On materialistic reductionism

Thorongil

First, it seems to assume that which it attempts to disprove, namely, that which is being reduced. If all is material, then nothing can be reduced to it, since it alone exists. The "what" in "what is being reduced" is either material, in which case one distinct thing is not being reduced to another, or it is immaterial, in which case it cannot be reduced to anything other than itself without contradiction (think of the absurdity of positing the soul's "location" in the pineal gland, à la Descartes). It could be that all things are material, but this is what one must first argue for, which, if successful, makes talk of "reduction" superfluous.

Second, the origin of something and its function constitute two different kinds of explanation, the conflation of which I deem fallacious in some cases (specifically a category mistake). If one desired to know what the human heart is (how it works or its essence), for example, one is asking for an explanation as to its function. If one desired to know what the cause of the heart is (how it came to be), one is asking for an explanation as to its origin. Obtaining the answer to one question does not necessarily require knowledge of the answer to the other. William Harvey discovered how the heart works in the 17th century, long before we knew that the human species and its organs evolved over many thousands of years.

I take materialistic reductionism to posit that things can only be explained in terms of material phenomena (atoms, molecules, synapses, etc). This is problematic once again if by "things" one means "material things," for then it begs the question, but also because it merely provides an explanation of origins, not necessarily of possible function/essence. If I asked someone to explain what the basis of morality is, and in their answer they babbled on about group dynamics in the Pleistocene, the behavior of chimps, and brain chemicals, then it seems to me that they haven't understood the question. Similarly, if I asked someone about what the nature of the world is, and they droned on about the big bang, quarks, and quantum fluctuations, then they haven't understood the question. An explanation of morality and of the world's nature could be given that at the same time, if true, is true irrespective of big bangs, quarks, chemicals, and the like.

Or take another example. If I asked what Moby Dick is and one replied by saying that it is a book and that books are made of paper, glue, ink, etc, then they could be mistaken about what I intended to ask. I could be asking about what the fictional (i.e. non-material) character of Moby Dick in Herman Melville's novel symbolizes.

To wit, the broader problem with materialistic reductionism is not just that it reduces certain apparently non-material phenomena to material phenomena, but that it reduces the number of possible kinds of explanation down to one, an unwarranted move on account of the different kinds of perfectly intelligible questions we can ask. If there are non-material explanations for the very same thing that, in addition, need not have anything to do with that thing's origin, then materalistic reductionism cannot be true. Were it true, then it would be impossible to meaningfully ask the latter question in reference to Moby Dick, let alone for Melville to write the book in the first place.

Pneumenon

Democritus: "By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color: but in reality atoms and void." And pray tell, whence convention?

Wayfarer

Democritus' model was very influential but has been shown to be wrong.

_db

This is what Chalmers calls don't-have-a-clue-materialism:

"I don’t have a clue about consciousness. It seems utterly mysterious to me. But it must be physical, as materialism must be true"

Moliere

It seems to me that most of your arguments would apply equally well to any kind of reductionist project. No?

Wayfarer

↪Moliere

What other kinds of reductionism are there?

Incidentally, one of my favourite quotes, from one of Dennett's books, speaking of what we see 'through the microscope of molecular biology':

Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.

Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 202-3.

TheWillowOfDarkness

↪Wayfarer

That's not a reductionist argument though. It's a causal one. Rather than precluding the existence of consciousness or saying it's the same as its cause, it merely argues an experience is caused an object which is not itself.

Here's where we see the reductionism of immaterialism. Supposedly, the given argument has rejected the existence of consciousness by saying it's caused by other states. An assumption which only makes sense if it is taken that consciousness has nothing to do with the material-- without that reduction, the possibility of material states causing the distinct instances of consciousness cannot be discounted.

Jamal

Here's where we see the reductionism of immaterialism. Supposedly, the given argument has rejected the existence of consciousness by saying it's caused by other states. An assumption which only makes sense if it is taken that consciousness has nothing to do with the material-- without that reduction, the possibility of material states causing the distinct instances of consciousness cannot be discounted. — TheWillowOfDarkness

(Y)

It's a point I've made before, although it should be noted that Dennett does mean it in the strong reductionist sense, I think. What makes the immaterialists reductionist--or perhaps I should say not anti-reductionist enough--is that they accept that material basis and material causation entail an 'explaining away', just as some materialist reductionists themselves believe. Which is why they can seem eager to deny all materialist description.

Moliere

↪Wayfarer

It seems to me that any ontology where it is fair to formulate it as "Everything is X" is reductionist. Depending on how you splice it it seems some idealist ontologies fit that description.

Not sure if that's the right way of putting it. Another thought is that any given reductionist would agree to a sentence of the form, "This appears like A, but it is really B" - but that wouldn't necessitate a reductionism in the sense of the arguments put forward up above, I wouldn't think. In some sense this is just a way of explaining a phenomena and isn't necessarily reductionism in that everything is reduced to one thing, but a reduction does take place.

To use one of @Thorongil's examples: One of the first theories of morality was what is now called Divine Command Theory -- What God says is good is what is good. Full-stop, end of story. This would be a strong version of reductionism in the field of morality.

One might even be able to posit that any answer to the question "What is Good?" is, in some sense, reductionist (perhaps reductionism can come on a scale, though). Which might cut to what I would say is the main problem with reductionism, in general -- is that it overgeneralizes, and details which are important to the particularities are often lost with such overgeneralizations.

schopenhauer1

It seems like some models of materialism posit that the brain secretes consciousness, but into "what" I don't know. It is as if people have a hidden dualism whereby the hardware is turning into software (or whatever shows up on the monitor). The physical brain stuff creates this mental software (monitor) stuff. But there is no monitor for the mental software to project to. Unlike a computer where there is a monitor to project the information (and the monitor itself exists within an observer's point of view), there is only brain stuff doing stuff, but never in any "outside" observer's point of view. There is no "monitor" for the hardware of the brain to project into. This leaves the hard problem of consciousness.

Wayfarer

What God says is good is what is good. Full-stop, end of story. This would be a strong version of reductionism in the field of morality. — Moliere

I don't see that as 'reductionist', though, because there are no 'primitive elements' being proposed. It might indeed be criticized for authoritarianism but 'reductionism' consists of the analysis into the most simple underlying parts or components.

It's not so much generalisation that is the problem, but the treatment of all manner of questions as if they're ultimately engineering problems. 'Once you understand how all the parts fit together then you can solve the problem.' So the thing which reductionists hate about 'consciousness' or the mind is that it is so slippery and undefinable. J B Watson, who invented behaviourism, believed the very notion of 'mind' was a superstitious relic; his successors, such as Dennett, argue along the same lines.

That is why reductionism is generally associated with 'scientism' - it's because it's a typically engineer-oriented attitude. It only wants to deal with questions which are amenable to that method, and doesn't want to acknowledge that there could be problems of any other kind.

Janus

It's a point I've made before, although it should be noted that Dennett does mean it in the strong reductionist sense, I think. — jamalrob

Any explanation which is given in mechanistic terms, in terms of atomistic simples such as "molecular machinery" is reductionist "in the strong sense" that's what 'reductionism' means, after all. The characteristic species of claim made by reductionist thinking is that whatever is to be explained is exhaustively explainable, at least in principle, in terms of some simples and their deterministic or mechanical interactions. Implicit in this claim is the further claim that that the thing to be explained just is, despite any appearances to the contrary, really nothing more than the sum of the interactions between its most primitive constituents.

Note that if the claim is that the explanandum is exhaustively explanatory and given entirely in terms of simples, then it necessarily follows that the simples are all that is ultimately real in the explanans. I think all such claims are inherently incoherent, simply because no explanation can itself be comprehensively understood to consist in a set of mechanical interactions between atomic parts.

Moliere

↪Wayfarer

I look at reductionism more along the lines of the phrase "reduces to..."

I don't know if there is any single treatment of reductionism, or if it's at all possible since it seems to me to be a bit of a squishy term, but it's not the materialist alone which wishes to "reduce to..." -- such as certain idealisms -- so even if you don't accept the moral theory example then there still remains certain reductions which are not materialist alone. Hence, some of the arguments would apply equally to them because they, too, are "reducing to" such and such.

I don't disagree with the arguments, it should be noted. Only that certain materialists are the only culprit.

Streetlight

Most definitions of reductionism are terrible, and tend to resolve into some sort of useless tautology; "reductionism means that everything can be reduced to..."; To treat reductionism rigorously however, is to recognize that 'reductionism' simply means context invarience. It says: here is an explanation of the thing, and this explanation holds irrespective of context. Reductionism means explaining the thing from the inside-out, and never the outside-in, hence the reductionist refrain, "such and such is only....

Thus, if 'material reductionism' means that 'things can only be explained in terms of material phenomena "(atoms, molecules, synapses, etc)", this in turn means that atoms, molecules, synapses and so on function as they do (however they do) irrespective of context. This is demonstrably, scientifically, false, at every level. Each and every one of these so-called 'primitive elements' have behavior which is profoundly context-sensitive. As such, despite the usual cries of science as being 'reductionist', the actual science of nature evinces no such thing. Reductionism is thus not just 'unscientific', but frankly anti-scientific - and it is so because it imports assumptions which are not empirical. As Isabelle Stengers says, science, as an empirical study ought to never say "such and such is only", but rather "this..., but in other circumstances that ... or yet again that..."

Nobody who knows anything about thermodynamics or synaptic plasticity could ever, in good faith, subscribe to the idea that phenomena in those fields can be explained only on the basis of atoms, molecules, or synapses. If anything, the triumph of contemporary science is to show how wrong was the emphasis on context-insensitivity in classical, Newtonian-influenced science. The very fact that 'atoms' are grouped together with 'molecules' in the OP (molecules being atomic compounds with properties very different from the elements which make them up), should show, on it's own, just how arbitrary and trivial is any demarcation between the 'primoridal elements' and 'epiphenomena' or what have you.

Ironically, I suspect those who want to save the idea of spirit or other mystical woo would prefer if science is the reductionist project of the 18th century, if only to carve out a little breathing room for their own immaterial phantoms.

schopenhauer1

Ironically, I suspect those who want to save the idea of spirit or other mystical woo would prefer if science is the reductionist project of the 18th century, if only to carve out a little breathing room for their own immaterial phantoms. — StreetlightX

Not a bad little rant against reductionism. How do you solve the problem I posed earlier in thread regarding the hardware and the software? Hardware on a computer can eventually run software which can then cause pixels to appear on a monitor which in turn appears in the existence of a human point of view. Where then does the human point of view appear or project into? It is obvious that we can say neurochemistry and environmental inputs (in part) cause consciousness, but where do the mental aspects of a particular organism "project" onto? "Where" or "what" is this mental? It's as if materialists are saying material "things" are secreting some sort of mental realm (a dualism of sorts). "What" this mental realm is, is never explained except by referring back to the material causes.

Some materialists it seems, think that with a wave of the hand, they can eliminate that which they look to explain (the mental) as being "really" some sort of illusion (which is itself is never explained except by its material causes, thus begging the question). An illusion is actually not used correctly here it seems. Rather, they are simply giving a non-intuitive account of how the causes work to create the mental, but the unitary-what-its-like aspect is really not being explained. There seems to be a category error of getting at one phenomena with another. Unfortunately, reductionists cannot use the usual means of reducing one category to another, as the underlying ground of a point of view is always assumed in every other phenomena (things "emerge" in something), but this is the limits for emergence as this particular phenomena (the mental that is), is not emerging in any larger point of view. Therefore, it keeps running into a loop whereby it must constantly refer back to its causes with no room for it to emerge into something.

Streetlight

I dunno, the whole hardware/software/projection just seems like a misplaced metaphor to me. It's not useful to speculate upon just-so stories like that.

schopenhauer1

It's not useful to speculate upon just-so stories like that. — StreetlightX

I edited the quote above so it has a bit more explanation. Don't take the analogy too literally. It is just an introduction to a larger point. The actual 1-1-1 of the analogy (obviously it is just simplified version of what happens) does not mean the broader point has no merit. Don't pay attention to the computer analogy part if that is what trips you up.

Jamal

Any explanation which is given in mechanistic terms, in terms of atomistic simples such as "molecular machinery" is reductionist "in the strong sense" that's what 'reductionism' means, after all. The characteristic species of claim made by reductionist thinking is that whatever is to be explained is exhaustively explainable, at least in principle, in terms of some simples and their deterministic or mechanical interactions. Implicit in this claim is the further claim that that the thing to be explained just is, despite any appearances to the contrary, really nothing more than the sum of the interactions between its most primitive constituents.

Note that if the claim is that the explanandum is exhaustively explanatory and given entirely in terms of simples, then it necessarily follows that the simples are all that is ultimately real in the explanans. I think all such claims are inherently incoherent, simply because no explanation can itself be comprehensively understood to consist in a set of mechanical interactions between atomic parts. — John

Yes I see, but we're working with some unclear distinctions here, and I suppose I was trying to cover all the bases. In one sense reductionism is a method: the practice of explaining complex things in terms of simpler things, a practice that need not be exclusive or applied everywhere. This methodological reductionism is what I'm allowing for in my post. But yes, I should probably assume ontological reductionism in this discussion, a theory that entails Street's context invariance. Thus what I called reductionist materialism in the strong sense would become reductionism tout court, as you suggest, and the merely methodologically reductionist materialism could become part of a non-reductive materialism, in which other (higher-level) explanations are not only not ruled out, but also recognized as the best or only explanations in some contexts.

Wayfarer

Ironically, I suspect those who want to save the idea of spirit or other mystical woo would prefer if science is the reductionist project of the 18th century, if only to carve out a little breathing room for their own immaterial phantoms. — StreetlightX

It's more that the scientific populists are still advocating the reductionist view. Dennett, and others like him, get a lot more press than actual philosophers of biology.

Jamal

↪Thorongil

A nice critique, and I mostly agree with it. Some scattered thoughts...

A response to one of your arguments is that reductionism does not actually assume what it attempts to disprove, but takes it as a convenient starting point, because that is just how we see the world. What is evidently real may not be what is really real. So even if reductionists begin with a thing to be reduced, they are not committed to the reality of that thing, since the reduction can reveal it to be illusory (or a convenient fiction, an imaginary product of mid-range animal perception, etc). Reductionism thus begins with what is evident and works to uncover what is real beneath it. But this is just mereological nihilism, and as far as metaphysical commitments are apparent in science, I don't think it is a popular view. How many scientists would deny that water exists?

A more moderate reductionist may respond that in beginning with a thing to be reduced, they merely begin with what is evidently real and dig down to find what is more real. Thus they end up with ontological levels or some kind of dualism, which is likely not where they wanted to end up. Another way of putting this is that water does exist, but is nothing more than its parts, such that the privileged way of explaining anything is in terms of parts, if only we knew enough. And the same would then go for Moby Dick and the mind: they exist, but they are nothing but their material parts (and processes?).

This second view is more than a methodological reductionism, but falls short of the target of your critique, so maybe it escapes the charge of assuming what it sets out to disprove, because it doesn't set out to disprove evidently real things at all; it just privileges a certain kind of explanation. But how do they justify this? As you say, they're begging the question.

So, do reductionists believe that water exists? If so, it looks like they might not be full-on reductionists in the exclusive ontological sense at all, or else they're inconsistent in the way you've described. And if not, then they're mereological nihilists. For them, water is merely simples arranged waterwise, so the ontological commitment is to the existence of simples and to the non-existence of meaningful arrangements of those simples.

Jamal

Ironically, I suspect those who want to save the idea of spirit or other mystical woo would prefer if science is the reductionist project of the 18th century, if only to carve out a little breathing room for their own immaterial phantoms. — StreetlightX

This is exactly the problem I have with some of the criticism of reductionism. It must assume that science and materialism are crudely reductionist, because today's science and materialism leave no space for the mystical woo. Thus it would be disastrous for the mystics to accept that science and materialism today are not crudely reductionist in the way that bad pop-science philosophy sometimes suggests.

On the other hand, I suspect you may underestimate the social and ideological importance of this crude reductionism. Fighting against bad pop-science philosophy may be an important battle, even if it's not very philosophically interesting.

Janus

↪jamalrob

8-) Nothing to disagree with here, Jamalrob...

Jamal

It seems to me that any ontology where it is fair to formulate it as "Everything is X" is reductionist. Depending on how you splice it it seems some idealist ontologies fit that description. — Moliere

I think this could be an important point. One could even draw a distinction that cuts across those which are commonly made around this issue: between, on the one hand, views that are materialist insofar as they deal with whatever science discovers, taking this to be independent of interpretation; and on the other hand, views that are idealist insofar as they pre-emptively reduce things to a familiar substance, be it mental or neural or subatomic. Seen in the light of this distinction, crude reductionists are a species of idealist. Perverse?

Wayfarer

Any examples of 'idealist reductionism'?

Jamal

↪Wayfarer

Everything is mental.

Jamal

↪Wayfarer

Or, developing one of @Moliere's examples, "This table appears like an external object, but is really a product of your subjective experience". Notice how similar this is to "This table appears like an external object, but is really a construction of your brain".

Streetlight

Yep, same shit, different name.

Wayfarer

I don't see subjective idealism as reductionist. It has many issues and may indeed be untenable but for reasons other than being reductionist. Reductionism is associated with particular kind of scientific mentality - granted one that is declining in many ways - but one which reduces the problems of philosophy to issues that can be understood through the techniques of the physical sciences.

Jamal

↪Wayfarer

Sure, but I'm playing with concepts. The way we tend to talk about these things might not be the best, and it may be that the philosophical problems with each are the same.

Wayfarer

That's reductionist!

Jamal

↪Wayfarer

I know that's probably tongue-in-cheek, but let me interpret it as making a serious point, namely that one can uselessly call anything reductionist if it explains something in other, perhaps simpler, terms. But in saying that idealism is reductionist or vice versa, I'm being much more specific than that: I'm talking about the similarities between certain ontological positions, or views on what best explains the world.

On materialistic reductionism

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