> Your last statement is what I have always maintained, about humans suffering from the handicap of our limited senses and minds when we attempt to fathom the unknown. We don't have the perspective of God, after all. I'm curious, actually, what you mean by "Reductionism ... has been discussed lightly here before, ... a fascinating idea, except that it would destroy the foundation of the knowledge."
>
> That's terribly vague. With all due respect, what did you mean by this, may I ask?
>
> Wolf "I think the joke about Reductionism is that at the most basic level, 'it's all just physics.'" spirit

Oops. Sorry about that. For the first part, see the link below. For the second, I left it hoping people would play through the logical consequences by themselves. Most simply: If the mind is a chemical illusion, then there is nothing capable of knowing that the mind is a chemical illusion.

A bit lengthier way of saying it: (1) If there is no distinct mind, but rather the mind is only chemical reactions, then (2) our 'minds' are no guarantee of good logic. Since there is no separate mind, again, (3) there could be no independent check on the results of the chemical reactions except more chemical reactions, which would be subject to the same restriction as the first batch. (4) No matter how complex the reactions become, they are still part of what they are observing. (5) That last means that a new variable or set of variables is introduced which can never be eliminated.

Thus, the person who states, "I believe that the world is reductionist" also by default states, "I cannot affirm that the world is reductionist." This has nothing to do with whether or not it is *true*, of course, merely with whether it can be known.

A theory whose age I cannot guess but always seems to pop up in these discussions is that of information. I do not adequately understand it, but the gist is that information also exists imprinted in matter, but it is not matter. For example, one would not describe a book by the quality of paper and color of ink used in it, but rather by the information contained in its words. The same identical information can be transferred from the ink and paper to phosphors on your computer monitor to magnetized metal on your hard disk to electrons passing through the phone lines to some poorly understood chemical process in your brain. Which matter is used, and the way in which it is used, is unimportant--the information is the same regardless.

gabby