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Reductionism Quotes

Browse 52 quotes about Reductionism.

Reductionism Quotes

“You may show what atomic groupings are necessary in order that life may emerge out of matter, sentience out of life, or intellect out of sentience; but you cannot thereby reduce life, let alone sentient life and intellectual life, to terms of matter; you have only succeeded in tabulating the material coefficients of things which are not themselves material. I do not mean that Mr Russell would not be able to put up a case against this argument; I only complain that he simplified his task by pretending to misunderstand what the argument was; by assuming that it was merely physical when as a matter of fact it is metaphysical.”

FactsMaterialismReductionism
Book:Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]
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“Were these boys in their right minds? Here were two boys with good intellect, one eighteen and one nineteen. They had all the prospects that life could hold out for any of the young; one a graduate of Chicago and another of Ann Arbor; one who had passed his examination for the Harvard Law School and was about to take a trip in Europe,--another who had passed at Ann Arbor, the youngest in his class, with three thousand dollars in the bank. Boys who never knew what it was to want a dollar; boys who could reach any position that was to boys of that kind to reach; boys of distinguished and honorable families, families of wealth and position, with all the world before them. And they gave it all up for nothing, for nothing! They took a little companion of one of them, on a crowded street, and killed him, for nothing, and sacrificed everything that could be of value in human life upon the crazy scheme of a couple of immature lads. Now, your Honor, you have been a boy; I have been a boy. And we have known other boys. The best way to understand somebody else is to put yourself in his place. Is it within the realm of your imagination that a boy who was right, with all the prospects of life before him, who could choose what he wanted, without the slightest reason in the world would lure a young companion to his death, and take his place in the shadow of the gallows? ...No one who has the process of reasoning could doubt that a boy who would do that is not right. How insane they are I care not, whether medically or legally. They did not reason; they could not reason; they committed the most foolish, most unprovoked, most purposeless, most causeless act that any two boys ever committed, and they put themselves where the rope is dangling above their heads.... Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood. . . . I know, Your Honor, that every atom of life in all this universe is bound up together. I know that a pebble cannot be thrown into the ocean without disturbing every drop of water in the sea. I know that every life is inextricably mixed and woven with every other life. I know that every influence, conscious and unconscious, acts and reacts on every living organism, and that no one can fix the blame. I know that all life is a series of infinite chances, which sometimes result one way and sometimes another. I have not the infinite wisdom that can fathom it, neither has any other human brain”

InspirationalWisdomScienceCompassionMoralityEmpathyChoiceBiologyFree WillDeterminismReductionism
Book:Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom
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“As Einstein once said, “It is the theory which decides what can be observed.” But I must add that prior to theory there is what we call “thinking”—a systematic form of consciousness deeply driven by the unconscious that enables understanding and experimental predictions The parallel is expressed in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (KJV). For humans, all beginnings are in thought or reason. And in the reductionist search for reality, science can only identify mind, first in thing shopped for, then in the assurance of unseen evidence.”

MindReligionExperienceUnseenEinsteinReductionism
Book:The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Reflections on Faith, Science, and Economics
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“Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion? ...Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Renaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can.”

TruthUnderstandingExistenceDoubtAtheismRespectAtheistIndoctrinationBrainwashingReductionism
Book:Nature's imagination: the frontiers of scientific vision
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“By now, I hope you recognize this as one more example of the reductionist paradigm at work, even when it's couched in natural and alternative terms. As we saw in chapter ten, one of the major problems with modern medicine is its reliance on isolated, unnatural chemical pharmaceuticals as the primary tool in the war against disease. But the medical profession isn't the only player in the health-care system that has embraced this element of reductionism. The natural health community has also fallen prey to the ideology that chemicals ripped from their natural context are as good as or better than whole foods. Instead of synthesizing the presumed "active ingredients" from medicinal herbs, as done for prescription drugs, supplement manufacturers seek to extract and bottle the active ingredients from foods known or believed to promote good health and healing. And just like prescription drugs, the active agents function imperfectly, incompletely, and unpredictably when divorced from the whole plant food from which they're derived or synthesized.”

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Book:Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition
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“What is the colour of things in the dark?’ ‘I suppose, no colour at all.’ ‘And what of their shape? Have you any notion of it save as what could be seen or touched, or what you could collect from many seeings and touchings?’ ‘I don’t know that I have.’ ‘Then do you not see how the giant has deceived you?’ ‘Not quite clearly.’ ‘He showed you by a trick what our inwards would look like if they were visible. That is, he showed you something that is not, but something that would be if the world were made all other than it is. but in the real world our inwards are invisible. They are not coloured shapes at all, they are feelings. The warmth in your limbs at this moment, the sweetness of your breath as you draw it in, the comfort in your belly because we breakfasted well, and your hunger for the next meal—these are the reality: all the sponges and tubes that you saw in the dungeon are the lie.’ ‘But if I cut a man open I should see them in him.’ ‘ A man cut open is, so far, not a man: and if you did not sew him up speedily you would be seeing not organs, but death. I am not denying that death is ugly: but the giant made you believe that life is ugly.”

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Author:CS Lewis
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“It seemed a ruse that fear of death should be the sole motivation for living and, yet, to quell this fear made the prospect of living itself seem all the more absurd; to extend this further, the notion of living one’s life for the purposes of pondering the absurdity of living was an even greater absurdity in and of itself, which thus, by reductio ad absurdum, rendered the fear of death a necessary function of life and any lack thereof, a trifling matter rooted in self-inflicted incoherence.”

ParadoxAbsurdityFear Of DeathAbsurdismReductionismIncoherenceFear Of UnknownReason For LivingCircular Reasoning
Book:Only the Deplorable
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“We have come to understand the phenomena of life only as an assemblage of the lifeless. We take the mechanistic abstractions of our technical calculation to be ultimately concrete and "fundamentally real," while our most intimate experiences are labelled "mere appearance" and something having reality only within the closet of the isolated mind. Suppose however we were to invert this whole scheme, reverse the order in which it assigns abstract and concrete. What is central to our experience, then, need not be peripheral to nature. This sunset now, for example, caught within the network of bare winter branches, seems like a moment of benediction in which the whole of nature collaborates. Why should not these colours and these charging banners of light be as much a part of the universe as the atoms and molecules that make them up? If they were only "in my mind," then I and my mind would no longer be a part of nature. Why should the pulse of life toward beauty and value not be a part of things? Following this path, we do not vainly seek to assemble the living out of configurations of dead stuff, but we descend downwards from more complex to simpler grades of the organic. From humans to trees to rocks; from "higher grade" to "lower grade" organisms. In the universe of energy, any individual thing is a pattern of activity within the flux, and thereby an organism at some level.”

ExperienceAbstractPhenomenonMechanismConcreteReductionismHolismVitalism
Book:The illusion of technique: a search for meaning in a technological civilization
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“It is not that a whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that the parts themselves are redefined and re-created in the process of their interaction. So the reductionist sociobiologists argue that individual human limitations place constraints on society, but, in fact, social organization is the negation of individual limitations.”

Philosophy Of ScienceDialecticsReductionismSocial OrganizationHolismSociobiologyThe IndividualThe Corpse In The Elevator
Author:Richard Lewontin
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“Melancholy pervades me every time I enter a souvenir shop. I have been to many of them around the world. I try not to buy anything for multiple reasons. One of them is because I find the way souvenir shops represent a country or a culture problematic, to say the least. The items you find there are almost always either much better or much worse than the way locals do things. Each item is glorified or trivialized – depending on the taste of the manufacturer and the demand of the buyers. They are always designed to give you a presumed idyllic and warm feeling about the country from which you buy them. In reality, many locals strive to get close to owning some of the items displayed in souvenir shops. Moreover, even if locals use items like those displayed, their daily lives are never as romantic and as smooth as the feeling you get in these shops. In a sense, then, souvenir shops are places where people and their cultures are objectified and romanticized par excellence. Their human joys are amplified. Their grand sorrows are downplayed or buried altogether. Their real histories are either erased or diluted at best. Nevertheless, I confess to you, I always end up buying honey. Perhaps because bees represent life to me. Perhaps because I find that healthy bees and wildlife speak volumes about the overall health of a place and its people?”

CultureColonialismConsumerismRepresentationSociologyUnderstanding OthersSouvenirsCommercialismReductionismCultural Anthropology
Author:Louis Yako
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“In the West, the great problem that was created for Christianity from the 17th century onward and even earlier during the Renaissance was that religion began to retreat from one domain after another in order to accommodate the forces of modernism and secularism. One can point to the Galileo trial, after which the Church ‘‘lost the cosmos.’’ In fact, the Church was right in many ways, because what Galileo was saying did not concern astronomy alone, but also theology, which was quite something else. As a consequence of this trial, the Church withdrew from its concern with the sciences of nature and no longer challenged what kind of science was developed, and suf- fered the results of accepting the reductionism and materialistic views of modern science. This process resulted in the complete secularization of nature and the cosmos.”

ChurchChristianityMaterialismSecularismModernismReductionismSecularizationGalileo Trial
Book:در جست‌وجوی امر قدسی
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“I refuse to have my vagina photographed because I have no interest in being desired on the basis of its appearance. It has taken me decades to appreciate its power and beauty, and not merely because it birthed a child. Responsive to tenderness and the source of a luminous ecstasy, my vagina has enabled me to transcend an otherwise limited sense of self. I feel no need to make it conform to another’s aesthetic or have it applauded by strangers.”

WomenPhotographyWomanhoodFemininityPornographyPornObjectificationReductionismVaginaSexual Organs
Author:Antonella Gambotto-Burke
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“Vi blir lätt stötta om vår egen personlighet och vårt sätt att vara beskrivs som typiskt för vår kultur eftersom det inte gör rättvisa åt oss som individer: vi betraktar inte vårt eget beteende som typiskt, utan som uttryck för vår egen identitet och våra personliga val. Det här är trots allt något som vi lätt glömmer bort när vi vänder blicken mot andra: de andra beskrivs ofta utgående från vad som anses typiskt för deras kultur.”

RacismPrejudiceSvenska CitatReductionismRasismReduktionism
Book:Kultur, människa, möte - ett humanistiskt perspektiv
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“The essence of things is not rationally knowable, and reality cannot be reduced to mechanistic frameworks. When realizing this, we can finally start to look for the essence of life where it truly can be found: in that which always escapes rationalization and mechanization, in that which dissapears from a conversation when you digitalize it, in the difference between the mother's womb and an artificial plastic womb, in the difference between the heat of an electric heater and that of a wood-burning stove, and so on.”

Human BeingsContactBiologyReductionismMechanization
Book:The Psychology of Totalitarianism
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“When questions arise of possible harmful effects of pesticides, the defenders of the products always try to narrow the scope of the inquiry to their most immediate, direct and measurable consequences and then downplay them, The critics of pesticides, on the other hand, urge that the ecosystem is strongly interconnected, highly variable and vulnerable. Thus debates around environmental impact become debates on the philosophy of nature: are things readily isolated or richly interacting? Is the average behavior of chemicals and organisms an adequate basis for decision making or must we be concerned with the unevenness of the world? Shall we "be realists" and stick to measurable costs and benefits, or shall we concern ourselves with all kinds of consequences of what we do? Gradually we see a confrontation of the world views of mechanistic reductionism and of dialectical materialism.”

BiologyMaterialismEcologyIdealismMarxismDialecticsReductionismDialectical MaterialismSystems Biology
Book:The Dialectical Biologist
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“There is a strong current in contemporary culture advocating ' holistic ' views as some sort of cure-all... Reductionism implies attention to a lower level while holistic implies attention to higher level. These are intertwined in any satisfactory description: and each entails some loss relative to our cognitive preferences, as well as some gain... there is no whole system without an interconnection of its parts and there is no whole system without an environment.”

WellsWholeCultureStrongLossLevelsViewsAttentionEnvironmentHigherGainsCurrentsContemporaryCuresDescriptionRelativePreferenceCognitiveHigher LevelHolisticAdvocatingIntertwinedInterconnectionReductionism
Author:Francisco Varela
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“One good reason for the popularity of "reductionism" among the philosophical outposts of the Western Establishment is that it can be, and is, used as a device for trying to take the wind, so to speak, out of the sails of Marxism. . . . In essence reductionism is a kind of anti-Marxist caricature of Marxist determinism. It is what anti-Marxists pretend that Marxist determinism is.”

TryingKindReasonUsedSpeakWindEssencePhilosophicalWesternDevicesEstablishmentPopularitySailMarxismSpeaks OutMarxistCaricaturesDeterminismReductionism
Book:Cockburn Sums Up: An Autobiography
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“We live at a time that is notable for the polemical nature of discussions about identity, consciousness, rationality, agency, memory, and feeling. 'New atheists' and reductive materialists conduct gladiatorial debates against defenders of faith and enemies of reductionism. Lots of heat is produced, but, alas, little light is shed. How marvelous it is, then, to see this fine new book by Lenn E. Goodman and Gregory Caramenico. Here is a learned, illuminating, and decidedly non-polemical treatment of the classic questions of soul, mind, and brain-an exemplary work of scholarship.”

MindLittlesBookSoulFeelingsLightMemoriesBrainConsciousnessEnemyIdentityFineAtheistDebateDiscussionHeatClassicAgencyTreatmentShedMarvelousRationalityAlasScholarshipNotableDefendersNew BooksIlluminatingExemplaryGoodmanReductionism
Author:Robert P. George
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“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.”

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Book:The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present
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“The Truth doesn't need your cooperation to exist. All forms of cult, all forms of hype, all forms of delusion do require your participation in order to exist. I've looked into marginal areas of human experience -historical and otherwise- with a rational mind, and what I've found is that doorways into the miraculous are far fewer than the publicists of the New Age would have us believe. On the other hand, they are not as rare as the proponents of radical reductionism and materialism would have us believe. There are doorways out of the mundane.”

NeedsMindBelieveHumansHandsAgeFormOrderFoundAreasHistoricalRationalRadicalDelusionMaterialismCooperationFewerParticipationCultNew AgeHuman ExperienceMiraculousMundaneHypeDoorwaysPublicistsReductionism
Author:Terence McKenna
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“[R]eductionism' is one of those things, like sin, that is only mentioned by people who are against it. To call oneself a reductionist will sound, in some circles, a bit like admitting to eating babies. But, just as nobody actually eats babies, so nobody is really a reductionist in any sense worth being against.”

PeopleBitsSoundSinBabyEatingOneselfCirclesAdmittingReductionism
Book:The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
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“Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?”

ThinkingWorldMindLooksUnderstandingSimplePowerfulEmotionEnvironmentInspireComplexesSentimentsSentimentalScience And ReligionScornUpbringingReductionReconcileWishful ThinkingMuddleReductionismDisparagingUnderstanding The World
Author:Peter Atkins
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“We still find, especially in parts of academe, the damaging notion that everything is a struggle for power, or being empowered, or hegemony, or oppression: and that all competition is a zero-sum game. This is not more than repetition of Lenin's destructive doctrine. Intellectually, it is reductionism; politically, it is fanaticism.”

StillsGamesStruggleCompetitionNotionDoctrineOppressionDestructiveZeroRepetitionEmpoweredFanaticismHegemonyReductionismZero Sum Game
Author:Robert Conquest
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“A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms. But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.”

IfsEvilNamesIndividualReligiousViolenceEconomicBalanceIntellectualTemptationIdeologySinnerCombatDelicateRighteousReligious FreedomEconomic SystemsIndividual FreedomReductionismIntellectual FreedomSafeguarding
Author:Pope Francis
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“And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.”

WorldYearsBelieveKindArtMatterLawEnergySpaceNovelThousandModelsMachinesSentencesRationalWorks Of ArtConstructionThousand YearsConstructsTime And SpaceInsufficientMappingReductionismMatter And Energy
Author:Terence McKenna
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“There is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners. The contemporary world, with its open wounds which affect so many of our brothers and sisters, demands that we confront every form of polarization which would divide it into these two camps.”

IfsWorldTwoFormEvilBrotherDemandWoundsContemporaryTemptationSinnerDividesCampsRighteousBrothers And SistersPolarizationReductionism
Author:Pope Francis
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“Reductionism is not the right viewpoint for everything, and it certainly won't explain the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is because of a feature known as emergence. When you put together large numbers of pieces and parts, the whole can become something greater than the sum.”

MindWholeTogetherNumbersBrainKnownGreaterPiecesFeaturesViewpointsLarge NumbersEmergenceReductionism
Book:Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain
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“Clary: What are you doing here, anyway? Jace: 'Here' as in your bedroom or 'here' as in the great spiritual question of our purpose here on this planet? If you're asking whether it's all just a cosmic coincidence or there's a greater metaethical purpose to life, well, that's a puzzler for the ages. I mean, simple ontological reductionism is clearly a fallacious argument, but- Clary: I'm going to bed.”

IfsWellsMeanAgeSpiritualPurposeSimpleGreaterPlanetsBedArgumentAskingCosmicBedroomCoincidenceJaceGreat SpiritualReductionismClary Morgenstern
Book:Cassandra Clare: The Mortal Instrument Series (3 books): City of Bones; City of Ashes; City of Glass
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“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.”

WorldHumansWellsSoulBodySpiritualScienceBeliefTermExistenceBrainMysteryMaterialsActivityAccountsClaimsPatternsRecognitionMaterialismSuperstitionsMaterial WorldSpiritual BeingsReductionism
Author:John Eccles
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