Reductionism

Life, when viewed from inside itself, is necessarily paradoxical, because reality is infinitely detailed, whereas the brain is only finite. For those who think in opposites, noticing a paradox is uncomfortable. The feeling is of something like confusion, but in a vaguely unsettling way. When I notice a paradox, my first instinct is either to distract myself or to try solving it. I have to really force myself to let it be. And we should let the paradoxes be. We can look at them—indeed, they can be quite beautiful, as they are what gives the world its quality of mysticism—but not so closely that we begin to understand them.

I don’t like it when people try to get rid of things that are really there. I want to see more of reality—not less. I want to believe in different things at different times. That’s how the world was designed; if the gods wanted us to know everything all the time, they would not have given us time or opinions. I want to walk around and see multiple sides of what is there. There is more than one thing in the world. Everything is exactly itself.

Anti-reductionism is about allowing the tension that comes from seeing a paradox. To be inside the world, rather than trying to escape from it. Since a human cannot go outside the world (except while asleep), attempting to do so anyway is actually a form of self-deception that prevents us from seeing the paradoxes. Perhaps a god could look at a paradox and understand it fully without reducing it, but those things that are alive in the ordinary sense inside the world, cannot. (The gods are dead in the same way that dreams come from death and that life happens inside of death.)