Member-only story
Reductionism, Holism, and Abstraction in Model Building and Thinking
Reductionism permeates how we view the world because it is so intuitive. When we explicitly construct models to understand the world or solve a problem, we tend to formulate abstractions or break down problems into constituent and simpler parts. Implicit in this reductionist approach is that there even exists “constituent” parts. Even the notion of intuition itself implicitly assumes there are various “moving parts” of a system that are interconnected in some way, and through a creative subconscious process we discover those connections that weren’t apparent or considered before.
I will attempt to explore what reductionism means, and consider where the reductionist approach is ill-defined or at least limited. We will see how the reductionist approach can lead to more complexity at best, or may simply be the wrong approach since it is ill-defined. The examples I consider will draw primarily from physics, but will touch other fields such as biology.
Atomic View of the World
The great physicist Richard Feynman pondered what was the most important aspect of science to preserve if we were forced to forget everything else.
If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next…
