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?
I mean, to begin, philosophers of science aren't unaware of this problem. Many are anti-realists about science, which seems to respond to Whitehead. Some are anti-realists when it comes to metaphysics. Regardless, most contemporary philosophers and most physicists no longer naively believe in an old 20th century materialist ontology--e.g., there are some kind of Lego brick units of irreducible material we can't yet see that make up everything. "What's at the bottom" should now be accepted as a metaphysical question, because quantum physics seems to imply that the universe is "made up of" energy expressed in different *ahem* modalities--? I think you could be on to something there, though. In my view, teleology is expressed in scientific laws of nature, which are extremely difficult for Naturalists to account for.
Reductionism is, more specifically, the view that everything that exists reduces to [whatever fundamental physics says is real]. Even if we don't know what fundamental physics says is real, they can still express their faith that there is such a bottom, even if it's just fluctuations of energy. At that point, it's an epistemic problem rather than an ontological one. (I find this epistemic view very problematic, by the way.)
I don't know about Nagel's idea about essentialism. I think he's some kind of loose "Naturalist" but believes that mind and subjectivity just are facts of the universe that can't be construed as material, objective things, and therefore, even if a loose Naturalism is true, Reductionism is false.
I haven't fleshed out my view that we're in God's mind, but it seems at least true in some sense--for, what is it for an all powerful mind to ex nihilo create except to make it in its mind. As long as you preserve a distinction between God and creation, then sure, it seems very plausible.
Haven’t you made an a priori separation between art and science? Why can’t science also be a form of art, or at least integrate aspects of art? Perhaps art and science as practiced redictionistically are antithetical to each other. But must science be practiced in a reductionist way?
It's a great question. Art and science don't need to be antithetical--they're complementary. However, each can more effectively capture different parts of reality than the other. Because some much of are is non-referential, like dance, it can communicate or transfer something that objective description cannot. As Nagel argues for in "The View from Nowhere," science fails to capture the entirety of reality precisely because it tries to remove subjectivity from its language. Some areas of science deviate from this. So-called "soft" sciences, like sociology, biology, or psychology, try to incorporate subjectivity into its study. So, that's interesting. Maybe that or, as I mention in the essay, phenomenology, could capture more of subjective experience. The main point I'm making is that if reductionism is false, then art has a unique place in capturing reality. The (unspoken) point is that if reductionism is true, art seems at best superfluous. That's a stronger point but seems correct. Thoughts?
To be fair, I think even soft sciences can be practiced in reductionistic ways. E.g. there is no shortage of psychological theories that attempt to reduce the complexity of the human psyche to simple hypothesis and statistical patterns.
But I think this need not be how science is understood. in fact, I think most scientists don’t go about their everyday work in the laboratory with the goal of trying to reduce everything. I think this has to do more with philosophical theories about the status of science and what it ought to do. It’s this philosophical framework of reductionism that’s problematic, not science itself, and so i don’t see strong reasons why science and art can’t be more tightly interwoven - it’s perhaps more so science as understood in modern times has this tendency, but my point is it need not be this way.
I don’t agree with the argument at the end. I don’t think anything can render art superfluous as though it’s been destroyed. This would be like saying a hypothetical scenario where a complete physicalist theory of colour would all of a sudden render colour experience to be superfluous, or otherwise reduce or destroy the experience. How could any propositional knowledge possibly do this? Whatever you tell me about the physics underlying the colour blue, i would still perceive the blueness in more or less the same way. Nothing about the experience of blue itself, or perhaps at best very little, would change. I think art is the same way. Thoughts?
Actually, I entirely agree with you. I think science and reductionism are not the same thing. Reductionism is a philosophical position, not a scientific one. So, yes, some scientists go about doing science with reductionist assumptions, but that doesn't make art moot, precisely because reductionism is false. If you accept Nagel or even Jackson's original anti-physicalist argument (e.g, colorblind Mary), then you would have to reject physicalism or reductionism. Propositional belief in physicalism doesn't make you somehow un-perceive color, even if Jackson is correct. Instead, I take his argument to be a reductio ad absurdum, e.g., IF physicalism is true, then Mary wouldn't learn anything new about colors. Clearly, she WOULD learn something about colors. THEREFORE, physicalism is false.
I'm in agreement that a reductionist could experience good art. It might just be an example of an inconsistency in their views and experience. In my view, art and science make up sometimes overlapping, sometimes distinct, ways of looking at reality. However, it seems to me that if REDUCTIONISM is true, then art is unnecessary to explain our inner, subjective reality--a sufficiently powerful brain scan could do that. Art and science are not in contradiction. Plausibly, what I've argued, is that reductionism and art are in contradiction.
Hopefully that clarifies things, and maybe we actually agree, haha
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?
I mean, to begin, philosophers of science aren't unaware of this problem. Many are anti-realists about science, which seems to respond to Whitehead. Some are anti-realists when it comes to metaphysics. Regardless, most contemporary philosophers and most physicists no longer naively believe in an old 20th century materialist ontology--e.g., there are some kind of Lego brick units of irreducible material we can't yet see that make up everything. "What's at the bottom" should now be accepted as a metaphysical question, because quantum physics seems to imply that the universe is "made up of" energy expressed in different *ahem* modalities--? I think you could be on to something there, though. In my view, teleology is expressed in scientific laws of nature, which are extremely difficult for Naturalists to account for.
Reductionism is, more specifically, the view that everything that exists reduces to [whatever fundamental physics says is real]. Even if we don't know what fundamental physics says is real, they can still express their faith that there is such a bottom, even if it's just fluctuations of energy. At that point, it's an epistemic problem rather than an ontological one. (I find this epistemic view very problematic, by the way.)
I don't know about Nagel's idea about essentialism. I think he's some kind of loose "Naturalist" but believes that mind and subjectivity just are facts of the universe that can't be construed as material, objective things, and therefore, even if a loose Naturalism is true, Reductionism is false.
I haven't fleshed out my view that we're in God's mind, but it seems at least true in some sense--for, what is it for an all powerful mind to ex nihilo create except to make it in its mind. As long as you preserve a distinction between God and creation, then sure, it seems very plausible.
Haven’t you made an a priori separation between art and science? Why can’t science also be a form of art, or at least integrate aspects of art? Perhaps art and science as practiced redictionistically are antithetical to each other. But must science be practiced in a reductionist way?
It's a great question. Art and science don't need to be antithetical--they're complementary. However, each can more effectively capture different parts of reality than the other. Because some much of are is non-referential, like dance, it can communicate or transfer something that objective description cannot. As Nagel argues for in "The View from Nowhere," science fails to capture the entirety of reality precisely because it tries to remove subjectivity from its language. Some areas of science deviate from this. So-called "soft" sciences, like sociology, biology, or psychology, try to incorporate subjectivity into its study. So, that's interesting. Maybe that or, as I mention in the essay, phenomenology, could capture more of subjective experience. The main point I'm making is that if reductionism is false, then art has a unique place in capturing reality. The (unspoken) point is that if reductionism is true, art seems at best superfluous. That's a stronger point but seems correct. Thoughts?
To be fair, I think even soft sciences can be practiced in reductionistic ways. E.g. there is no shortage of psychological theories that attempt to reduce the complexity of the human psyche to simple hypothesis and statistical patterns.
But I think this need not be how science is understood. in fact, I think most scientists don’t go about their everyday work in the laboratory with the goal of trying to reduce everything. I think this has to do more with philosophical theories about the status of science and what it ought to do. It’s this philosophical framework of reductionism that’s problematic, not science itself, and so i don’t see strong reasons why science and art can’t be more tightly interwoven - it’s perhaps more so science as understood in modern times has this tendency, but my point is it need not be this way.
I don’t agree with the argument at the end. I don’t think anything can render art superfluous as though it’s been destroyed. This would be like saying a hypothetical scenario where a complete physicalist theory of colour would all of a sudden render colour experience to be superfluous, or otherwise reduce or destroy the experience. How could any propositional knowledge possibly do this? Whatever you tell me about the physics underlying the colour blue, i would still perceive the blueness in more or less the same way. Nothing about the experience of blue itself, or perhaps at best very little, would change. I think art is the same way. Thoughts?
Actually, I entirely agree with you. I think science and reductionism are not the same thing. Reductionism is a philosophical position, not a scientific one. So, yes, some scientists go about doing science with reductionist assumptions, but that doesn't make art moot, precisely because reductionism is false. If you accept Nagel or even Jackson's original anti-physicalist argument (e.g, colorblind Mary), then you would have to reject physicalism or reductionism. Propositional belief in physicalism doesn't make you somehow un-perceive color, even if Jackson is correct. Instead, I take his argument to be a reductio ad absurdum, e.g., IF physicalism is true, then Mary wouldn't learn anything new about colors. Clearly, she WOULD learn something about colors. THEREFORE, physicalism is false.
I'm in agreement that a reductionist could experience good art. It might just be an example of an inconsistency in their views and experience. In my view, art and science make up sometimes overlapping, sometimes distinct, ways of looking at reality. However, it seems to me that if REDUCTIONISM is true, then art is unnecessary to explain our inner, subjective reality--a sufficiently powerful brain scan could do that. Art and science are not in contradiction. Plausibly, what I've argued, is that reductionism and art are in contradiction.
Hopefully that clarifies things, and maybe we actually agree, haha