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 pe

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.