[Edited Oct 26th]
Ethan Siegel wrote an excellent article defending Reductionism that touches on my feelings towards philosophers who seem to spend most of their time confined within their own mindscapes, not even explicitly recognizing the fact. It’s about the lazy thinking that makes "Appreciating the divide between physical reality & biology ~ and the thoughts and feeling and convictions constantly firing across our respective minds ~ seem like an irrelevant irritation.
To my mind, it’s that comfort level with an appreciation for our physical body’s biological evolutionary reality that doesn’t care to reach beyond ‘From Rock to Mind’ that helped set the stage for our current excursion into dystopia.
So I will keep pushing back at the phobia against incorporating our human evolutionary reality into our philosophizing.
Why is that happening anyways? Don’t want to offend God, or is it simple our supreme position on the throne that we can’t let go of?
Subtitled: “The whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts; that’s a flaw in our thinking. Non-reductionism requires magic, not merely science.”
The third section I found personally helpful: How “apparent emergence” is readily explained by reductionism
"Yes, we can’t rule out non-reductionism, but wherever we’ve been able to make robust predictions for what the fundamental laws of nature do imply for large-scale, complex structures, they’ve been in agreement with what we’ve been able to observe and measure. "
The God-of-the-gaps nature of non-reductionism
But it is true that resorting to non-reductionism — or the notion that completely novel properties will emerge within a complex system that cannot be derived from the interactions of its constituent parts — is tantamount, at this point in time, to a God-of-the-gaps argument.It basically says, “Well, we know how things behave on a certain scale or at a certain time, and we know how they behaved on a smaller scale or at an earlier time, but we can’t fill in all the steps to get from that small scale/early time to understand how the large scale/later time behavior comes about, and therefore, I’m going to insert the possibility that something magical, divine, or otherwise non-physical comes into play.”
“The more complex a phenomenon is, the harder of a task it is to derive all of its properties from the fundamental, but that’s not the same as having evidence that something more is required.
In science, however, we’re never satisfied with a statement that simply says, “This problem is hard, so maybe the answer lies beyond science?””
Yet Chalmers has made a lucrative career out of doing just that, and yes, it does offend me and my bottom up evolution & science respecting Earth Centric sensibilities. And I will keep trying to refine and voice by objection to such self-absorbed flights of fancy.