Quotes About Reductionism

My ability to help my clients was limited by our narrow focus. This was partly my fault for defining myself as a specialist, but I eventually came to see that this problem of reductionism is endemic to our culture.

Atheists seem to exercise their reductionistic tendencies selectively. If religion stands in the way of saving people, these people have infinite worth. But if the scientist stands in the way of preserving human life, the embryo is "nothing more than a dot.

Materialism: The philosophical position that there is only one thing in the universe: stuff, matter. Anything other than matter is either reducible to matter, as thoughts are reducible to the matter of a brain doing its thing, or doesn't exist, like the Tooth Fairy.

Scientific reductionism has threatened the spiritual aspects of medical practice from within, by denying the existence of the transcendent. The industrialization of health care now threatens the spiritual aspects of medical practice from without, denying the importance of the spiritual. Yet

By a monstrous act of reductionism, the infinite depth of who you are is confused with a sound produced by the vocal cords. (p. 28)

Reductionism and elimination make one feel clever, but what happens when the meditator drops her fixation on feeling clever?

You can take a watch apart and analyze its parts, but they won't tell you the time of day. It's the same with any holon. The wholeness of the holon is not found in any of its parts, and that puts an end to a certain reductionistic frenzy that has plagued Western science virtually from its inception. Particularly with the systems sciences, the vivid realization has dawned: we live in a universe of creative emergence.

Beware the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

But when I'm talking about God, I'm talking about the divine being who can't be located tangibly with the kind of evidence that the rationalism of reductionism demands in the same way that you cannot be located in your eyelashes or spine or shoulder.

The Book of Revelation wages war on the reductionism that chokes awe.

My central premise is that although the reductionist approaches of scientists and artists are not identical in their aims—scientists use reductionism to solve a complex problem and artists use it to elicit a new perceptual and emotional response in the beholder—they are analogous.

To him who looks on the world reductively, the world looks reductively back.

In a reductionist view, understanding something complex requires breaking it down into its components; understand those parts, add them together, and you'll understand the big picture. And in this reductionist world, to understand cells, organs, bodies, and behavior, the best constituent part to study is genes.

Entities should not be posited unnecessarily.

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

The most insistently reductive, device-like models of living creatures, models that left their unmistakable mark on Darwinism,relied upon a theology, a supernatural power to provide meaning and purpose.

Whereas traditional reductionism sought to find the commonality underlying diversity in reference to a shared substance, such as material atoms, contemporary systems theory seeks to find common features in terms of shared aspects of organization.

So many "emotional affairs" are pulsing with sexual tension, regardless of whether genitals have made contact, and giving them a new label seems to me to promote erotic reductionism. Clearly, affairs can be sexual without involving a penis entering a vagina, and in such cases, it is more helpful to call a spade a spade.

The belief that life on earth arose spontaneously from nonliving matter, is simply a matter of faith in strict reductionism and is based entirely on ideology.

My humanity includes not just what I am at the present moment, but what I can be. I am also my future, To exclude the potential from the real, and identify the real only with what is already actualized is another form of reductionism. -Sexuality and Spiritual Growth

Our interests in life are not always served by viewing people and things as collections of atoms—but this doesn't negate the truth or utility of physics.

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition.... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.

The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.

I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.