Reading Reflection – Week#1

I enjoyed the reading as I feel like it is very relevant in many disciplines such as the sciences, computer science, maths, economics, meteorology. The reading starts off with the idea of reductionism and how a system can be understood by examining its individual parts and even though I did agree partially after reading this first statement, I definitely had some doubts. I did think of humans and emotional intelligence as an example. You may be able to describe the cells that make up a human, but you wont be able to study humans emotional intelligence without adding humans or animals into the study. And that is where the text takes us to and explains how the opposite idea of reductionism, holism may be a better way to explain life as a whole.

Holism – the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts. Holism is often applied to mental states, language, and ecology.

This is the definition I got from Google and I agree with this idea more about we need to use the interdisciplinary to explain effects and reasoning of many things in the world. Reductionism looks at the world as the root of a tree structure and maybe cells or quantum qubits being the children of this tree but in reality, that root we saw as the world would be the children of another tree in a whole new universe.

I want to touch upon how the idea of computers combining experimental and theoretical have helped many disciplinaries work together and create revolutionary ideas. I really enjoyed the part on how simple and random are what make the complex and I can see that being applied in this course as we further discuss simple and random ways that make a ‘complex natural’ structure, contradicting ourself.

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