Example: the utter foolishness of reductionism (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, August 21, 2020, 23:31 (1345 days ago) @ David Turell

Brian Greene produces an other example in his new book. Ed Feser comments:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2020/08/the-particle-collection-that-fancied.html#more

"In Brian Greene’s case we have someone who seems a pleasant enough fellow. But his new book Until the End of Time nevertheless exhibits the usual foibles of the genre. I’ll focus here on what he says about the place of the human mind in the physical universe (the topic of chapter 5). The basic metaphysical assumption is a crude reductionism: All that really exists, we are assured, are basic particles governed by mathematical laws. Hence consciousness, free will, etc. must somehow either be reduced without remainder to these, or eliminated from our picture of reality. The problem Greene wants to solve in the chapter is to explain how this program can most plausibly be carried out.

"There are three main difficulties with Greene’s solution to the problem. First, the solution is a non-starter, because second, he doesn’t understand the problem in the first place. But third, it doesn’t matter, because the reductionistic assumption that creates the problem isn’t true anyway.

"Let’s start with that last point. Greene insists that the “evidence” supports his basic reductionist assumption. In fact, the “evidence” does no such thing, and the assumption is false.

***

"...the methods of physics don’t capture the intrinsic nature of phenomena, but only those relations between phenomena susceptible of mathematically precise description. Hence physics simply doesn’t tell us everything there is to know even about the material world (let alone anything beyond the material world).

***

"Greene claims that the “evidence” provided by the successful predictions made using the laws of physics supports his reductionist position, but it does nothing of the kind. After all, as Greene himself happily acknowledges, there are no laws that allow us rigorously to predict the behavior of systems conceived of as dogs, cats, basketballs, dollar bills, human beings, etc. We have to abstract out all that is distinctive of these things qua biological, cultural, economic, etc. phenomena and describe them instead in the simplifying terms of physics, and then we will get rigorous predictions (though only of those aspects of their behavior that are reflected in the simplifying description).

***

"Let’s move on to the second difficulty, which is that Greene does not understand the problem he is trying to solve. To be fair, he does at least see that there is a problem facing anyone who wants to insist on the kind of reductionism he favors while also affirming the reality of conscious experience.

***

"All the same, he fails to see the depth of the problem, and in particular fails to see that the methods of physics are precisely what generate the problem in the first place, so that it is clueless to think (as Greene does) that the problem can be resolved by further application of those methods.

***

"Like so many other superficial materialists, Greene thinks the problem merely has to do with its being intuitively difficult to see how conscious experiences could be material. No, the problem is much deeper than that – it is that modern physics essentially defines the physical world in a way that entails that consciousness is non-physical. The problem has less to do with consciousness than with matter as physics conceives of it.

***

"Nagel and other contemporary philosophers of mind like David Chalmers have argued that consciousness cannot be explained in physical terms unless physics revises its conception of matter. Greene considers Chalmers’ version of this idea, but replies that there is no “convincing evidence” for such a thesis (p. 135). But the reason he doesn’t see the evidence is, as Orwell would say, because it’s right in front of his nose. It is there in physics’ own conception of matter, which excludes consciousness from the material world precisely by allowing into that world only what can be described in the language of mathematics.

***

"There is a crucial but widely overlooked lesson here. When your basic assumptions are unsound, greater intelligence by no means guarantees that you will come to see this. On the contrary, sometimes you will end up only more hardened in error than a less intelligent person would be, because you will be able to come up with subtler fallacies and cleverer self-deceptions."

Comment: Ed Feser is a strict Aristotelian Catholic philosopher. I'm with him on opinions.