—“Break it down to its component parts” reductionism doesn’t work for understanding some vastly interesting things about us. Instead, in such chaotic systems, minuscule differences in starting states amplify enormously in their consequences. —This nonlinearity makes for fundamental unpredictability, suggesting to many that there is an essentialism that defies reductive determinism, meaning that the “there can’t be free will because the world is deterministic” stance goes down the drain. —Nope. Unpredictable is not the same thing as undetermined; reductive determinism is not the only kind of
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