My Doubts on Reductionism
December 21st, 2006 by 
soulster
Since we began this blog, some key differences in worldview have been emerging between myself an others. That is a good thing, not because we disagree, but because I am truly learning about myself and others. This difference is becoming foremost in my mind: I am not a reductionist. I find holism [wiki] attractive and emergence [wiki] convincing, but not reductionism [wiki] (though when I say that I might mean "greedy reductionsim").
In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins coins the term "hierarchical reductionism" in which he says everything can be explained by simplier things just one order lower than a particular thing and it's related components. Humans, and all things human, like culture and psychology, can be explained by the things one order lower — namely as the sum of aspects of animal biology. I think a similar view has been used in some of the comments and posts on this blog. Drunkentune and beepbeepitsme (among others) made a case that love can be explained by reactions of biochemicals in the body because such reactions were helpful to the survival of our genetic material. They've also made some claims that seem to indicate that all psychological items and cultural components are just advanced forms of the same in animals. As I read their posts and comments, I felt like their explanations rang slightly hollow, not just because of the absence of God, but even rationally hallow. I asked myself, "Do I really think that a thing is only the sum of its parts?" (Or do I instead agree with Aristole: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts".) Can I be explained as the twittering of biological machines and genetic expressions? (And I'm not the only one wondering.)
This led me to think about Occam's Razor [wiki], the famous rule drunkentune has used more than once. It's the central axiom of methodological reductionism [wiki]. Basically, the rule says that you should limit an explanation to only what is absolutely necessary. Or, in laymen's terms, something like "the simplier explanation is usually better."
But what about something like atomic theory, which gave birth to partical physics? In the ancient world, many believed matter could be divided indefinitely — it was not composed of anything fundamental. But Asian philosophers in the 6th century BCE and Greeks the century after were not satisfied with this explanation, so they developed more complex explanations — atomic theories of sorts. It wasn't until the 19th century AD that these theories were shown to be basically right, but in the proofs, sub-atomic particles were accidently discovered as the basic blocks of matter, futher complicating things. It would have been sufficient to think of the world as just nuetrons, protons, and electrions, but some people tested and tested and things got even more complicated: now there are many more types of particles, and some that even exist only part of the time, and ways of thinking of those particles as if they are not particles at all. So what should be simple is now the fields of particle physics, quantum dynamics, quantum thermodynamics, quantum chromodynamics, and many other things that you study your whole life and still not know all about what matter is. Not surprisingly, when I finally got around to doing the research on particle physics to see if I was thinking straight, I found that many other people have raised this same objection when thinking about particle physics and reductionism [here]. In fact, when it comes to our exploration of the world, it seems the more we poke around, the more 'entities' we discover and the more complicated all the explanations get.
Now that doesn't necessarily mean that Occam's Razor is useless or that reductionistic thinking doesn't have its value. It won't due to multiply possilbe explanations unnecessarily either. I think it's very helpful as a logic tool and should be in very good critics pocket. But that does not make it a rule I can live by. Maybe it can compliment my emerging holism, but I do not think I am convinced that systems are only parts.
When I was younger, I became a bird watcher and dragged my dad along. I was really fascinated with anything alive. I remeber watching from the edges of woods near my home as Great Blue Herons hunted on the misty banks of the stream by my house in the early morning. Had they not been so wary of humans, I would have joined them there to watch them move slowly over the water in their deadly dance. One day, years later, my biology teacher and Environmental club advisor brought in a heron a fish farmer had killed. I was one of the few who stayed after school to help him disect it. Dead, there on the tray, it wasn't the same creature that I had watched in the mist. It was dull and stiff and awkward. As we pulled it apart I learned something about myself. I am not a disector. Let me loose to wade in streams and watch the herons from the water's edge and I will learn their life and beauty. But it is not for me to cut all things to pieces. So life for me is art more than reductionistic science. Even the days when they taught me to disect God and cut up his Word are behind me and I do not desire to return to them or any such scalpel days. Call me blind or a dreamer, but I think I shall spend my life watching simplicity fold out into complexity and back again rather than mechanize the world and miss the variety and wonder at all that is beyond raw sums.
Criticism of Reductionism by People Much Smarter Than Me
John Dupré: The Disunity of Science
Neither reductionism nor parochialism
Multiple Realizability (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
On Reductionism
Posted in epistemology, evolutionary theory, naturalism, philosophical issues, spectrum of belief | 
December 21st, 2006 at 9:24 pm
soulster,
I happen to disagree with some of what you’ve said about reductionism. While I don’t consider myself a reductionism, at times I find myself flirting with its arguments. In many cases I do agree with you in part: the whole most certainly has more than the sum of the parts that we currently know of, but I don’t see any reason to believe the English alphabet is any more than 26 letters, or that a watch is any more than springs and gears. We give meaning to such objects or concepts, but I don’t see how anything can be more than its sum.
I do think, however, you may have misrepresented Occam’s razor. Instead of “the simpler explanation is usually better,” a more full definition may be “the simpler explanation that takes into account all the evidence is usually better.” Many have taken the first definition to ’show’ that Creationism or ID beats out evolution as simpler explanations.
December 21st, 2006 at 9:44 pm
To piggy-back on what dt’s already said, the idea of Occam’s Razor is not just “simpler is better”, but rather “the simpler theory that explains more evidence is more likely to be true”. The complexity of physics and other fields of modern science wasn’t introduced because scientists thought it’d be cool to make the theories more complex. The theories became more complex in order to explain more evidence. In other words, they are only as complex as they need to be. So for instance, the idea that God created Earth and everything on it in 6 days is a worse theory than planetary evolution, despite being simpler, because it does a poorer job of explaining the evidence we have concerning the age of the Earth.
December 21st, 2006 at 9:54 pm
To clarify, I don’t consider myself a strict reductionist, because of the emergence phenomenon soulster mentioned.
Hmmm, upon review, the last sentence in comment 2 would work much better as the 2nd sentence.
December 21st, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Speaking of emergence, soulster, have you looked at this before?
Flocking
Flocking, where birds and emergent behavior meet
December 22nd, 2006 at 9:57 am
drunkentune and Benny:
Like I said, I was putting Occam’s Razor in laymen’s terms. Sure, you could add “…that explains all the evidence” and that would make it stronger, so good point. I did not miss that part of the razor in my own understanding. I just think that people get the K.I.S.S. principle and would assume that. But that’s what I meant when I said “only what is absolutely necessary”. You obviously can’t leave pistons and spark plugs out of explanations of how combustion engines work just like density problems were some of the first ‘evidences’ to further atomic theory. And I don’t agree with the popular 7-day creationist agrument that the theory is simpler because, like you, I think it eliminates a lot of evidence.
I’m not saying the razor doesn’t work a lot of the time. I’ve used it for a long time in my practices of text criticism. What I’m saying is that if you make it a central rule, it may present a bias that I disagree with. And the bias comes from, in my view, at least in practice, closing the set of evidence. Yes, I respect the progress of physics, and the role the razor has played, and that the complexity comes from more evidence, as I included in my brief history of particle physics, but I also agree with the science philosophers that holding the razor to close to the center produces a blind spot to the fact that more data and more evidence will likely always emerge.
December 22nd, 2006 at 11:16 am
soulster,
I think I understand what you’re saying about the blind spot. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a result of applying the razor. The razor itself says nothing about the inclusion or exclusion of new evidence. It’s when someone clings too tightly to a favored theory that they begin to exclude new evidence. And I think this can happen no matter what the theory is, or how they arrived at it.
December 22nd, 2006 at 12:56 pm
Benny:
Sure. I would extend what you’re saying to say that any thought system or worldview has, by virtue that it includes assumptions, its own blind spots as the consequence of finite brains. That’s why I say that I might really be proclaiming my doubts in “greedy reductionism”, which, in my opinion “clings too tightly” to certain reductionist ideas. I would agree with a certain ontological reductionism applied carefully. For example, I do not have any problem saying biology can be reduced to chemistry and physics, and chemistry could further be reduced to physics, at least at the center of these sciences (which is an important distinction). And while I think biology, chemistry, and physics explain some of psychology and psychology explains some of sociology, I would not blow the arrogant horn to say all knowledge of life can be reduced to the physics and chemistry of DNA.
Again, I will say I use the razor and think it a good tool, I just do not think it helpful to be considered an axiom or a universal principal. That is the difference. My discomfort with the comments on this blog about love, culture, and human psychology, etc, has to do with the tone, and perhaps the judgement, that all things are a simple sum of parts. I think that’s some blindness caused by an over applied reductionism, but that’s my interpretation.
When it comes to culture, human behavior, and psychology, so much evidence remains beyond us and such complexity exists that to simply keep saying ‘genetics’ and
‘naturally selected animal behaviors’ creates a great deal of unhelpful assumptions. It apparently works as an explanation for some people, but not for me, primarily because I think the razor, or perhaps more accurately reductionistic thinking, is over applied in those cases. For example, in drunkentune’s piece on love, he equates it with a biochemical process. Others might go on to say it is nothing more than a mechanism to protect genetic material and insure its transmission. That does not explain much of the complexity of love in my experience and in fields such as psychology. Currently, we do not know a lot of love’s ‘parts’, and to claim we do is premature. Love is so complex, to simply say it is biochemical, I think, comes dangerously close to creating a bias that will miss so much data that it could be in danger of being called ‘ignorant’, not in that it is stupid, but in that it may ignore data. Now, I do not want to apply that term to anyone here since their involvement in this dialogue proves otherwise. Nor do I think all of their worldview is invalid because I draw this objection. I am simply pointing out a difference in worldview and why I find the extent of reductionistic thinking in some thought systems less than attractive and even a little suspicious. I would be more comfortable with worldview has an expectation or assumption that simplicity and complexity are created by our minds and depends often on how we draw mental boxes. So we should expect a great deal of complexity and always search for more complex answers whenever questions remain, while at the same time pairing down all answers to only what the evidence supports.
December 22nd, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Benny:
By the way, cool wiki on flocking. I understand the premise, but some of the logic is over my head.
December 22nd, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Flocking is awesome. We have some birds around here (Houston) that have really huge flocks and have a wonderful regularity to their flocking behavior.
Their flocks pulse and stretch and break and reform like big balls of oil in water.
Funny… I was just talking about emergence and flocking with my girlfriend the other day.
A few questions:
What is emergent behavior and what is simply component behavior? (IOW, a car doesn’t exhibit the “emergent behavior” of its parts, they’re just components… but how do we differentiate?)
Is there a relationship between the complexity of the agents in the “flock” and the complexity of the actions of the flock?
In what ways can the emergent behavior be said to be “inherent” in the agents themselves?
Any good book recommends?
December 22nd, 2006 at 3:59 pm
soulster:
Thank you for your elaboration. I see now that my disagreement arose mostly from less-than-full understanding of your words. I agree, Occam’s Razor should not be taken to be an axiom or universal principle. I see it as more of a heuristic/useful rule of thumb. Neither this, nor any other useful tool in the toolkit, should get in the way of appraising everything with as little bias as possible.
ben:
A stab at your questions…
1. My understanding is that emergent behavior is that which arises from the interaction of components (can only be observed when multiple components are interacting), and component behavior is that which arises from the component’s behavior itself (can be observed in just a single component).
2. In accordance to the my understanding from above, I think the complexity of the flock’s actions is more related to the complexity of the interactions between agents, and less related to the complexity of the agents themselves (except when it affects the complexity in the interactions).
3. I think emergent behavior is more inherent in the interactions than the agents.
4. Nothing serious. Michael Crichton’s Prey is an entertaining read that revolves around the concept of emergence. It’s where I was first exposed to the concept, actually.
I forgot to mention: playing with some of the links at the bottom of the Wiki article on flocking is a great way to pass time
December 22nd, 2006 at 4:40 pm
I’m going to get a tatoo that says “CHECK WIKIPEDIA FIRST.”
Emergence.
December 22nd, 2006 at 4:55 pm
Say, isn’t that the second link in the first paragraph of soulster’s opening post?
December 22nd, 2006 at 8:12 pm
Re holism and reductionism
I don’t think that either theism or “atheism” relies exclusively on either.
Though it is difficult to understand the complete nature of anything without knowing of its parts.
And one may not be able to know of the complete nature of anything by only knowing of its parts.
It is by the study of both, that one develops an understanding.
Where we would disagree, of course, is whether a god concept actually represents the complete nature of anything, or whether it is an abstract concept used to express originally a geomorphic view of the universe through an anthropomorphic lens.
It’s pretty obvious that my opinion is with the latter.
December 24th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
I compiled a lengthy collection of essays by philosophers on the mind/body question (roughly the same subject matter), and discovered a lot of fascinating reflections by atheists who aren’t materialists (particularly, the brilliant David J. Chalmers, who commended me for my paper in a letter). If anyone is interested:
A Philosophy of Mind, Consciousness, and the Soul Consistent With Christianity
http://web.archive.org/web/20030604161257/http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ286.HTM
http://web.archive.org/web/20030604120332/http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ309.HTM
December 24th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Here is an example from Chalmers (as far as I know, no Christian, and probably an atheist or at least an agnostic):
—————
Within the philosophy of mind, the problem of consciousness is no big news. All the same, materialism — the view that the mental is nothing more than the physical — has become a received wisdom in recent years, even though there has been a sort of unease about consciousness in the background. People have managed to avert their eyes and hope for the best. There have been a number of people putting forward anti-materialist views, but these have been a little piecemeal, often in the form of bite-sized articles rather than detailed research programs. In my book I try to give some really systematic arguments, drawing on a background framework in metaphysics and the philosophy of language, for why materialism and the existence of consciousness can’t be reconciled, and then I try to outline in some detail where we should go from there . . .
. . . Sometimes the sort of non-materialist view I put forward is seen as anti-scientific, but I don’t see it that way at all. I argue that neuroscience alone isn’t enough to explain consciousness, but I think it will be a major part of an eventual theory. We just need to add something else, some new fundamental principles, to bridge the gap between neuroscience and subjective experience. Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes . . .
. . . I think most people accept the existence of qualia. Only a few deny them — Dan Dennett, for example, and even there the denial isn’t unequivocal. What’s controversial about my own view is not so much that I defend the existence of qualia, but that I argue that they are nonphysical. Many contemporary philosophers would like to have their cake and eat it too, by accepting qualia and holding that they are physical. That would be nice if it worked, but at the end of the day I think it just doesn’t work . . .
I take materialism, or physicalism, to be the thesis that the only fundamental properties and laws in nature are those characterized by physics: space, time, mass, charge, and so on, and the various laws governing them. To speak metaphorically, we might say that after God had created all of physics and had set up the boundary conditions, everything else came along for free. My central claim is that this is false. One needs further fundamental properties to accommodate consciousness — experiential properties, or proto-experiential properties . . .
I see the options as falling into three classes. There is epiphenomenalism, on which the new properties don’t play a causal role, so I suppose they can’t be physical-1 in Sellars’ sense. There is interactionism, on which they do play a causal role, so they might or might not be physical-1, depending on whether they are located in spacetime. And there is “panprotopsychism”, the last view on which the novel properties are somehow inside the microphysical network from the start. I am perhaps most sympathetic with the last view, which is beautiful and elegant if the details can be worked out. But I have days when each of them seems attractive. It all depends on how a detailed fundamental theory shapes up, sometime in the future.
(from: interview published in
Philosophy Now, Issue 21, 1998)
http://www.ditext.com/chalmers/chalm.html)
December 24th, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Yep, David Chalmers is an atheist (see his own self-description below). But he is the type of atheist I greatly respect, because he acknowledges when he doesn’t know things, and doesn’t (as far as I have seen thus far) mock those who have a religious view as fundamentally deficient in intellect (like, e.g., Dawkins and Dennett do).
He follows scientific and philosophical method, but at the same time recognizes that they can’t explain all of reality (which is why he isn’t a materialist, when all is said and done).
This is the point I have been trying to make: it’s foolish for atheists to make out that they have all the answers and no faith, while Christians have only faith and little rationality. We all coie to a place where we have to make some sort of leap, because of incomplete rational knowledge.
Here is an excerpt from another fascinating interview with Chalmers:
——————
Natasha Mitchell: So your suggestion is in a sense that something about subjective experiences is something akin to a fundamental law of nature like Gravity, like Time, like Space and this is where it gets a bit kooky though for some people.
Dave Chalmers: I don’t see it that way, I mean the reason is we are used to the idea that in science you’ve got to take some things as basic and irreducible, you don’t get science for nothing, there are some aspects of the world you’ve got to take as basic. In physics, we take space and time and mass for example as basic categories you don’t try to explain space in terms of something more basic, you say ‘these are fundamental aspects of the world’ - now I’ll give you a bunch of fundamental laws that say how those things relate. If I’m right about this it just turns out there’s something you need to add to that catalogue of fundamental properties. There’s something about consciousness that’s fundamental too.
Natasha Mitchell: It’s a hard one to get at because it’s almost verging on the spiritual it seems, on something that we can’t give a material form.
Dave Chalmers: There’s some convergence with religious and spiritual views. It’s true that people who have those views often find some aspects of what I have to say congenial. Now I have to say I’m a complete atheist, I have no religious views myself and no spiritual views, except very watered down humanistic spiritual views, and consciousness is just a fact of life, it’s a natural fact of life.
We already know there are aspects of consciousness that are very difficult for example to describe in language, they are hard to pin down. How could you describe the experience of the colour ‘red’ in words, or the experience of an intense pain, an experience like an orgasm, these things have their own distinctive striking ineffable qualities. It’s very hard to pin down in language but this isn’t to say it’s not perfectly real and indeed, perfectly natural.
Natasha Mitchell: I mean some people would clearly disagree with you and certainly people like Susan Greenfield and others talk about the firing of our neurons at different levels in a sense, a kind of synchrony of neurons firing in our brain is what gives rise to that subjective experience. It’s just that we haven’t quite sussed out a way to measure it yet.
Dave Chalmers: There’s plenty of disagreement in this field it’s fair to say, nothing in this field is uncontroversial. Most people think there is a serious problem here, it’s around this point a lot of people become agnostic, they say ‘OK, we haven’t explained it yet, we can’t even see how you could explain it, but we’ll keep doing enough neuroscience and psychology and we’ll come back to it eventually and maybe there’ll be a solution less radical’ than postulating a new say, fundamental property.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/s919229.htm
December 24th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Another thing I immensely respect about Chalmers is the fact that he thinks “outside of the box” and pushes and expands and attempts to redefine accepted categories.
He’s on the cutting edge of his field of thought. He’s not afraid to follow his thinking and the facts wherever they lead, regardless of the current fashionable dogma or orthodoxy in philosophy or atheism or the zeitgeist or whatever.
I always admire people like that. I detest ignorant dogmatism and simply going with the flow, whether it be a Christian or an atheist who is doing it.
I think exactly the same of Richard Behe, if Intelligent Design fame. Others may put Behe or even Chalmers down because they are different; because they refuse to accept every fashionable orthodoxy, but that’s part of the package. Every great, original thinker goes through that.
These are the sort of thinkers I like. It goes beyond whether one is a Christian or atheist or green-eyed, left-handed Rastafarian moth-catcher. There is a method of thought and open-mindedness that can unite anyone of any persuasion, at least on the level of thinking processes and how one approaches knowledge, or what might be called the philosophical inquiry, or even “quest for truth,” with mutual respect and charity.
When I myself seem to go against this mutual respect, as when I do some satire or make pointed remarks, it is precisely because I sense that someone is outside of this spirit of fair-minded inquiry, and hence shows extreme disrespect for others not of their same opinion, and show double standards in wanting to critique without willing to be critiqued themselves, or those who aren’t being honest with themselves about their own beliefs and ultimate commitments.
I confess that I have a very difficult time with folks who exhibit that spirit; always have, and I suspect that I always will.
December 24th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
Dave:
Fascinating reads. Mr. Chalmers sounds like a very admirable individual to me as well, with many qualities that I hope to someday possess. Maybe we have more in common than I suspected
For what it’s worth, I don’t think I regard those with religious beliefs as fundamentally deficient in intellect. Everyone I’ve ever dated have held strong religious beliefs. And I don’t think I would ever be attracted to someone I regard as intellectually deficient.
December 24th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
Good for you. Unfortunately, atheist polemics are rife with swipes at the ignorance and gullibility and supposed infantile qualities of Christians, as well as insinuations of mental illness.
I know, because I’ve spent a great deal of time interacting with them. This will, sadly, always be the case, for many reasons.
The good news is that there are also folks like you, and they are the ones I am interested in dialoguing with. Why would anyone in their right mind want to “dialogue” with someone who thinks they are either nuts or an ignoramus?
That would itself prove you were nuts . . . and stupid, too, for that matter LOL A sort of “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
December 31st, 2006 at 9:01 am
Maybe we are all nutz, the difference beling that atheists don’t have invisible friends who agree with them.
December 31st, 2006 at 2:03 pm
Dave,
I am not attacking you: let me make that clear before I tear into your comment. Many in the ID movement look like the new leaders in the scientific community with a grand new ‘theory’, but I hate to break it to you: it’s as bogus as creationism.
I had an enjoyable laugh reading your comment #17, for within it, there’s this gold:
Linking Chalmers and Behe together is – to put it bluntly – a joke. Behe is perhaps one of the most famous “ignorant dogmat[ists]†you despise. Michael Behe’s ‘irreducible complexity’ is the notion that some biological systems in principle could not have evolved through natural causes, since if you remove any one part they no longer work. He employed the logical fallacy of proof by definition. I make up a technical jargon that means ‘designed’. I then say that some feature can be described by this phrase, and then try to argue therefore, the feature must have been designed. It’s a poor illusion of logic: I’m stacking a linguistic deck to get my desired outcome. In his (along with Dembski’s) a priori ruling-out of any scientific explanation, ‘irreducibly complex’ is just a rhetorical appeal to ignorance.
One of Behe’s favorite examples of ‘irreducible complexity’ a few years ago was the immune system of vertebrate animals, so during the Dover trial, Eric J. Rothschild handed over a stack of books and papers he had previously lent him, with such titles as Evolution of Immune Reactions, Origin and Evolution of the Vertebrate Immune System, The Natural History of the Major Histocompatibility Complex, etc.
Behe had not read any of them.
Rothschild responded:
Behe responded. (Kitzmiller v. DASD, Trial Day 12, Afternoon Session, p.23)
Behe, does not think “outside of the boxâ€, and is not a “great, original thinkerâ€; he is clearly an ignorant dogmatist, denying facts and employing logical fallacies to further the stated agenda of the ID movement:
December 31st, 2006 at 6:13 pm
I see now that I put “Richard” Behe for some reason. It’s Michael, of course.
December 31st, 2006 at 6:19 pm
I see now that I am a virtual prophet (does that prove there is a God?):
“Others may put Behe or even Chalmers down because they are different; because they refuse to accept every fashionable orthodoxy, but that’s part of the package.”
And so drunken comes around in #21. Your atheism might be a little more intellectually exciting and appealing, if you weren’t so utterly predictable, drunk!
Happy new year to everyone.
December 31st, 2006 at 7:00 pm
Is there nothing more emotionally satisfying than an ad hominem attack on someone’s chat name in lieu of rational rebuttal?
Apparently not..
And a Happy Gregorian Calendar to you too.
December 31st, 2006 at 7:35 pm
Dave,
I ‘put Behe… down’, as you say, ‘because … he is clearly an ignorant dogmatist, denying facts and employing logical fallacies’, and then demonstrated why my conclusions are just and, to second beepbeep, I am merely ‘predictable’?
Hah!
And a Happy New Year to you too, Dave ‘the prophet’ Armstrong.
January 1st, 2007 at 2:52 am
Is there nothing more emotionally satisfying than an ad hominem attack on someone’s chat name in lieu of rational rebuttal?
I fail to see where I did that. If it appeared so, it was wholly unintentional.
But, pick a silly nickname and such accidents are bound to occur sooner or later, as above.
I’m long on record opposing Internet nicknames for many reasons. We need to make Internet discourse MORE personal (in the sense of congeniality and warm humanness, not ad hominem), not less, because it is already disembodied and unnatural, and thus prone to all sorts of unfortunate misinterpretations and botched conveyance of messages and meaning.
January 1st, 2007 at 3:03 am
Dave ‘the prophet’ Armstrong,
Some ’silly’ nicknames are chosen randomly to hide an identity; others come naturally, such as yours.
You want personal? I am a Russian Jew living in America. I don’t give up much more than that on the Internet. People I trust, such as Ben (soulster), get my name.
January 1st, 2007 at 5:07 am
Why don’t you use “Russian Jew” then? That would make a helluva lot more sense than “drunkentune.” At least we would know two significant facts about you, which would, in turn, foster more personal interactions: desperately needed on the Internet.
January 1st, 2007 at 5:53 am
Does the control freak element of religious conservatism know no bounds? Let’s ban nicknames that dave has a tizzy fit over.
Dave has a problem with nicknames. “Beepbeepitsme” is also a nickname to which he takes personal offence as well. I didn’t know this, but “beepbeepitsme” is a male name according to dave.
Perhaps dave would be happier if I changed it to sweet_feminine_christian_virgin or something similar?
Suggestions are welcomed. (Now, now - nothing too risque, we don’t wanna scare the emus. )
January 1st, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Does the control freak element of religious conservatism know no bounds?
Once again, manifest proof that atheists here never make personal, insulting, ad hominem remarks; only “paranoid, angry” Christians (like I supposedly am) do so. How pathetic.
C’mon, soulster. If you don’t at least rebuke this sort of garbage, how do you expect to accomplish what you are trying to do here? This is intelligent, open-minded discourse?
Now, to simply “oppose” something is to “take personal offence”? Wow; I marvel at the wonders of logic and re-definition of words that one can find on this blog among the atheists.
And my great sin was assuming that beepbeep was a male, because some 90-95% of the participants of almost every Internet venue I have been in have been male.
Excuuuuuuuuuuuuse me! I repent in dust and ashes. Mea culpa mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
January 1st, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Dave,
Your divisive actions, and your constant obsession with the ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ of Christianity v. atheism, naturalism, et al., get on my nerves. I do not find you a ‘paranoid, angry’ Christian; after reading your comments, and seeing your behavior, I find you a paranoid, divisive, angry person. I could be wrong, but I think you are projecting an image to others that does a disservice to your argument and your position. People respond to honey, not venom, and if you want to prove me wrong on my judgment, drop the act.
January 4th, 2007 at 12:20 am
It is my intention to be a listener and not a cop. While I attempt to encourage dialogue and listening, I have always attempted to call us to higher ideals, but would loath to resort to policing comments on this blog. In peace building, the strong position is that which refuses to take offense and instead insists on continuing the conversation towards constructive ends. Unfortunately, peacemakers are often the only one’s involved in dialogue with this conviction. I welcome anyone’s informative comments, including yours (the one including qualia led to some facinating reading), but tend to avoid both attacks and defensiveness since they stand in the way of my objective.
January 4th, 2007 at 4:22 am
Hi soulster,
I can respect this approach (it’s basically my own on my blog, too, where I have banned exactly one person in almost three years: an extremely notorious case of a persistent troll widely banned by both Protestant and Catholic blogs).
On the other hand, it is my opinion that dialogue is impossible (for myself) with drunkentune, for reasons I have given. He respects you, and so you two can do it, but he has something against me which makes him distort my opinions.
Therefore, dialogue is impossible, because a constructive dialogue requires each understanding the other’s positions so they can intelligently critique them, and also, if at all possible, mutual respect.
And since I have concluded that dialogue with drunken is impossible, my participation here is at an end, because even if I tried to talk to other people (reasonable, non-hostile types of atheists), he would try to jump in, just as he is trying to goad me on now after I have said it’s over, due to futility. He doesn’t even accept my word that I am through trying to talk to him, for heaven’s sake.
I think it’s a shame, as this blog seems to me a promising place for great dialogue and increased mutual understanding, but it was fun for a while.
Continued best wishes on your goals here. Perhaps drunken can learn to respect other Christians as much as he does you. I hope so.