Meditações - um mundo de redutibilidade

To get some idea of how much the world we live in shows reducibility, compare its ordinary behaviour with what would happen if, suddenly, the reducibility were lost, i.e. if every variable had an effect, immediate or delayed, on every other variable. The turning over of a page of this book, instead of being just that and nothing more, might cause the lights to change, the table to start moving, the clock to change its rate, and so on throughout the room. Were the world really to be irreducible, regulation would be so difficult as to be impossible, and no organised form of life could persist.

W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics