Pete's Page

Things are always more complex than they seem. I am always intrigued with the fact that my attempts to simplify are always shattered by the reality that confronts me. Nevertheless, I continue to strive to understand the world around me, and arrive at simplifications that suit my limited intellect, yet capture the greatest amount of reality possible. In doing this, two temptations arise. The first is to oversimplify, which is usually motivated by my own desire to keep things simple. The second is to embrace complexity to its full, which is massively confusing and lacks progression of any sort. Finding the ‘sweet spot’ between reductionism and complexity is incredibly important in psychology. Both problems are evident in our current thinking. Reductionism is most evident in the field of neuroscience where and underlying theological naturalism is often unknowingly applied to reduce all mental phenomena to neurological and biochemical events. At the other extreme, attempts at integrating biological, psychological, and sociological phenomena can become so complex that they lose comprehensiveness or utility. It seems that a new approach to the human condition is urgently needed to provide a succinct yet comprehensive theory which accounts for past empirical findings yet is not based upon them, but rather, is based on explicit presuppositions.