Reductionism

If materialism and or physicalism are factual, then how do we explain the conscious occurrences we and other animals possess? How can we reduce this consciousness to a material object? Reductionism claims that a complex entity is nothing but the quantity of its parts. For example, a physicalist may use reductionism and state that all mental thoughts can be reduced to the physical parts of the…

Biological reductionism, Essentialism, Social constructionism, Symbolic Interactionism and Early gender socialism. Social constructionism is perhaps my favourite concept as it focuses on how categories are produced socially and culturally. Socialisation plays a key role in social constructionism and most importantly primary socialization – family. Topic covers…

(Larson 2014: 505). The female sphinx inspired artwork was made of sugar, polystyrene, plastic and molasses (Lewis 2017: 12). Walker addresses how the black female body has been represented through stereotyping practices for years. Essentialism, reductionism and naturalization are used in A Subtlety. Essentialising is when a race’s intrinsic nature is essentialised to a few internal qualities or behaviours (Hall 1997: 245). These essential qualities or behaviours represent who they are as a…

Chalmer states that the hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining the relationship between physical phenomena, such as brain processes, and experience. (Robert J. Howell and Torin Alter (2009), Scholarpedia, 4(6):4948) Thomas Nagel sees the problem as turning on the “subjectivity” of conscious mental states (1974, 1986). He argues that the facts about conscious states are inherently subjective—they can only be fully grasped from limited types of viewpoints.…

our body and our brain; the way we are built, affect our behavior. This approach to psychology states that we are born as the individuals that we are, and that the information encoded into our DNA is what defines us. We can look at the theory of reductionism: every complex concept is a sum of its parts, which implies that every concept can be defined if we break down and look at its parts. In other words, if we take the human body and observe every body part - all the DNA and every little atom;…

Let us briefly summarize the terrain we have traveled. Whereas the Western notion of utopian striving provides a sense of hope and the will to act, the impossibility of actualizing the utopian ideal also invites fanatical devotion to delusional pursuit. We can see this pattern playing out vividly in our contemporary culture, where an unbridled commitment to consumerism promises a happiness that it cannot deliver, and in a cognitive neuroscience program that illogically assumes that continuing to…

Identity of Physicalism Physicalism has many forms and lens to look through. Physicalism believes the mind is part of the body and nothing else. Physicalist believe in the facts of science and that everything can be explained, even the mind with science. In this, the singular philosophical belief of identity will be explored through science and the simplicity of understanding of the brain. With science behind physicalism that simplifies the mind and the world down to an atomic level.…

thing we are aiming to examine, without specifying what it really is. There have been many different attempts at defining religion and these come from a range of philosophical and anthropological fields such as cultural relativism, absolutism and reductionism. One reason as to why it is particularly difficult to define ‘Religion’ is due to cultural differences between the Western scholars of Christianity and the indigenous religions such as those worshipped…

Wilson stated that “the love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.” While Consilience and Life is a Miracle converse over the idea of unifying knowledge and the practicality of it, they each have an obvious standpoint on the topic and it is linked to the study of how the universe was created and the theories surrounding creation. E. O. Wilson takes a unique vantage point as a scientist and Wendell Berry does the same from the…

On Sept. 24, Pope Francis gave his first address to the United States Congress. The speech, which pushed a message of peace, environmental responsibility and economic justice, did not go over well with House Republicans. House Majority Leader John Boehner invited the Pope to speak, but the pontiff's politically-charged address condemned many policies the GOP promotes and called out the House for refusing to enact meaningful change in America and around the world. The Bishop of Rome issued a…