Saturday, March 24, 2012

Reductionism

Does reductionism collapse into eliminative materialism?

I tend to think it does. In fact, I think reductionism is somewhat incoherent, maybe because the concept of 'reduction' is an odd one. I'll try to illustrate:

If A=B, then B=A
If A reduces to B, it is not necessarily the case that B reduces to A.

The reductionist will say that we have mental states, but what they really are are brain states. Or, mental states exist, but they reduce to the physical. Let's take an example:

Say I look at a lightning bolt and I identify it as a lightning bolt. Now, that lightning bolt, I am told, can be reduced to a group of electrons. However, reduction does not go both ways. It doesn't make sense to say that electrons are reducable to a lightning bolt. So reduction says that while A can reduce to B, it may not be the case that B is reducable to A, which is why I say it seems incoherent.

 If I say that a lightning bolt is reducable to electron motion, then what there actually is is the electron motion. There is no actual lightning bolt outside the existence of this electron motion. It would be the case that A=B. Since the lightning bolt is only electrons, then there is only electron motion. 

Now move to the case of the mind. The reductionist says there are mental states, but they reduce to the physical. But if A reduces to B, then only B exists, and there is no A. And since materialists insist that this 'A' be physical in nature, then there I say there can be no mental states. If A=B, then A and B share all the same properties, but it's obvious that mental and physical events don't share all the same properties. 

This is why, amongst other reasons, I think reductionism of the mind moves towards eliminative materialism, and that is a slippery slope, which inevitably leads towards the denial of beliefs, truth, and the concept of self. But one can hardly make an argument for eliminative materialism without contradicting himself, if in fact it is possible. 

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