One of my favorite parts of Salon are their periodic discussions on philosophy and science, which always have a very unique perspective.  The most recent of these articles is an interview with Alva Noë, a philosopher in the Philosophy of Mind field at Berkley.  Noë’s central thesis in his work is that the contemporary drive towards a reductionist and purely neurological understanding of human consciousness is deeply flawed.  In other words, as the article is titled, “You are not your brain.”  He explains that understanding the brain is not enough to understand consciousness because consciousness itself revolves around an interaction between the neurological systems of the body and the outside world.

This is a sentiment that echoes feelings that I have had for some time, namely that there is really an over-emphasis in modern intellectual thinking towards reductionism.  We feel that if we understand the pieces that make up a system, we have understood the system as a whole.  While this works extremely well in the physical sciences, I fear that in the behavioral sciences this approach is misguided and exists with entirely too narrow of an epistemological framework.  Noë describes this narrowness as the difference between thinking of the brain as an engine and thinking of it as a car on a road.  Engines are essential for driving but understanding ‘driving’ requires more than understanding the engine.  I think that a better example would be the difference between a computer program that sits on a hard disk as a series of magnetic charges that represent 0s and 1s and a computer program as it is executed and experienced by the user.  The understanding of what ‘the program’ is differs vastly between the two!

Noë gives philosphical reasons why this is dangerous, but I would like to suggest that this has more broad implications for the average person.  It is easy to pick up the reductionist sentiment from media and news and the perspective is much more deeply entrenched in contemporary consciousness than one might first believe and many people are reductionists without even realizing it because they are simply unaware that alternatives exist.

I think it is terribly important to understand the world in a way that is both accurate (informed by science) but that is simultaneously meaningful.  Accuracy is wonderful, but it loses its value in a world that is so informed by accuracy and science that it cannot appreciate meaning, beauty, art, religion and sentiment.