One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradict ory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness. )
You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up.
The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.
Psychoanalytic categories such as "neurosis", "psychosis", "mania", and "fixation" have become part of our everyday psychological vocabulary and we now routinely interpret states of anxiety, excitement, or depression in terms of physiological factors involving levels of serotonin, adrenalin, or blood sugar. To say that the characterization of thinking has a normative function that is irreducible to neurophysiological processing is not to say that our extant classification of the forms of thinking is incorrigible.
In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted. . . Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.
There is irreducible chance in the universe.
Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root].
Principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.
