Blog #9

The idea of reductionism, breaking complex things into smaller things that explain them, is hurtful to understanding of the historic philosophical questions such as “who are we?” Some scientists may believe that the idea of reductionism is helpful to reach the destination of fully understanding a scientific phenomenon. According to Steven Pinker in “Science is Not Your Enemy,” the idea of reductionism is confused with the term intelligibility, though they explain the same process. Pinker believes that reductionism is considered a sin, but intelligibility “explain[s] a complex happening in terms of deeper principles,” which do not “discard its richness” (Pinker). This refutes the idea that reductionism or intelligibility is hurtful to the understanding of long searched for answers of these philosophical questions, although Jonah Lehrer in “The Future of Science… Is Art?” believes that this processes is exactly what is limiting our knowledge. A specific location where reductionism is hindering is when observing self consciousness. Lehrer states that “our self-consciousness seems to require a top-down approach,” due to how long we have been researching the brain with neuroscience and still have not progressed any further in understanding consciousness (Lehrer). A top-down approach would involve artistic or creative thinking instead of using a break down of scientific processes. This may be the answer to the question “who are we?” and “why are we here” which science has been searching for for centuries.

In order for science to progress, scientific claims and findings need to “nurture opportunities for the falsifications of its own beliefs” (Pinker). In Pinker’s essay “Science is Not Your Enemy,” he believes that science needs to constantly be proven wrong in order for us to understand the world. He believes that we need to integrate “skepticism, open debate, formal precision, and empirical tests” when trying to disprove scientific findings (Pinker). I believe that this is a valid claim because if everything we think about were believed as fact, there would be a lot more error in science than there already is. Although Pinker offers mostly scientific approaches to falsification of science, I believe that this is where art could be the most useful for debunking things that are not actually correct. Open debate is a good start to this, as it uses the human mind to look at both sides of a claim and try to break it apart. This could go a step further if we added creative ways to debate or debunk scientific studies. If humans are able to use their consciousness instead of scientific tests to falsify or qualify something, then we will be fast approaching the goal of breaking through scientific limitation.