i appreciate your engaging with my post, though you don't appear to afford it much respect or sincere consideration.

of course i have never claimed that culture can exist without matter. i believe what you are stating here is that since culture cannot exist without matter (the term you replace my term "nature" with), then culture must be composed and reducible to matter/nature. is that right? it is difficult to respond specifically to your post, since you have not actually engaged with much of what i originally wrote, but rather an oversimplified version of it that was easy to deny.

what i wrote included the following claims:

1) using a phenomenological method (you might refer specifically to Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, one of the lucky monkeys who banged out a sensible paragraph or two), our direct experience contains cultural elements whose variety and breadth cannot be mapped one-to-one back to "nature"; e.g. this cultural experience of dance and its particular textural dimensions and practices are REALLY just me wanting to procreate and the other aspects of it are completely unreal. I was pointing out that we need to "note how we perceive and make sense and measure our experience, carefully recognizing what each interaction does."

2) "This idea that everything can be made sense of in terms of its smaller, more basic component parts, is an aspect of the alienation in physics that is just now beginning to be overturned." What I am referring to here is the questioning of the atomic model represented by string theory and the modern questioning of reality being reducible to small, cueball particles seen in our models. Heisenberg's principle is also much more suggestive than it first appears as well.

The philosophers I was thinking of included Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and the mystics included Lao Tzu and the Buddha. All had very sophisticated epistemological theories that present lived reality as more of a result of a relationship between perceiver and perceived than many think, a notion quantum physics (of the vigorous variety, not the piece of shit film "What the Bleep Do We Know?" variety) is beginning to come to.

I hope you're still interested in responding. I appreciate talking with people about these topics a lot!

let's try to avoid ad hominem statements. they won't further our discussion. wait until you have concrete evidence that all i've read is pop science, and then critique, like a good scientist should!