Sunday's LA Times carried a fascinating op-ed piece, by Seed magazine editor Jonah Lehrer, on the limitations of contemporary neuroscience. He writes:
The success of modern neuroscience represents the triumph of a method:
reductionism. The premise of reductionism is that the best way to solve
a complex problem -- and the brain is the most complicated object in
the known universe -- is to study its most basic parts. The mind, in
other words, is just a particular trick of matter, reducible to the
callous laws of physics.
But the reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very
real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into
tiny pieces. Look, for example, at a Beethoven symphony. If the music
is reduced to wavelengths of vibrating air -- the simple sum of its
physics -- we actually understand less about the music. The
intangible beauty, the visceral emotion, the entire reason we listen in
the first place -- all is lost when the sound is reduced into its most
elemental details. In other words, reductionism can leave out a lot of
reality.
Lehrer isn't a fuzzy-headed idealist. He credits reductionist neuroscience with, for example, great and beneficial advances in pharmaceuticals. "A work of art," he writes, "obviously isn't a substitute for a scientific experiment -- Proust isn't going to invent Prozac." But, he continues:
the artist can help scientists better understand what, exactly, they
are trying to reduce in the first place. Before you break something
apart, it helps to know how it hangs together.
As a lover of Joyce's Ulysses, which traces many of the thoughts of a character during a single day, I am grateful to Lehrer for a quotation I didn't know about:
Virginia Woolf . . . famously declared that the task of the
novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary
day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in
appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness."
And as a lover of Shakespeare's Tempest, which gives this blog its name, I especially noted Lehrer's conclusion:
Unless our science moves beyond reductionism and grapples instead with
the messiness of subjective experience -- what James called a "science
of the soul" -- its facts will grow increasingly remote. The wonder of
the brain is that it can be described in so many ways: We are such
stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. What we need
is a science that can encompass both sides of our being.
In between the passages I've quoted are many more I could have. In my browser, the essay is less than four screens long; you'll be rewarded for the time you spend.
(Thanks to Seed magazine for the link.)
Chapter One of Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism begins with an epigraph from the Gospel of John:
