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. 

Qualia

How can qualia be best explained? 


Qualia is a Latin root, meaning'what sort' or 'what kind.' This type of vagueness in the definition is something that, to me, can be best grasped from approaching qualia in a different direction. 


I'm currently reading Lessons from the Light, by Kenneth Ring, where he describes a patient who experienced a NDE who was blind from birth. It's difficult for us seeing folk to understand what being blind from birth would actually be like, but in hearing this woman's account, something became clear that should have been obvious to me. This patient, Vicki, remembers floating out of her body and experiencing the hospital room - actually seeing it. She then floated out of the hospital, and looked around at the city of Concord, where she was hospitalized. After this, she was shot through a tunnel, and the rest of her experience (actually, the entire thing), is like most other NDE's. What's interesting, and separates Vicki's account from others, is that she remembers seeing blood gushing out of body, but was unable to describe the color of the blood. It brings about the interesting concept of trying to describe a color without calling it the color itself, or relating it to another color. If you could use neither of these two things, how would you describe the 'redness' of blood?


There is a difference between colors, in this sense, and say, a book. If I am blind, I could still understand the concepts of 'smooth' and 'thin' and 'rectangular.' I feel the outline of a book, and I am told it is rectangular in its nature. I am told it's pages are thing. But how would I have the cover of the book, an illustration, described to me in colors?


Colors are a good example of qualia - especially obvious in relation to blind people. Vicki was able to recognize 'buildings' and 'rooms' and 'doctors' because she has heard them, and most importantly, felt them. She was able to recognize these things because she experiences them on a day-to-day basis, and upon actually seeing them, relate these experiences she has had to her new-found visual perception. 


The problem with color, is that we only know color through relations. How can a blind person, who is able to see, understand color without it being related? If I see the world 'red' next to the color I perceive as red, I have then grasped the concept of 'red.' Or, in Vicki's case, if she is pushed to answer what color the blood was, she could say 'Well, it was the same color as a stop sign." But Vicki obviously, has no idea of what a stop sign being red actually means. She knows what a stop sign is, and she probably knows they are red, but the concept of 'redness' she is told to associate with that stop sign is completely absent. 


And this brings us, I think, closer to seeing how qualia can be a problem for a materialist conception of the mind. If our mind can be reduced to the physical firing of neurons, in what sense could the firing of neurons ever amount to a color? In this sense, colors seem to be irreducible in nature. No doubt, our brains may have neurons associated with certain colors, but in what sense would these neuronal firings ever amount to 'blueness.' It could be argued that we only experience colors through objects, and when we imagine redness, we only imagine the redness insofar as we see a red object. But what Vicki's story shows us, is that only someone who is able to relate a stop sign to blood, and call the two red, must have an objective color in mind when they call the two red.