It’s what many scientists are accused of by those who condemn science as “evolutionary materialism” and “evolutionary materialism” with “atheism”.
But what is “reductionism” supposed to mean? Evolution News and Views has an article up today (h/t to bornagain77 at UD) that is a critique of an article on “neuroaesthetics” in PLOS biology.
The EnV article begins:
Evolutionary materialists must believe, at some level, that the experience of beauty can be reduced to actions of neurons in the brain
(my emphasis)
Well, I guess I’m an “evolutionary materialist”, and I’m also a neuroscientist. But I was also trained in the arts, and spent most of my life as a musician. Do I think that “the experience of beauty can be reduced to actions of neurons in the brain”?
Well, it depends on that word “reduced”. I do think that the Leonardo’s painting of Mona Lisa can be “reduced” to a pile of dust, in which, at least in theory, the resulting dust pile had exactly the same mass as the painting itself – and we could, in theory, make an inventory of every molecule in that pile of dust and have a complete list of what made up the Mona Lisa. But of course we would no longer have the painting. It would have been destroyed. Equally, if we made our inventory without first reducing the painting to dust, our inventory would not be equivalent to the painting. The inventory would simply be a list of what the painting is made of, at a molecular level.
However, if we were also to note the location of every painting particle, and the precise molecular composition and orientation of each particle, in the painting, we could then (in theory at least) reconstruct the painting.
Have we now “reduced” the painting to an inventory and a set of coordinates? In a sense, yes. Is this “reduction” the same as the painting? No, it isn’t.
Faced with the choice of viewing the painting and viewing the inventory and the set of coordination, I will choose the painting because it will by far the prettier. The inventory-and-coordinates are simply a set of instructions as to how to make the painting, they are not the painting – and we know this because the set of instructions do not have the same impact on me, as a viewer, as the painting itself does.
So can I add something else to my “reduction” that will give me a “reduced” version of the painting that is equivalent to the painting? Well, I guess I could try a different tack. I could attempt to induce the effect of the painting on my brain by artificially exciting those neurons that would, were I to be faced by the painting, be induced by the painting. And, interestingly we can do this, to some extent – we can, in conscious brain experiments, trigger cascades of neural firing similar to those induced by exposure to some object, and, in so doing, produce in the sensation in our experimental subject of exposure to that object – or at least the memory of some previous exposure. Indeed, that is probably how memory works – a memory emerges when a cascade of neural firing is triggered that is similar to the cascade that was triggered by the initial experience.
Does that mean we have “reduced” the experience of viewing the Mona Lisa to a cascade of neural firing? Well, no. We have induced the experience of viewing the Mona Lisa by triggering an actual cascade of neural firing, but in so doing we have recreated it, we haven’t re-duced it to anything. We’ve simply noted the instructions for building it, just as the inventory and coordinates of the painting were merely instructions for reproducing the painting, not The Thing Itself.
In other words, when scientists “reduce” (bad term) a thing – let’s call it X – to some “materialist” description, they are not saying “this is merely what X is” – they are saying: “this is how you build X”, or, if you prefer, “this is the process from which X emerges, described at the level of the molecule/neuron/quark” whatever. Such a description does not supplant higher level descriptions, such as: “to create a painting with the effect of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo used the technique of chiaroscuro sfumato to soften the eyes and mouth, so that when we focus on the eyes, the mouth resolves into a smile, yet when we focus on the mouth, the eyes are the feature that seems to be smiling”. And we could even get more technical, and note that peripheral vision is better attuned to low spatial frequencies, and the chiaroscuro technique is essentially a high pass filter. Or less technical: we could note that we find the Mona Lisa beautiful because she appears to radiate a serenity to which we all aspire, and gazes back at us in a way that seems to radiate her blessing.
In my view, none of these description is any more, or less, “reductionist” than any other; they are simply answers to different questions. The fact that I, as a neuroscientist, know that the corners of the Mona Lisa’s eyes and mouth have the effect they do because they are processed largely by magnocellular neural pathways, rather than parvocellular pathways does not mean that I don’t feel moved as my eyes scan her face, and she seems to smile on me.
Descriptions are just that – descriptions. They are not The Thing Itself. And some descriptions are minutely physical/material, and some are conceptual and subjective. The fact that one is a good description, doesn’t mean the other isn’t.
None are complete, and none can ever be. But that doesn’t stope them being informative and useful.
A good topic.
As far as I can tell, “reductionism” is a philosophers term, not a scientists term. Many scientists use it, but are not at all clear on what they mean. Philosophers aren’t all that clear either, but they are clearer than scientists. There seem to be several different schools of philosophical thought, about what is being reduced to what.
In a comment on another blog, I recently wrote:
I see reductionism as absurd. It may be that when I do mathematics, it is all a matter of the motion of atoms in my brain. However, that does not in any way explain mathematics in terms of the motion of atoms.
I’ll stand by that.
We can look at music as a sequence of changes of sound pressure over time. That’s about what is recorded on a music CD. Or, we can look at music as a blend of different pitches, which is roughly what is written on the sheet music. In mathematics, we can connect the two using Fourier analysis. Mathematicians talk of this as a duality between the time view and the frequency view. We have many similar dualities in mathematics.
The Fourier transform is not anything like a reduction, in the sense that philosophers use the term. Simple descriptions in the time view transform to very complex (infinitely complex) accounts in the frequency view. And simple descriptions in the frequency view transform into very complex accounts in the time view.
It seems to me that their might be an analogous relation between the mechanical descriptions of physics, and the intentional descriptions from a lot of human language. So connecting the two is not likely to be a reduction, in the sense that philosophers use that word. It would be more like a transform, with simple descriptions in the language of physics turning into complex descriptions in the language of intentionality, and simple descriptions in the language of intentionality turning into complex descriptions in the language of physics.
In practice, we participate in both worlds. We use the language of physics where that is simpler, and we use intentional language where that is simpler. And we often mix them up to get the benefits of both.
I don’t see how their preferred solution to “just neurons firing”, i.e the brain is just a “radio” for your real brain somewhere out there, gets anybody anywhere as presumably that “real brain” is made of something analogous to neurons anyway.
They just push it back a level and claim victory. V.odd.
Isn’t the EnV article just a different spin on the old “confusing the map for the terrain” issue so many creationists seem to suffer from? They wish to accuse “materialists” of believing that cakes are nothing more than the sum of some ingredients – a fallacy of composition – arguing that materialists can’t possibly accept that “taste” and “texture” exist because these are not material properties of any of the individual ingredients.
But of course they are; they are emergent properties of those ingredients under specific environmental conditions. And we “materialists” can tell the difference between a baked cake and the instructions and ingredients for making it. Once the ingredients achieve the state of “cakiness”, we can then also make subjective qualitative assessments of the cake – the pleasingness of the cake texture, its aesthetic beauty, its fulfilling flavor, and so on. None of these attributes apply to the ingredients and recipe; those are just a map.
So no, I don’t think that the OP’s premise is valid. We do not (or at least this “evolutionary materialist” does not) believe that the experience of beauty can be reduced to actions of neurons in the brain. The firings of neurons that produce an image of the Mona Lisa – is, as Lizzie noted,is a road map of how the image comes about in our brains, not a reduction of the beauty of the image itself. Beauty is our subjective assessment of preferential features. The preferences themselves are like the cake; they are an emergent property of neurological behavior, learning, and environmental stimuli.
I woukd like to know what you “evolutionary materialist” means by subjective.
Also an assessment mean an evalutaion against references, how we get the references in order to make an assessment ”
Again learning is a process that needs references how they “emerge”?
It’s arbitrary. An alien would look alien to us, to other aliens – not so much.
Blas, speaking for myself, by “subjective” I mean what I experience or report from my own literal and metaphorical point of view. By “objective”, I mean what independent observers can agree on.
Subjective:
Not impartial: based on somebody’s opinions or feelings rather than on facts or the evaluation of evidence.
We compare paintings to other paintings, cakes to other cakes, sculptures to other sculptures, and so on to get references. We also compare how we feel before we look at a painting and after we look at the painting and get references from that.
I like these definitions Lizzie. Nicely put.
Which is the difference between opinions and evaluation of evidence?
So, we make a direct relationship between what we see and the satisfacción we get. Then the better art is that produce more satisfaction.
Ok, it is arbitrary. My question is what is it and where it come from for a materialist.
How do you get your point of view?
Objective means that independent observers has the same point of view then?
Blas,
Perhaps it would help me understand the question (as I’m somewhat unclear) if you explained where it comes from for you, presumably a “non-materialist”.
But we get the “references” simply the same way we get everything else. We absorb our cultural heritage, in short. Same as you in fact, the non-materialist.
Reductionism in the world of physics has long been passé. The notions of “reducing” physical phenomena to a set of fundamental laws is misleading because we take matter apart to find out what rules operate at the levels of elementary particles.
However, in the focus on taking matter apart, many onlookers miss something extremely important; namely taking matter apart means that there is stuff to take apart. Matter condenses.
When matter condenses, all sorts of phenomena emerge from the collective interactions of simpler parts with each other and with the environment. It is not possible to predict what phenomena will emerge because these phenomena emerge so rapidly and so early in the condensations of matter. Even the simplest compounds are nothing like their constituents; and even in hindsight it is difficult to link emergent phenomena with the properties of more elementary constituents.
Neil Rickert’s Fourier analysis example gets at some important ideas. Fourier analysis and transforms simply break down a waveform into projections onto an orthogonal basis set of frequencies. Fourier analysis is a subset of Hilbert space; it is very much like breaking down a vector into its components along a chosen orthogonal set of axes; except in the case of Fourier analysis, the basis set is a countably infinite set of frequencies for the discrete transform and a continuous set for the Fourier transform.
The Fourier transform doesn’t say anything about what emerges in the perceptions that take place in the brain of an individual when a waveform is synthesized out of an orthogonal basis set. So Fourier transforms are reductionist only in the sense of displaying a waveform in terms of its basis set; how much of each individual frequency it contains.
If anything, Fourier analysis is a good illustration of what is wrong with reductionism in physics; other then giving the shape of a waveform, it says nothing about the emergent effects that a waveform produces on the system on which it impinges.
I suspect that the ID/creationist crowd likes to accuse “Darwinist materialists” of “reductionism” because it makes scientists appear to have no humanity, no empathy, and no sensitivity to beauty, art, and music. It is a political demonizing tactic. Furthermore, attempts by the scientific community to point out emergent phenomena are frequently met with sneers from the ID/creationists.
Human emotions are not reducible to quarks and gluons; they are not even reducible to amino acids and DNA. They emerge from the fantastically complex interactions of billions of complex systems; but that doesn’t make them any less important to a scientist any more than it does for anyone else. In fact, just knowing that condensed matter can do these things generates all the complex emotions of awe and appreciation that art and music do.
Well, I’d say a description, for instance, was “objective” if multiple independent observers could agree on it.
For instance, I might find a particular wine evokes the scent of melons. Others might not get that particular evocation. My description of the wine as “melon-scented” is therefore highly “subjective” – I cannot expect that others will have the same experience when they drink it. On the other hand we can all agree, no matter what our “point of view”, on the alcohol content, because we can measure it to within a small degree of error. The alcohol content is therefore an “objective” observation about the wine.
Yes, Fourier analysis is an excellent example. As chance would have it, I have just done an interesting exercise, inspired by a related thought. I am dealing with Magnetoencephalography (MEG) data at the moment, which is a bit like EEG data, in that we get a time course of oscillations of the electromagnetic fields produced by neural activity in the brain.
We usually use time-frequency plots to “take apart” the raw signal, and very interesting they are too. But it would obviously be wrong to think that the actual signal is produced by a bank of sine-wave oscillators in the brain – it’s just that we can break down the signal as though it was. But it’s always struck me that our auditory system has excellent built-in analysis software for detecting patterns in oscillatory data, so I transposed the signals up into the auditory frequency band. Fascinating! I’ve been listening to the brain talking to itself! (I made a stereo wave file, with time courses from two different brain regions, one in each ear).
OK, back to the topic….
A friend of mine suffered a stroke recently; and it resulted in numbness and weakness on one side of his body.
He has been in rehab retraining his muscles and is making good progress; but he tells me that pressure on the bottom of one of his feet and on the side of that leg he now perceives as heat.
I’m a great fan of Douglas of Douglas Hofstadter, and found his book I am a Strange Loop very moving, as well as stimulating, of course. And he is a great art-lover, especially music. There is a fantastic interview with him here which addresses at least some of what I was trying to say in the OP.
Methinks someone is protesting too much here.
In the end something has to cause our subjective sense of beauty. What do you propose that thing is if it is not neuronal connections?
For mine, we should start with the basic, biological fact that human brains are supremely good at matching patterns. What human brains are not necessarily good at is ensuring that we can settle on explanatory patterns that are agreed to be true and reliable (in this case, what you see as beautiful, I might see as execrable).
The ability to recognise a pattern as “beautiful” is contingent on what “beautiful” means for a specific social group. Humans “read” things as beautiful or ugly because what we see conforms to socially agreed patterns.
Since we use our brains to work out what is socially agreed, I don’t see any reason to go looking for an aesthetic sense that lies outside of how we understand the brain works.
But “how the brain works” is not the same as “how people work”. If we want to understand why people find certain things beautiful, or why some people find certain things beautiful and the other people find the same things execrable, then we need to ask the question at a higher level than the brain. Neuroscience might tell us (and I am sure it will) a lot about the neural processes that give rise to the perception that a thing is beautiful, and may even tell us why certain things have the effect they do (magnocells and sfumato, for instance). But if we want to ask the question: why do I find the Mona Lisa beautiful, and (say) you don’t, then fMRI isn’t going to tell us the answer, although it might confirm that our perceptions are different, and also tell us which circuits are implicated in your disgust response and my awe.
Perhaps the Mona Lisa was a bad example, but George W Bush’s painting of his own legs in the bath was an interesting one – some people hated it, some people loved it; I was in the latter camp, and could sense my own reluctance to like it (not being a George W Bush fan) being overcome by a sense of empathy – a sense that the painting was giving me an insight into what it might like to be be George W Bush, and even the sense (for the first time!) that George W Bush might have more in common with the rest of humanity than I had hitherto given him credit for.
The neural mechanisms by which these thoughts arose might be at least partially
delineated (well, some time in the future!) by an fMRI scan, but the results would be the answer to a quite different question to the one I posed: “why did I like that painting?” It’s the wrong level of analysis to address it. Not because the world is not material, but because we can parse the world at very different levels of abstraction, and questions posed at one level are not addressed by answers sought at another.
Joe,
A human programmer created MS Office. In fact, a team of them.
One of them is called Richard Brodie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Brodie_(programmer)
Now, I have accounted for the origin of MS Office. Please do the same for biological life from an ID perspective. Fair’s fair.
Opinions cannot be checked against a standard. Evidence can.
I don’t have any idea what you mean by “better art”. I provided a description of how we evaluate “beauty” (or taste) without reducing it to atomic particles or matter and physics. Don’t know what you are getting at in your question above.
There is no such thing as beauty. its a human pyth.
All there is IS accuracy in symmetry.
We live in a inaccurate world and so the few examples of this accuracy are classified as beauty.
In wiki on math those studying math see beauty in math for the same reason.
Its a sign of God having originally made everything perfect.
We know it when we see it.
So a painting like Mona couldn’t possibly be attractive except in its accurate symmetry.
Its parts don’t tell the truth of its identity.
Its reduction misses its existence as a entity.
Biological etc etc entities are based greatly on deeper laws and so reduction is rightly seeked for it as in physics.
Why then isn’t a circle the most attractive thing? It has the most symmetry.
I recently saw Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring in person – it’s on display in San Francisco right now. I recommend that anyone within a day’s drive make the trip to see it. Awesome, in the true sense of that word: inducing awe.
The thing that I thought interesting at the time, and also in context of this discussion, is that even a competent reproduction of that painting fails to induce the same awed sensation in me.
As usual, Lizzie’s analysis is spot on. Reductionism fails, but then again, that’s not what we’re doing when we do “science” instead of “art”.
I actually went and tried to look “pyth” up. Damn you Roberts!
😛
Yes, I’m always moved when I see a painting for real. Nowadays we so often know a painting very well from reproductions, before we actually see it. I saw this painting, for real, a few years back, having known it for years before from reproductions, and even written part of a dissertation on it!
It moved me to tears.
I still find myself in the bah humbug camp.
Any analysis that attempts to abstract a signal from a noisy reality involves applying “reductionism”. Science does it in experimentation by controlling for inessential variables.
“Common sense” does it when crossing a street by searching for the signal of approaching traffic amid the noise of parked cars, passers-by, flashing lights and so forth.
Even art appreciators do it by extracting the signal of emotional response from the noise of the context in which the object is observed. Lizzie’s comment about being more moved by a painting than by its reproduction makes this point very neatly.
Of course you do! Because the signal is stronger! The pattern (the intent of the artist) is more easily discerned from the distracting background.
You reductionist art critic, you.
It is in its place. The curves of a women are circles or half circles.
Beauty is by definition about hierarchy .
for the winners there must be common presumptions.
So beauty is clearly about right answers as opposed to wrong ones.
A beautiful horse is only way because of accuracy in its symmetry.
Inaccuracy, however mild, loses its status as beautiful.
In reality however is just means there is common conclusions about what something should like.
This because it was gOds pklan for things to be accurate.
So much failure from accuracy created the status of beauty.
In fact it doesn’t exist.
Just right verses wrong .
Would you believe in Canada myth is spelled pyth because of the French Canadians???
Otherwise its a typo.
If you found this word it might of greatly helped me or hurt me.
Maybe there is a beauty to spelling accuracy.