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Reductionism
The conviction that even the most complex of phenomena can be disassembled into their smallest components without any content whatsoever being lost. According to reductionism, all forms of emergence are illusory and seemingly emergent phenomena are nothing other than unusually complex phase transitions. Note that in spite of its extended popularity reductionism is incompatible with Darwinian evolution, for example.
Totalism is driven by the self-sacrifice myth, the libidinal connection to self-hatred. What is brilliant about totalism is how for the first time in history it denies the human being’s feeling that the whole of her is greater than the sum of her many different constituent parts. Totalism appears with reductionism as its faithful side-kick. A whole, according to reductionism, can always be deconstructed into ever smaller components without the phenomenon’s mental weight or value being affected. Thus, the human body can be reduced to just body parts; the body itself has no value as an emergent phenomenon according to the totalists. Therefore, Plato can contend that the body is inadequate to define the human being. He picks out of humans that which arises as an indisputable surplus when the various components are combined, and converts this into a separate magnitude with unique and obviously completely fictitious properties: the soul. If the body parts cannot speak or think for themselves, while the body as a whole and as a unit talks and thinks, it must be a matter of a contribution from the outside. It is this soul, added from the outside, not the emergent body that talks and thinks. After this manoeuvre, Plato returns to the body. The fact that there even exists a feeling or a thought in conjunction with the whole body’s status as – in fact – an entire body only goes to prove, according to this line of argument, the existence of the soul.
Reductionism is based on tautological circular reasoning rather than on scientific insight. But its attraction is enormous, and all the way through to the 20th century, totalism’s many faithful believers actually persevere in trying to weigh the soul in order to thus establish that it constitutes a physiological surplus which in some essential sense it would be possible to distinguish from the body, for example by throwing dying people onto industrial scales, whereby a few grams of exhaled air disappearing from the lungs at the moment of death are immediately interpreted as scientific evidence of the soul’s existence. Reductionism also makes it possible for the totalists to atomise existence, divide it up and sort the world into isolated units, which one naturally does one’s best to try to domesticate and control with the aid of constantly ongoing and increasingly far-reaching moralising. Totalism has a formidable weapon at hand in this endeavour, namely the most important by-product of written language, the law.
With the advent of the law, there is an explosion of what the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls the anthropotechnics, that is, attempts by the human being to domesticate not only plants and animals, but also to develop techniques to curb and tame herself. From the arrival of the law and onwards, anthropotechnics and its concomitant asceticism dominate human life. In an age obsessed with the successful and wealth-generating domestication of plants and animals in the building of civilisation – made possible by and organised through written language – Platonist totalism functions perfectly as the feudalist metaphysics for the masses. As long as reductionism is considered to be natural and beyond all question, totalism maintains its hold on metaphysics. It is not until Leibniz launches his mobilist monadology in the 17th century that totalism starts being questioned.
On the other hand, it is a mistake to imagine that in some mysterious way these emergences are givens, that they follow some kind of metalaw of nature – which in that case must exist even before the genesis of the Universe, which of course is an impossibility in an internal self-creating universe without a creating god that is both external and preceding. The Universe has namely not created itself in the past, it is creating itself all the time. In this, Kauffman breaks radically with reductionism, the fundamental axiom of the sciences since Newton’s heyday. According to reductionism, everything can be deduced downwards in the hierarchy; as if everything that arises higher up and on a later occasion always lies fully preprogrammed at one of the lower levels on a previous occasion. According to reductionism for example, biology is really only an advanced form of chemistry, while chemistry is really only an advanced form of physics, and nothing more than this.
Reductionism quite simply assumes that the Universe and its history follow a preordained trajectory, which in some mysterious way is preprogrammed even in the Big Bang. Bizarrely enough, the actual creation of the Universe must therefore be both well-planned, immediate and long since concluded. Kauffman replies that this absurd idea – the reductionist illusion – arises because philosophers and scientists are fixated on only following the hierarchies from the top down, as if things cannot be anything other or more and greater than the sum of their constituent parts. But if one instead studies the hierarchies from the bottom up along the arrow of time – contrary to the masochistic fantasy of how spiritual power and thereby also physical existence must be structured from the top down – one discovers how suddenly arising emergences change the entire playing field once and for all through contingently introducing new phenomena into existence, which in turn contingently give rise to new paradigms in history. Emergences quite simply generate new laws and rules in at least their own region of the Universe, without these specific behavioural patterns having existed anywhere else previously. Thereby it is proven that the arrow of time is real – rather than illusory, as Plato, Newton and Einstein imagine it to be – and determinism is thus dead.
A dynamic system is regarded as ergodic if its behavioural patterns on average over time concur with its behavioural patterns on average in space. Scientists are fond of ergodic systems since they are relatively simple to turn into mathematics – they are of course, seen as totalities, comfortable constants rather than messy variables – and thereby even relatively simple to use as building blocks. However we do not live in an ergodic universe, which reductionism persistently insists that we do. In fact, nothing occurs in the same way twice, every event is instead completely unique, every apparently identical repetition takes place in a completely new, specific context. Kauffman even claims that without the reductionist illusion, the metaphysical premise for classical atheism also falls down. The insight that we live in a non-ergodic universe must quite simply have dramatic consequences for metaphysics too. An anti-reductionist explanatory model is required that replaces the reductionist model. Existence is enormously much more complicated, the future is enormously much more open and harder to predict, and the Universe is enormously much more active than the reductionist illusion has led us to believe.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58