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Reductionism
THINKING ALLOWED
Essays on Issues, Ideas and Reflections on the Times. Published now and then. Opinions pro or con are welcome
REDUCTIONISM
My bicycling through South Florida (actually a ten mile circle three times a week) has given me time to reflect and also to listen to lectures on tape. The tape series on the “Philosophy of the Mind” is almost at an end and I have exhausted my interest in the intricacies of “intentionality”. I would rather think about dualism, causality and reductionism.
Now, I was mightily influenced by the Greek philosopher Plato. My introduction to the ancient thinking that we came in two halves, one physical and one mental still strikes me as a good starting point. Simply stated this is a “dualism”. The additional idea that the mental part of us consists not only of thinking but it the seat of the soul has been bought by most of the world throughout history and even down to today. Causality is also a dualism – cause and effect. My efforts at thinking and writing seem to result in what the philosophers call, “reductionism”. I also am a “Pragmatist” at most other times.
Reductionism means something special and particular to me. In solving life’s problems and doing a lot of thinking about the problems of life I tend to try to reduce large things down to small, terse, simple and clear meanings. There is no need of the obfuscation of lawyer language in trying to understand the meaning of life and the meaning of why we do things the way we do them although it is quite clear that we are messy beings. If aliens from distant planets were to visit us they would be attracted and repelled by the morass of remains we left for them to sift through and try to explain. We are trying to explain through the examination of artifacts the kind of arts and sciences used by earlier civilizations that have long since been weighted down by the dust caused by human scurrying to and fro over the bones of those trampled in the process.
I mean something quite simple by reductionism. I try to say what needs to be said about things I like to write about on one page. That takes a lot of reduction. Saying things that need to be said about problems that beset us need to have histories or introductions. They need to have the meat of the problem laid out for inspection. And, they need a conclusion or what it all means.
This piece about “Reductionism” is a sentence or two too long. I fixed it by reducing the size of the font and stealing spaces at the top which I have just done.
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