Philosophical reductionism

It's probably time I left problems in analytical philosophy alone.  Such problems are a real brain-strain and my last academic publications on such topics were in my '20s.  I am now 70.  Yet what time has eroded perhaps time has also replaced.  Maybe more knowledge has replaced less-keen reasoning.  So I am going to say a few words about an old philosophical problem in the manifestly absurd belief that I have a solution to it.

There is a good and up to date account of the problem here.  As science has progressed, it has become clear that a lot of what we do can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules in our brains interacting.  We seem to be just protein machines entirely at the mercy of influences within ourselves and influences acting on us from outside.  We have no freewill. All our decisions are mechanistically foreordained.

But that seems wrong.  We certainly feel that we have choices and make decisions.  And that is the problem of philosophical reductionism.

In both philosophy and psychology (I have an academic background in both) reductionism has long been debated, with passionate committment common on either side.  A complication is that theism/atheism seems to get dragged into it.  Christians triumphantly declare that their beliefs correspond to reality whereas what the mechanists say is clearly absurd.  And that does burn up the mechanists, who are generally atheists.  Do we need a "soul" to make the explanation of human behaviour complete?

The reference given above stresses that point.  The mechanists feel that if they let go of their reductionistic explanations, they will be in danger from religion  -- a most feared and abhorred  fate.

I am actually, I think, going to make it easier for them.  I am the most utter atheist you have ever met (like Carnap, I don't even believe that the word "God" is meaningful) but I am also profoundly grateful for the lessons I learned from Christianity in my youth.  I was a very fundamentalist Christian in my teens but my readings in philosophy converted me to atheism when I was about 19.  Unlike most who have undergone such a conversion, however, I still have the warmest memories of my time as a Christian and have a very high regard for Christianity.

So there is a sense in which I straddle both camps and I can therefore think about the issues without fear of what I might conclude.

And I can give my conclusion in a single sentence:  Mechanists mistake how we work for what we are.

To illustrate:  I may be looking close-up at a bit of canvas and see with utter clarity that it is made up of a series of coloured dots with no rhyme or reason evident in their placement.  That is the sort of thing that the mechanists quite accurately see.  But I cam also take a few steps back and look at the canvas as a whole.  And what I see then is a French pointillist painting worth millions of dollars.  Both views are of course accurate within their own context.  The painting is BOTH of the things seen about it.

So what comes of all those atoms and molecules swimming about in our brains is both a literal reality and an EMERGENT reality.  Our  brain activity CONSTRUCTS something real and important.  That, by and large, is what brains do.  And that construction is both wonderful and of supreme importance.  God doesn't come into it.  We just need to accept that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts.  And it is the existence and interactions of those higher order constructs that injects the indeterminacy into our behaviour.  What is contructed will vary slightly between people and that generates debate and uncertainty.  It is the EXPLANATION of our world that is important, not the atoms and molecules that enable patterns in our world to be seen and used.  We really are more than what makes us work.  Concentration on our internal machinery is  useful for some things but for most everyday purposes it is silly and fruitless.

The concept of emergent properties is a hoary one in philosophy  so one could ask why it is not widely seen as an answer to the  problems of reductionism.  For many (but not all) the answer to that question would seem to be a matter of ideology.  Leftists in particular (and most philosophers are Leftist) find reductionism  an important prop for their rejection of everything in the world about them.  And declaring that we are just a collection of molecules does seem a good rationale for their gospel that "There is no such thing as right and wrong".  How can there be if we are simply the product of chemical reactions?

The hilarious thing about that nihilistic account of morality, however, is that nobody believes it.  Just listen to Leftists talk about apartheid, George Bush, Israel or racism and you will hear the moral language coming thick and fast.  Racism is wrong even though there is no such thing as right and wrong!  I pointed out long ago how attached to moral judgments Leftists are, despite their philosophy.  Reason is wasted on such people.

I hasten to reiterate that reductionism is not of itself a folly. I have after all done a bit of it myself. It has its place in understanding how we work but how we work gives rise to a much bigger story.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).