Reductionism as a Scientific Mythos
And what CS Lewis's 'The Discarded Image' can tell us about the fuzzy maps of human knowledge
Once upon a time, a band of clever primates stood upright, mastered fire, and began assigning names to things and processes in the world. They soon strung these names together, creating descriptions and instructions. Their new technology supercharged cooperation, enabling them to gather and hunt more efficiently. This in turn led to an increase in leisure time. Ruminating around the fire after a satisfying meal, these early humans invented the narrative. Perhaps it started as a teaching aid — a way to glean lessons from the day’s adventures.
Before long, the storytellers around the fire began to weave more complex narratives. Not satisfied with explaining how to set a trap or collect honey, our ancestors began to speculate. They told wild tales of animals and ancestors, of spirits and symbols, of wars and wisdom. Some of these stories snowballed into great myths: they were passed from generation to generation, first orally, and then using a startling new technology: writing. These myths posed big questions. How did the world begin? How did we get here? Why do suffering and death exist? And what should we do about it all?
Unfortunately, the most enchanting answers became tools to oppress people and stifle curiosity. After many centuries under the sway of myths, humans discovered a new way to engage with the world: science. Instead of narratives, science offered tools with which to predict and manipulate the world, and thereby to explain it. A cloud of unknowing was cleared by great intellectual revolutionaries. To this day, plucky bands of rationalists attempt to break the spell woven by the storytellers, hoping to usher in a golden era of peace, progress and prosperity.
The paragraphs above tell a myth about the origin of myths and the birth of science. But by this I do not mean that it is wholly untrue. I suspect that most people who valorize science believe in some aspects of this narrative, though they would be justified in calling it a gross oversimplification1.
Why would I use the term “myth” to refer to a story that I myself put some credence in? Isn’t “myth” a shorthand for a popular misconception? This pejorative connotation has always bothered me — I like mythology2. I view traditional myths as a kind of memory technology: they braid history, explanation, ethical instruction, and entertainment into a grand whole.
Rather than viewing myths as popular misconceptions, perhaps we can just think of them as popular conceptions. And if we can’t shake the negative connotations, maybe we can use the term “mythos” instead. This has somewhat more positive connotations, since it conveys creative world-building or mythopoesis.
A mythology/mythos is marked less by whether it is true or false than by its cultural and psychological uses. A myth serves as a map for navigating a vast cognitive space. This space could be the accumulated legends and beliefs of a culture, the fantastical visions of a single creator, or the sum total of all human knowledge3.
Reductionism as Science Fiction
Reductionism is the idea that in order to understand any phenomenon, we just break it up into the tiniest measurable pieces, and then understand the pieces. The pieces are the only “real” entities in the universe, and everything else is just the sum of whatever the pieces do individually. This worldview — that subatomic particles are the lego blocks and everything larger is “built up” from them — is so common that it may seem synonymous with science itself.
There is a loose sense in which the central reductionist claim is true: whenever we break a thing down, whether it is a rock, a tree or a person, we typically find that the amorphous remains are mixtures of the elements in the periodic table. And these in turn can be broken down into a handful of subatomic particles. But if I give you the appropriate quantities of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, iron and the other elements central to life, you cannot make a person. You cannot even make most biological molecules, let alone cells or organs.
Here is the stage at which a reductionist often claims that one could build up (or simulate) a person “in principle” at some point in the future4. But that concedes the essential point: right now, the idea that humans are “built” or “made” from atoms is akin to science fiction, since by the epistemological standards of science, no one has actually demonstrated this process of building. We don’t even know how to sketch a blueprint!5
This implies that the reductionist narrative does not acquire value in the same way quantum mechanics or general relativity does6. In a narrow scientific context, narratives don’t really help much: we need theories, which tell us about the key processes underlying phenomena, and models, which allow us to predict and control phenomena. The bare assertion that everything is “just chemicals” does not help anyone develop a cure for cancer.
An earlier version of yours truly would have argued that this lack of utility means we should abandon reductionism. But that logic might be skipping a few steps. I still think reductionism is a dodgy worldview, but not because it is an inaccurate scientific theory or mathematical model. We should instead assess reductionism in its role as a science-inspired mythos. In other words, we have to examine it outside of narrow scientific contexts, with an eye on how it confers meaning and context to people’s lives.
The Not-Yet-Discarded Image
CS Lewis knew a thing or two about world-building. And not just because he created the Chronicles of Narnia. He also wrote a little masterpiece called The Discarded Image, which examines the world-image that developed in Europe during the Middle Ages. In this image, the earth sits at the center of a series of embedded spheres, one for each of the classical planets: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
Here Lewis captures a key aspect of medieval thinking:
In medieval science the fundamental concept was that of certain sympathies, antipathies, and strivings inherent in matter itself. Everything has its right place, its home, the region that suits it, and, if not forcibly restrained, moves thither by a sort of homing instinct:
Every kindly thing that is
Hath a kindly stede ther he
May best in hit conserved be;
Unto which place every thing
Through his kindly enclyning
Moveth for to come to.
(Chaucer, Hous of Fame, II, 730 sq.)
The book describes how this conception arose, evaluating it as an artistic creation and source of inspiration, as opposed to a failed scientific model. The medieval cosmos arose from a harmonizing of Greco-Roman mythology with Christian theology, mediated by astronomy and astrology. The synthesis was by no means straightforward, and took centuries to stabilize into an all-encompassing tapestry.
Most importantly, the medieval synthesis provided a framing narrative for individuals on earth. Their lives participated7 in processes that stretched out to the visible cosmos. This vision was particularly influential among artists and poets. In fact, CS Lewis points out that mathematicians, astronomers and astrologers were probably well aware that their framings were metaphorical, as are our own uses of “law” in the context of science:
On the common medieval view there were four grades of terrestrial reality : mere existence (as in stones), existence with growth (as in vegetables), existence and growth with sensation (as in beasts), and all these with reason (as in men). Stones, by definition, could not literally strive or desire.
If we could ask the medieval scientist 'Why, then, do you talk as if they did,' he might (for he was always a dialectician) retort with the counter-question, 'But do you intend your language about laws and obedience any more literally than I intend mine about kindly enclyning? Do you really believe that a falling stone is aware of a directive issued to it by some legislator and feels either a moral or a prudential obligation to conform?'
If we are dealing with mere metaphors, why should we care about which ones populate our framing myths? Lewis has a good answer.
On the imaginative and emotional level it makes a great difference whether, with the medievals, we project upon the universe our strivings and desires, or with the moderns, our police-system and our traffic regulations. The old language continually suggests a sort of continuity between merely physical events and our most spiritual aspirations.
I think of reductionism as the Not-Yet-Discarded Image. Interestingly, its metaphors of “building up” rhyme with older theological ideas: the reductionist world is composed of logically coherent atoms (which may be ‘material things’ or ‘bits of information’) that could have been assembled by a cosmic clockmaker, architect, or programmer. Such personifications are circumvented by careful use of the passive voice: the world “is built up” from leptons and quarks, but not by anyone.
Given that we cannot yet emulate the great Passive Maker except in very restricted circumstances, what use does the image serve? We have to examine “the imaginative and emotional level”. Reductionists do not live in a universe where every kindly thing “enclynes” towards its rightful place8. But their mythos offers other consolations.
One of them is an intuitively satisfying explanation for the intelligibility of the universe. If the universe is made up of parts that are finite in number, simple, and non-capricious, then we can feel confident that whenever we break unfamiliar things down we will eventually find familiar things. But there is more to reductionism than an expression of faith in rational analysis.
The Reductionist Image — especially when drawn with Deterministic Ink — seems to ward off magical spirits and divinities. The hope is that a worldview without these unaccountable causal interlopers can inoculate us against vain hope in miracles — especially given how such hopes are exploited by unscrupulous miracle-merchants. “Hard-nosed” reductionist heroes view themselves as waging a heroic war against sentimentality, superstition, and stupidity.
Now imagine what emergentism sounds like to the faithful reductionist. A whole that is different from the sum of its parts? An affront to the elegance and simplicity of the lego universe! Phenomena that cannot be predicted from first principles? A backdoor to let in inexplicable spirits! The Warriors Against Woo cannot allow any backsliding.
I sympathize with some of this. As with the medieval image, the reductionist image is not without aesthetic and ethical merit — as long as you value intelligibility and non-miraculousness.
Why then would I want people to discard the reductionist image? I think the answer is twofold: it does a disservice to the actual practice of science, and perhaps more importantly, it seems to devalue human agency and dignity, at least for some people.
Through a Glass, Darkly
Reductionism concocts a worldview out of the successes of analysis, which means “breaking up”, “loosening” or “splitting”. But this leaves out the complementary process: synthesis — putting things together. The breakthroughs of chemistry involved tight alignment between analysis and synthesis9. If we only had analysis, we’d be in a Humpty Dumpty situation: all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would not be able to reassemble the phenomena that we break apart. This is the state of play in most scientific fields. Geologists can chip away at a mountain, but they do not have the ability to create one. Molecular biologists can tell us the elemental composition of a cell, but that doesn’t mean they are able to start with those elements and create a viable cell. Our synthesis abilities only get worse as we move to more complex phenomena.
One might counter that we don’t really need to make phenomena from scratch if we “know” what they reduce to when smashed to smithereens. Maybe theoretical understanding takes other forms? Maybe it involves perfect prediction or simulation of properties?
Consider water — ordinary, ubiquitous, life-giving water. It remains the case in the 21st century that several important properties of water cannot be perfectly predicted using models that we “know” to be correct from analysis. In other words, the most accurate way to determine many crucial properties of water is to actually measure them. There are no theoretical shortcuts yet10.
This turns out to be rather common in physics and chemistry. Even approximate solutions are not guaranteed to be accurate (relative to the capabilities of our measuring devices). As the physicists Robert Laughlin and David Pines say in their paper “The Theory of Everything”:
… the schemes for approximating are not first-principle deductions but are rather art keyed to experiment, and thus tend to be the least reliable precisely when reliability is most needed, i.e., when experimental information is scarce, the physical behavior has no precedent, and the key questions have not yet been identified. There are many notorious failures of alleged ab initio computation methods, including the phase diagram of liquid 3He and the entire phenomenology of high-temperature superconductors (8–10). Predicting protein functionality or the behavior of the human brain from these equations is patently absurd. So the triumph of the reductionism of the Greeks is a pyrrhic victory: We have succeeded in reducing all of ordinary physical behavior to a simple, correct Theory of Everything only to discover that it has revealed exactly nothing about many things of great importance.
So reductionism misleads us about how theory relates to experiment, even within the domain touted as reductionism’s greatest success: physics. This can create deep misunderstandings about the history of science and the relations among disciplines, and can therefore bias both the people who do research and the people who fund it11.
Most practicing scientists with an eye on empirical findings are aware of the pragmatic limits of reductionism, so we might be tempted to say that the narrative is harmless. Let the heroes on the frontlines of the war on ignorance employ caricatures and half-truths. After all, isn’t all this for a good cause?
I’m not so sure. One’s sense of what is possible and what is important derive in large from the myths one subscribes to, rather than the Methods section of a technical paper. If one thinks that the microscopic is always more fundamental and more important than the macroscopic, one may miss out on revealing aspects of a phenomenon of interest. As Laughlin and Pines point out, science involves “art keyed to experiment” rather than a reductionist instruction booklet. And art requires imagination. If we are open to the possibility that some collective phenomena are not linear combinations of their parts, we may theorize, model and experiment differently.
The role of reductionism as an imagination-constraining myth is not the only problem though. I think the main problem is how it ties into value systems. If only subatomic particles are “real”, then are scientists who study other phenomena less worthy of respect? If everything I perceive is “unreal”, what meaning does my life have? If “real” causality occurs at microscopic levels below consciousness, is my feeling of volition a mere epiphenomenon? Some might choose (!) to soften the blow of reductionism with the help of Stoicism or Buddhism, but there are limits to the diffusion of such subtleties. I have encountered members of the general public who experience severe anxiety as a result of the suggestion that Science-with-a-capital-S has “disproved” free will12. I doubt saying "there is no self" would offer them much succor. Reductionism in the natural sciences can also give intellectual cover to social reductionism, which induces us to see everything in terms of ruthless individualist utility-maximization. Does anyone really believe that climate change, exploitation, and other systemic crises can be solved by just tweaking individual behavior, leaving larger institutions unchanged?13
So it seems clear to me that the reductionist myth is far from harmless: first, its a misleading map of most scientific fields, and for this reason it may stifle the imagination; second, it can trigger despair in people who look to science for some source of hope or meaning; and third, it can be used to justify apathy in the face of problems that require collective agency. But let me be clear: the problem with reductionism is not that it is a myth, but that it is not a very good myth. It has a few interesting elements — intelligibility and skepticism of miracles — but I think we can recover them in a modified narrative14.
I’ve suggested here that we should see myths as potentially useful fictions that map cognitive spaces and contribute to emotional and “imaginal” well-being. We do not discard mythic images in order to see the world “face to face” (which is impossible15). Instead, we create new images that, if not less distorted, are at least different in aesthetically and ethically enriching ways. Mythic images are lenses — we do not just see them, we see through them.
Notes
On scientific myths versus myths about science. We can distinguish between narratives derived from science and narratives about science. An example of the first is the popular conception of the Big Bang: it is a physics-approved version of “let there be light”, and gives us the poetic idea that we are all made of stardust. An example of the second is the Great Man theory of scientific discovery. A closely related narrative is the idea that science is a phenomenon unique to western Europe. Recent scholarship has shown that this latter narrative is extremely misleading. A review of two recent books is relevant here: How Not to Tell the History of Science.
On the appeal of myth. I began to appreciate mythologies as a result of the book The Power of Myth, a conversation between Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers. My dad bought this book after seeing the PBS documentary — we used to read bits and pieces of it when I was a kid. I now know there are various problems with Joseph Campbell’s approach to mythology, but it can still be valuable if taken with a pinch of salt.
On maps and scale. The cognitive spaces mapped by myths are vast, which means that any attempt to view them within a single framework is necessarily going to involve creating a fuzzy and coarse-grained picture. We have to stand further back in order to see more of the world, but then we lose details. And that’s what we want, anyway. Jorge Luis Borges’s story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ captures the uselessness of a map that is as detailed as the territory it represents. A fuzzy map tells us roughly where we are, so that we can then consult more detailed maps, which necessarily frame smaller areas. The scope of a framework and its resolution can be used to define emergence. See this excellent paper by Alex Ryan: Emergence is Coupled to Scope, Not Level [arXiv].
“In principle we can do it.” Reductionists often invoke the perfect physics of the future, in conjunction with all-powerful computers, in order to make their case. This amounts to a promissory note for a future theory. The alleged “principle” at work in here is little more than faith in the future, or worse — circular reasoning. Debates along these lines are so common that one paper features a fictive dialogue that illustrates the standard tropes. In On the Success and Limitations of Reductionism in Physics, the first chapter of the collection Why More is Different, Hildegard Meyer-Ortmanns imagines the reductionist saying “My claim is that the supercomputer would reproduce the formation of protons and neutrons out of the quarks and gluons, nuclei, atoms, molecules, macromolecules, proteins, nanomachines, and to cut a long sequence short, life.”
On the blueprint metaphor of DNA. The idea that an organism’s DNA serves as a blueprint for building it is very popular, but on closer inspection it falls apart. I’ve written about this here: If the DNA molecule is the book of life, it’s a very strange book indeed.
On how scientific theories become popular. We take it for granted that scientific theories tell us about “fundamental” reality. But all cultures have touted certain stories as essential truths. What is different about science? I think it is the tight interaction between theory and empirical data: prior generations in literate cultures never fully integrated elite speculation with the practical know-how of craftspeople. But practical know-how is difficult for most people to appreciate, since it rarely takes the form of a narrative. Most non-experts take what scientists say as true because powerful and/or trustworthy people seem to. And also because the narratives that are abstracted from technical ideas sometimes resonate with us, or fill us with awe. And this is precisely the social role of myths.
On medieval participation. Aquinas’s concept of participation is quite different from most modern ideas (though it might be put into a productive dialogue with some of Manuel DeLanda’s dynamical systems-inspired thoughts in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy). I first encountered it in an odd little paper by the neuroscientist Walter Freeman: Nonlinear brain dynamics according to Aquinas.
On kindly inclinations. The astute reader may notice that this notion of “enclyning” bears some resemblance to the concept of attractors in dynamical systems theory. See this lecture I posted on YouTube: Cognitive and behavioral attractors: dynamical systems theory as a lens for systems neuroscience.
On the lessons of chemistry. Manuel DeLanda, in his book Philosophical Chemistry, gets into the distinctive features of the history of chemical thought, and the light it sheds on our narratives about science. Pragmatic grip — often manifest in the analysis-synthesis cycle — was crucial, and helped bridge theoretical disagreements. The book also leads us to wonder if we have taken too much inspiration from the myths of physics.
On the complexity of water. Many people use water as an example of perfect reduction: we now “know” that water is just H2O. And we “know” that the Schrödinger equation governs molecular matter moving much slower than the speed of light. But how much precision grip does this knowledge give us? A paper from 2002 explains that "... no model succeeds to reproduce at once the temperature of maximum density and the critical point of real water". More recent papers say the same thing. The philosopher Hasok Chang discusses this in his book Is Water H2O? I posted an excerpt on twitter.
On scientific narratives and bias. The history of science is a treasure trove of anecdotes that can be used to justify new approaches — or to critique them. But history is far from a predictive science; much of it instead contributes to mythopoeisis. Also see note 1.
On science and free will. Someone once contacted me about an existential crisis triggered by the no-free-will narrative. Here’s how I responded: Science does not disprove free will.
Myths and the is-ought problem. Most scientists agree that we cannot derive an “is” from an “ought”: science tells us what is the case — how phenomena work — but does not tell us what we ought to do with this information, or even which phenomena are the most important to study. Most people would also add that we cannot use oughts to decide what is. That would be wishful thinking. But the situation is more subtle in the case of a mythos. Metaphysics is far less constrained than science: we can modify the stories we tell about a theory while leaving the detailed mathematical and experimental apparatus unchanged.
Towards an emergentist mythos. No one will be surprised to learn that I think this new narrative will involve emergence, a topic I have written a fair amount about. The scientific justification for using the term is fairly solid (see my emergence reading list, and also this twitter thread/rant). I’ll grant that there are still kinks to iron out conceptually. But for a mythos, ironing out conceptual kinks is more of an aesthetic than a pragmatic exercise. I suspect that even the most arid analytic philosophy treatment of the reductionism-emergence debate is implicitly in the service of narratives and world-building.
“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing.” If the reductionist mythos satisfies hedgehogs, perhaps an emergentist mythos is fox-oriented. In at least one fox’s worldview, we cannot step outside the universe to take in the Passive Programmer’s view. We are enmeshed in a world we did not create. Nevertheless, with effort and creativity we can come to grips with aspects of it — not only by 'composing' phenomena from first principles (whether they be physical or conceptual ‘particles’), but also through open-minded interaction with each phenomenon of interest. The emergentist is open to shattering Humpty Dumpty, but she knows that putting him back together again is rarely straightforward. Any synthesis might reveal unanticipated potential latent in the analyzed parts. But just because something is unanticipated does not mean it is miraculous or inexplicable: the entire history of science tells us otherwise.
On coming to know a “mind-independent reality”. This concept remains popular, but I think a careful analysis of it reveals its paradoxical nature. We can only assert that we have some mind-independent fact. But the manner in which we establish facts is mind-dependent and also historically contingent. I wrote about some of this in my previous substack post: Maybe it's time to retire the phrase "mind-independent reality”. My essay on the map-territory relation is also relevant: The Finger Pointing At the Map.
Like the use of myth here very much. It centers the topic a bit over from where we usually argue.
A tweet of yours: “Nonreductionism might usefully be framed as the practical non-commutativity of analysis and synthesis.” I love this framing. It wheels nicely around the term “practical non-commutativity”.
I object to the duality of reduction and non-reduction, mainly in the vein of obscuring whether we’re talking about how reality happens, or how reality is analyzed, modeled, or understood. Your “analysis and synthesis” are a good pairing in that framing, but you’re implicitly limited in the framing to analysis, not reality itself. Thats why the mythos approach- the explanation- is so valuable here. Mythos is about analysis, explanation.
But for me, yanking synthesis in this way from reductionism and placing it wholly in the realm of nonreductionism isn’t just a simple matter of obvious definition, or au fond distinction. For instance, we seem ok with accepting that reductionism entails the vast synthesis of sub-particles into field activity, or even atomic or molecular activity; but somewhere along the line we want to artificially demarcate things. In the realm of how reality happens, it seems grossly unfair to exclude reductionism from applicability to catalytic process, or evolutionary protein genesis, or levels of analysis and emergence in general, merely because it is typically loosely framed (analyzed) as microscopic or foundational. Catalytic activity is included in reduction- it’s basic, foundational, part of the tiny, involved ways that little shit builds into big shit. To limit scope and level to a vague ‘small’ is symmetric to the problem of limiting nonreduction’s scope to a (mythic, vague) ‘large’. Dynamical systems theory teaches us that, while top-down and bottom-up models can be fantastic in their proper place, reality isn’t built up or down. Cause and interdependence swirl between all levels of scope. No wizard of Oz is doing any math (analysis, mereology) to nudge reality forward. Models don’t DO anything. We’ve developed an analytic tool called reductionism, and flail away with it as our vorpal blade- our mythos- but it isn’t how reality works. But neither is emergence. They are models, pointing at something. The distinction is artificial and, it turns out, arbitrary and vague, contrived for practical purposes.
Analytically, reduction’s sins as a mythos are limned pretty well, all over the place, in many fields- we’ve all suffered greatly from them, all our lives. But- and here the notion of self-similarity comes to mind- all of life has also all been saved by the rabid and broad-brush, aggressive use of reductionism at many levels of our lives. This particular fellow’s monkey hand is never going to let go of reduction to free myself to enjoy non-reduction as I’m living my life. Even in the modeling sense one has to go back-and-forth in a discrete attempt to mimic the brutal synthesis of real life- how much more pertinent, then, as we live our real life, is the need to see less and less of a fundamental distinction. They’re not even merely conjoined, or irremediably tangled, in my view. Maybe if we truly knew what “fundamental” meant without approximating, we could calve reduction cleanly from emergence. But I’d contend that both exist at all levels of scope, that as we do this divvying we do, we want to stay aware that we only engage in arguments about usefulness and applicability and models- about mythos- not actuality.