stable enough to warrant separate description. For human purposes, a workable model might be: physics → chemistry → biology → neurocognitive → social/political. This hierarchy is neither complete nor final, but it is functional and explanatory.

Counter Claim:

The two strongest claims against this are

• Strict Reductionism/Eliminative physacalism suggests that the microphysical level is the only ontologically real level which everything else is grounded in and reducible to.

• Ontological pluralism suggests that different levels of organization are possible. For example, mental properties may not be emergent from physical being but exist at a similar fundamental level.