Announcement List for the Virginia Atheists & Agnostics

[victoria kovalchuk <>]

Hello everyone!

For this week's meeting we'll be trying to have Jin Lee speak at our meeting again! He will be talking about emergence in science.The meeting will be this Thursday, April 26th at 7pm. It will be in New Cabell 415, and the blurb for Jin's talk is underneath the election results, so please read both!

I'd like to make an announcement about the VAA elections that occurred last week. We had a great election, lot's (I am unclear on the definition of "a lot" but I was told it applies here) of people ran, and there was a lot of discussion about the future of VAA. I also gave a very inspirational speech. I'm am sorry to anyone that missed it. Anyways, Here are your new leaders:

President: Mason Scott

Vice President: Ali Shanoon

Hope you all are excited for all their plans! 

See you all on Thursday! (It's the last official VAA meeting of the semester!)

Victoria Kovalchuk

Blurb:

There exists a controversy regarding the reduction of scientific theories, with implications towards the consistency of science itself. Can the development of a network of neurons be reductively explained by the genes that produce them? Can one's thoughts, feelings and actions be reductively explained by the neural network? The answer, when we look at macroscopic vs microscopic scales, tends to be "no, it's more complicated".

One then asks, "are complex systems inherently not explainable by their simple parts? what is it that makes this incompatibility of scale ontologically different from our ability to construct the natural numbers from 5 axioms, or to explain the asymmetry of the water molecule's charge distribution from quantum mechanics?"

Reductionism and emergence are two concepts at the center of a controversy in the philosophy of science. Both can be seen as two sides of the same coin, for those that strongly support one concept tend to argue against the other. I will be presenting on the definition of these two concepts and examples of such controversies in modern scientific research. I hope to see if people can spot this pervasive problem in their own fields of study and illuminate where they stand on this issue. Such a discussion, I believe, has implications towards our certainty in the consistency of scientific theories between macroscopic and microscopic scales.