Reductionist philosophy

The limitations of the reductionistic philosophy became apparent near the end of the 19th century. The recognition of the diversity of life following the... 

Figure 18-2 shows the scheme I propose for understanding human consciousness. Human consciousness is shown as the result of the interaction of six dimensions, each one just as real in some ultimate sense as any of the others. The dimensions are matter, energy, space, time, awareness, and an unknown factor that may be life itself. Science, guided by a physi cali sti c, reductionistic philosophy, investigates finer and finer levels of the matter and energy dimensions, within a certain space-time framework but these dimensions constitute only two of the six or more dimensions that must be examined for full... 

For a while, I joined another practice, but I kept encountering the same assembly-line mentality and reductionist philosophy. For a field that had begun with such a broad view of human nature, psychiatry seemed to have devolved into a mechanistic vision of brain chemicals and medications. 

Paul Davies, in God and the New Physics (1983), argues that the discovery that the mind exists as an abstract, holistic, organizational pattern, capable of disembodiment, refutes the reductionist philosophy that we are all nothing but moving mounds of atoms. ... 

Horst, Steven. 2007. Beyond reduction Philosophy of mind and post-reductionist philosophy of science. Oxford Oxford University Press. 

Witmer, Gene. 2008. (Review) Beyond reduction Philosophy of mind and post-reductionist philosophy of science. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, http //ndpr.nd.edu/news/23449-beyond-reduction-phUosophy-of-mind-and-post-reductionist-philosophy-of-science/. Accessed 5 July 2013. 

The term collectivism has sometimes been used to distinguish this AL philosophy from the more traditional top down and bottom up philosophies. Collectivism embodies the belief that in order to properly understand complex systems, such systems must be viewed as coherent wholes whose open-ended evolution is continuously fueled by nonlinear feedback between their macroscopic states and microscopic constituents. It is neither completely reductionist (which seeks only to decompose a system into its primitive components), nor completely synthesist (which seeks to synthesize the system out of its constituent parts but neglects the feedback between emerging levels). 

John Dupre Or you d explain human behaviour in terms of the interactions of brain cells. The opposite, downward causation, would be, for example, to say that the behaviour of a person causes their brain cells to move in a certain way. Lisa s example today, I take to be, as she just summarised it, precisely a claim to downward causation. That is to say that the social phenomena actually act causally on the individual, and, of course, to deny what is a very common thesis in the philosophy of social phenomena, which is methodological individualism, which says, and many people, social scientists and philosophers have said - you have to be able to explain social phenomena by looking at the behaviour of individuals. And that s the reductionist view as opposed to the downward causation view, which is an anti-reductionist view. And I think that s certainly one of the standard ways philosophers have understood the debate. 

Waters, C. K. (1990), Why the anti-reductionist consensus won t survive the case of classical Mendelian genetics , in A. Fine, M. Forbes and L. Wessels (Eds), PSA 1990, Vol. 1 Proceedings of the 1990 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Contributed Papers, Philosophy of Science Association, East Lansing, MI, pp. 125 -139. 

There has evolved over the past three decades a set of general concepts that have revolutionized the way we regard and study systems in nature. Their basic premises run counter to the Newtonian reductionistic approaches and might thus be labelled post-Newtonian concepts. The central theme of this new philosophy is the recognition that the behaviour and properties of a system are non-linear combinations of the subsystems. Such a system is endowed with complexity and displays specific properties that emerge from dynamic interactions between the subsystems. We discuss briefly complexity and emergence as the two pillars of post-Newtonian thought. 

Although the reductionist argument is of obvious validity, the inverse process of constructionism is impossible. This philosophy assumes that the properties of more complex systems can be predicted from those of a simpler one. By this logic theoretical chemists of the 20th century have persistently tried to reconstruct chemical behaviour from the fundamental equations of wave mechanics. To date the most powerful computers on the planet have failed consistently to reconstruct even the most fundamental property in all of chemistry, namely the structure of a molecule. Computations, known as quantum chemistry, all have to rely on the kick-start of an assumed molecular structure. 

What the psilocybin experience seems to argue is that there is a kind of parallel universe that is not at all like our universe, and yet it is inhabited by beings with an intentionality... No reductionist, no empiricist could experience what I have experienced without having to seriously retool their philosophy. ... 

Even more recently, in 1994, the quantum chemist Bader, echoing Kant, but explicitly adding a reductionistic picture, wrote 15 A scientific discipline becomes exact, in the sense that predictions become possible, as soon as the classification represents the physics that underlies an observation. And at a philosophy of chemistry conference in 1996,16 Frenking (1998,106-107), a theoretical chemist, discussing the autonomy of chemistry, says ... 

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