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Many people professing to be materialists are actually physicalists. The claim is not that everything that matters is matter. Rather it's that everything that m

Many people professing to be materialists are actually physicalists. The claim is not that everything that matters is matter. Rather it's that everything that matters is physical state.

beaconstudios 5y ago
If you (not you personally, the general 'you') still believe that reductionism can explain all phenomena then even if you claim to be a physicalist, you are still stuck in materialist patterns of thinking.
- feanaro 5y ago
  Ah, I'm sorry to see this answer so late, but I find this interesting so I'll respond anyway. I find "reductionism" to be a very vague and often unclear term. When used correctly (at least how I understand it), it is meant to denote phenomena where in principle, with infinite computational power, you still could reduce the total behaviour to a combination of underlying lower-level behaviours. But with irreducible phenomena, this way of understanding it is suboptimal and does not produce understanding in practice, because it is missing the forest for the trees and introduces a lot of information which can effectively be ignored. In this way, moving up a level, or doing a kind of basis shift, we can understand the phenomenon much more easily. In these situations, we say that reductionism does not hold. But I've also seen people use the term in a mystic, almost magical way, where supposedly the upper phenomena cannot be put into a connection with the lower underlying phenomena even in principle. They seem to be seeing it as a kind of break in causality, so that the upper phenomena stands on its own, unrelated to the lower layer. With the above in mind, why do you specifically think that reductionism determines someone specifically as a materialist and not a physicalist? Can you expand a bit more on that?
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Materialist and emergentist are both types of physicalist, so a materialists is already a physicalist, just missing some of the pieces. > But I've also seen people use the term in a mystic, almost magical way It's really unfortunate that holism in general has attracted the likes of woo-peddlers and magical thinkers because it discredits the core idea. My perspective on reductionism (and by implication, materialism) versus holism is that reductionism tends to focus on the smallest pieces rather than appropriately scaling up and down the ladder of abstraction depending on what level you are operating on. So for example, when looking at behaviour you want to deter (crime, environmental damage etc) a reductive approach would be to just attempt to counter the individual's behaviour with punishment (ie, making such behaviour illegal). The holistic view would be to examine not just the behaviour of the individual but the incentives and structures that drive said behaviour and try to fix that, because without removing the incentive the behaviour will not be truly removed. I believe that reality is organise from the bottom-up, so there's nothing being added at the higher levels that is apart from physical reality. But the thing that reductionism typically misses out on is that reality is made of material _and relationships_ and when you take the material apart into the smaller parts, you break said relationships and much of the picture. The reductive approach to understanding reality is to do exactly that, to take things apart to understand them, but many things stop working when you remove the individual part from its environment, and thus in those scenarios you need to understand the whole picture. So often I see people trying to address a problem that manifests at point A (say, a particular component of a software system) by fixing it at point A, where the correct fix is actually elsewhere. It was running into this pattern over and over in my software engineering work that made me discover systems theory in the first place but I see the same mistake all over the place.
    - feanaro 5y ago
      Thank you for taking the time to explain! I find this sentence particularly illuminating: > But the thing that reductionism typically misses out on is that reality is made of material _and relationships_ and when you take the material apart into the smaller parts, you break said relationships and much of the picture. I fully agree with this position. This is actually what I attempted to explain (but not very well) with my "reductionism understood right" take above.

Many people professing to be materialists are actually physicalists. The claim is not that everything that matters is matter. Rather it's that everything that matters is physical state.

beaconstudios 5y ago

If you (not you personally, the general 'you') still believe that reductionism can explain all phenomena then even if you claim to be a physicalist, you are still stuck in materialist patterns of thinking.

feanaro 5y ago
Ah, I'm sorry to see this answer so late, but I find this interesting so I'll respond anyway. I find "reductionism" to be a very vague and often unclear term. When used correctly (at least how I understand it), it is meant to denote phenomena where in principle, with infinite computational power, you still could reduce the total behaviour to a combination of underlying lower-level behaviours. But with irreducible phenomena, this way of understanding it is suboptimal and does not produce understanding in practice, because it is missing the forest for the trees and introduces a lot of information which can effectively be ignored. In this way, moving up a level, or doing a kind of basis shift, we can understand the phenomenon much more easily. In these situations, we say that reductionism does not hold. But I've also seen people use the term in a mystic, almost magical way, where supposedly the upper phenomena cannot be put into a connection with the lower underlying phenomena even in principle. They seem to be seeing it as a kind of break in causality, so that the upper phenomena stands on its own, unrelated to the lower layer. With the above in mind, why do you specifically think that reductionism determines someone specifically as a materialist and not a physicalist? Can you expand a bit more on that?
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Materialist and emergentist are both types of physicalist, so a materialists is already a physicalist, just missing some of the pieces. > But I've also seen people use the term in a mystic, almost magical way It's really unfortunate that holism in general has attracted the likes of woo-peddlers and magical thinkers because it discredits the core idea. My perspective on reductionism (and by implication, materialism) versus holism is that reductionism tends to focus on the smallest pieces rather than appropriately scaling up and down the ladder of abstraction depending on what level you are operating on. So for example, when looking at behaviour you want to deter (crime, environmental damage etc) a reductive approach would be to just attempt to counter the individual's behaviour with punishment (ie, making such behaviour illegal). The holistic view would be to examine not just the behaviour of the individual but the incentives and structures that drive said behaviour and try to fix that, because without removing the incentive the behaviour will not be truly removed. I believe that reality is organise from the bottom-up, so there's nothing being added at the higher levels that is apart from physical reality. But the thing that reductionism typically misses out on is that reality is made of material _and relationships_ and when you take the material apart into the smaller parts, you break said relationships and much of the picture. The reductive approach to understanding reality is to do exactly that, to take things apart to understand them, but many things stop working when you remove the individual part from its environment, and thus in those scenarios you need to understand the whole picture. So often I see people trying to address a problem that manifests at point A (say, a particular component of a software system) by fixing it at point A, where the correct fix is actually elsewhere. It was running into this pattern over and over in my software engineering work that made me discover systems theory in the first place but I see the same mistake all over the place.
  - feanaro 5y ago
    Thank you for taking the time to explain! I find this sentence particularly illuminating: > But the thing that reductionism typically misses out on is that reality is made of material _and relationships_ and when you take the material apart into the smaller parts, you break said relationships and much of the picture. I fully agree with this position. This is actually what I attempted to explain (but not very well) with my "reductionism understood right" take above.