Cyan2 comments on Fake Reductionism - Less Wrong

41 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 March 2008 10:49PM

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Comment author: Cyan2 18 March 2008 02:51:14AM 0 points [-]

There's another kind of anti-reductionist: one who says that there is *something* (e.g., a field, a resonance, etc.) which influences the whole of an object and cannot be studied by reducing a complex object to easier-to-understand constituents. This is different from "science robs the rainbow of its beauty" reductionism -- as near as I can understand, the contention is that a better scientific understanding can be obtained by considering the object as a whole. I'm still not sure if this anti-reductionist position is a claim about the map or a claim about the territory.