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presumption, naivete and absurdity

Doesn't reductionism require a combination of naivete and presumption?

Naivete about the lower level entities to which one reduces the higher level: one employes common sense notions of the nano entity being a whole of a certain kind and of it acting in accordance with the kind of thing that it is... an assumption similar to that which we make in our everyday practices, with the exception being that these nano entities have exotic and paradoxical combinations of characteristics.

Presumption inasmuch as one assumes that a glimpse of the nano-technology, as it were, of life, suffices over-turn the common sense notions of part and whole through a Copernican revolution. I object to this presumption, for its seems arguable that every theory relies upon common sense: if we overturned ALL of common sense in one fell swoop, science would disappear entirely, like the snake swallowing its tail. It is more reasonable, in my opinion, for the scientist to think of themself as clarifying confusions had by those who rely solely on common sense.

One can avoid the naivete by refusing to make the assumption that nano entities are wholes: they are instead composites of their parts, and those parts are composites; etc. ad infinitum until you have infinite numbers of infinitely small entities in each finitely small part of the universe: a reductio ad absurdam.
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Unknown said…
Very insightful. It's almost as though reductionism tries to explain away purpose/mystery by making it an accident of an non-mysterious unseen world. But then the unseen world (i.e. the atomic world) turns out to be even more complex then the everyday world - beauty gets more and more complex as we go deeper, like Barr said.
11:52 AM
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