#reduction

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part… What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent? ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#philosophy #reductionism #science #beauty

The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy has brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural science: to transform the world by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. ↗

— Georg Simmel

#money #reductionism #life

The ideal of the 11th/17th century physicists was to be able to explain all physical reality in terms of the movement of atoms. This idea was extended by people like Descartes who saw the human body itself as nothing but a machine. Chemists tried to study chemical reaction in this light and reduce chemistry to a form of physics, and biologists tried to reduce their science to simply chemical reactions and then finally to the movement of physical particles. The idea of reductionsm which is innate to modern science and which was only fortified by the tehory of evolution could be described as the reduction fo the spirit to the psyche, the psyche to biological activity, life to lifeless matter and lifeless matter to purely quantitative particles or bundles of energy whose movements can be measured and quantified. ↗

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#life

The TUC's new slogan 'a future that works' sets a profound challenge. Austerity and rapid deficit reduction is failing in its own terms, but even at its best it is short-sighted, muddle-through politics with no vision of a new economic model. ↗

— Frances O'Grady

#best #challenge #deficit #deficit reduction #economic

But the debt limit obviously is something that needs to and will be passed. That is not inconsistent with a process and a belief that we have to get significant deficit reduction. ↗

— David Plouffe

#debt #debt limit #deficit #deficit reduction #get

The best reduction, the most final reduction, is to destroy the warheads. ↗

— Jack Reed

#destroy #final #most #reduction #warheads

Tax rates for the wealthy should revert to Clinton-era levels, both because it is necessary for long-term deficit reduction and because fairness dictates it. Moreover, there is no proof that higher marginal rates dissuade investment, all the rhetoric from the Right notwithstanding. ↗

— Eliot Spitzer

#both #deficit #deficit reduction #dictates #fairness

I believe that we should allow younger workers to contribute toward a personal account that they own, as long as it is coupled with deficit reduction measures that enhance the long-term condition of Social Security. ↗

— Cliff Stearns

#allow #believe #condition #contribute #coupled

Scientists worldwide agree that the reduction needed to stabilize the climate is actually more like 80 percent. ↗

— Donella Meadows

#actually #agree #climate #like #more

I would simply ask why so many critics, so many writers, so many philosophers take such satisfaction in professing that the experience of a work of art is ineffable, that it escapes by definition all rational understanding; why are they so eager to concede without a struggle the defeat of knowledge; and where does their irrepressible need to belittle rational understanding come from, this rage to affirm the irreducibility of the work of art, or, to use a more suitable word, its transcendence. ↗

— Pierre Bourdieu

#rationalism #reductionism #transcendence #art