Reduction and Reductionism: Up & In or Down & Out

It started innocently enough with an article I read this morning called Medieval ‘Reductio’ vs. Modern Reductivism, before things rapidly spiraled out of control (https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2022/10/18/medieval-reductio-vs-modern-reductivism/?mc_cid=e5a5432269&mc_eid=c604663a22). 

The article not only makes a point we've made in the past, but a point we’ve made again and again, in ever more (or less) amusing ways. I know this because I searched the blog for a certain phrase, and up popped I-don’t-know-how-many posts, going back to the earliest days. I began skimming them and said to myself, “who wrote this stuff? It’s pretty amusing."

The article highlights the distinction between "the Latin word reductio and what we mean by 'reduction,'” which “are two very different things”:

For us, “reduction” means making things smaller. Literally, however, the Latin word reductio means to “lead back.” Thus... “reduction” of the other disciplines to theology does not involve shrinking them down into theology.  Not at all.  Rather, the goal [is] to show how all the other disciplines, operating according to their own proper methods, can lead us back to God.

Now, speaking of the early days of the blog, there was a time that I would occasionally revisit old posts and republish the worthy. Even then, it was often as if I were reading them for the first time. Fifteen years later, I am reading them for the first time.

There's a man in my head
But he isn't me anymore --Mike Scott

As we all know by now, science is the reduction of multiplicity to unity, while scientism reduces this vertical unity to the horizontal plane, thus redounding to a total cosmic Oclipse. With that in mind, a compilation of Greatest Hits on the subject:

Transcendent Unity bifurcates into subject and object, without which there can be strictly nothing and no one to know it. But both subject and object reflect the primordial Unity from which they arise.

The essence of science -- at any level of reality -- is the reduction of multiplicity to unity. As such, there is clearly an appropriate kind of reduction, so long as it confines itself to its own domain and doesn't try to pull all of the other ones down with it. Even if the material realm operated under completely mechanistic principles, that would have no relevance to the manner in which the mind operates. Your Dreamer, for example, couldn't care less about linear causation or Aristotelian logic.

In fact, the rise of modern science some 300+ years ago simply represented a systematic way to organize all of the diverse and contradictory facts that appear before us. Eventually "laws" were discovered that explained seemingly disconnected phenomena, e.g., the "force" of gravity explaining both the fall of the apple and the continuous "fall" of the earth around the sun. 

Science is a function of intelligence, which is the ability to know the substance in the accidental -- to escape the deceptive world of phenomena and know the principle in its manifestation.

Science seeks increasingly deep unities to explain the outward phenomena. Presumably this will end with a big TOE, a Theory of Everything, the equation of our cosmic birth, a simple formula for generating this cosmos and everything in it.

But supposing we do ever stub this TOE on our mental furniture, we would still need to know who or what devised the equation, and it could not be something less than intelligence. And it would indeed be the "ultimate intelligence," since it would be the ultimate case of Unity beneath diversity.

As intellectually OMniverous Raccoons, we want nothing less than the TOENAIL: Theory of Everything: Nous, Atman, Intellect, & Logos included.

O is like the ocean. It tosses up theories about itself like so many grains of sand on the beach. And then it washes them away like tsand castles in a tsunami. The little human monkeys that theorize about O often forget -- especially lately -- that they are as much a product of O as are their theories. 

Thus, at best, these manmode theories can account for everything but the theorizer. Even if these theories approach the penumbra of this thing called Truth, they cannot account for this most shocking property of existence, which is not just that Truth exists, but that it permeates existence on every level.

Although existence is necessarily One, it nevertheless discloses many seemingly irreconcilable worlds -- at least if we begin at “the bottom” of the cosmos and try to work our way up. 

For example, modern physics reveals a world “underneath” (whatever that means) ours that operates along shockingly different lines than the human world. One of the major conceptual problems in physics is that even physicists don’t know what to do about the bizarre micro-world they've discovered, as it cannot be reconciled with the macro-world of relativity, let alone with any human world. It's as if macro existence floats on a swarm of the incomprehensible. And we all know how painful that can be.

And neither the macro-world of relativity nor the micro-world of subatomic physics has anything to do with the human experiential world, at least in the absence of a heroic dose of psilocybin. 

In fact, the quantum world is so paradoxical that it literally cannot even be imagined. That is, if we try to picture what goes on down there, the picture will most certainly be wrong. This is not to say that we cannot use quantum physics, which we obviously do. It is just that we cannot use it to understand our world, the human world. You cannot read a (post-classical) physics text and expect it to disclose any useful information about our day-to day-world. You can’t tell the IRS your income is only probable, or both there and not there, or only there when a physicist observes at it. 

Likewise, with regard to cosmology, the “big bang” undoubtedly conjures up a visual image, but the image has nothing to do with the reality, any more than you could imagine the square root of negative one. For it is not a human world.

Nor is the world of DNA a human world, or even a living world. From the standpoint of the human world, life is not a function of DNA; rather, DNA is a function of life, which is a total freaking mystery. Any questions? Wrong question, for there are only questions.

Consciousness too is a complete and utter mystery. You will often hear the cliché that you can learn more about human beings by reading this or that great novelist than you can by studying psychology, and this is often true. There are certain forms of psychology that most certainly do not touch the human world, behaviorism among them. 

This is where religion comes in, because, it discloses quintessentially human knowledge, aimed at human beings and the human world, which is to say the real world. This is something that truly needs to be emphasized: that science does not disclose the real world, but various abstract models of the world that humans -- and only humans -- may access, and only because of their humanness. But no one can live in a scientific model, any more than you can eat the menu.

Thus, science is an extension of the human knower, but it can never explain the existence of the human knower. In other words, it is a small part of the larger world called truth to which humans have unique access. While animals are subject to the laws of the cosmos, the fact that we can know the truth of these laws places us infinitely above them.

Metaphysics is the science of the Absolute and of the true nature of things. You might say it is the science of the ultimate Subject, whereas science is the religion of the ultimate object. The purpose of metaphysics is to discriminate between the Real and the apparent, in order to align our mind and will with reality, in a divine-human partnership.

Being comprises two necessary and irreducible poles: existence and intelligence, which ultimately flow from the same Absolute source. This is why both “things” and “subjects” open out to the infinite. In the case of things, they radiate the divine presence in any number of ways (varieties of truth and beauty), while in the case of subjects, it is their very nature for the divine presence to inhere in them. It is why the world is intelligible to intelligence; to say one is to say the other, for if the world is not intelligible there can be no intelligence, and vice versa.

What is language, anyway? What is a word? It is a special thing, because only it has the capacity to bridge the bifurcation introduced by Creation. Apparently words can do this because they are somehow prior to the Great Duality and therefore partake of both heaven and earth, above and below, vertical and horizontal.

The literal meaning of the word "symbol" is to "throw together" or across, as if words are exterior agents that join together two disparate things. But the Biblical view implies that language actually has this "throwing together" capacity because it somehow subtends the world on an interior level: language is what the world is made of, so it shouldn't surprise us that with it we can see all kinds of deep unities in the cosmos. The unities are there just waiting to be discovered, and language is our tool for doing so.

For man possesses two types of intelligence, a horizontal, analytical, “dividing” mind, and a unifying, synthesizing mind. However, the latter takes priority, for the ultimate purpose of analysis is to synthesize. If science is the reduction of multiplicity to unity, then the final unity must be the same unity from which we begin, only transformed by the spiraling journey back to its eternal self.

To summarise: if reality is nothing else, it is One. It is One prior to our bifurcation of it into subject and object, and it will always be One. We can throw out the Oneness with a pitchfork, but it will always rush back in through the walls, up through the floorboards, and down from the ceiling. 

The wholeness of the cosmos is ontologically prior to anything else we can say about it, and it is precisely because of its wholeness that we can say anything about it at all. In the mirrorcle of knowing, subject and object become one, but the oneness of matter and mind undergirds this process. In reality there is just the one world that miraculously knows itself in the act of knowledge, as "the circle which opens in truth closes in beauty.”

There is much more, but enough is enough. There's more to life than spending all day reading a bunch of stale bobservations.