NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility
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Issue #158 November 9, 2004
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A Publication of The Nature Institute
Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)
On the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
Can we take responsibility for technology, or must we sleepwalk
in submission to its inevitabilities? NetFuture is a voice for
responsibility. It depends on the generosity of those who support
its goals. To make a contribution, click here.
CONTENTS
---------
Editor's Note
The Reduction Complex (Stephen L. Talbott)
What happens when cognition becomes too grasping?
DEPARTMENTS
About this newsletter
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EDITOR'S NOTE
The article below culminates (for the time being, at least) my series on
the mechanistic tendency in modern thought. I try here to characterize in
a rather more systematic way the interwoven notions of materialism,
mechanism, and reductionism, and I touch for the first time upon their
moral aspect. The lengthy essay will not be for everyone, but all readers
may wish to look at the first three sections: "Reductionism in Context",
"A Defining Gesture", and "Fighting for Possession of the Truth". I also
suggest you check out the concluding section, "Incoherence".
This essay is part of a growing collection entitled "From Mechanism to a
Science of Qualities", available at
http://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/mqual.
The collection, which is subject to continual revision (your critical
comments are invited!), includes several essays that have not previously
appeared in NetFuture.
It will now be a relief to turn my main attention to a more positive
characterization of qualitative science. After all, any critique of
mechanistic thinking must appear lifeless except insofar as it grows out
of a positive vision. On the other hand, once the positive vision is
sketched, the critique will become much more than a critique; it will be
an invitation, not only to a different way of doing science, not only a
different way of relating to technology, but also to a different way of
being human.
SLT
Goto table of contents
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THE REDUCTION COMPLEX
Habits of the Technological Mind #5
Stephen L. Talbott
(stevet@netfuture.org)
Materialism, mechanism, reductionism -- these are strange and slippery
terms, easily abused by both advocates and opponents. You realize that
they must be slippery when you consider how widespread the claim
to be a materialist is among scientists today, and then ask yourself,
"Where is the material in this passionately embraced materialism?
What sort of material, for example, does the quantum physicist believe in?
How material are the energies and intersections of forces that guide
our thinking about the physical world today?"1
How material, for that matter, is a machine as it is now conceived
"mechanistically"? Just as the Cheshire cat slowly disappeared, leaving
behind only its smile, so, too, the glitch-susceptible physical device has
been disappearing from mechanistic thinking, leaving behind only its
comfortingly determinate algorithm, or software. (See "The Vanishing
World-Machine" in NF #151.) The theory of machines today is mostly a
theory of algorithms, machine-states, information, and other abstractions
considered without relation to real-world machines.
As for reductionism, philosopher Daniel Dennett claims that it has both
bland and preposterous meanings. According to the bland reading, it is
possible to unify all the sciences, including the biological and social
sciences, in the sense that everything obeys the laws of chemistry, "which
in turn must answer to the regularities of the underlying physics". A
Supreme Court justice is bound by the same law of gravity as a mountain
avalanche. On the other hand,
According to the preposterous readings, reductionists want to abandon
the principles, theories, vocabulary, laws of the higher-level
sciences, in favor of the lower-level terms. A reductionist dream, on
such a preposterous reading, might be to write "A Comparison of Keats
and Shelley from the Molecular point of View"....
Dennett goes on to say that since "probably nobody" holds to the
preposterous view, and everybody should accept the bland view, the
charge of reductionism is "too vague to merit a response":
If somebody says to you, "But that's so reductionistic!" you would do
well to respond, "That's such a quaint, old-fashioned complaint! What
on earth did you have in mind?" (Dennett 1995, p. 81).
Well, what I have in mind is the following.
Reductionism in Context
-----------------------
The quantum physicist, David Bohm, tendered this definition of the
scientist's "mechanistic philosophy": it is built upon an assumption that
the great diversity of things that appear in all of our experience,
every day as well as scientific, can all be reduced completely and
perfectly to nothing more than consequences of the operation of an
absolute and final set of purely quantitative laws determining the
behaviour of a few kinds of basic entities or variables. (Bohm 1971,
p. 37)
This seems to me well-stated. By expanding on this definition we can
arrive at a useful picture of the intertwined notions of materialism,
mechanism, and reductionism. Then we will be able to recognize the entire
complex of ideas as the expression of a particular and limiting cognitive
stance.
So I will begin by suggesting that the Reduction Complex (in which I now
include both materialism and mechanism) expresses the following
convictions:
(1) There are a few, simple, fundamental constituent elements of the
material universe (Bohm's "basic entities or variables").
(2) These elements relate to each other externally, like the parts of a
machine2.
(3) The fundamental elements and the laws governing them can be precisely
characterized mathematically and logically.
(4) The fundamental elements and laws account for and ultimately explain
everything that happens. This explanation proceeds unidirectionally,
"from the bottom up".
(5) The constituent elements and laws of the world possess no intrinsic
character of mind.
Now, there are many ways to begin thinking about these interrelated
aspects of the Reduction Complex. But I want to draw upon a simple,
unifying image capable of illuminating the issues in a striking way.3
We can discover the coherence of our five reductionist propositions by
recognizing in them the operation of a single gesture of the cognizing
mind. The gesture itself is not pathological; rather, its singleness --
its operation in conjunction with a suppression of the necessary
counterbalancing gesture -- is alone what renders it and its reductionist
results pathological. Reductionism, at root, is not so much a body of
concepts as it is a way of exercising (and not exercising) our cognitive
faculties.
The cognitive gesture I'm alluding to here is the inner act of isolating
something so as to grasp it more easily and precisely and gain power over
it. We want to be able to say, "I have exactly this -- not that and not
the other thing, but this". The ideal of truth at work here is a
yes-or-no ideal. No ambiguity, no fuzziness, no uncertainty, no essential
penetration of one thing by another, but rather precisely defined
interactions between separate and precisely defined things. We want
things we can isolate, immobilize, nail down and hold onto.
How do we avoid ambiguity and approach nailed-down, yes-or-no certainty?
Part of the answer is: by drawing on one of our highest achievements,
which is our ever finer power of distinguishing and cleaving. Whatever
looks complex and of diverse nature must be analyzed into distinct, simple
parts with clearly spelled-out relations. Such analysis and clarification
is the function of logic, a discipline we have carried to extraordinary
levels of sophistication.
A Defining Gesture
------------------
I referred above to "the inner act of isolating something so as to grasp
it more easily and precisely and gain power over it". Grasping is indeed
a useful description of the cognitive activity I am pointing toward. Of
course, we must try to get hold of things in our understanding. But if
we are too intense and one-sided in our will to grasp a thing, then we
sever it from its relationships to everything else, as when we uproot the
plant to study it in the laboratory. This may be helpful in its own way,
but requires us to keep in mind how we have falsified and decontextualized
the thing we are trying to understand.
To know the reality of the plant in truth, we would have to live with it,
experience the conditions of its life, and participate imaginatively as
well as physically in its habitat. We would, in other words, have to
change, adapting ourselves to a different way of being. In this manner
what lives in the form before us also comes to expression within us, and
becomes knowledge. In all this we conform to reality with more than just
our abstracting minds.
Similarly, to know water, we must learn to flow with it, as when we swim.
We must know the water in part as a fish does, by allowing its laws to
come to expression within us as our laws. This is not merely to know
about water in the abstract, but to participate in its way of being.
Our aim in such endeavors is not so much to possess truth as to follow
reality and conform to it, remain true to it. I realize that this "remain
true to it" will sound a little artificial to many. Where is the
imperative for us to remain faithful to water? Yet there is no truth of
the world that is not in one way or another a truth of our own organism --
a fact that, in the case of water, may be painfully borne in upon anyone
suffering the hardening or ossification of living processes that should
remain flexible and fluid. Our habits of cognition run deep beyond all
current imagining. Much more needs to be said about this.
As the contrast between possessing and following already suggests, the
cognitive gesture we are considering may also be seen as a moral gesture.
As such, it seems to figure centrally within religious tradition4. For
example, in the Hebraic scriptures a fateful moment for humanity occurs
when Eve reaches for the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden. It is an
attempt -- perhaps necessary, and certainly successful enough in its own
terms, but with severe consequences! -- to grasp and possess the fruit of
the tree of knowledge. The result was isolation: the eyes of Adam and
Eve were opened to see themselves as separate from the world, and naked.
Discovering themselves alone and cut off, they knew fear for the first
time, and therefore hid from the approach of the divine Other.
Likewise within the Christian tradition, where a governing image portrays
the ultimate result of the alienation that began with the Fall: the Life
of the world is nailed to the now dead and rigidified form of a tree. But
this Life could not be held there, just as it could not be confined by
religious law that had become too external, rigid, and narrowly defined.
I suspect you could find similar images in the other great religious
traditions. While the moral dimension is not the primary subject of this
essay, my aim is very much to recognize the shape and movement of our
dominant cognitive activity -- and to recognize it in all its human
fullness. Surely anyone who would know the world is obligated, by that
very desire, to seek uncompromised awareness of the conscious (or
unconscious) instruments of his knowing. This work becomes all the more
difficult when the dominant style of knowing not only crucifies the soul
of the world, but is also perfectly calculated to put such moral realities
out of sight.
Fighting for Possession of the Truth
------------------------------------
Moreover, we needn't look to religion to see the inner gesture of
reductionism on vivid display. Just look at how people appeal to science
in order to clench their arguments. You might hope that, if only by
association, the invocation of science in a conversation would naturally
lead people to relax their grip on hard-and-fast dogma. You might hope
that the thought of science would inspire them to consider the rich, many-
faceted contexts of the topic under discussion, searching these contexts
for new insights -- for a deeper and transformed understanding of the
issues at hand.
But, no, the desire for the imprimatur of science becomes little more than
competition for an authoritative word from on high. It is enough to say,
"There is no scientific evidence that..." or "It has been shown
scientifically that..." and the conversation is expected to halt at the
stark dividing line between certainty and nonsense. If you've already
"got" an unarguable truth, why muddy the waters with contextual
complication?
The same drive to claim possession of a lifeless truth is evident in the
intense competition for the spoils of victory in the race for scientific
discovery. For example, during the early 1950s numerous laboratories were
pursuing the structure of DNA. Everyone knew it was just a matter of time
before the issue was resolved (as resolution is counted in such matters).
They knew further that if any of the investigators should drop out of the
race, the remaining ones would nevertheless soon reach the goal because of
the common heritage of data and understanding available to all.
But it happened that Crick and Watson got there first -- whether by days,
weeks, or months, no one can know for sure. With their now-famous
announcement of the double helix, they won the race and were granted
ownership of the discovery. Their proprietary claim brought the sort of
prestige and power that put them in a class apart from all the others
contributing to the same project. One social function of the Nobel Prize
committees is to confer this prestige and power by designating and
crowning the official owners of scientific discoveries. Knowledge
assignable in this way is knowledge one wants to hold in one's closed fist
while saying "mine".
The underlying cognitive gesture we are speaking of also helps to
illuminate our loss of humanity's earlier, participative relation
to knowledge and the world. If we can fix and possess the truth, then
clearly it cannot possess us. By keeping a tenacious grip upon the
truth -- which only seems possible so far as, in good Cartesian style, we
imagine the world to exist wholly outside the observing mind rather than
in living conversation with it -- we spare ourselves the worry that the
truth of the world might demand something uncomfortable of us. Reality is
no longer something we must follow, no longer a way. Our truth ceases to
bring us into a mutual exchange with the world.
This, of course, is why ethics -- for example, the entire bioethics
industry -- has been spun off from the main body of science. Ethics
becomes a kind of afterthought, tacked on after the scientific work
is done. We may, if we are so inclined, choose to worry about how the
knowledge we have gained is subsequently used, but the knowledge itself
is thought to be intrinsically neutral. And it certainly appears to be
neutral, because we have gained it from a stance that demands and sees
only what is neutral -- even if this stance also propels us toward
vacuity.
In an effort to characterize this vacuity more fully, I will now offer a
brief critique of various aspects of the Reduction Complex -- especially
those aspects not adequately discussed in previous essays. I wish to
emphasize, however, that it is the one-sided cognitive stance imposed as
an ideology upon the scientist, that I am criticizing here -- not the
body of science itself, which possesses vastly more life than the
reductionist position accounts for.
Analysis
--------
The desire for simple, rock-bottom, graspable entities necessitates
devotion to a method of analysis for the simple reason that everything in
the world is in fact wrapped up with everything else. Analysis is the
means by which we try to disentangle and isolate things.
The isolation can serve our understanding -- but only so far as we
continually overcome its falseness through the kind of re-integration that
must be achieved imaginatively. We will see later why this imaginative
effort receives no credit within the Reduction Complex. For the moment,
the important thing is to recognize the emptiness we would be left with if
analysis were actually pursued in the pure spirit of reductionism.
To analyze is to cleave and distinguish. We answer the question, "What is
X?" by pointing to the parts Y and Z of which X is composed. That, of
course, raises the question, "What is part Y or Z?" each of which must now
in turn be analyzed. The problem here is that, without a countermovement
foreign to reductionism, one can never stop to consider a thing in its own
terms. The tree resolves into root, branch, and leaf, the leaf into
cells, the cells into organelles, the organelles into biochemicals ... and
so on without end, down to the most remote subatomic entities.
How, without the largely uncredited countermovement, could there possibly
be a satisfactory end? If the part must explain the whole, so that all
understanding must be founded upon analysis, and if this analysis were
ever to stop at some fundamental, unanalyzable thing, then that thing
(upon which the reductionist would erect all else) must, by virtue
of its unanalyzability, stand as an incomprehensible mystery, no more
approachable than divine fiat. At some point, in a spirit opposite to
that of analysis, we have to be able to say in meaningful terms what X
is in its own right -- the task we have avoided all the way down.
To accept this task in its full significance would mean a revolution in
science. But, as things stand, the subatomic, almost purely mathematical
and probabilistic extreme of our analysis seems to have carried us as far
as possible from the goal of knowing what it is we are talking about.
All this helps to explain why we earlier (NF #155) heard Arthur Eddington
confessing that the knowledge of physics is "only an empty shell ....
knowledge of structural form and not knowledge of content" (1920, p. 200).
If we do nothing but analyze and clarify our terms in order to make their
content ever less ambiguous and more exact, we end up with the almost
perfectly exact terms of pure logic and mathematics -- and, as
Wittgenstein pointed out, "every proposition of logic means the same
thing, namely nothing". We learn to be more and more precise about a
universal theoretical framework that tells us less and less about anything
in particular.
Of course, the reductionist manages to avoid any debilitating awareness
of the incomprehensible mystery he makes of the world. Two things help.
One is that the analysis never does come to a fundamental stopping point.
Therefore he can keep imagining that the method -- despite the fact that
it continually carries him away from the particular things he takes in
hand to study -- will, in the end, somehow provide the promised key to
everything. In the second place, by progressively substituting
mathematical abstractions for the world, the method strips all content
from the mystery -- by stripping the world of its content. The robbery
is achieved through the dismissal of qualities.
In sum: analysis alone can never tell us what a thing is, but only what
it is made of. And because the same limitation applies to the things it
is made of, we have a perfect method for avoiding any engagement with the
actual substance -- the being and presence -- of the world. This
substance is essentially and irreducibly qualitative. If you want to say
what X is, you have no choice but to speak of qualities. Every science,
so far as it flees the consideration of qualities, is driven inexorably
toward reductionism. Reductionism, in fact, can be understood essentially
as the attempt to impoverish the world by ridding it of qualities. This,
in a sentence, is the reductionism I would complain of to Dennett when he
asks, "What on earth do you have in mind?"
Qualities
---------
The reductionist must turn a blind eye to qualities, for there is nothing
fragmented or discrete about them. The coolness, lightness, and clarity
of spring water, the eddying, vortexing, meandering ways of a stream,
the soundless power of great ocean swells, the thundering and shattering
force of a Niagara -- these and all other qualities present us, not with
yes-or-no features but with a realm of relative likeness, contrast, and
interpenetration. They present an imaginal or pictorial aspect of
reality. And they are inescapably freighted with psyche. We experience
qualities "in here" -- within consciousness.
But what is insufficiently realized is that we also experience qualities
"out there," in the only external world we have. We cannot characterize a
world -- any sort of world -- without qualities. Subtract all qualitative
content from your thoughts about things, and there will be no things left.
Try to imagine a tree without color or visible form, without the breeze
whispering through its leaves, without the smell of sap and leaf, without
felt solidity, and the tree will have ceased betraying any sign of its
existence. If you are inclined to redeem the situation with talk of
molecules or subatomic particles, try to characterize those without
appealing to qualities! If you tell me anything at all about what you
believe exists -- as opposed to the quantities and formal algorithms you try
to abstract from them -- you will be speaking of qualities5.
If we let ourselves think about it, this problem proves fundamental,
overwhelming in scope, and decisive for everything we are talking about.
The world is not there for the reductionist -- or wouldn't be if he
managed to live by his own principles. He can say absolutely nothing
about any world content without speaking of qualities, and yet he refuses
-- or tries to refuse -- to make those qualities a disciplined and
integral part of his science. At the same time, he is reduced to dumb
silence about the supposedly objective, mechanistic, non-qualitative
reality he imagines to undergird our "merely subjective" experience.
It's fine to say, "Our dealing only with what can be quantified is exactly
what leads us from the qualitative world of the subjective observer to
the realities of hard science". But the phrase "what can be quantified"
has no content except to the degree we can say something significant
about the "what" we are quantifying. Given a set of quantities, we have
to know what they are quantities of if we are to understand anything at
all about the actually existent world. And the only way we can know this
is by moving in a direction opposite to the one we took when we abstracted
the quantity from its phenomenon. We must attend to the phenomenon in its
own terms, but very little in science teaches us how to do this.
The Problem of Becoming
-----------------------
It is a truism that the scientist generally prefers to deal with motion by
stopping it -- by freeze-framing it. Photography has been a tremendous boon
for those investigating everything from insect and bird flight to cloud
formation to plant growth. But no one contemplating, say, a galloping
horse and what it is actually doing, imagines that it is simply adding
together countless freeze-framed instants. We cannot get movement from
stillness, however many times we multiply the stillness. The horse's
movement in time and space is seamless, transcending the static isolation
of the snapshot. Once we have assembled our countless snapshots, movement
remains the invisible, animating reality between them.
This is a problem for a strictly analytical science -- a science that even
when dealing with the motion of a planet finds itself analyzing this
motion into an infinite array of infinitesimal and mutually exclusive
points of time and space. It is not that this fragmentation is wrong or
that it fails to contribute to knowledge. But, again, as a one-sided
approach to understanding, it abandons reality. For example, by providing
discrete, frozen instants that we can easily lay hold of as if they were
fixed things, it discourages the more difficult work of entering into the
living, willful, inner movement that alone can bridge these dead instants.
Every division of time into separate and disconnected moments is a turning
away from, a deadening of, reality.
The shattering of time into discrete instants deprived of their living
participation in a larger whole supports various pathologies of thinking,
one of which infects the common notion of cause and effect. Only when we
have splintered the world can we imagine discrete, isolated causes and
effects. The philologist and semantic historian, Owen Barfield, once
wrote a dialogue that included this exchange between a schoolteacher
(Sanderson) and a physicist:
SANDERSON: Does an effect follow its cause in time, or is it
simultaneous with it?
BRODIE: It follows; otherwise it wouldn't be an effect.
SANDERSON: I know it wouldn't. Is time infinitely divisible?
BRODIE: We must assume so.
SANDERSON: I know we must. Then what happens in the instant of time
that elapses between cause and effect? Alternatively, if we say they
are simultaneous, how do we distinguish an effect from a cause?
(Barfield 1963).
There is a puzzle here and I do not mean to suggest that it can easily
be solved. But one can hardly help asking whether our preferred modes
of thought fracture reality in a manner that is irreparable without
recourse to long-ignored cognitive capacities. Certainly our science
would be much healthier if we instructed scientists-in-training about
the unworkable concepts that inform, or misinform, the most routine
knowledge formulations offered in the name of science. Then, at least,
practitioners would know some of the problems needing work, and some of
the imbalances to be countered.
The fact is that even a "trivial" system involving three bodies
interacting gravitationally cannot, in its movement and becoming (which is
to say, in its reality) be faithfully apprehended by our current science.
The so-called "three-body problem" points to the impossibility of
isolating the elements of a "becoming" system from each other in any
radical manner.
But the essence of the problem applies even to two bodies and,
indeed, to everything: there is no relation, no coherence of things,
without interpenetration -- that is, without a need for us to overcome the
fragmentation of discrete elements in our understanding. One thing cannot
be affected by another without in some way being open to the other and
therefore sharing in its being. This interpenetration, this sharing,
means that we can never have unproblematic objects that are just one
thing and not another. There are no objects that we can grasp and then
hold statically in full truth. Nor can we reveal their relatedness in
any deep sense by merely adding together their frozen instances.
A Building-block Universe
-------------------------
Physicist Bohm asks us to consider two vortices side-by-side in a stream.
We can readily abstract them from the larger flow as two distinct entities
-- and they are more or less distinct. But they also merge and unite,
with one vortex swirling into the other. The two patterns gain their
existence only within the context of the overall movement of the stream
(Bohm 1980, p. 10). While we can treat the vortex in thought as an
isolated, separately conceivable phenomenon, this is only because, in
thought, we have sacrificed some of its reality and integrity.
Already in the mid-nineteenth century Michael Faraday was thinking along
similar lines when he suggested that "matter is not merely mutually
penetrable, but each atom extends, so to say, throughout the whole of the
solar system, yet always retaining its own centre of force" (quoted in
Barfield 1971, p. 245 n. 17). Despite such longstanding realizations, the
inertia of thought within science (which seems to be as great as in other
fields) has so far prevented the radical reconsiderations called for. So
it is that Bohm can write:
When it comes to the informal language and mode of thought in physics,
which infuses the imagination and provokes the sense of what is real
and substantial, most physicists still speak and think, with an utter
conviction of truth, in terms of the traditional atomistic notion that
the universe is constituted of elementary particles which are "basic
building blocks" out of which everything is made. (Bohm 1980, pp.
14-15)
Bohm here testifies strikingly to the force of intellectual, aesthetic,
and, as we have seen, even moral habit undergirding the Reduction Complex.
But he himself views matters quite otherwise, having concluded that we
need to "give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of
basic objects or 'building blocks'" (p. 9). After all, Faraday's
suspicion has been more than justified (if also rendered mysterious) by a
physics that speaks of entanglement -- that is, the non-local
connectedness, or inseparability, of two particles. Likewise by a physics
that has been driven away from the consideration of single, well-defined
things and events to a statistical treatment of aggregations of
possibility. The basic problem is this: how can you reasonably say that
a phenomenon is built out of, or constructed by, certain elements when
each of those elements already bears within itself something of the larger
whole supposedly under construction? It's like saying the stream is the
result of its vortices. The opposite claim makes at least as much sense:
the vortices result from the stream.
Yet bottom-up, is-made-from explanation remains a central feature of the
Reduction Complex, as is seen from the usual appeal to atoms (whether
subatomic particles, molecules, or atoms proper). It is almost impossible
for us not to think of water as being made from hydrogen and oxygen atoms.
There is no way, in a brief space, that I can hope to counter this deeply
entrenched habit of thought -- a habit that survives unweakened despite the
unquestioned truths we just now heard voiced by Faraday and Bohm. But the
fact remains that the reductionist's atom is hopelessly incapable of
bearing the explanatory and causal burden assigned to it. Hydrogen and
oxygen, conceived in the building-block mode, are not in any adequate
sense the constituent elements of water. They are not materials from
which water is mechanically constructed.
Our habit of thinking otherwise evidently arises from our experience in
building things. When we construct a house with bricks, it is natural
enough to think of the house as made of bricks. Then we may leap to
the breathtakingly naïve conclusion that the aggregation of bricks is
what explains the house. And then, with a further leap, we may assume
that our combining of already-existent substances to build things like
houses is the proper model for understanding how nature comes up with the
substances themselves. Finally, in order to apply this building-block
model to water, we have to ignore the profound, immediately given fact of
transformation: water is obviously not a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen
gases in anything like the way a house may be (in part) a collection of
bricks.
The Atom Transformed
--------------------
I will try to elaborate a bit. We know that, under the right conditions
-- say, by bringing volumes of hydrogen and oxygen gas together in the
presence of a spark -- we can obtain water. Of course, we may also (as a
physicist-friend reminded me) obtain a devastating explosion. This, too,
somehow belongs to the moment of water's creation. How easy it is to
overlook the colors and sounds, the smells and textures, the
characteristic happenings, that give us the distinct phenomena we observe!
They disappear into the gaps between our textbook formulas. Yet they --
and not just a set of inert building blocks -- are part of what gets us
from one side of the equation to the other.
If we were thinking in terms of the world's actual presentation of itself
instead of theoretical atoms and molecules, the first thing that would
strike us forcibly is that the hydrogen and oxygen gases have wholly
disappeared into the water. They aren't there any longer. A
transformation has occurred. This, of course, is exactly what those
stick-and-ball models we are all so familiar with tend to conceal. Look!
-- there is the hydrogen ball, still present in the water molecule, just
like a good building block! Who can argue with that? The only problem is
that the model's static concreteness, which is the essential support for
our building-block image, happens also to be what makes the model false.
If we want to think more truthfully than the model allows, then we must at
least realize that the configuration and intersection of forces within the
supposed hydrogen portion of the water molecule is radically different
from what it is in a molecule of hydrogen gas -- and this configuration,
or, rather, the dance of this configuration, is what the new reality is.
The gas molecule as such has vanished. So where, exactly, is our
building block? Why should we say that the building blocks make up the
water, rather than that the remarkable transformation yielding water makes
the constituent elements the new things that they are?
The problem lies in the model. We have abstracted certain mathematical
features from the qualitative and watery reality we started with, and now,
in the model, we have re-clothed our abstractions in phenomenal,
qualitative terms -- but certainly not the terms of water! Water does not
consist of sticks and balls. Far too much of our scientific thinking
takes place in terms of the more or less concrete and false models
haunting our undisciplined imaginations. Very conveniently (for the
mechanistic thinker), the reality of ground-level transformation becomes
the illusion of a mere recombination of fixed, fundamental elements.
Yet scientists have long known that, once we have removed nearly all
phenomenal qualities from our notional constructs, we run into endless
trouble if we start thinking of those bare constructs as entities and
causes in the way we think about familiar phenomena. (Recall the
confusions about light as both wave and particle.) The problem is all the
greater when we call our theoretical entities, not "waves" or "particles",
but "building blocks". The abstractions we have arrived at simply cannot
be re-clothed in this way.
This is why the physicist, Nick Herbert, felt compelled to remind us that
"the unremarkable and commonsense view that ordinary objects are
themselves made of [the physicist's theoretical] objects is actually the
blackest heresy of establishment physics" (1985, p. 22). The heresy,
unfortunately, remains firmly entrenched in the thought habits of the
reductionist.
Causation Is Not Bottom-up
--------------------------
If we want a sound science, our only recourse is to retrace our steps,
recover the qualities of things where we first found them, and realize
that here is where we find the fundamental, irreducible starting
point for explanation. This reality is not built out of atoms; we arrive
at the truth of the atom (legitimately, if one-sidedly) by subtracting
things from this reality. The atom reduced in this way cannot be
understood as a tiny, material piece of the fuller reality from which it
was abstracted. It can, however, give us valuable insight, as long as we
remain alert to the narrowed scope of the reduction. We can get atoms
from water, but (to recall an earlier essay) we can no more get water from
atoms than we can get Lincoln's Gettysburg Address from a formal graph of
its grammatical structure.
The popular notion that causation flows unidirectionally upward from
fundamental building blocks, giving us successive levels of explanation as
we ascend from the foundation, is wholly gratuitous. Nowhere in our
experience -- as opposed to the world of our models -- do we find such
one-directional causation. And what plausible reason do we have for
assuming that the smaller the piece of the universe we are looking at, the
more fundamental its explanatory value? This is to take the crudest
possible reading of human experience in assembling things and to make a
controlling scientific principle of it.
Yes, I know how powerfully we are compelled by our habit of taking tiny
elements as most fundamentally constitutive of the world. But the habit
proves upon reflection to be vacuous: no significant line of thought
supports it, and I'm not even sure whether anyone has ever made a serious
attempt at such a line of thought. Our compulsion is nothing but habit.
One final note on this theme, by way of the analogy pursued in earlier
essays. We can abstract grammatical elements from meaningful speech, but
it doesn't make much sense to say that these elements occur at a lower or
more fundamental explanatory level than the speech itself. Why lower, and
why a different level at all? To abstract is to wrench something implicit
from its context, and this is less a change of level than a thinning, a
reduction of richness. We should not confuse the elements of analysis
with the elements of genesis. And if this applies to speech in general,
it certainly applies as well to the speech we take to be descriptive of
the world.
What we should really look for is not different levels of explanation
ascending from some single, ultimate bottom, but rather different
contexts of explanation. While contexts often do fall into approximate
relations of subordination, they do not arrange themselves in strict,
vertical hierarchies. Different contexts interpenetrate one another, and
there is never a single direction of influence or explanation between any
two contexts. If they stand in any relation to each other at all ...
well, then, they stand in relation, and a relation is always a two-way
street.
Mindlessness
------------
Finally, the abstraction inherent in the reductionist program -- and
especially in the requirement for analysis and quantification -- is what
enables the scientist to ignore mind. The habit of abstraction draws a
deceptive veil over our mental activity. Already at the end of the
nineteenth century the philosopher Rudolf Steiner noted that abstractions
function within our intellect very much in the manner of things (1985,
p. 163). Over half a century later the physicist, David Bohm, made the
same point:
logically definable concepts play the same fundamental role in abstract
and precise thinking as do separable objects and phenomena in our
customary description of the world. (1951, pp. 168-72)
Think about this. The point sounds deceptively mundane, but it holds the
key to the pathologies of modern thought. When we retreat into
abstraction -- and the Reduction Complex gives us a kind of paradise of
abstraction -- we retreat into thoughts that we can isolate and grasp and
manipulate rather as we isolate, grasp, and manipulate the mechanistically
conceived things of the world. We try to make things of our thoughts. As
formal logic and algorithmic thinking illustrate so well, once our
thoughts have become abstract, they can proceed almost automatically, one
thought apparently demanding the next, like a chain of billiard-ball
impacts. A muscular activity of imagination is no longer necessary. Our
thoughts think themselves with minimal need for us to become aware of our
own inner activity in thinking. In turning away from this activity, we
can more easily misconstrue our thinking as a mere mechanical shuffling
around of things we can possess -- brain things, silicon things, bits of
information, or whatever.
The irony in all this is that a science founded on abstractions in the
form of equations, rules, and algorithms gives us a world that is almost
nothing but mentality, even if conveniently veiled for modesty's sake.
Equations are ideas, not things. Their mentality may be of a peculiarly
one-dimensional and impoverished sort, but it is still mentality.
From physics to biology we see this kind of mentality given an
increasingly important role as content of the world. This is evident in
the continual appeal to program, computation, code, information, signal,
message, and all the other terms referring back to the conceptual content
of human thought and communication -- to which we might add more general
terms like "tendency" and "pattern". All these, Barfield notes, give us a
way to smuggle immaterial influences into our system of materialism and
mechanical causality. This is akin to the way Epicurus gave his atoms
their famous ability to swerve. But the tactic is self-defeating:
The trouble is, that [mechanistically conceived] particles as
such ... cannot even arrange and rearrange themselves without more.
Yet, if one credits them with immaterial "swerves" or "tendencies" and
so forth, he has forgotten that those are the very things he was
purporting to explain by them. (Barfield 1971, p. 205)
The mindless world, at the hands of the reductionist, becomes a
contradictory world filled with mind of the most abstract and impotent
sort -- so abstract and impotent that he can almost manage to forget that
it is mind.
Incoherence
-----------
Materialism, mechanism, and reductionism: their presuppositions and
tendencies are all of a piece, because they are all expressions of a
single cognitive gesture6. The aim of this gesture is to lay hold of a
simple, fixed, precise, unambiguous, manipulable reality divested of
the inner life and qualities that might make uncomfortable demands
on us. We anesthetize the world in order to possess and control it
like a thing. But despite this singleness of purpose -- or, rather,
because such a single-minded gesture becomes sterile without the life
and movement of a counterbalancing gesture -- the presuppositions of the
Reduction Complex betray a striking incoherence. They offer us:
** Materialism without any recognizable material.
** Mechanism that must ignore actual machines, occupying itself instead
with the determinate and immaterial clarity of machine algorithms.
** Reductionism that produces ever more precise formulations about an ever
more impoverished reality.
** A one-sided method of analysis that never stops to tell us about
anything in its own terms, but forever diverts our attention to
something else.
** A refusal to reckon with qualities despite the fact that we have no
shred of a world to talk about or understand except by grace of
qualities.
** Cause wrenched apart from effect; all becoming -- that is, all active
be-ing -- frozen into stasis.
** Bottom-up explanation that tries to explain a fuller reality by means
of a less substantial reality, ignores the bi-directional flow of
causation between all contexts, and naïvely takes the smallest
parts of the world-mechanism as most fundamental for explaining it.
** Finally, a denial of mind as an irreducible and fundamental aspect of
the universe -- this while scientists increasingly describe the world
as driven by, and consisting essentially of, little more than
collections of mental abstractions -- mathematical formulae, rules,
information, and algorithms.
This entire body of dogma defines the reductionist ideology, not science
itself. However, the dogma has tremendous power to distort the practice
of science, a distortion evident on all sides. At the same time, there is
reason to hope that in our day the dogma will finally collapse in upon its
own absurdities. If this happens, it will not be because particular
discoveries "disprove" the reductionist position, but rather because --
much like during the earlier break with medieval thought -- more and more
people simply find it impossible to look upon the world in the old way.
We are not without promising signs. It is remarkable, for example, to
hear a leading physicist such as David Finkelstein, who is editor of the
International Journal of Theoretical Physics, confessing:
I feel a little embarrassed now at having spent so many years looking
for something that could be completely known. It's a little
undignified. I like the idea of spending the rest of my years looking
for something that cannot be completely known. (Quoted in Zajonc 2004,
pp. 191-2)
What we need, however, is not to draw a strict line between the known
and unknown, or between the knowable and unknowable. (There can be
no such line; the very act of drawing it would require at least some
characterization of the unknown.) Rather, in all things we must
seek a living knowledge that resists encapsulation in precise formulas.
The reason it resists this encapsulation will not be that it is vague
or shoddy or immature or reaches for the unknowable, but rather that
it is so intensely rich and meaningful. It will seize our imaginations
and, indeed, our entire being, even as we engage it through our active
response.
All this will naturally sound mysterious. It will do so because science
has, from the beginning of the modern period, tried to ignore the
imaginative, qualitative, and participative side of cognition. What we
ignore long enough eventually becomes strange and incomprehensible to us.
But it is time to overcome the limitations of a science motivated by the
desire for truths we can anesthetize and collect as our secure
possessions. In pursuing such a science, we remain like the greedy child
who picks flowers and hoards them in a jar in order not to lose them.
Notes
-----
1. Philosophers today speak of "physicalism" rather than "materialism", due
to the recognized inadequacy of the older view of matter as inert,
tangible substance -- a view that hardly works for energies or the force
of gravity. But there is little agreement about the meaning of the term
"physical". Moreover, it is striking how little creative thought is given
to the question. There is tremendous mental inertia here, so that somehow
the philosopher just takes for granted that the true nature of physical
substance must be known and understood -- this despite their belief that
our actual experience of the world veils rather than reveals the true
character of things! Because of the mental inertia at work here, the
imaginative picture sponsoring the convictions of the physicalists
continues to be much like the older picture of denatured matter stripped
of all qualities -- except that now it is projected into a submicroscopic
realm beyond direct experience. I suspect that more physicists than
philosophers have freed their imaginations from this faulty take on the
nature of material substance.
2. If we confront a group of machine parts whose external relations to each
other haven't been clarified, we lump the entire collection together and
call it a "black box". This allows us to treat the collection
mechanistically -- that is, as a single part with clearly defined external
relations. Of course, the assumption is that, upon investigation, the
internal workings of the black box will yield to a proper mechanistic
understanding just like the machine as a whole. It will be found to
consist of independent, separately definable parts relating externally.
3. All the presuppositions of the Reduction Complex listed above mutually
imply and play into one another as expressions of the same cognitive
posture. For example, the quantification that gives us our desired
precision also demands distinct things existing side by side and therefore
relating externally, like the parts of a machine. As Henri Bortoft notes,
we measure by viewing nature through a superimposed grid (scale) divided
into units -- our own, not nature's -- which are "external to one another,
separate but juxtaposed". Unsurprisingly, then, "the quantitative way of
seeing discloses a world fragmented into separate and independent units"
(Bortoft 1996, pp. 173-4).
Likewise, explanation must proceed from the bottom up when you are intent
upon isolating a few, simple, fundamental elements, and when you want to
understand the world from its parts in the way you understand the piece-
by-piece construction of a machine. To start explanation from any other
place -- for example, from the integrity and meaning of a whole such as an
ecological habitat -- would be to accept as fundamental a logically
"confused" reality in which one part is definable only through its mutual,
organic participation, along with the other parts, in a significant whole.
This requires active imagination and is unthinkable to a cognizing mind
bent upon precisely defined, well-structured truth that can be passively
received and conveyed mechanically from one mind to another.
We will have occasion to see more of these interrelationships. It is not
easy to separate any of the five presuppositions from the others because
all of them are expressions of the same underlying cognitive stance.
4. I owe the following thoughts on moral gesture to conversations with Slava
Rozentuller.
5. "To abstract" is often taken to mean: "to abstract form from content".
This is misleading. Content is form -- qualitative form. Form is always
and only a qualitative content. We move toward abstract formalism when
we try to grasp this form with an emphasis on precision in preference
to gestural quality. But if we know only the movement toward precise
formalism, we progressively lose content, which is also to lose form. The
"form" of a formalism is form on the way to disappearing. You can't have
a form that isn't the form of something, that doesn't express a content.
We are impressed by the "form" of a formalism only because we are enamored
of our precision, and take it to mean we are getting hold of the "bare
form" more definitively. But this is to ignore the fact that what we are
trying to get hold of is escaping through the gaps between our precise
data points. Neither a list of numerical coordinates nor an equation
gives us a circle until we read the qualities of point, line, space, and
circular form into the data. In fact, in order to get the actual form of
a point from a numerical coordinate, we must already imagine a spherical
(or other) form.
6. Each of these three terms emphasizes different aspects of the Reduction
Complex. Materialism is rooted in a commitment to mindlessness.
Mechanism focuses especially on the external relationships of
parts -- relationships that are conceived as precisely mathematical and
logical. Reductionism reduces reality by abstracting quantities from
qualitative phenomena and dismissing the rest; by reconceiving wholes in
terms of parts and losing sight of the conceptual and imaginal unities
through which the parts are constituted; and by taking as fundamental for
purposes of explanation only a few, simple entities, laws, and variables
operating at a submicroscopic level.
Regarding this last point, which amounts to the principle of bottom-up
explanation, many reductionists today speak of the need to allow
"higher-level, emergent" realities into scientific explanations. But
these emergent realities are always seen as derivative in relation to the
lower-level, more fundamental elements, whereas those lower-level elements
are not derivative in relation to the emergent realities. All explanation
remains one-directional, from the bottom up.
Related Articles
----------------
For other articles in this series, together with some essays not
previously published in NetFuture, see http://qual.natureinstitute.org.
Bibliography
------------
Barfield, Owen (1963). Worlds Apart (A Dialogue of the 1960's).
Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Barfield, Owen (1971). What Coleridge Thought. Middletown CT:
Wesleyan University Press.
Bohm, David (1951). Quantum Theory. New York: Prentice Hall.
Bohm, David (1971). Causality and Chance in Modern Physics.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Originally published in
1957.
Bohm, David (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Bortoft, Henri (1996). The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way toward a
Science of Conscious Participation. Hudson NY: Lindisfarne.
Dennett, Daniel C. (1995). Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the
Meanings of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Eddington, Sir Arthur (1920). Space, Time, and Gravitation.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Herbert, Nick (1985). Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics.
New York: Doubleday.
Steiner, Rudolf (1985). Goethe's World View. Spring Valley NY:
Mercury Press.
Waldrop, M. Mitchell (1992). Complexity: The Emerging Science at the
Edge of Order and Chaos. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Zajonc, Arthur, editor (2004). The New Physics and Cosmology:
Dialogues with the Dalai Lama. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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This issue of NetFuture: http://www.netfuture.org/2004/Nov0904_158.html.
Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #158 :: November 9, 2004