Laughlin versus reductionism

In a posting Laughlin vs. reductionism Luboš Motl chooses to shoot down Robert Laughlin's book "A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down" for its supposed attack on reductionism. I commented before on Reductionism versus emergentism, where I came out in favour of Laughlin's book, because it strikes me as being a fairly balanced account of the merits and disadvantages of reductionism and emergentism. However, my salary is no longer paid to me for doing fundamental physics, so presumably I have less to lose when Laughlin's book damns reductionism with faint praise.

More generally, it is very useful to think at many levels, all the way from deep underlying theories (i.e. reductionism) up to phenomenological descriptions (i.e. emergentism), because useful science can be done at all of these levels, and usually insight at one level can help progress to be made at another level, although this isn't guaranteed.

As I said in Reductionism versus emergentism, my hope is to use self-organising networks to address the relationship between reductionism and emergentism, and "if it all goes to plan then reductionism will emerge from emergentism by a process of self-organisation".

In information processing I certainly do not want to have to think in terms of individual binary digits the whole time. I want to build software objects that have well-defined behaviour at a much higher level, and to be able to ignore the detailed internal workings of these objects, and to deal instead only with their externally exposed properties. However, at the same time, I want to be able to interrogate those higher level properties to discover their internal dynamics. This is what a self-organising network will allow me to do.

You certainly can't do useful (read "macroscopic") self-organising information processing without bumping straight into emergent properties.