Understanding Reductionism: Key Insights on Scientific Philosophy and Consciousness

which in turn allow for a greater understanding of them. For this reason, the understanding of a phenomenon can be progressively deeper even starting from the basis of the same sensory and perceptual data. The same phenomenon of an apple falling from a tree can produce very different impressions: to someone it may tell that a fruit was ripe, to Newton it revealed the "universal law of gravitation".

The Fallacy of Reductionism

Reductionism postulates being able to totally reduce the properties and evolution of a complex system to the properties and evolution of a simpler system. In the case of materialist reductionism, the properties and evolution of any complex, living, thinking or conscious system would be reducible to the properties and evolution of a more elementary physical material system. For commonly understood reductionism, the world is nothing but a set of spatio-temporal arrangements of fundamental physical objects and properties. Men and women, society, rocks and galaxies, animal and plant variety would be only processes, whose successive states are spatial arrangements of elementary physical objects: electrons, photons, quarks, neutrinos, etc.

These elementary physical objects, arranged in different configurations, would explain all the surprising variety we encounter in our daily lives. According to reductionism everything that has happened, what could ever happen and what will happen is encoded in that list of particles and in their interactions which, acting with absolute causality, univocally determine universal evolution. Following this philosophical position if we knew the elementary particles, the physical laws that govern them and the exact conditions in which they find themselves at any moment of universal evolution, it would be possible, without any uncertainty, to determine the past, present and future of the entire universe and the beings within it.

Given that every complex system is explained by a more elementary physical system, for the pure reductionist the truths discovered by the psychologist would be subordinate to those discovered by the neurophysiologist, which would be subordinate to the processes discovered by the biologist, which would be determined by the reactions discovered by the chemist, which would follow the laws discovered by the physicist, which would be based on the formulas discovered by the mathematician, whose ideative process would however be explained by the psychologist. This amusing circular paradox illustrates a central problem in materialist reductionism.

By its nature the reductionist process, after a long descending chain, must arrive at a conclusion, that is a series of minimal and irreducible elements from which it would be, in principle, possible to explain everything. In its naive approach a reductionist would say that such elements are elementary particles and the laws of physics that govern their dynamic evolution. And here we encounter the first real problem! The irreducible datum to which we want to arrive consists of two components: a matter, i.e. a set of "particles"; a set of instructions, i.e. a set of "laws". But what would these "laws of physics" be made of?

Would they be mathematical laws, constituted by some form of matter, stored in some remote corner of the Universe and continuously checked by individual particles at every moment and universal place to know how to behave? Or are they "instructions" that permeate the entire spatial and temporal universe and have always regulated the evolution of energy? If so these laws, absolutely valid in every place and at every time, would transcend space and time itself and thus the reductionist would arrive at the conclusion of having to admit the irreducible existence of the transcendent.

Although philosophically very weak, reductionism owes its fortune to the great results of classical Newtonian physics. It was indeed Newton, with his principle of determination, who affirmed the possibility of deducing all the dynamic evolution of a mechanical system starting from its initial conditions and from the differential equation that governs it. Newton's principle of determination which is fundamental for the evolution of mechanical systems, no longer finds its application in quantum systems, for which Heisenberg discovered a principle of indetermination. Both are not very informative in describing the evolution of organic systems for which a principle of finality seems more appropriate, and even less informative in the evolution of self-conscious systems for which a principle of self-determination is valid.

The Failure of Ontological Reductionism

From a philosophical point of view, ontological reductionism encounters an insurmountable obstacle that prevents it, in its common formulation, from being a valid candidate in explaining the phenomenon of consciousness. The reason for such failure lies in the absence of an underlying structure accepted by the reductionist and to which the category of psychic phenomena can be reduced. To expose the problem let us examine a simple and well-known example. Suppose we have a phenomenon we want to explain: for example the "red color". A pure reductionist must, first of all, encounter a causal relationship between the