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.

I had an interesting conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago about the ethical implications of a multi-billion person humanity. This is where the personal and social moral worlds intersect. It seems like many of the systemic evils in our world (poverty, hunger, consumerism, apathy) are caused partly if not entirely by large numbers of individuals acting, well, as individuals, rather than as members of the network we call humanity. This is a different side to ethics that does not really fall much into our everyday consciousness of our ethical decisions.

Many decisions we make daily do not seem to have much of an ethical component to them. They do not involve interaction with, let alone harm to another person. They do not harm us. They seem to be simply actions. Let us make this a bit more concrete with an example about urban sprawl. Urban sprawl is a growing societal problem in the U.S.. It is a large environmental concern, destroying habitats, fueling erosion by crating ground cover, and leading to water shortages. It is deeply related to the growing class-ification of our society. It destroys community and aesthetics through mindless copying of housing designs. Needless to say it is a problem that the U.S. faces. It is also a problem that has moral consequences and is to some extent a moral issue.

However the factors that lead to urban sprawl do not seem to be ethical at all. Individual families want large homes that are not ‘in the goonies’ but also in a place with open spaces and fresh air. Consequently there is a huge demand for the suburban housing market, which then expands (and along with it, the size of our sprawl). This same effect can be seen in a huge number of societal problems: global warming, globalization, recycling problems, white-flight, immigration. The list goes on. It seems as though awide swath of our society’s most endemic social evils have their origins in relatively minor acts of individuals.

This provides a framework for an additional level of meaning in Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which states that we should Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. When I encounter a moral dilemma, I must proceed in a way that I could rationally assent to becoming a law for all times, places, and people. However, we can see also now that the categorical imperative also tells us what situations are in fact moral dilemmas. In fact every situation turns out to be a moral dilemma because every situation will look different when we examine how it would be if everyone were to act that way.

This actually can be helpful to us. There are many situations where we have some inkling of an idea that it is a moral situation, but it does not seem to be particularly important. Recycling comes to mind. Keeping in mind the categorical imperative (and the empirical fact that oftentimes everyone else will do the same thing in that situation), we can learn to see the broader context and ethical significance of such acts and hopefully be further motivated to live them out.

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address – May 21, 2005

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

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