Reductionism is often seen as explaining something away and, unfortunately, that’s often the goal of those doing the reducing. This isn’t a new development in modern thought. When St. Augustine explained the mind in terms of three components — intellect, memory, and will — he was reducing a complex entity to three components he felt to be more primary or more basic in some sense. There was a reason a Trinitarian Christian theologian might try to reduce the mind to three components, though I don’t accept that sort of an analogy between the human mind and God. In any case, any sort of reduction is a reduction.
Sometimes strategies of reductionism provide substantial analytical understanding of a higher layer and sometimes they discover the aspects of an indivisible whole, allowing descriptions. In any case, the effort is necessary because we would otherwise be dealing with things and living creatures as if they were only surface phenomena. A reasonable sort of reductionism gives us ways of talking about what it’s like to be a star or to be an alligator or to be our neighbor.
St. Augustine and other great thinkers reduced as a way of developing words and concepts to understand. They never lost sight of the more complex reality they were trying to understand. Any reductionism, or any talk about a system of reductionism, which has too many words like ‘just’ or ‘only’ is immediately suspect because the thinker behind that system has reduced a whole to a pile of rubble and has disdained his responsibility to respect that whole and to show how the pieces of a system of thought allow some understanding of actual parts or at least aspects of a complex entity or phenomena.
Let me start with an example that deals only with perception — color vision. Back in our school days, most of were taught about primary colors, red and yellow and blue, and how primary colors mixed to form other colors. In high school, we might have even seen diagrams of the eye showing receptors for the primary colors. As it turns out, that is more a fairy-tale than a scientific explanation, In fact, two great scientists of the 19th century — Hemholtz and Maxwell — explained that the primary-color vision theory was obviously wrong: if we saw colors that way, a red ball would change colors drastically when it was moved from the sun to the shade. Objects emit a very different spectrum of wavelengths under different lighting conditions, yet we see that red ball as red under a wide variety of conditions.
It’s interesting that the theory of primary colors lasted more than a half-century after being shown wrong by strong reasoning. It’s even more interesting that it’s lasted more decades since Edwin Land, MIT scientist and founder of Polaroid, showed it to be wrong in the middle of the 20th century. Land’s experiments were rigorously conducted and definitive. What he showed, to simplify a bit, is that a colored surface with perfect smoothness and other properties that don’t allow contextual and contrasting clues will be seen as pure white by human beings. It turns out that the human brain, and the monkey brain, use ad-hoc techniques to carry out operations which are somehow equivalent to the solving of systems of partial differential equations. The interested reader can browse a copy of “A Vision of the Brain” by Semir Zeki, one of the neurobiologists who has done pioneering work on the question of how we see colors.
The primary color theory and the more recent theory of how we see color are reductionistic though that more recent theory is extremely complex and, in fact, no one knows yet what sort of basic elements will best allow analysis and discussion of the issues. We know our brains don’t literally solve huge systems of partial differential equations and yet that is the only way human scientists know of describing what our brains do in allowing us to see colors. It’s neurons that carry out these tasks by way of exchanging small electrical charges and chemicals through their various linkages. We now know, and accept when we have to, that our control over our own bodies can be destroyed by problems with dopamine, a common brain chemical. This condition is Parkinson’s.
When we or a parent are diagnosed with Parkinson’s, we know enough not to go looking for an exorcist or for a witch to undo the evil spell which is destroying the ability to move our limbs properly. Nor do we engage in self-examination of our minds, independent of empirical knowledge. Yet, we think of such human aspects as moral will or poetic thought as if we should be understanding our moral character or our poetic skills by way of magic or by styles of philosophical thought which are forced when we go beyond our empirical knowledge.
To some extent, language involving brain-cells and groupings of brain-cells will be necessary even for understanding higher-level aspects of human beings and other creatures. I do think it’s wrong to think that limited language would be sufficient for understanding our selves, as Richard Rorty speculatively suggested in “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”, but I agree with his criticisms of the view that such language has no important role to play in our understanding of our own natures. Since the work of developing a view of the world around us seems to proceed in a way that doesn’t involve direct cell-to-cell communication, then — I would propose — we’ll soon be following those like William Calvin who are exploring the various fields our brains are known to generate and also some other more exotic fields which our brains may be generating.
Still, we have to be very cautious of falling into a mindless or naive reductionism, whether from laziness or ideological corruption or from culpable ignorance. This warning applies to those who think we surely have minds or souls made of a more pure stuff than matter and also to those who think that higher-level mental or spiritual events are illusions if our stuff is ‘only’ physical matter and energy and fields. Our stuff is ‘only’ those things because stuff exists as a result of relationships and the stuff of this universe is what we call material. Under this view, our immaterial aspects come primarily from acts-of-being, existential acts, possible only to God. Secondarily, they come from lesser acts-of-being possible to God in powerful ways and to His creatures in lesser ways.
These lesser acts-of-being are different ways of speaking about the relationships which cause collapse of a wave-packet to an electron in a specific place with a vaguely defined momentum or an electron with a well-defined momentum and a vaguely defined location. As I said in my published book without being able to elaborate: this sort of fluidity and — you might say — uncertainty in this universe at the level of creaturely perception and creaturely thought gives us some hints of the nature of the freedom which is appropriate for us, in our thoughts and in our external actions. Even our freedom is contextual and not a result of some self-contained human component called free-will. We form our minds by proper response to our environments but that formation has something of the nature of movements across a sheet of ice. We are still part of the physical universe created by God, still constrained by it, but some restrictions from our momentum have been reduced. A more fluid and graceful movement is possible — if we have taken care to obtain the proper equipment and to develop the proper skills.
There is no a priori reason that different sorts of stuff can’t exist, call it ‘mind-stuff’ if you will, but there’s no reason to believe this other sort of stuff does exist and some strong arguments that radically different sorts of stuff couldn’t communicate. We have too much evidence of correlation between brain-events and even the most ethereal of mental events to doubt the existence of at least a tight connection between the brain and any mind-stuff. For human styles of reason to be valid, any mind-stuff or soul-stuff would have to follow pretty the same cause-and-effect relationships as the stuff of this physical universe.
It seems certain to me that the bare language of brain-cells, brain-chemicals, and so forth needs to be supplemented by a different sort of language that allows us to speak of the events that motivated talk of immaterial minds and souls, but there’s no reason to let Christian reason, or any other sort of human reason, be corrupted by magical talk. As I proposed in To See a World in a Grain of Sand the electromagnetic fields, and possibly quantum fields, generated by our brains might well correspond to ‘minds’ and ‘souls’. Those fields would operate in a way that would give us the impression that we have components which are immaterial. And that’s far from wrong unless taken literally. The so-called Big Bang model implies an expansion of the universe out of a state where it was an extremely compressed and homogeneous stuff. Fields seem to be the most ‘relational’ form of that stuff. In a sense, they are closer to ‘reality’, that is, to the most basic aspect of created being.
I’ve argued that relationships are primary and substantial being is created from nothing by God’s love for it. Relationships also bring substantial being into existence in a secondary way: they shape raw stuff into things and then continue to shape those things until they become, perhaps, bacteria and then jellyfish and then slime molds and then fish and then frogs and then snakes and then rats and then monkeys and then human beings. I’ve played fast and loose with evolutionary transitions to summarize a complex history in a single sentence. The point is that evolution can be seen, from the beginning of the current expansion of the universe, as a gradual shaping of very strange stuff — almost abstract stuff — into a creature with a brain that is capable of encapsulating the universe and perhaps Creation in all its phases.
In the end, these systems of thought based on modern empirical knowledge are ways of reducing a complex entity — the human mind — to basic elements which allow us to study and analyze and maybe even understand. A system which reduces human thought to specific actions of an immaterial mind upon a physical body can be pious in respecting human nature and religious beliefs but it has to be evaluated on the basis of what is known about human beings and the physical world they bodily inhabit. A system which seeks to understand by first reducing human thought to relationships of components of the physical human body, including generated fields, is no different. Such a scheme can be used to understand though some will fear it’s being used to explain away, and there will be some who will try to do exactly that. But any scheme, including those which use mind-stuff or soul-stuff can be used to explain away. Some magical systems of thought favored by C.S. Lewis and other Christians do their best to respect human nature and its Creator by waving away any true understanding of the words of God as embedded in this universe.
What is the test of a system of one set or another of basic elements including the allowable relationships between those elements? There is a very simply stated test which is very complex in practice: does that system allow plausible descriptions and narratives of the world which we inhabit or of specific entities in that world? The goal of any scheme in Christian thought is to understand this universe which God created and then to understand it in light of what God has told us about His purposes — and He told us that most clearly in the crucifixion and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I’ve proposed that the human brain is the sort of entity which is, in principle, capable of encapsulating God’s world, the physical universe seen in light of God’s purposes for Creation. I think it’s likely we can encapsulate a more general set of truths manifested in the Primordial Universe from which this universe was shaped. Still more importantly, as noted by various individual philosophers and perhaps some Oriental traditions, our minds are not separable from their context. Our brains are the substantial foundations of our minds, whatever they prove to be in total, and those brains are part of the physical universe and subject to the laws of that universe. Moreover, the content that ‘fills’ our minds is inseparable from what shapes those minds seen as containers.
My way of speaking about the human mind is inseparable from my way of speaking about Creation. This makes a lot of sense in the light of modern empirical knowledge and — most important of all — allows us to make creaturely sense of God’s direct revelations to us just because it makes our very minds part of the world which is a shaping of the truths God manifested in the Primordial Universe which He created from nothing. When we reduce the human mind to basic elements provided by modern science and understood in light of modern empirical knowledge as a whole, we gain more power in understanding both our selves and our world. Ultimately, we subject our understanding of human nature to the most important knowledge we have — God’s purposes for Creation and for each of us in particular. This approach is more respectful of Creation and the Creator than are magical or supernatural ways of viewing the mind. I remain within human knowledge of the physical world, seen from my faith in God’s self-revelations, especially that He is an all-powerful Creator. In addition, I’ve been forced to realize that the sufferings, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ couldn’t be a divine response forced by creaturely errors. The crucifixion of our Lord tells us something very basic and very central to God’s purposes for Creation. It’s not given to any particular human being to understand the universe so truly as to see why the sufferings, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ moved with the grain of that universe. If any human being could achieve such an understanding, he would understand fully God’s purposes for Creation.
We reduce as part of our efforts to understand reality as a whole. Any efforts which use words like ‘just’ or ‘only’ too often are probably wrongful, literalistic in assigning ultimate reality to our derived basic elements even at the expense of making sense of the world as a whole or even of making sense of human nature. That is how ‘reductionism’ gets a bad name. When we see the factual truth in the evolution of life, that doesn’t force us to believe life is ‘only’ a chemical process nor to believe that man is ‘just’ an ape. If anything, it forces us to give greater respect to the chemical processes of this universe and greater respect to non-human apes. It forces us to give greater respect to all the physical aspects of God’s world and to all the living creatures He has shaped within that world. It shouldn’t at all lessen the respect we feel for God or for Creation or for individual creatures, including human beings.