By Sophia Gottfried
“Behold! A mind!” The reductionist broke down the door to my academy with a bang. He struts in triumphant and throws down a wet, blobfish-like, object onto the floor with a splat sound. However, something smells fishy to me about this mind, as it does not appear to have any of the properties which my own mind does. Where is the conscious thought, the experience of perception, the experience of being a certain entity? Where do these aforementioned properties come from, and are they special? The reductionist mantra that “the mind is nothing more than the brain” has an inability to answer these challenges, so I propose and will defend an alternative viewpoint: emergentism. Emergentism proposes that mental properties are ontologically distinct from non-mental ones and are irreducible to lower-level components.
Thus, emergentism, reductionism’s worthy arch-enemy, is not only the correct way to view the mind-body problem, but rather all properties. The reductionist believes that all objects ought be merely defined by their compositions, ergo all existents can be reduced to their parts. The modern reductionist project reduces everything, from seals to Goldwin Smith Hall to Steven Pinker, into atoms. Reductionists support this endeavor by championing “ontological simplicity” and by claiming that the whole exists as nothing more than a sum of its parts (Ney, Reductionism). However, these arguments are both flawed: first, radical holism, which states that one object makes up the whole of the universe, maintains an equal amount of, if not more, ontological simplicity than any form of reductionism. In other words, there is no difference between scaling turtles all the way down, or turtles all the way up, and no logical way to argue for one or the other.
Second, many objects have additional properties when assembled from disparate parts. In other words, new properties seem to emerge when components join together. On the micro-level, atoms join to make up molecules and gain certain tendencies (e.g. hydrogen and oxygen atoms forming to make water molecules, which both have more polarization than any given atom within their chemical makeup and collectively exist as liquid at room temperature). On the macro level, organs and bones make up humans, and the whole human has unique properties which the individual components do not, such as being able to throw a ball at a target, pig out at an all you can eat buffet, or get to class on time. It would not make sense to refer to a water molecule as a “couple of atoms” or a human as a “couple of organs” because reducing these objects to their parts would erase the unique behavioral changes that arise when the parts unite.
To prove this proposition from a more formal perspective, take the Law of Identity, a logical principle stating that each object equals itself (Wang, “Logical Truth”). If a “couple of certain atoms” or a “couple of certain organs” is not identical to “a water molecule” or “a human,” then they cannot be ontologically equivalent, and thus reduction fails. This notion has already been proven above, as if we concede that certain smaller units together create bigger units with different properties, then the bigger unit can not be the mere sum of smaller units by virtue of those different properties (see the many examples above), ergo reductionism cannot be universally true.
In the case of the mind, reductionists often argue that the mind equals the brain because they argue that mental properties (sensation, perception, thought) are neural properties (Smart, “Seasons and Brain Processes,” 144). In a reductionist’s own words: “All it claims is that in so far as a sensation statement is a report of something, that something is in fact a brain process. Sensations are nothing over and above brain processes” (Smart 145). However, if we extend the logic above, a sensation, and all other mental processes, must prove to be identical in properties to a brain process in order for this claim to be true. If one used an MRI to observe the brain of someone viewing the Mona Lisa, one would see various electrical signals, but one would not be experiencing the sensation of looking at the Mona Lisa. This notion reveals one property by which brain processes differ from sensations: brain processes are available to be observed by an outsider, whereas one has to be experiencing the sensation in order to observe it. To take an example from Nagel, one can observe all the neurological components of a bat, without knowing what it is like to be a bat (Nagel “What Is It Like to Be a Bat” 436). The latter piece of knowledge can only be accessed by those who have the fortune of being bats because they have the unique physiological structures that can give rise to “batness.”
Another objection by a reductionist: Treating the mind as separate from the brain is not conducive to understanding the science of mental phenomena. Mental processes must become neural processes so that neural processes can become chemical processes, etc., in order for us to have a complete understanding of human existence from a scientific perspective (Smart 142-43). Although, it is not clear how this reduction would add to scientific understanding, as not recognizing the unique attributes of mental processes damns the possibility for science to explain them. In particular, an objection to reduction called the multiple realization argument illustrates why denying the mind damages the scientific processes: different brains, different both in speciation or age, have vastly different brain states for similar mental phenomena (Ney). This reasoning is problematic because from a biological or social science perspective, when one wishes to study a sensation like “love” or “happiness” across multiple species or age groups, it would seem impossible to do so if happiness merely equals a brain state unique to one specific type of physiological structure. Rather, it seems multiple brain states functionally equate to “love” or “happiness,” as demonstrated by the wide variety of creatures who have emotions akin to these (Evans, “What Kind of Emotions Do Animals Feel?”). A particularly poignant example of this issue comes in the form of children with Angelman syndrome, who demonstrate the ability to interact with the world around them and display conscious thought but have brains that appear completely unconscious (Frohlich, “Frames of Consciousness”). Although these children possess the ability to move, play, laugh, and other indicators of an internal subjective world, you would think they would be devoid of any mental activity if you viewed their neurological makeups using brain-imaging technology (Frohlich). They possess consciousness, but not the neurotypical makeup of it. If consciousness equals a mere brain-state, then the reductionist must claim Angelman children have no conscious awareness.
Reductionists sometimes utilize a third argument: that physicalism is true. Physicalism is the belief that everything existent is made of the physical world. What is the “physical world” you might ask? It refers to an ontological category, very disputed among philosophers, with some arguing the physical must be observable, some defining the physical in opposition to the supernatural, and many others coming up with novel definitions. The above contention to emergentism, however, does not respond to my thesis, as emergentism does not contradict physicalism in any sense. Emergentism only states that objects have different properties than all of their parts combined, but it makes no statement on whether the properties are physical or not. Admitting the mind possesses different qualities does not necessarily mean that they possess non-physical qualities. Many physical objects, e.g. hardware of a laptop, give rise to other physical objects with distinct properties, e.g. software, while both the parts and the whole are (mostly considered) physical.
Thus, one need not understate the power of neural properties, erase experience, reject science, nor deny physicalism, to be an emergentist. One only needs to admit that different levels of reality exist and that each of those levels of reality differs in what properties they possess. So no, that squishy pink organ on my floor does not encapsulate the whole of human experience, rather it acts as one piece in an unusually complex puzzle, a puzzle that only reveals its rich image when all components stay in place. Therefore, smashing such a puzzle into pieces will not do you any good, reductionists, nor will denying the existence of the wider picture in the first place. Behold! A mind!
Works Cited
Evans, Karin. “What Kind of Emotions Do Animals Feel?” Greater Good Magazine, July 29, 2019. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_kind_of_emotions_do_animals_feel.
Frohlich, Joel. “Frames of Consciousness.” Aeon, May 18, 2020. https://aeon.co/essays/to-say-what-consciousness-is-science-explores-where-it-isnt.
Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat.” The Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (October 1974): 435-50. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iatl/study/ugmodules/humananimalstudies/lectures/32/nagel_bat.pdf.
Ney, Alyssa. “Reductionism.” In Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/red-ism/#SH2a.
Smart, J. J. C. “Sensations and Brain Processes.” The Philosophical Review 68, no. 2 (April 1959): 141-56. https://fewd.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/inst_ethik_wiss_dialog/Smart__J._1959._Sensations_and_brain_processes_In_Phil_review.pdf.
Wang, Hao. “Logical Truth.” In From Mathematics to Philosophy (Routledge Revivals), 131-66. N.p.: Routledge, 2016. https://books.google.com/books?id=h6FTDAAAQBAJ.