weirdway

I think most of us here understand that one of the big problems with physicalism is how they try to reduce everything to atoms, quarks, gravity and so on. Experience is too rich and too gnarly to be reduced to just those models, imo.

However, just because some of us here oppose physicalism, do we think reductionism cannot seduce us? I think subjective idealism has the potential to be the least reductionist account of experience. However, just because such potential exists, I don't think we're completely immune from the temptation to build ourselves some simplified models and try to reduce everything to just those models.

And, get this, it's especially true when the models are good ones (!!) and are very effective! It's precisely when we're doing really well that the danger of reductionism is the strongest.

When you believe someone is right 90% of the time, aren't you tempted to think, "If this person got so much right, they're probably right about everything else too?" I know I've had that temptation happen to me a few times, especially with the Buddha. Well, the Buddha is right here and here and here.... so why not just cut to the chase and say the Buddha is 100% right about everything. Luckily, I think, I pulled away from that dangerous temptation. Now I think, even if the Buddha had an amazing mind, no, I don't think he was right about absolutely everything. And this is basically reductionism on the human level. Reductionism in its essence is just conceptual simplification. It's simpler to ignore the few times I think someone was wrong when they happened to be right (from my POV) say 95 out of 100 times.

So a lot of us are fairly obsessed with the visual sense and we tend to ignore hearing, touch, a sense of up/down, temperature sensations, a sense of satiation, taste, scents, and so on. I don't think we should be doing that. Our experience cannot be reduced to 3D space and to only whatever happens in 3D space. 3D space is an important model by all means. I don't think we should stop talking about it. Far from it. But I hope we keep it in mind that we're not going to build our TOE (theory of everything) by making appeals to fractional aspects of experience. Vision is just a fraction. It's important to most of us sighted people, but think about someone who's been blind from birth. Vision is completely irrelevant to them, but touch and hearing are way more important. Think how differently their known universe appears to them. And what if we had no sense of up and down? Just imagine how confused we could get if up/down suddenly went missing.

"The world" is a very important term. It's a very thick term. And I think it needs a thick description that doesn't reduce it too much, or ideally, at all. As subjective idealists I think we are perfectly positioned to describe the world as it is experienced, with more honesty than it was ever thought possible! But we're not immune to reductionism. And so, subjective idealism is not philosophical pixie dust that's automatically going to make us intelligent and superior.