Atla wrote:No not really, by the way. I was talking about the forgotten step before that.
First we divide the universe into made-up parts that stand on their own (something that may not be doable without information loss). Then comes reductionism, we can reduce these made-up parts, these systems to their constituents (smaller made-up parts of the universe, maybe resulting in even more information loss).
OK. But that
is my understanding of Reductionism. It is the process of attempting to create descriptive and predictive theories about a complex system by considering parts of that system either in isolation from each other or with well defined, simplified interfaces to each other. I think it's what happens whenever we make a conceptual model of the world.
So your view seems to be that ontologically the universe has no parts because the distinctions which define the parts are things that we overlay on the universe in order to try to understand it. i.e. The distinctions are part of the map and not the territory. To be honest, I don't really have a strong view on that view. I neither agree with it nor disagree with it because it doesn't look like a factual claim so much as a way of viewing the world. A holistic way I suppose. I prefer to just remember that models are models.