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Comment by jmathes | Hacker News Reader

"I find no attraction to reductionism of any kind. It's always seemed to me a truncated worldview, artificial and strained, ignoring the real content of our deepest intuitions of meaning, beauty, love and justice."

Every piece of technology you use was built on insights provided by reductionism. Nothing you do is benefitted by the reductionist-less grand metaphysical musings of Zeus worshippers. In every age of humanity, there have been reductionists slowly advancing the state of the species, and high-concept self-proclaimed thought leaders using intuition to make eventually-meaningless but feel-good declarations about things like beauty, love, and justice. Of course reductionism doesn't feel attractive - it requires the surrender of the ego in pursuit of fact. It makes sense that you wouldn't feel threatened by alien ideas if you allow yourself to disregard reason.

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Ah, here we go. Don't really have the space here to unpack the metaphysics behind this, but I'd start by pointing out that there's a difference between pursuing causality on one plane of experience, and demanding dogmatically that every aspect of reality will always and must always submit to the reductionist program.

I humbly suggest to you there are other philosophical points of view that don't necessarily involve Zeus worship. You can reject dogmatic reductionism without any religious cant whatsoever -- the Enlightenment and modernity are replete with thinkers that do so. Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, heck even Descartes himself to some degree. Contemporaries like Husserl, Bergson, Whitehead and Hans Jonas all have a robust view of Science and the power of Baconian observation, but also reject dogmatic reductionism. In particular I'd point to Whitehead's famous essay on the history of Science in _Science and the Modern World_, and Jonas' essay "Is God a Mathematician?" as good examples of purely philosophical rejections of reductionism that don't entail any religious dogma whatsoever.

The style of writing you use is different from mine. I make declarative statements about facts when talking about my point of view, and suggestions and conditional statements about yours. You use suggestions and conditional statements about your own point of view (as well as references to famous people who appear to share it), and declarative statements about mine.

I suspect that this is because I'm trying to understand, and you're trying to be well-rounded, which I think is a social attribute, not an intellectual one. I think this is evidence that a reductionist point of view is more likely to result in accurate understanding. I should point out that I only use the word reductionist because you used it; to me it sounds silly. It's like putting the suffix "ist" on the end of "logic" or "1+1=2" to suggest that there's a viable alternative and that the jury's still out.

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