Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds.

But [in bureaucracies], too, decision making takes place in a world full of unceratinties. Any actual system of information processing, planning and control will never be optimal but merely practical, applying rote responses to recurrent problems and employing a variety of contingency tactics to deal with unforeseen events.

We live in a world populated by structures - a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history

Emergent properties result from interactions between individual parts, so it follows that a top down analytical approach that begins with the whole and dissects it into its constituent parts is bound to miss precisely those emergent properties

Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds.