How do televisions work?
Why reductionism is incompatible with everyday life.
How do televisions work? There are small people in small sets inside the TV. How does our mind work? There is a homunculus inside our head controlling our thoughts, actions and emotions. How did the Universe come to be? God created it.
The interesting thing these naive answers have in common is that they all lead to an infinite regress. If God created the universe, who created God, and who created that creator? Does the homunculus have another homunculus inside its own head, with another homunculus inside it as well? What if there is a TV on the set inside the TV, will there be another even smaller TV set inside it? Asking these follow-up questions will lead you into a cycle of asking them over and over, forever.
Interestingly, anyone can come up with an elegant solution to the recursion problem: you don’t have to go further into the rabbit hole if you give special and mysterious powers to your first answer, thus breaking the cycle. The TV in the TV set doesn’t show you real images; they are merely pictures, like moving photographs, that seem to show real tangible objects. The homunculi in your head have a particular structure within them, “mind-stuff” that allows them to perform these tasks; they don’t need more homunculi, for a thinking thing is what a homunculus is. God doesn’t need a creator; He is eternal and omnipresent; He exists outside of time and space and, without God, there is no time nor space.
The problem with this approach is that one can quickly recognize that these very solutions can be applied to the very first step of the problem. The TV isn’t showing you a real scene, only a moving picture that appears to be real, so they don’t need to have people inside of them. Our own heads have a particular structure of “mind-stuff” that allows us to behave the way we do and feel the way we feel, so they need no homunculus. The Universe is eternal and encompasses all of space; there was no time before it and there is no space outside of it, so it needs no creator.
So why do (at least some of) these naive answers appeal to us at all? They bring us no real answer, not properly, only the masquerade of an answer. They don’t break down the problem and they do not advance the questions to be asked; instead, one returns to the starting point after the answer is delivered, rather than acquiring new insight. Only by recognizing that these naive answers don’t bring us any closer to the truth may we think of further, better questions to ask.
I would like to argue that the appeal of these answers rests in incredulity. The special properties one needs to invoke to solve the problems are hard to believe in and lead to further questions in and of themselves (how does the TV produce its ilusory images? What might be the structure of this mind-stuff? If the Universe does not have an ultimate creator, what clues do we have in the present for how it might have been in the past, and if it is not a creation, what is the Universe, really? What is its purpose? Why does it exist?). But, if the dillema is between an infinite regress and the invocation of special properties, we have no choice but to accept that these properties must arise somewhere along the way. So why does one choose to place these properties only upon the second step of the problem, and not the first?
Because, I believe, by placing the incredulity upon the second step, one pushes it further away from the familiar. The mystery becomes isolated in its own realm, where all questions come to an end, not because they have an answer, but because the answer is unknowable. In this way, we create the illusion that we are protected from our own ignorance. “I know God is the answer, though I would not be so arrogant as to claim that I understand the nature of God.” And, unless one stops to think about the answer, the problem is solved. The questions are stored inside a black box and, although we don’t know what lies inside it, we are content to know what doesn’t.
One might think that these examples are too far-fetched and that the parallelism between tiny people living inside TVs and the existence of God is absurd. There is a caveat, however: these aren’t the only examples. We do this all the time, because, to function normally, we cannot accept that we do not understand anything around us. So, we trick ourselves: we make a compromise between the homunculi and the recognition that non-conscious mind-stuff must exist. The familiar is exactly what it seems to be, and the explanation of why it is that way is left halfway unanswered. How does a hair dryer work? You push a button and hot air comes out. But how does it do this? Well, there is a mechanism inside it that has the ability to detect the button and push out air (and it has a fan!). How does a speaker work? You push a button and sound comes out. How does a flashlight work? You push a button and light comes out. How does your smartphone work? It has a screen through which you can interact with a graphical interface fiilled with buttons and knobs and scrollable surfaces. All of these explanations are superficial at best.
But of course, you may disagree. You might know how a smartphone and a flashlight and a speaker and a hairdryer work, or at least have a very good notion. And yet... How often do you think of it? A hairdryer is, effectively, a thing that pushes out hot air and we don’t trouble ourselves with the details. As far as we know, there may as well be another tiny hairdryer inside it. And your smartphone’s screen may as well be a window into a dimension where pages and layers of holographic paper are organized in a particular geography that can be travelled across by scrolling and swiping. We may know that the interface is, just like the TV, an illusion of sorts — but we allow ourselves to believe in it.
I suppose the main reason we don’t think about these details is that they also lead to an infinite regress, though, to make things worse, this regress is exponential in nature. When we are young and learn to speak, we keep asking “why” and “how”. As one asks new questions, one gains new insight, which leads to further questions and so on and so on. As we grow, we stop doing this, and we might think that young children do it because they do not understand the world around them. But this answer lacks nuance. I believe the problem isn’t that children don’t understand the world; although that is very much true, we must concede that adults don’t fully understand the world, either; the problem is that children aren’t yet familiar with it. In this way, gaining familiarity kills curiosity, without providing comprehension.
There is a clear benefit to asking in depth questions: one begins to understand what things are, rather than use recursion or unfounded invocation to explain them (e.g. lightning is caused by the uneven distribution of electrical charges in the clouds, and not by the mighty Jupiter who has the power to cast it. It is a real and tangible phase of matter, a plasma, and not a magical device forged by Vulcan). And yet, there is a clear loss to asking these questions as well, a loss that is worse than the cognitive effort it takes to ask them: things slowly stop being what they seemed to be, and what was once familiar reveals itself to be mysterious and unknown (e.g. we understand that Jupiter and Vulcan are gods, who in many ways are like people. But on the other hand, what are the electrons and ions that make up the plasma?).
To make this point clear, let us return to the mind problem. It is clear that the hypothetical “mind-stuff” that has all the properties we need to explain the mind must exist, yet it is also clear that it is nothing like a homunculus. To put it in better terms, it is nothing like a mind. One cannot claim that mind-stuff is simply imbued with mind and conscienceness. Saying that brains are made of “something that thinks” is true, but it is not an explanation, for the exact same reason that saying brains contain something that thinks (a homunculus, or a soul, or a team of tiny yellow sponges) isn’t an explanation either. Therefore, all we know is that the brain has the special property of thinking. But if we can’t resort to things that simply think to explain the thinking thing, what can we resort to? We can only resort to simpler things that do not think. This is the essence of reductionism.
Reductionism will apply (essentially) to all things around us. The only reasonable explanation for why things are they seem to be is either that (a) they really just are, or (b) they are made of things that aren't, but together behave as if they were. But this is a terrible mindset if one seeks to function normally on their day to day lives, because, on almost all occasions, the true explanation will be option (b).
To illustrate this, we can recognize that the very passive act of seeing rejects reductionism; it is its very opposite, a sort of holist essentialism. I see a table; I can see that it is made of wood and has four legs, but what it is is a table. I know this, because I am familiar with it. What gives it its “tableness” does not matter; if anything, the table is a manifestation of an ideal, platonic table that simply exists. It is in table-heaven where the table homunculi live, inside their tiny heavenly TV set.
But this is not true. A table is not a “table” any more than your mind is a “mind”. It is made of things that are not tables. Then where does the table come from? How does it “emerge”? How do the parts create the whole? Reductionism doesn’t tackle the problem head on, or, at least, it can be phrased in a way that doesn’t. The problem of emergence can be avoided forever if we refuse to accept that there are no tables out there. I defend that it is in the act of seeing tables that our very minds create them, inside our own heads. Table-heaven is the mind, it is in the mind that the platonic ideal sits. And so, what we believed to have been concrete and real reveals itself to be abstract. The whole isn’t really real.
And herein lies the greater problem in seeing the naive answers for what they are. If you ever even glimpsed the problem, it will gnaw at you until you face it. If the table is in the mind, because it cannot be made of tableness, where is the mind, if it isn’t made of “mindness”?
The reason why a normally functioning human being needs to avoid reductionism in their day to day life is that it will undo the very idea of the what is familiar, of the social world and of the self. The incredulity of the answer reaches absurdity, because it questions the very notion of the asker. What are we? In our day to day life we see ourselves as persons. As thinking beings. We are, fundamentally, social beings, even inside our own heads we talk to ourselves and hypothesize (and believe in!) the existence of an agent. We see other people all the time, and we see their faces, their expressions, read their emotions, empathize with them, feel with them and for them. But, if minds are not really “minds”, then the other people out there are not really “people”. They are things.
And we ourselves are things.
We are not really worse off than we were before, if we only just realize we have never been where we thought we were, where we seemed to be. Even with the homunculus inside our head, who were we? The homunculus that we do not understand, or the puppet, the thing it controls? And with regards to the existence of the Universe, even with God holding the reigns, why is there something rather than nothing?
Perhaps the unsatisfactory answer to the ultimate questions is that they are wrong to be asked. Perhaps there is no who for us to be and there is no why to the universe.
In this way, reductionism proves to be a futile exercise in the day to day life. Sure, we are better off understanding televisions and hairdryers and smartphones, but it seems that thinking of ourselves as things and of the universe as pointless brings us nowhere. Indeed, even after dissecting the self, one will find it impossible to kill.
