I recently came across an old post on Slate Star Codex, titled Is Everything a Religion. In it, Scott compares things like investing and medicine to religion, and found that they share many similar characteristics (e.g. they all have a set of laws and taboos). He recognizes that maybe these comparisons are being too abstract, and elaborates more on the nature of religion. But it got me thinking specifically about reductionism in general, and the different levels that you can make arguments on.

With the most concrete lens, everything is different, even two identical-looking bricks, because the composing atoms as well as the space they occupy are never the same. On the other hand, in the most abstract sense, all that exists in the universe is the same, as everything is just bits of information encoded in slightly different ways. Between these two extremes is a spectrum of the levels of reductionism, where most arguments lie.

Different levels of reductionism can provide different insights, and the quality of the insights can vary greatly depending on the level, as well as what we are looking for at the moment. The ability to abstract is often seen as one of the hallmarks of human intelligence. But I think more important than that is the ability to evaluate what the most useful level of abstraction is, under various circumstances. To me, the really interesting question is not whether or not everything is a religion, but rather what can we learn by reducing things to this level where everything is a religion (and whether or not that knowledge is what we are looking for right now).

I think that many arguments of disagreement are actually caused by people operating on different levels of abstraction, without explicitly realizing it. The level of abstraction is determined by each person, based on what the person has deemed to be the most appropriate to use for the current situation. Many arguments fundamentally boil down to disagreements about what the most useful level of abstraction is to use.