---
title: You can just think about it different.
date: 2024-11-19T17:38:46.353Z
slug: 2024-11-19-you-can-just-think-about-it-different
author: Thomas Wilson

---
In the past few weeks I've been doing a lot of non-fiction reading about about god.  About the claims made about god in religion, individual people's ideas about god, and the place of god within religion and religion within society.  Pretty big stuff, to be honest.

It's been really interesting.  Some very clever people have contributed thoughtful, precise arguments about some big ideas.

I've experienced a few interesting things since engaging with this literature.  

The first is that it's very hard to summarise these big ideas.  I think part of this is because they're ideas from clever people. Sort of like how re-telling a professional comedian's joke is hard, there's non-zero effort in the telling.  In fact: the telling *is* the skill.  I think part of it is that ideas are often defined best in opposition or relation to each other - so it's hard to separate them.

The second thing I've noticed is that there are these whole ideas I have about what is "true" that I rarely notice, and when I do notice them I just think of them as "objectively good".  

Allow me to sound like a (probably non-sober) university undergraduate for a second.

The most helpful thing I can give here is an example.  I was trained in science.  Not the natural sciences, but the science-y: earth sciences, social sciences,  information sciences.  Then I became a software engineer, and worked with technical systems. 

Throughout all of this time, I have been served well by attempting to break larger systems down into their constituent parts.  "Sustainability" is a combination of economic, environmental, and societal practices.  Global migration is a combination of push and pull factors.  

This idea, broadly, is the idea of [reductionism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism), something which the Wikipedia article reminds us:

> [is] one of the most used and abused terms in the philosophical lexicon

I don't want to abuse the term further - so I'm going to tell you an oversimplification: reductionism is broadly the idea that any "thing" can be broken down into, and entirely explained by, smaller "sub-things".  A family is just a group of X people related by blood.  Biology is just chemistry is just physics is just maths is just…

The thing is that it's at very least philosophically defensible to say that this is wholly appropriate, or that this is complete nonsense.

The thing is, some parts of reductionism don't feel true to the softer (read: joyful) parts of being human.

Consider a good evening meal with friends.  You might have your three closest friends, candlelight, live music, soft lighting, and more than enough wine.  That *feeling* of "a good evening meal with friends" doesn't feel adequately explained by those things put together.  Because you could have the meal during daylight, have zero alcohol, or play jazz not classical music, and the experience might be improved, ruined, or wholly unchanged.  

There is a "something else" that makes your good evening meal with friends special.

Don't you dare tell me it's just brain chemistry, because every *thing* you have ever experienced (including your literal dreams, being drunk, your phobias, etc.) are arguably just brain chemistry - doing this kind of fuzzy hand-waving is *worse* than whatever it is you think I'm doing - I will not have it.

I'm not now a die-hard vitalist - keen to tell you that every thing has a living soul (it might, idk), but I am aware that I could just think something different.  Because although reductionism has helped us break apart and understand a lot of the natural world - it might not be good at everything.  

It wouldn't be any more useful or true to say "reductionism is good" than to say "reductionism is bad".  It all depends.  It depends on quite a lot.

If I want to, I can just pick up a different way of thinking, a new way of seeing - and I don't have to feel guilty that I'm not using my "real way" or my "proper way".

Even if one way of thinking about truth and knowledge actually gets us, finally, to the Ultimate Nature of Reality, I think there would still be people arguing that it's not an epistemically defensible paradigm.  We're not always trying to get to the truth at the heart of the universe, or get everyone to agree with us - sometimes we're just curious about a new idea, but it feels somehow "silly".

I give myself permission, whenever I need it, to abandon positivism, or reductionism, or whatever other *thing* embedded itself into my brain and disguised itself as subconscious or "human nature".