The Reductionism Delusion

I'm tired of these reductionists. My complaint is about these fundamentalist scientific reductionists who try to deny me the comfort of thinking that my computer fried because my friend played Wolfenstein on it--and used a flamethrower. He happens to be a reductionist who stubbornly resists holism; he has no intentions of thinking outside of his rigid digital electronic box and owning up to the destruction he's caused. It is one thing to talk about microchips and gates and whatnot--don't think that I don't know about Carry Lookahead Adders--and quite another to deny outright the very possibility that my friend's binge with the flamethrower had absolutely anything to do with a component (which has a max operating temp of 100oC) going up in smoke. Am I to believe that all those computing newbies who think that their computers will blow up if they press any key to continue are delusional? Such arrogance is the hallmark of reductionism. It is the sort of error that only a naive reductionist like Richard Dawkins will commit.

This attempt to reduce love, sadness and nailgun-wielding aliens to neural networks and NAND gates is not just objectionable on moral grounds, but also on rational grounds. Who in their right minds would think that a romp with a rocket launcher in Quake III will not have an adverse effect on the motherboard which is definitely not designed to survive large high-explosive projectiles? You may claim that there is no evidence for this, but reductionistic science can only get us so far. Anyone not affected by such scientism understands that digital electronics doesn't have all the answers.

Another more subtle form of this philosophical travesty is when they try to claim that faith is not a valid way of knowing about reality. Our senses are unreliable, so how can we be sure that science is the only way of reliably learning about the universe? I mean, we cannot reliably know what goes on inside those microchips no matter how carefully we inspect them--basic Quantum Mechanics. So who's to say that more insight into the operation of the Floating Point Unit is gained by looking at microchips than by exploring the Unreal Tournament 2004 world? The arrogance of scientism and atheism might, but not those of us who are more sophisticated in dealing with such matters. Those hardware engineers who rashly deny such reasonable possibilities should perhaps remain more open-minded to the possibility that the all-day wargamer might have some guiding insights into the design of CPU microcode, rather than claim that their reductionist view of digital electronics, ones and zeroes, provide all the answers that they need. Clearly, their views have only as much validity as the RPG player's given the unreliability of it all. I'm not claiming that faith is all you need to know about the world or that game playing experience is all you need to design CPUs--I'm saying that Science and faith, like Digital Electronics and Doom III expertise, are complementary. Digital Electronics is simply rudderless without hours of NFS: Most Wanted experience to guide it, whether you are designing a binary adder or a CPU bus.

[Okay, so nobody broke my computer; but I have faith that somebody will, that ought to count]