People often mean different things when they say "reductionism". Sometimes they mean that the phenomenon under consideration is always reducible to a common se

People often mean different things when they say "reductionism". Sometimes they mean that the phenomenon under consideration is always reducible to a common set of basic physical underpinnings, which is something for which we have never conclusively observed a contradiction. Other times, they mean to say that the phenomenon in question can be well understood using a lower level set of abstractions than we initially considered and that there is no need for further abstraction. This is observably not true, i.e. the workings of an internal combustion engine are not practically modelled by combining a model for each of its individual atoms. I think consciousness might eventually be reducible in the first, but not in the second sense. Of course, crude initial models don't explain a lot, but I don't think that has much bearing on a thing being reducible.