by Alistair I M Rae, 2013, Oneworld Beginners Guides
This is a well-organised and clear book, but I was disappointed that it seems imbalanced. The majority of the book develops the bottom-up picture of science from fundamental physics through chemistry, the properties of matter in bulk, the extraordinary engines of biochemistry and into the structure of the human brain. He frames each stage in terms of the concepts of “subvenience” and “emergence”, asserting (where the evidence is strong enough) that a full understanding of the parts can account for the behaviour of the whole, while still allowing for the emergent behaviour that does not require anything non-physical.
The detail of the extended example however swamps the discussion of reductionism as a philosophical idea. Rae frames the book within a good short account of Popper’s “verificationism”, but doesn’t tackle why Popper himself believed in a dualism of mind / brain. Then at the end of the book, the author looks at objections to reductionism. But these are too readily dismissed as not accounting for the existence of emergent behaviours. I do not believe that all anti-reductionist standpoints are necessarily ignorant, even though Midgley appears (in Rae’s characterisation) to assume a “nothing-but-ery” form of reductionism. Are both Rae and Midgley setting up a straw man on both sides of the argument?
I have to remind myself that this is after all a “beginner’s guide” but even though I fully support his argument, I felt short-changed. As a physicist I think he is accurate and honest in his summary of what is known and what is not in his grand chain of reductionism, but this little book is out of balance and should have mentioned more of the alternative ways of thinking and how reductionism stands within the wider field of philosophy and the history of ideas. A vast literature on the nature of the “mind-body problem” and what for centuries was (and popularly still is) the prevailing assumption that there exists both matter and “spirit”, cannot just be dismissed along with the voice of one lone opponent of reductionism? Rae’s explanation of reductionism also seems a lot more nuanced than many thinkers and writers who adhere to this “self-evident” foundation of scientific enlightenment. I am not so familiar with the tone of Dawkins’ “unweaving” of the rainbow, but there are those who hold views that don’t seem as welcoming as Rae’s to emergent properties.
Even today vitalist concepts survive. We see them embedded in terms such as ‘life force’ and ‘vital spark’, which are commonly applied to living beings.
Rae (Chapter 4 – The Chemistry of Life)
Admittedly the author does include some promising chapters towards the end. One is on “Can we reduce the mind?” on the as-yet-unbridged chasm between electrochemical activity in the brain and our subjective experience of thought, perception and free-will, which includes as clear an explanation of the “Halting Problem” (when questioning the analogy between the operation of the mind and software); another addresses whether the collective activity of human society is explicable by the behaviour of individuals; a third short chapter ambitiously opens up the subject of the interpretation of quantum mechanics, especially the contested orthodoxy of the Copenhagen interpretation. Each of these just takes the lids off three cans of worms, each of which has been addressed in libraries of deep thought.
I find echoes of hard reductionism in other places where prominent thinkers seem to have denied that some behaviours are not more than the sum of their parts. For example, Stephen Pinker’s dismissive view of music as something of no evolutionary importance is utterly missing the importance of social phenomena in human evolution; or when a mathematician of such impeccable credentials as Roger Penrose resorts to some kind of special pleading about speculative large scale quantum phenomena to “explain” consciousness, as if quantum mechanics were a handy substitute “God of the Gaps” whenever our explanatory powers fall short. These are the areas that I want to hear touched on, in a discussion about Reductionism, but perhaps that book does not exist? (Perhaps it needs to be written to prove that these thoughts are simultaneously “nothing but” the series of words on the page, while also signifying more…)
What I reach for next…
- Carl Popper – The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934)
- Richard Dawkins – Unweaving the Rainbow (2006)
- Vyvyan Evans – The Language Myth: Why language is not an instinct (2014) The title of Evans’ book is in direct contradiction to Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct: How Mind Creates Language (1994) and others after Chomsky who hold a particularly reductive view on language acquisition and the brain. This will be the subject of a later post.
- Roger Penrose – The Emperor’s New Mind (1989) and The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Physical Universe (2004)