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of Deniz Cem Önduygu

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Tag "reductionism"

Find Out What You Are

18-05-2012
Fun, My Work, Philosophy, Science, Thoughts

This is a personal project that dates back to 2009; I’ve been postponing sharing it because I wasn’t sure it was finished. I still am not sure but I decided it waited too long in my computer and would better develop with comments from other people.

My challenge to myself was to map these different adjectives with yes/no questions that have the pronoun “you” as their subject. First, let me make it absolutely clear that I would easily admit that this whole thing is a gross oversimplification if pushed; I even deliberately went for the fun factor in some questions/answers. Secondly, I salute those who see the seriousness in it, and below the image are some explanations for them.

This chart was done with basic ontology and epistemology in mind – with some weight on modern philosophy of mind; it doesn’t include ethics or political philosophy because the adjectives for these areas of philosophy are not mutually exclusive with the ones that are on the chart: one can be a non-reductive physicalist and a Marxist at the same time. I realize that even some of the ones on the chart are not always mutually exclusive, but they at least deal with the same type of questions and therefore can be said to be “in competition” with each other. Maybe the most troubling in this respect are the nihilist/postmodernist categories: a nihilist can be a biological naturalist, but I expect a true nihilist/postmodernist to answer a question like “Can you be duplicated within a computer?” with “I don’t care” or “It doesn’t matter” or “It’s an invalid question” – they would have a unique indifferent stance towards those questions. That’s why I included them in this chart.

My apologies go to those who take this thing seriously enough to feel bad that they are excluded from it; I will do my best to include other adjectives (related to the concept of the chart) if you point them out to me. I know, for instance, that Hindus are missing, but their beliefs are too diverse for me to understand, generalize and transform into one question-answer. It should be obvious that, even though I did my research for the majority of the adjectives, I went deeper in areas I was most familiar with.

A final note: You don’t really get to be non-reducible just because you believe it and consider yourself a non-reductive physicalist. While the questions on this chart are about what you think you are, the answers in fact reveal what you are – the adjective you get in terms of your theories/beliefs.

Biology as Ideology

29-02-2012
Philosophy, Review, Science

Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNABiology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA by Richard C. Lewontin

Lewontin is a leftist and he couldn’t be more obvious about it. When he unconvincingly accuses all science of being ideological, it seems like he’s preparing the ground for and justifying the strong ideology behind his own writing. He refuses the extreme idea that genes are the source of all causation in the human sphere, only to replace them with bourgeoisie and capitalism! Yes, he takes particular delight in linking everything from reductionism as a scientific tool to the information-theoretical paradigm in biology back to “the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century”. It’s funny how reductionistic leftists can become when trying to refute reductionism.

It’s one thing to dream of a more egalitarian, more democratic and more fair society; it’s another to filter facts according to that dream. I find this confusion especially troubling for a scientist: everything he writes suggests that if ever science shows beyond dispute that intelligence – or some other “good” human quality – is differentially inherited, he will reject that conclusion just because it’s not in line with his precious ideals of equality and fairness. (He actually has a go at it in the book, and maybe this isn’t much of a problem for him since he admits that scientists are inevitably ideological creatures.)

Speaking of fairness, I actually loved the book (1) because it is nicely designed and (2) because Lewontin certainly has a rare gift of balancing our thinking against the sometimes lazy Dawkins-Dennett line of thought by pointing out neglected perspectives and offering a lot of food for thought. The problem is that – just like his ally Gould – often he’s pushing it too far, to the point that the poor arguments injected at those specific points compromise his otherwise amazing authorship.

Another problem worth noting is that in some of the corrections he proposes for the Dawkinsian reductionism – again, just like Gould – he is actually overlapping with what Dawkins says, only with a different vocabulary: the contructionism (“the environment of organisms is coded in their DNA” – p.112) that he defends against adaptationism is the same as Dawkins’s concept of extended phenotype (1982), and the below passage with which he closes the book (1991) is one step shy of memetics (1976).

(…) the genes, in making possible the development of human consciousness, have surrendered their power both to determine the individual and its environment. They have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, social action.

In this respect, he reminds me of Dennett’s metaphor for Gould in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: the boy who cried wolf.

Freedom and Neurobiology

10-10-2011
Philosophy, Review

Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power (Columbia Themes in Philosophy)Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power by John R. Searle

Searle is always good at summarizing things, and the introduction entitled “Philosophy and the Basic Facts” offers a nice big-picture, including my favorite part of the book: a list of recent (last century) – and fortunate, in my opinion – changes in philosophy:

  1. Epistemology is no longer at the center of philosophy.
  2. Philosophy of language is no longer at the center of philosophy.
  3. Systematic large-scale philosophy is possible again.
  4. There is now no sharp distinction between philosophy and other disciplines.

The chapter on free will, however, comes along very dry as we witness the classic Searle reasoning through nothing but plain common sense and dismissing fruitful (and possibly accurate) ideas/theories on the basis that they are “intellectually very unsatisfying” (p. 62), or “literally incredible” (p. 77).

The most obvious and even fun case is on pages 45–46 where he literally uses his nemesis Dennett’s heterophenomenology approach (“Granted that we have the experience of freedom, is that experience valid or is it illusory?”), only to discard the illusion answer as it is “absolutely astounding”. One wonders how many more counter-intuitive facts we have to discover in order for him to abandon his intuitions; apparently the Copernican, Darwinian and Einsteinian revolutions weren’t enough.

In the end Searle declares that there are two viable answers to the question of free will: epiphenomenalism (i.e. free will in its ordinary sense is an illusion) and quantum indeterminism. For the latter, he bypasses the common criticism (“randomness isn’t freedom”) by proposing that randomness at the micro level may not necessarily imply randomness at the macro level. Yes, enter the almighty emergence…

For a book with a such promising title, it is hugely disappointing to find out that the two chapters “Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology” and “Social Ontology and Political Power” were written separately and only relate to each other as parts of a “much larger philosophical enterprise”. Nevertheless, the second chapter has proved useful to me with the concept of “desire-independent reasons for action”, getting close to answering a question pending in my mind for years: What motivates a rational person to vote in elections while she knows that her single vote isn’t going to change anything?

I must confess that, despite all its disappointments, I realize that I still like the book. I fear it may be because it has a marvelous cover.

House MD: Stories Worth Watching

07-01-2010
Art, Philosophy, Thoughts

I’m not a big fan of stories. In fact, I lost my interest in stories a long time ago. I easily get bored when I’m exposed to a story, so much so that I would rather read an article on a subject that I don’t like at all than read a story – real or made up by someone. I like to learn things, I want people to say what they have to say as directly as possible, and I’m not interested at all if all they have is a pretty little story.

It was sad that all required reading were novels when I was in school; we were left, perhaps unintentionally, to think that book equals novel, and reading equals reading stories. I still remember how thrilled (and mad against my past teachers) I was when I first discovered that there are other things to read than stories: books on science, philosophy, art, design… A treasure carefully hidden by education.

For a long while now, my rule on stories when it comes to reading has been pretty strict and simple: I don’t read stories. But it gets a little more complicated when it comes to visual storytelling. For one thing, watching is easy – stories aren’t worth the effort of reading, but I can watch them alright when I’m too tired or too bored. Plus, I get kicks out of good tricks of visualization as a visual thinker. For one reason or the other, I have watched some TV series like 24, Lost, Fringe, Two and a Half Men and How I Met Your Mother. They all were little doses of entertainment in days of work or boredom; and with time, I lost interest in all of them. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be a “fan” of a TV series until I hit upon House MD. It was different.

I was introduced to House MD by my girlfriend who said “You have to watch this, there is a guy who thinks like you and another who looks like you!” But these personal identifications aren’t the only reason why House MD is so special in my view – there is an objective one. Amongst all the shows I watched and I know of second-hand, House MD has a special condition. It isn’t an all-embracing mythology like the others. A hardcore intellectual standpoint, a strict worldview is described, even advocated in House MD. It eliminates all old/new sanctities from religion to humanism; touches all the hot spots from free will to love, from death to polygamy with a physicalistic and evolutionistic approach; it mocks all conformist courtesies and habits. Believe it or not, episode by episode it piles a complete modern philosophical system with its ontology, epistemology and ethics. Considering how subtle the implementation is, this show fits into one of the definitions of good art as far as I’m concerned; stories of philosophy and science.

But can good art also be a popular culture item? To my surprise, House MD does all this within the popular culture: everybody loves it. I’ve never seen someone who doesn’t. And why is this interesting at all? As I said before, what House MD does is to proudly present a radical worldview – that I personally embrace – to the public, and that’s why I’m so interested in what people think of it. I’m pretty sure that nearly none of those people around me who “absolutely love” House can tolerate the worldview presented in the show. These are all regular people who say “Bless you” when somebody sneezes, or believe in the sanctity of human life. I’ve heard “House? It’s awesome!” from such people that I wondered if we were watching the same show. Something doesn’t add up.

One possibility is that they are not aware of what they’re watching and that all they understand from the show is how “awesome” Gregory House is. This doesn’t sound plausible to me because it is the very same philosophical and social standpoint I described that makes House who he is. Another probability is that they notice the intellectual blizzard going on but this doesn’t trigger anything in their minds apart from House becoming as cool a character as Barney Stinson; it is all cast aside as a tool used for the dramatic unfolding of the episode. Either way, all these people continue to watch House MD as if they’re watching How I Met Your Mother, and to perceive it at the level of “who did what to whom” – the level of story that I despise.

Either position seems tragic to me. I’m still waiting to meet a clever, honest and coherent person, interested in more than the story, saying “I watched House MD, they have good stories and interesting characters but the worldview presented there bothered me, so I’m not a real fan of it”. I’m not that naive to expect everyone to think on what they watch, but, I mean, nobody? Not one?

The Story of a Clever Young Man

26-06-2009
My Work, Philosophy, Science, Thoughts

Since I watched Wittgenstein by Derek Jarman and fell in love with the story told by J. M. Keynes (John Quentin) to Ludwig Wittgenstein in his death bed, I’ve been thinking of ways to visualize it.

“Let me tell you a little story.

There was once a young man who dreamed of reducing the world to pure logic. Because he was a very clever young man, he actually managed to do it. And when he’d finished his work, he stood back and admired it. It was beautiful. A world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy. Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching to the horizon.

So the clever young man looked around the world he had created, and decided to explore it. He took one step forward and fell flat on his back. You see, he had forgotten about friction. The ice was smooth and level and stainless, but you couldn’t walk there. So the clever young man sat down and wept bitter tears. But as he grew into a wise old man, he came to understand that roughness and ambiguity aren’t imperfections. They’re what make the world turn. He wanted to run and dance. And the words and things scattered upon this ground were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous, and the wise old man saw that that was the way things were.

But something in him was still homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless. Though he had come to like the idea of the rough ground, he couldn’t bring himself to live there. So now he was marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither.

And this was the cause of all his grief.”

This, in my view, is possibly the most beautiful story that can be told of the heroic thinkers who reach ingenious theoretical reductions of the world although they have to lead their lives in the practical “imperfection and indeterminacy”. Call it “the reductionist condition”.

This is a visual interpretation of it by me:

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