Back-tracing reductionism 🧩 — a viable exit strategy in a digital world
Remember when you were younger and you were presented with a problem like the above? How would you go about solving it?
In the reductionist view of our world, reality can be understood by reducing phenomena to other, more fundamental laws or principles to explain causality relations. This approach was followed by many scientists throughout the ages, as they were trying to explain the outcomes of their experiments. It has brought us where we are today — and yet it leaves much to be desired.
It is not my intention to stir up more controversies or emphasize disagreements around what is or what isn’t “true”. Rather, I would like to see if we can agree on a common understanding of how innovation happens, how ideas are formed over time. Let us start from the words of Tarde, which I have blogged about before:
“[…] every invention and every discovery consists of the interference in somebody’s mind of certain old pieces of information that have generally been handed down by others.” — Gabriel Tarde, The Laws of Imitation p.382
Thanks to the internet and technologies like the printing press, we can find papers reflecting the words of many famous scholars and scientists that form the basis of the modern views of the world that reside within each of us today. We can look back in time and use the power of hindsight to see how ideas were once combined to form new ideas — tracing back the maze to its starting point.
And then, if we feel that the current exit point does not fully satisfy our philosophical needs and does not explain why things are the way they are, we can take a different turn. For the maze of our universe has infinitely many possible exits.