Pretext Part 1

I think some people try to understand things so much that they get to the point that they don’t understand anything because they have too much information to comprehend. Why you break down everything into its simplest form you lost sight of what you were looking at. However the opposite is also very true. Many people try to understand things without looking far enough into the workings of it and they end up with a distorted view of reality. You have to find a happy medium between the two to understand what you are observing.

This can be seen with medicine. To understand how a drug works you have to look at how it affects the body on a molecular level. At this level you can understand how a drug interacts with the nervous system to create a desired effect. If you took reductionism too far and looked at an atomic level there would be too much information to understand. It would be like going to a movie theater and sitting one foot from the screen. You would not be able to understand what is going on because you don’t have the proper perspective. On the other hand, if you just looked at the cells you would not be able to understand what was going on and the reason the cells act the way they do in response to the medication. In reference to the movie illustration, it would be like watching a two inch screen from the back row of a movie theater. You would not be able to see what was really going on. This is why it is important to know what you are looking at and how deep your understanding of it needs to be to have the be idea of what is going on.