666

„For people who don’t already know, hard determinism states that since every event is causal, free will is incompatible with such. I don’t label myself as a Hard Determinist, but rather a Hard Incompatibilist (Meaning free will is incompatible in both a deterministic univerese as well as an indeterministic universe), but either way neither implies a reductionistic framework. Reductionism, at it’s stripped away base, means that everything can be reduced down to it’s parts. And there are reductionists out there who think everything is just the “small bits” bouncing around. Some even say large scale objects don’t really exist due to this. This is what I call “extreme reductionism”. The rejection of what those parts make up due to being able to reduce an object to the parts. And it’s a big, ginormous, whopping mistake from what I can tell. […] But why is this reductionistic framework a mistake? Because we know otherwise. We know that parts make up wholes which have an actual effect on the parts themself. That simply isn’t possible without extending existence to the very wholes that the parts make up. […] When we say that the whole can have an effect on the parts, that is often called “downward causation”, and it is opposed to reductionism. And if the universe is entirely causal (determinism), then both upward and downward causality apply. This means that parts create wholes which effect parts, which effect wholes, and so on. Wholes of some parts can be parts of even bigger wholes, which can causally funnel back down to what the parts do and in turn what the wholes do. Keep in mind that free will is equally as incompatible with a framework that accounts for the wholes, just as much as it is for one that only accounts for the parts. When someone uses that “reductionistic” word to describe determinism and the lack of free will, they are mistaking determinism as reductionism. And though some determinists are also reductionists, it doesn’t follow that one has anything at all to do with the other. Upward, downward, sideways, multidirectional, or even special-swirly-whirly causation is “deterministic” and incompatible with free will.“