Irreducibility


(While reading Karen Armstrong's latest book The Case for God I was struck by a thought - ok, series of thoughts - about our fears of material determinism...)

Does our human cognitive tendency to reductionism produce a false fear/rejection/perception of material determinism?
Is the fear that we are reducible?
That our fullness is, in the end, insignificant?
What if we found out that while material determinism is true, the universe (including us) is irreducable?
What if our rejection of deterministic ideas is a result of our not believing that we are reducable to simplistic, singular, or trivial physical/chemical reactions?  What if this idea is misplaced because the universe can be both deterministic & irreducible...

What if the fullness of our being is, as the sages suggest, fully important, fully interconnected, and fully necessary to the functioning of the universe...
does determinism take on a different cast if this is true?
does this impact our understanding of the Daoist idea that both we and everything around us is and can only be perfect?
is this position, itself, not akin to determinism?

While these ideas apply to the strong version of determinism, they also got me thinking about the weak version...

Does determinism act only at certain scales?  How do these scales relate to the meaning generating or experiential aspects of human life?  For example, we might discover that while determinism is strong at the scale of culture/century it might be very weak at the individual/minute scale. The introduction of ideas of probability also calls into question whether a Strong determinism is possible in a probability based universe or whether determinism in such a universe is bound to be of the weak or probabalistic variety.

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