Going on with my project (8) - Reductionism and Constructivism

Although on the surface of grammar it seems possible to assert we live in a Matrix, and of course we cannot know that we do not, it is not ultimately (humanly) intelligible.  In a passage that goes to the core of this issue, Wittgenstein wrote:

 

'I believe that he is suffering.'  – Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton?  It would go against the grain to use the word in both connections.  (Or is it like this: I believe that he is suffering, but am I certain that he is not an automaton?  Nonsense!). . . .  'I believe that he is not an automaton', just like that, so far makes no sense.  My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul.  I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.

 

The implication of this passage is radical: not only, as a matter of fact, is the question “Do I also believe that he isn't an automaton?” absurd in the sense that it uses a particular language in nonsensical ways; the implication is that it must be absurd in any possible human language, just as impossible for us to imagine as a round square. If I have understood the passage correctly, Wittgenstein's thoughts show that the idea that our conscious life is a shadow of the really REAL conceived as physical events that can be investigated by science is as unintelligible as a round square.

            Of course, if our inner life is nothing but a shadow of physical processes obeying physical laws, then we must imagine ourselves to be automata.  If someone's grief over the loss or a loved one or remorse over a wrong done to some loved one are nothing but insubstantial shadows cast by (what source of light?) the Real physical events taking place in those people's brains and bodies, then what else could they be?  The conscious experience of grief or remorse would then be like a computer screen where what appears is a function of the programming, which itself is determined by physical laws.  The shadow “remorse” (with all the language of remorse: “Oh my God, what have I done”) seduces us into thinking thoughts like “The person who was wronged was unique,” “I could have acted otherwise,” “I can make and keep promises,” and the like – shadows so dark they prevent us from seeing the reality that we are nothing more than automata carrying our physical programs, more complex than the orbit of the planets, perhaps, but just as mechanical.

            People's behavior (at least in science fiction – the Body Snatchers! and perhaps some bureaucrats!) could conceivably make one wonder whether they are automata. Given certain contexts it might indeed make sense to ask the question of a particular person.  But just so? Wittgenstein's point is that robot-like behavior could count as evidence of being an automaton only against the background that no one could seriously doubt that you have real thoughts and feelings.  And if one can't seriously doubt this, then one can't intelligibly entertain the notion our inner lives are nothing but physiological states. This “primitive” response to others as sentient (“attitude towards a soul”) is not an assumption, conjecture, hypothesis, or bit of knowledge concerning the reality of thoughts and feelings; assumptions, conjectures, hypotheses, and knowledge invite questions about whether they are justified. That you are a sentient being is not something we can seriously doubt because sentience happens prior to all thinking and asking questions:  thus it is not something we can sanely question or “have an opinion about.”  It is, in fact, the precondition (like being alive) of doubting, asking questions, and having opinions in the first place.  Grammatically you can ask whether I have an opinion on the question of whether the rest of the people in the class are automata; logically, the question is meaningless.

            The notion that our inner life is a shadow is so obviously flawed, I am tempted to coin the new name for this (actually quite ancient) logical fallacy in its honor – the Matrix fallacy.  This occurs whenever one wants to abandon the difficult job of critically and honestly reflecting on experience, and tries to underwrite one's own particular attitude with – and merely deduce it from – a hypothesis concerning ultimate Reality. All metaphysically reductive hypotheses are like this: Love is nothing but . . . physical events, conditioned behavior, the play of signifiers, discourse masking the will-to-power, a bourgeois ideology, subconscious libidinal forces, and so on – the list of the candidates for the really Real is (embarrassingly) quite long.   One could define the Matrix fallacy so:  one starts off by wanting to account for something meaningful and ends up explaining away the reality of what one began by wanting to account for.  One saws off the very branch one is sitting on.

         It’s like we imagine consciousness as a person inside a submarine who must rely on instruments to have experience of the world outside the submarine. The instruments translate whatever they pick up and can pick up into electrical impulses, that the instrument retranslates back into images, sounds, and so on. Now if someone doubted the the images we see on our instrument panel represented the world outside of the submarine as it really is, as least insofar as the instruments themselves can translate it, we would have to be able to go outside the submarine (i.e. consciousness itself) and compare what a non-conscious, non-representational angelic mind perceived with the images on the instrument panel. But ex hypothesi that is impossible. So we have faith in our instruments – or not. Our instruments have evolved by allowing us to navigate the outside world and even develop a world in the submarine, a world at bottom so real that to doubt it would not be intellectual courage but madness if extended beyond the philosophical armchair. And yet reductionists of all kinds from materialists to Foucault ask us to do just that. (The submarine metaphor I took over from Martin Hollis, though I adapted it for a slightly different purpose.)

 

. . .

 

   I wrote that some time ago (in connection with work on Peter Winch and Raimond Gaita, both of whom make that point in different ways). It seems a natural follow-up to the previous entry. The tendencies of so many post-industrial thinkers from naturalist-reductionists such as Daniel Dennett to postmodernists such as Derrida and Foucault and all kinds of others reduce to this: to invite us to see meaning as reducible to some non-meaning. That is, they explain away love, remorse, beauty, or moral horror by collapsing them into something else that is not, itself, meaning—something material, mechanical, socially constructed, or purely functional.

 

Examples.

 

Metaphysical Naturalists / Scientific Reductionists

 

     Daniel Dennett (Consciousness Explained) argues that consciousness itself is a user-illusion produced by brain processes. What we experience as “intentionality,” meaning, or love is really just computation at the neuronal level, a function of physical laws. Here, meaning is reduced to neuronal firing patterns—something non-meaningful in itself.

 

    Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) believes that love, morality, and altruism are survival mechanisms created by natural selection. The deep meaning we feel in relationships is actually just genes “selfishly” ensuring their propagation. What seems like meaning is biological programming, no deeper reality behind it.

 

 

Postmodernists / Constructivists

 

     Michel Foucault argues that truth and meaning are just effects of power relations. What we think of as "moral truth" or "objective knowledge" is really a product of historical discourses that serve dominant groups. Meaning is reduced to power dynamics—which, in themselves, are not meaningful, just strategies of dominance.

 

     Jacques Derrida believed (I think!?) Language does not reveal meaning but defers it endlessly in a chain of signifiers. What we think of as deep, stable meaning is just an illusion created by the way language functions. Words don’t "mean" anything in themselves; they only refer to other words. Meaning never reaches its object.

 

Economic and Sociological Reductionists

 

     Karl Marx believed that morality, religion, and culture are not real expressions of meaning but ideological superstructures. These “values” exist to justify economic arrangements and class interests. Meaning is reduced to material conditions and class struggle.

 

    Pierre Bourdieu believed that meanings can be reduced to the social structures that generated them. Our habits, tastes, and moral values are not freely chosen but determined by our social class and upbringing. Meaning is not real—it’s a function of social reproduction.

 

Psychological and Psychoanalytic Reductionists

 

    Sigmund Freud wanted to reduce meaning to subconscious drive. Religious belief, morality, and even love are projections of unconscious desires. Our sense of meaning is an illusion created by our need to repress or satisfy primal urges.

 

     B. F. Skinner believed that thought, emotion, and morality are not real in themselves—they are just behaviors conditioned by reinforcement and punishment. Meaning is nothing but conditioned responses.

 

Existentialist Nihilists

 

     Jean-Paul Sartre thought that since existence precedes essence, meaning is not discovered in reality but created by individual choice. There is no given meaning, only the absurd, meaningless brute fact of existence. (I’m am not sure I want to read Sartre as a reductionist per se but he does believe our everyday experience is meaning is inauthentic, not real.)

 

Albert Camus thought the universe is indifferent to human values, and meaning is ultimately an illusion. The best we can do is rebel against this meaninglessness through personal acts of defiance.

 

The core strategy behind all these modes of thought is to explain away our everyday sense in meaning in terms of something that is not meaning. In every case, what feels like meaning – a love, truth, beauty, moral duty – is dismissed as a mere effect of something else that is itself non-meaningful:

 

·         Biological survival mechanisms (Dawkins, Dennett)

·         Power structures (Foucault)

·         Economic forces (Marx)

·         Social conditioning (Bourdieu, Skinner)

·         Language games without real reference (Derrida)

·         Psychological projections (Freud)

·         Radical, subjective willfulness (Sartre)

 

The error in all of these views is that they attempt to understand meaning from the outside – as if one could study it like a detached observer. But meaning is not an object; it is something we live within, like the spiritual air we breathe.

 

      It's not like I deny that any or all of these non-meanings do condition our lives. All of them and more probably are the matrix from which self-consciousness, meaning, thought, art, religion, the world "emerge" as I believe is the term of art. Or I believe the world and our inner lives transcend all these non-meanings though they never escape them to become angelic, as I believe Descartes thought, and perhaps Kant. I grant this is something of a mystery, a philosophical problem probably impossible to solve. I feel the need to resort to metaphor, perhaps a bad sign for the philosophically-minded. These are the ones I have come across that seem most illuminating. 1) The realm of meaning (Gaita) is like a flame emerging from burning wood. The fire cannot exist without the material, but it is not reducible to the wood alone.  A scientific analysis of the chemical combustion process would not capture the warmth or light of the fire just as a neuroscientific or sociological account of meaning does not capture its reality. Or this: Meaning is like music played on an instrument. The wood, strings, and vibrations are necessary conditions for the sound, but the music is not reducible to them.  The reality of the music transcends its physical medium without ceasing to be dependent on it. A physicist could analyze the sound waves of the Bach “Chaconne” in terms of his equations but would be blind to the music without entering into the realm of meaning. But the “emergence” is actual whether we can understand it scientifically or not.

     The line is crossed when our lives (meaning) is reduced to any one or all of these non-meanings. Meaning does not exist apart from the biological, social, and historical conditions that shape it; but it also cannot be reduced to them. These factors are necessary for meaning to emerge, but not sufficient to explain it away. The human world transcends its material, psychological, and cultural origins – not by escaping them but by deepening them into self-consciousness, understanding, love, and truth. Reductionism in all these forms commits the Matrix Fallacy. It starts by wanting to explain meaning and ends by dissolving meaning into something that is not meaning at all. My view is the contradiction of these views as I affirm 

·         Love, moral horror, beauty, and awe are not illusions, but disclosures of reality.

·         Our fundamental experiences (grief, remorse, joy, reverence) reveal aspects of Being. It is not just our minds "projecting" onto a meaningless universe.

·         Reductionism is a self-undermining project. It destroys the very reality it set out to explain.

·         The rational (and moral) attitude is not skepticism toward meaning, but recognition of it.

 

My view – or the view I represent from my perspective; there is not much original about it and in a way is the plainest common sense – has the advantage that it avoids the Cartesian temptation to treat human reason and meaning as though they float above history and nature as an angelic intellect while also avoiding the reductionist temptation to collapse meaning entirely into its biological, social, or psychological origins. It allows us to acknowledge the real insights of neuroscience, sociology, psychology, etc., without letting them collapse the reality of meaning into their categories. It provides a middle path between scientific reductionism and disembodied idealism. It protects both the contingency and transcendence of human meaning: we arise from history, nature, and social conditions but we are at least potentially not trapped within them – which all the reductionist philosophies themselves just presuppose.

 

   My view also allows for a simple truth that the reductionist view cannot explain. That the Bach Chaconne is real, that the realm of meaning is real, and since real, part of nature. Nature is not a mechanical monster but gives rise to life and love – and philosophy. Every word I write is natural. The Bach Chaconne is as natural as the birch tree in my backyard – I completely agree with people like Dennett and Dawkins on that. Only I don’t reduce nature to what is disclosed by a form of reason whose essence is to reduce reality to study one aspect of it. If we are part of nature, and we experience meaning, then meaning must also be a part of nature. If meaning were just an illusion, we would have to ask: where did this illusion come from? If nature were truly meaningless, how could a being within nature even develop the ability to experience meaning? The fact that we experience love, moral horror, beauty, and awe is not an accident; it suggests that these things are woven into the structure of reality itself. Nature is not reducible to blind mechanism or brute physicality. Meaning is an intrinsic dimension of reality, just as fundamental as matter, energy, and time.

 

     Thus to make space within reality or nature for the realm of meaning, it must follow that nature is not just a system of physical laws but also the condition for love, beauty, and moral truth to emerge; that the human experience of meaning is not an anomaly but the most developed expression of something already implicit in the cosmos. Just as gravity or electromagnetism are part of the universe, so is meaning. We do not invent meaning in the way we invent fictional stories; we participate in it (a way of understanding what Plato meant by “participation” of nature in the Ideas/Forms). The mistake of materialist reductionism is not that it’s wrong about matter or energy but that it ignores nature’s full depth. Reality includes both physical structure and meaning. It is not a machine, but a reality in which life, mind, and meaning emerge as natural developments, not illusions.

 

    This is not an original insight. It expresses with what many great thinkers have recognized but which modern reductionism has obscured. For Aristotle, nature has an inner principle of form and purpose (telos), not just mechanical causation. For Heidegger Being is not just "stuff" but has a meaningful, disclosive character. For Thomists like Josef Pieper nature is intelligible, and meaning is a real aspect of being. What all these thinkers would affirm is the proposition that the world is meaningful because meaning is woven into the fabric of nature itself. We do not create meaning out of nothing. We discover and participate in it. This is a realistic alternative to both scientific reductionism and radical constructivism in which both our finitude (we emerge from nature) and our transcendence (we disclose its depth) are acknowledged.

 

 

 

 

So if the rational arguments for reduction are as unsound as I think, I must ask where the persuasive force of the various reductionisms in popular culture and academia comes from? This is speculation on my part. I think from two sources, interrelated in a unique way in my time: 1) the fat, relentless ego; 2) from social and historical conditions causing alienation, uprootedness. I won’t say much about the first. I will just recall myself as a student when I was very much in the thrall of various reductionisms. I felt quite superior that I could see through all these illusions and pretenses. It made me superior to the common run of men. It also gave me “social capital” as an “intellectual” that I would not have had otherwise. It was sinful. I will leave to others to determine how widespread this attitude is. And of course the capitalist is happy to see nature as meaningless raw material as his mode of existence depends on exploiting or destroying it (including human nature). 

     About the second I have more to say. It must somehow be connected with the phenomenon of "uprooting" on many levels. People are swimming, so to speak, in a massive transformation of humanity itself brought about by the revolutionary takeover of "Science-Technology-Capitalism" - a fusion of all three under the direction of those who control or manage capital. This has caused radical alienation on many levels: from nature, from community, from a notion of transcendence (people who are swimming in the flux just have to keep their heads above water and react, and so can't reflect in general). As our sense of reality is grounded in the very things tendency of "Science-Technology-Capitalism" alienates us from, it has become weaker. The idea that reality is individually or socially constructed seems to reflect this experience. Also it provides a narrative that legitimizes the alienation of modern life and makes it easier to accept the conditions imposed by Science-Technology-Capitalism. Given the philosophical weakness of the argument for reductionism – held by someone who is out to prove a thesis at any cost, perhaps –  I cannot explain its cultural power any other way.