Reductionism, Art, and "What is it like to be a bat?"
Part 1 of a series on contemporary philosophy of mind
- 6 min read time -
In The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) overlooks Beijing on a balcony with his tech mastermind, Luscious Fox (Morgan Freeman). They discuss how Batman will kidnap a mob boss and smuggle him back to Gotham City. Fox describes a gadget he’s invented that allows Batman to use sonar to spot enemies through walls and in the dark.
Realizing what kind of technology Fox is describing, Wayne grins.
“So, it’s like a—”
Fox cuts him off.
“Like a submarine, Mr. Wayne. Like a submarine.” He winks.
Of course, no one thinks that by wearing sonar to visual goggles, the user could experience what it’s like to be a bat (or submarine for that matter).
Converting echolocation to a visual display would be closer to the way bats experience the world than the way we normally do, but we’ll never experience the way bats use echolocation. This essay is about the gap between how humans and bats experience the world.
Reductionism and Thomas Nagel
In 1974, Thomas Nagel published the highly influential paper “What is it like to be a bat?” In it, he argues that the fundamental distinction between subjective perspective and objective description casts doubt on a philosophical position called reductionism. Don’t panic. I’ll break these phrases down.
Metaphysical Reductionism is generally the view that all reality could, theoretically, be described in an objective, third-person, scientific way (specifically, according to physics). Anything indescribable in this way is not a part of reality, i.e., does not exist. So, ghosts, which can’t be described in scientific terms, don’t exist according to this view.[1] Reductionism is closely related, but not identical, to other views like physicalism, naturalism, materialism, and scientism.
Consider a more pertinent example: The butterflies in your stomach on a first date could be described in terms of your brain chemistry, physiology, hormones, and, ultimately, the physics that’s underneath it all. So, romantic feelings do exist, but only because the feelings can be reduced to physical reactions.
A reductionist’s favorite example of reduction is water. The concept of water reduces to the chemical concept of H2O. What makes H2O, conceptually, more “objective” than water? Consider that an alien might have different notions of “water” than humans. Perhaps water is poisonous for them to drink. Regardless of our subjective perspective, we’ll agree about H2O and its respective properties (for example, the absolute temperatures of its melting, freezing, or evaporating point).[2] So, in that sense, the term water is reduced to H2O, a more objective, narrowly defined term because it’s less subjective.
Similarly, to a reductionist, “romantic attraction” reduces to a complex combination of hormonal and neurochemical events. Objective description strives to describe in non-subjective terms the way the world is. And reductionists think you can reduce everything that exists to that kind of description.
“What it’s like to be a bat”
Nagel argues there’s a problem with this view: We can’t describe subjective perspective in terms of objective description. This is because our conscious experience can’t be entirely reduced to objective terms.
I’ve restated and condensed what I take to be his argument here.
Subjective perspective is a necessary component of experience.
An objective description of experience, by definition, removes the subjective perspective.
But, this omits a necessary component of experience.
Experience exists.
So, an objective description of subjective perspective leaves something out of its description.
But if there’s something that exists that can’t be objectively described, then reductionism is false.
Formulating the argument like this is essentially circular (reductionism is false because reductionism is false), but expanding it out like this helps clarifies how Nagel gets to his conclusion. The contentious lines are (1) and (4). Reductionists seem to deny one or the other, so Nagel needs to provide evidence for it. He does this in terms of an appeal to intuition via an example.
We can objectively describe the way a bat’s echolocation works. We can even imagine a bit of what it’s like. Perhaps a person blind from birth could share some features of a bat-like experience. However, we’re not imagining what it’s like to be a bat as a bat but as humans. Nagel writes,
I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.
Yet surely, the bat does have an experience, so the experience seems to really exist.
However, “putting yourself in the shoes” of a bat by description is a bit like trying to describe an entirely new color. So, to get a complete picture of the experience, we need to account for the subjective perspective—but that’s precisely what objective descriptions want to remove! In other words, we cannot remove the essential “what-it’s-like” part of experience required by reductionism. But, it seems this “what-it’s-like” to be me exists. So, we cannot reduce all experience to purely scientific description. Therefore, reductionism is false.
Where does that leave us? Well, it casts doubt on reductionism. Nagel’s argument doesn’t disprove the position—he acknowledges as much. However, it’s a strong, intuitive case that conscious experiences, subjective perspectives, and the human mind (since it seems to include conscious experience and subject perspective) cannot be fully, objectively described.[3]
Nagel says the fundamental gap between subjective perspective and objective description is at the root of the mind-body problem, which I’ll unpack at a later time. For now, I’ll linger on a more accessible conclusion.
The value of art
Why should you care about the seemingly unbridgeable gap between objective description and subjective perspective? For one, it strongly suggests that you can’t reduce everything romantic to science after all–a quite widely held, intuitive, and important conviction. Nevertheless, it’s human nature to want to communicate about such things—to express our unique, subjective perspective and conscious experience of the world.
If Nagel is correct, we can never perfectly communicate our subjective perspective, no matter the method—scientific or otherwise. But we can get closer to an accurate relay. We get closer through clearer, objective language about our experience (potentially via psychology and phenomenology) and, crucially, by my understanding, art.
In the same way that wearing sonar glasses can get me closer to a bat’s experience, ways of expressing can help others get closer to what it’s like to be me. Art allows us to express subjective experiences through non-objective means. Dance, song, poetry, painting, fiction, and more, in some ways externalize internal experiences without direct appeal to objective description. What makes these expressions so helpful is their non-objective, non-immediately referential nature.
For example, in the case of music, each note doesn’t refer to one experience; there’s no one-to-one correspondence between the C-minor chord and a particular moment of sadness. Instead, the entire song, as a whole, can imperfectly, but beautifully, express my irreducibly complex, subjective experiences better than any scientific description could. In other words, art can’t completely close the gap between objective description and subjective perspective, but it can get closer than science in many areas of experience.
This view puts each mode of expression in a new light: science as an encompassing (but not all-encompassing) way of viewing the world and art as a way to close the gap between our experiences and those of others. In conclusion, reductionism, is intuitively false. Art takes on a new value if you accept the falsity of reductionism as a means of expressing inner, subjective perspective.
I’ll continue this philosophy of mind series off and on. I hope you’ve enjoyed.
Until next time,
Soli Deo Gloria
[1] Any reductionist would say that the fact that things that cannot be described in scientific terms have no evidence for them is a reason to adopt their view. In other words, it is because things like ghosts don’t seem to exist (given empirical evidence) that things that can’t be described in scientific terms probably don’t exist.
[2] This is all assuming we can get past the language barrier—more on that another time.
[3] There’s more nuance here to get into. For example, plenty of Naturalists, reductionists, etc., agree that these conscious experiences can’t be described in terms of objective description by us because of our epistemic limitations—but that’s fine for them, as long as it’s possible to describe them objectively.
In response, Nagel argues further in The View from Nowhere that such a perspective-less perspective cannot exist. I tend to agree with Nagel, but think all reality is grounded somehow in God’s “subjective perspective.” I’ll leave this mysterious notion for another time.
1.) Bat created by God.
2.) I am created by God.
3.) I'm like bat.
Checkmate loser.
I'm wondering about the mereological, cosmological, and ontological implications about anti-reductionism. It seems to be that this critique can be extended towards a higher-order critique of any kind of essentialism as a whole. Whitehead says that science (insofar as it was exercised paradigmatically during his time) is caught in a sort of dilemma between abstraction and concrescence. Science is however, blisfully unaware of this dilemma, so they function in the world operating with the assumption of "irreducible brute matter" at the essence of all objects. This then paves the way for what is known as "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness" wherein abstractions are mistaken for the concrete object up until a point where it is falsified and becomes another abstraction for another concrete. My point is that, taken to its logical conclusion, any kind of essentialism is a slippery slope towards this exact fallacy. So, my question is whether essentialism is even possible in scientific endeavor in the first place? Sure, we can essentialize the abstraction (which is done a little frivolously in my opinion in biological and ecological sciences), but this seems to be a self-negating cycle that inevitably ends up in a dead end. (Although if you are an adherent of scientism such as Degrasse Tyson or Sagan, this "dead end" is exactly where you want to end up.) Insofar then as we accept Nagel's anti-reductionism, then we ought to reject the paradigmatic notion that science is the analysis of external relations that point towards an essential thing; rather, the external relations are in a state of flux and *are* precisely the "object" of scientific analysis. It is not then that there is a static essence or substance behind the phenomena of the world, but rather the various interrelating modalities or manifestaitons of dynamism and flux lend itself to more modalities, etc. At the center of the teleology of the world then is not so much mechanistic laws that pervade the arising of multiple phenomena, but rather the ontological *creativity*--that is to say, the mere possibilities/potentiatlities that are enabled and tenable in a sui generis sense of the mere facticity of the intrinsic dynamism of a concrete thing. (This is to say, obviously, that for Whitehead the concrete thing lies in the terminus of causality, i.e., God, but I digress.) Does Nagel have a notion of essence that he operates under? I understand that mind might be this paradigmatic concrete thing, and insofar as we are in God's mind, then it does not seem so farfetched from a Whiteheadian take. But what do you think?