Krimel said to dmb: Here is a simple bottom line kind of question. What exactly to you find objectionable about seeking after necessary causes? After all that is all I can asking of reductionism.
dmb says: Since "seeking after necessary causes" is your phrase, I'm not so sure that it characterizes my objection. My objection to reductionism has been a response to specific statements. [Krimel] Since the phrase I used characterizes my position, I really don't know what you have been going on about these past three years. If you had a history of raising specifies objections to specific issues I would not be asking the question. But that is not what you have done. You have consistently sought to ignore, miscast, or dismiss things I have said simply by slapping that label on them. [dmb] You said you liked the idea that "brains secrete consciousness", for example. That's reductionism. The reasons for finding this objectionable have already been stated. Again, this would be a matter of explaining social and intellectual level phenomenon in term of biological mechanism. [Krimel] This is indeed a good example. I believe I was quoting Searle but it was lumped in with similar concepts like the mind is what the brain does or that the mind is a property of brain activity. First of all none of these are explicitly reductionistic since they do not imply that is all that is going on. Obviously the brain interacts with the environment of which it is a part. It is a process and consciousness emerges from the process. But it is not as though anyone has locked down an answer to the hard problem. I believe I was voicing an opinion about what I see as the most promising approaches to the problem. [dmb] An extreme reductionist would want to explain everything in terms of the simplest constituent parts, although I hope this is a hypothetical person and that nobody goes that far. Anyway, reducing social or intellectual patterns to the biological patterns which support them has a way of leaving the social and intellectual questions unanswered and unaddressed. [Krimel] You have thus far shown no capacity to discriminate any subtlety with regards to degrees of reductionism nor for that matter anywhere here have you said explicitly what is wrong with any version of it. I can't imagine any justification for the position that biology has nothing to do with social or intellectual patterns. It certainly isn't reductionism to ask what contributions biology makes or how it supports higher level patterns or how those patterns are shaped by the static patterns that give rise to them. [dmb] There's nothing wrong with studying the small stuff. But explaining the big stuff in terms of the little stuff, the complex in terms of the simple, really only makes sense within flatland materialism. [Krimel] Actually what we have learned about chaotic strange attractors and fractional dimensionality suggests that unpredictably complex events arise from extremely simplicity. The explanations derived from this are only "flat" if one chooses to see them that way or in your case not to look at all. [dmb] The levels of the MOQ, by contrast, paints a pluralistic picture. The forms and structures of one level can't be used to explain another because they play by different rules, so to speak. People object to reductionism for all kinds of reasons but it is especially naughty in this context, in a discussion of the MOQ. This plurality of emergent structures demands an epistemological pluralism. [Krimel] As I understand pluralism from the article you recommended it just means that we can look at things from different perspectives and that they look different from these different points of view. I challenge you to find an example of anything I have ever said that is opposed to this. In fact I have made of big deal, along with Arlo, about Michael Tomasello's view on the ontogentic and phylogenetic importance of this. I have also mentioned quite few times at length the significance of the blindmen and the elephant. [dmb] Each kind of thing is best understood in terms of own scale and context, point and purpose. Each has to be studied in its own terms. Consciousness is a topic of investigation in philosophy, psychology, sociology, religion, and a gazillion other fields. All this stuff should all be added to our knowledge about what brains do before one makes pronouncements about what consciousness is. Reductionism simplifies things, which can be convenient and emotionally comforting, but when it comes to something as complex as human consciousness, that's just a grotesque distortion, a narrowing beyond recognition. [Krimel] Silly me I thought bringing up points of interest from many of those fields would add to the discussion here and yet you typically not only dismiss my remarks but entire fields of study by labeling them reductionist or flatland or some other romantic excuse for not doing your homework. [dmb] Thus, as Pirsig says, there is no direct connection between biology and intellect. The social level is the middle term and they both have a relationship with the social level but not with each other. Likewise, psychology has direct connection with molecular biology. This is especially obvious if we're talking about analytic or analytical psychology rather than behaviorism, which sort of pretends to be a biological science and tends to be reductionist. [Krimel] No direct connection between biology and intellect? Try removing the biology. What are you left with? Try removing intellect? How long will the biology last? It seems to me that ignoring the connection really isn't going to get you anywhere. I applaud your interest in psychology but you really ought to know that Jung's contributions to the field are almost entirely confined to therapeutic applications. His contribution to the science and study of psychology was just about zilch. Now I like Jung, don't get me wrong, but comparing Jung to behaviorism is like comparing Dr. Seuss to John Irving. [dmb] Think about Pirsig's correction of Descartes. What he didn't see was that there is a middle term between mind and body, between intellect and biology. His famous line is re-written to say, "French culture and language exists, therefore I think, therefore I am." Descartes didn't see how much his consciousness depended on the social level. And so, more specifically, the idea that "brains secrete consciousness" also ignores the role of culture and language in making consciousness possible. It seems to be the neurological equivalent of Descartes mistake. [Krimel] Notice that nothing Pirsig says allows us to dismiss Descartes' cogito. Descartes constructed it to answer any possible objection a skeptic could raise. The objections that are raised against Descartes are all about where he goes from the cogito and not about the cogito itself. Taken in the context he used it, Pirsig was simply making a point about the importance of culture. But frankly culture has nothing whatever to do with the validity or importance of the statement itself. In fact if you pursue Pirsig's statement to its extreme then Descartes should have said something like, "The Milky Way galaxy has a spiral arm containing a solar system with planet Earth in it, on which French culture and language exists, therefore I think, therefore I am." Is that your idea of how to remove the pernicious effects of you boogey man? [dmb] Also think about how reductionism would compare to the things Rosenthal was saying about the inexhaustible richness of experience and the partial nature of all our intellectual descriptions. Temperamentally, at least, these are very opposite tendencies. [Krimel] She sees inexhaustible riches, some see extraneous variables. You say potato, I say potatoe. Any conceptual system can be characterized by what it leaves in and what it leaves out. Communication involves encoding and decoding and at every stage something gets left out. Conceptualization of any sort is a lossy process. When we select as foreground, certain salient static features from the dynamic background, we leave others behind. [dmb] Selling reductionism to a bunch of Pirsig fans is like selling polka to a punk rocker. He's no use for it and he's unlikely to admire your taste. [Krimel] So why are you telling me this, Dave? Other than being the only argument you seem to know how to use; I don't see the point. If you actually understood what I am saying you would see how clueless this sounds. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
