Quotes About Reductionism

In any case, however many subatomic particles there may be, organisms are wholes, and reducing them to their parts by killing them and analysing their chemical constituents simply destroys what makes them organisms.

Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.

It is time to learn from the mistakes of monocultures of the mind and the essentialising violence of reductionist thought. It is time to turn to diversity for healing.

I see people who talk about America, and then undermine it by not paying attention to its soul, to its poetry. I see polarization, reductionism and superficiality.

The convention that there were two sides to every story eliminated the third and fourth and fifth sides. Even dividing the past two and a half million years into the "Neolithic" (the new stone age) and the "Paleolithic" (the old stone age) was reductionist. "Write this down," he said. "Dichotomies are for idiots.

Nothing can account for the reductionist tendencies among neuroscientists except a lack of rigor and consistency, a loyalty to conclusions that are prior to evidence and argument, and an indifference to science as a whole.

In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.

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. For example

The people I really do dislike are the morally unimaginative kind of evolutionary reductionists who, in the name of science, think they can explain everything in terms of our early hominid ancestors or our genes, with their combination of high-handed tone and disregard for history. Such reductive speculation encourages a really empty scientism.

An extraordinarily nimble synthesist, Ridley leaps from chromosome to chromosome in a handy summation of our ever increasing understanding of the roles that genes play in disease, behavior, sexual differences and even intelligence. More important, though, he addresses not only the ethical quandaries faced by contemporary scientists but the reductionist danger in equating inheritability with inevitability." —The New Yorker

Without falling into sociopolitical reductionism, it remains necessary to protest against the prevailing tendency, among Western scholars, to read the works of Nishida [Kitar?] and the Kyoto school as expressions of a "pure philosophy" stemming from a "pure experience.

I figure anytime you put an adjective before 'writer,' it's a way of dismissing the writer.

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

By locating our consciousness in only one biological oscillator, the brain, we blinded ourselves to perceptions that have been common to human beings since they emerged from this Earth. In gaining a reductionist understanding of the world, we lost touch with the essential nature of the Earth and ourselves.

The majority of reductive scientists, when they experience this fundamental aspect of reality, experience one overriding emotion: fear. Self-organization leads to an inescapable conclusion: there is more going on than mechanical reductionism perceives or can explain.

Reductionism as a way of understanding food or drugs may be harmless, even necessary, but reductionism in practice—reducing food or drug plants to their most salient chemical compounds—can lead to problems.

Reductionism in the physical sciences has been challenged by the principle of emergence. The whole system acquires qualitatively new properties that cannot be predicted from the simple addition of those of its individual components. One might apply the aphorism that the new system is greater than the sum of its parts. There is a phase shift, a change in the organizational structure, going from one scale to the next.

The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn't have been this way. We didn't impose it on the Universe. That's the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it.

El reduccionismo no parece conceder un respeto suficiente a la complejidad del universo. A algunos se les antoja como un híbrido curioso de arrogancia y pereza intelectual.

Reductionism describes the scheme, and it has a long history of successes.

This book intends to make the case for explanation by reduction to physics and mechanical engineering, to this alternative realm of explanation: not to alternative explanations but to explanations of phenomena with which the biologist's classical chemical reductionism just doesn't help. As we'll see, this realm not only explains different phenomena but provides information that makes wonderfully satisfying intuitive sense.

But Quigley's interdisciplinary interests resulted not from dilletantism, but from a distrust of reductionism as a means of understanding society and an insatiable curiosity he synthesized into a revolutionary holistic epistemology.

Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.

To say that my anxiety is reducible to the ions in my amygdala is as limiting as saying that my personality or my soul is reducible to the molecules that make up my brain cells or to the genes that underwrote them.