[woodman]

Wow, I see I'm going to have to break this down Barney style in order to reach you:

The silly argument that started this all off was that you have to be an expert in every field in order to examine complex systems or problems that span multiple domains. This is simply not true, because a complex idea depends upon simpler ideas. These ideas can be formalized, where scientific theory occurs at the edge nodes and verification occurs at well connected nodes. This would allow an individual to select a layer of abstraction to work on - not unlike software development.

This isn't very far off from the present system of scientific journals and peer review.

[coldtea]

>This is simply not true, because a complex idea depends upon simpler ideas. These ideas can be formalized, where scientific theory occurs at the edge nodes and verification occurs at well connected nodes.

Only this is a very naive reductionistic epistemology, and not enough to cover modern science.

[woodman]

That would only be true if the finest component of information in "modern science" could not be represented in true/false/unknown. I know that back in the day folks working on cybernetics struggled with something kind of like this in neural networks, where they were stumped by nonsteady state output (they were hoping to represent everything in true/false). The solution was to just increase the layer of abstraction in representing the output, leaving enough room on lower layers to describe nonsteady state as another potential output state. Problem solved. If you've got an example demonstrating your concern, that would be helpful.

[coldtea]

The reductionistic part is in the very belief that there's such a thing as a "finest component of information" in the first place.

>If you've got an example demonstrating your concern, that would be helpful.

What I say is that sufficiently rich theories such as those we have today don't have "finest components" in the sense of being parsable down to some kind of "atoms" that are independent of the overall structure.

The whole intelligence lies in the connections between the components, and verifying that them are individually "correct" doesn't say much.

[woodman]

> The reductionistic part is in the very belief that there's such a thing as a "finest component of information" in the first place.

That seems like a major leap. I've heard people propose that there are limits to human understanding due to complexity, but this is the first time I've heard the suggestion that there is some level of information beyond any possible measurement. The lowest level I can think of is existence vs nonexistence - and you are essentially suggesting that there is some other state beyond measurement and therefor reasoning. Of course, such a thing would be impossible to prove... so the scientific method would be of no use. So if what you are suggesting is true, then it would have no influence on what I'm proposing anyway. Wait... you aren't religious are you? I'm not trying to pry or be insulting, but this suggestion would only really make sense in the context of trying to establish a place for religion in science.

As far as the rest, formal logic exists to do exactly what you say can't be done. Your argument sounds more like an appeal to emotion than anything else.