- #1
RAD4921
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Materialism is based largely on reductionism, which has its problems rooted in that one cannot keep cutting up the world into smaller and smaller pieces.
Though reductionism has proved very valuable in scientific discoveries, I think one who believes all the answers lie in reductionism is like a housefly landing on a television screen and only seeing the little dots and not the big picture.
Fritjof Capra explains this in his famous book, “The Tao of Physics”.
--- Quantum theory has thus demolished the classical concepts of solid objects and strictly deterministic laws of nature. At the subatomic level, the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve into wave-like patterns of probabilities, and these patterns, ultimately, do not represent probabilities of things, but rather probabilities of interconnections. A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparations of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated 'basic building blocks', but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitutes the final link in a chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can only be understood in terms of the object's interaction with the observer. This means that the classical ideal of an objective description of nature is no longer valid. The Cartesian partition between the I and the world, between the observer and the observed, cannot be made when dealing with atomic matter. In atomic physics, we can never speak about nature without , at the same time, speak about ourselves.---
Though reductionism has proved very valuable in scientific discoveries, I think one who believes all the answers lie in reductionism is like a housefly landing on a television screen and only seeing the little dots and not the big picture.
Fritjof Capra explains this in his famous book, “The Tao of Physics”.
--- Quantum theory has thus demolished the classical concepts of solid objects and strictly deterministic laws of nature. At the subatomic level, the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve into wave-like patterns of probabilities, and these patterns, ultimately, do not represent probabilities of things, but rather probabilities of interconnections. A careful analysis of the process of observation in atomic physics has shown that the subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparations of an experiment and the subsequent measurement. Quantum theory thus reveals a basic oneness of the universe. It shows that we cannot decompose the world into independently existing smallest units. As we penetrate into matter, nature does not show us any isolated 'basic building blocks', but rather appears as a complicated web of relations between the the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. The human observer constitutes the final link in a chain of observational processes, and the properties of any atomic object can only be understood in terms of the object's interaction with the observer. This means that the classical ideal of an objective description of nature is no longer valid. The Cartesian partition between the I and the world, between the observer and the observed, cannot be made when dealing with atomic matter. In atomic physics, we can never speak about nature without , at the same time, speak about ourselves.---