reductionism - CORRECT ANSWER-if you want to understand something complex, you
break it down into its component parts
how we go about understanding
... [Show More]
1. complex sequences of events
2. how we fix things
3. cure things,
4. mass produce things
What allowed for the invention of rational, scientific thought in Christian Europe
(emerging from the Dark Ages)? - CORRECT ANSWER-conquest in 1085 of the Muslim
city of Toledo,---along with a treasure virtually unknown in Europe, namely a *library*
-By giving Europe access to some of the vast amounts of knowledge lost with the fall of
Rome in 410--to forms of philosophy, logic, math that Europe only recalled as vague
myths--made possible virtually unprecedented marvels, like critical thinking, syllogism
and deductive reasoning, generating hypotheses in testable manners, and even then
testing them.
building blocks of reductionism (5) - CORRECT ANSWER-1. to understand the
workings of something complex, *break it down into its component parts* and
understand how those parts work
-(or are failing to work, in the fix-it scenario)
2. to get the complex system back from those component parts are to *put 'em back
together* in a *straightforward, additive, linear* manner
3. Implicit in this---there is a *point-for-point correspondence* between the component
parts and the final, complex state (all the following vice versa:)
----> if you know the *starting state* of a complex system, you can know the *final state*
without having to go through each intervening step
---> if there is a small change in the starting state, it *maps predictably* onto a small
change in the final state
----> approximate knowledge of the starting state gives you *predictive power* about the
approximate nature of the final state
4. a perfectly reductive syst. req. a *blueprint* (and intrinsic in that---a blueprint maker)
5. there's *variability* that is *noise*
-your measurement instruments are accurate---once you get better ones, the noise
should disappear
-makes it harder for you to perceive info [Show Less]