Thanks for the heads up. Now about reductionism: I believe it is true because it looks like so. To me, at least. Before Darwin, Newton, and the discovery of neurons, reductionism was an incredibly hard sell. Now however, I'm quite confident about it. But should something unexpected happen, I may well change my mind (it would be hard, but not as hard as forsaking Bayesianism itself). Sure, there are some (huge) loose ends, but it still looks like there's reasonable hope. And of course, Occam's razor strongly favours reductionism, though it could still lose.
Regarding "dead matter", I'm not sure the term is useful. The wave function, which is supposed to be at the bottom of all things (according to current physics), isn't even close to what we intuitively call "dead matter". Its behaviour certainly is (conceptually) simple and deterministic, though.
I hadn't exactly Popper's falsification in mind. But even from a Bayesian perspective, most experiments that don't end up as predicted still deal huge blows to the underlying theories.
"simple and deterministic" -- I do like that better, although "dead" does indeed convey the essence here: it's not alive, it's not thinking.
Occam had prior philosophical assumptions to support the Razor of reknown, namely his metaphysical nominalism, which I reject in favor of something closer to a reformed Aristotelian formalism, which to me is far more intuitive than nominalism or reductionism.
Lastly, reductionism was actually not a hard sell at all, it had its advocates long before Darwin and in fact the advent of Darwin was really highly desired and favored by this camp. The fact that Wallace and Darwin were pursuing very similar agendas at the same time speaks to this. We had the notion of evolution and atomism since the pre-socratics, just no plausible scientific evidence to give it public political traction and philosophical (in the sense of epistemological) credibility.
So I guess I end up agreeing with you -- it was a hard public sell before Darwin, but reductionism's advocates had been around for thousands of years. Also see F.A. Lange's _History of Materialism_. That also may be of interest to you. Lange was a Kantian who had tremendous influence on other atheist thinkers, especially Nietzsche.
Hmm, I'm a bit lost by your paragraph about Occam. (I know next to nothing about the distinctions between nominalism and formalism, maybe I should check this out.) For now, I just trust the formal version of Occam's razor, based on Kolmogorov complexity (or Solomonov induction, the two are equivalent), but I don't fully understand those yet. (I should definitely check this out).
So, for now I must admit, that feels like a leap of faith. I am very confident, but my curiosity isn't satisfied yet.
Regarding "dead matter", I'm not sure the term is useful. The wave function, which is supposed to be at the bottom of all things (according to current physics), isn't even close to what we intuitively call "dead matter". Its behaviour certainly is (conceptually) simple and deterministic, though.
I hadn't exactly Popper's falsification in mind. But even from a Bayesian perspective, most experiments that don't end up as predicted still deal huge blows to the underlying theories.