
Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism - chablent
http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/we-are-all-bewildered-machines
======
bitwize
One day, in my early twenties, I was feeling sorry for myself (as early-
twenty-somethings often do). I began reflecting how love was just a chemical
in my head or somesuch self-indulgent nonsense.

And then it hit me -- there's a _chemical_ in my head that _makes me fall in
love!_ And I got all excited because -- wow, that is some crazy shit! And what
a bizarre, crazy thing it is to be a human and have all this stuff going on
inside you that somehow adds, multiplies, and exponentiates to make up _who
you are_.

~~~
platz
Permission to pep up your language centers?

[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/escape-from-
sp...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/escape-from-spiderhead)

------
danielam
Wonder and awe are well and good, and certainly the world is awe-inspiring and
wonderful. And certainly, the deepening of our understanding of it is can lead
us to marvel at it. However, the problem with the article is that it doesn't
really get into the meat of the matter of mechanistic materialism. Mechanism
is a metaphysical position that we often today take for granted and do so
unthinkingly and tacitly, that is to say, without recognizing it for the
metaphysical position that it is. As a result, it is confused with empirical
science as such. To make matters worse, there are very serious problems with
the mechanistic view of nature, and despite our tacit acceptance of it, the
destructive consequences of a consistently held mechanism evade us.

It is important to remember that when explaining a fact, it is important not
to negate the fact in the process of explaining it. To do so would result not
in an explanation, but something else. That something else may be useful, but
explanations are not first and foremost about being useful. An explanation is
about accounting completely for the causes of a fact as it actually is. The
mechanistic philosophy, in construing the world and things within it as
machines, destroys whole classes of facts, not least of all because what
machines _are_ is observer-relative. Their components are arranged according
to human ends that are extrinsic to the machine itself and not according to
some intrinsic tendency of the machine. Thus, to construe all of reality in
mechanistic terms necessarily forces us to make these broad denials.
Furthermore, these human ends (as well as the awe, wonder, experience of
mystery and whatever else the author invokes and beyond) are facts which must
themselves be accounted for. A mechanistic materialist, when confronted with
these facts, is left to either deny their existence (eliminativism), posit a
non-mechanistic mind-or-something-else where these facts exist (dualism and
its variations) or to reject mechanism. While we need not resort to mental
phenomena to criticize mechanism and reductionism, perhaps nowhere else is it
made more obvious how defective mechanism is as a metaphysical position.

Since Descartes, mechanists either swept broad classes of facts under the rug
of the res cogitans or attributed them to God (think Paley). Mechanistic
materialism, having denied both the res cogitans and God, is left to deal with
these facts on mechanistic terms. Unfortunately, mechanistic methods are here
in principle incapable of explaining them, at least not completely.

Ultimately, mechanistic materialism must be rejected in favor of a richer
metaphysics.

~~~
scotty79
None of what you said makes any sense to anyone but a philosopher and has no
value in the real world.

------
Terr_
I can't find the clip at the moment, but I recall a Futurama episode where the
professor finally unlocks the last secret of the universe and gets really
depressed that there is nothing else to do.

Fortunately, he realizes nobody knows _why_ the universe has a limited number
of things to discover...

------
DoctorOetker
I think it's really a rephrasing of "for every question answered / settled, a
bunch of new questions pop up", intimately connected to the cycle of
experiment->theory->experiment->... so this is really just "science at work"

------
superkuh
Seeing the title I thought this article was going to be about the "problem" of
reductionism. But it delightfully doesn't fall into that trap and acknowledges
that reductionism to the lowest useful components does not necessarily imply
low complexity. Then goes on to express wonderment at the remaining complexity
after reductionism. That's fine, I guess. Just as long as we all remember
there's no such thing as a chemical that makes you fall in love.

~~~
throwrhebrick
> there's no such thing as a chemical that makes you fall in love.

I read this article a while ago that suggests love is produced by the
releasing of various chemicals: [https://www.thoughtco.com/the-chemistry-of-
love-609354](https://www.thoughtco.com/the-chemistry-of-love-609354).

~~~
superkuh
I guess people misinterpreted my last sentence as avocating for or implying
that there's some non-observable or sublime facet of love. I really don't mean
that. I only mean that release of neurotransmitters at a synapse is not even a
tiny part of the story. And the idea that there are 'chemicals' or
neurotransmitters that make you fall in love is absurd. It matters where the
chemicals are. It matters when. And that's ignoring the activity of astrocytes
completely.

I am a reductionist. But there's no such thing as a chemical in love. Such
descriptions are necessary but not nearly sufficient.

------
Quequau
Finally something I'm good at!

------
mmirate
Why does scientific reductionism need an antidote?

"antidote to scientific reductionism" seems about as useful as "antidote to
nonblindness".

~~~
dmreedy
I'd say for the same reason programs need APIs and cars need steering wheels
and emotions need words. It's often very helpful to be able to understand the
stack all the way down, but there's power in abstraction, and the nature of
things changes as they scale while their context remains constant such that by
talking about all the component pieces, you might miss the greater whole. Or
at least not be able to handle it with any reasonable dexterity.

~~~
jamesrcole
>> _Why does reductionism need an antidote?_

> _I 'd say for the same reason programs need APIs and cars need steering
> wheels and emotions need words. It's often very helpful to_

Your examples hardly involve _antidotes_. An antidote is for a poison, and we
talk of metaphorical antidotes for things we perceive in a negative light.

I think the person you replied to has a point. I've read a fair bit of
philosophy for my PhD work, and I've never come across a criticism of
reductionism that seemed to actually understand it. Criticisms of reductionism
are always criticisms of a _strawman of reductionism_.

Both Daniel Dennett (for an overview see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism)),
and Steven Weinberg [https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/10/05/reductionism-
red...](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/10/05/reductionism-redux/)
(behind a paywall) or his book "Facing Up" have pretty decent descriptions of
reductionism.

It's not just that people misunderstand what reductionism itself is, but they
also misunderstand what reductionism is and isn't meant to explain. It's not
meant to explain or document the characteristics of specific patterns made up
of the elements, yet again and again people present the fact that it doesn't
explain such details as somehow a fatal flaw in the notion of reductionism.

~~~
sudosteph
I hate doing this... but what has changed on HN such that a comment like this
is downvoted so soon after it's been posted? Sources are present, the tone is
not hostile. There may be valid disagreements or gaps somewhere here, but the
typical HN response in the past was to explore that via further discussion.

That said, it really does seem like the term "reductionism" is overloaded.
Perhaps it would have been more clear if the author had specifically referred
to the concept of Scientism, which is related to a specific problem with
excessive or mis-applied reductionism:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism)
> The term scientism is also used by historians, philosophers, and cultural
critics to highlight the possible dangers of lapses towards excessive
reductionism in all fields of human knowledge

I believe in that context, the original article and content make more sense.
Personally, as a fan of David Deutsch's "Beginning of Infinity", I see
absolutely no conflict between acknowledging both that scientism is harmful
and that many systems can be reduced to elegant, simple definitions that are
incredibly useful to understand.

