Vlad,
No I mean scientism.
I have no beef with methodological naturalism or methodological reductionism, only claims that science is the only means of describing or defining reality.
That’s not the claim though. The actual claim is that “science” (ie, a method that rests on reason, logic, evidence etc) is the only
known means of “describing or defining reality” because no other claimed means of doing that (“faith” for example) is
verifiable.
By the way – just out of interest have you ever, ever actually encountered an advocate for scientism? I know you use it frequently as a straw man here, but you’ve never shown us someone who actually argued for it. Why is that?
Since you apparently can't name an example of the type of reductionism I am criticising let me help you out.
Shifting the burden of proof doesn’t help you here. You introduced the accusation of reductionism so it’s your job to give examples of it, not mine.
An example is Dennett's reductionism of Consciousness. His reduction here is to state it as merely an illusion and not a thing at all.
That’s not what he says – the “illusion” is still a “thing”, but in any case what then do you think he thereby reduced
from? Souls? Consciousness pixies? What?
Your starting point would seem to be that we have to prove that consciousness exists because all we can observe is computing and it's hardware. Thus the illusion of consciousness is really complex intelligence.
My “starting point” is that if we’re to claim that
anything exists then we need evidence to justify the claim. It’s not difficult.
Your fault Hillside is to both talk about things having emerged while what has emerged doesn't actually exist. A most egregious example of cake-ism.
What was this hopeless gibberish supposed to mean?
Own it and stop referring to emergence.
I’m not about to “own” your straw man, and what’s wrong with referring to emergence – it’s a well understood and documented phenomenon?
You’re very confused about this.
