The Case of Epistemology in Modeling
Posted on August 2023
Reductionists view everything that exists in this world can be divided into their building parts. If we want to know the behavior of a phenomenon then we could study each of their parts. This view has made it big since the 17th century by the amount of technological advancement it produces. The realization that all things are made of atoms has made it possible for electricity to be invented. We defy the laws of nature and make it possible for humans to rule the sky with jet fighters. We turn seemingly useless things into a core that powers all technology.
There is another consequence of this view. It is the view that we can predict a phenomenon by studying its parts. While at first this view seems to radiate the hope of humanity, there is a fog of devil lurking. This view has produced a decadence in the human condition in the form of nihilism.
Like what is being presented earlier, we have seen, experienced, and used what reductionism has brought upon us. The success of reductionism seems to be a strong argument that this particular view is the de facto and the truest view of their kinds. That all things are atoms.
In line with the axiology of reductionism in the real world, this view also has its heroic moment in the form of abstraction. One of which is Occam’s razor. This razor allows us to dissect a problem into multiple simple parts that can be solved individually. If a problem seems to be so convoluted and complex at first, try cutting it with an Occam’s razor and see if we can solve it one by one.
So far we see that all points have cast support for reductionism. However that is not all the story. Let's see how reductionism fails in certain cases.
The first related to complexity that we talked about earlier. There is one assumption that we use if we are about to divide a complex problem into simpler parts. The assumption that the interaction between its parts is linier. Linearity means that if a system is combined with another system, the new resulting system is the sum of those two systems. However this is not always the case in the real world. An example would be a human brain. We know what and how a neuron, a nerve cell, is and works, but up until now we still do not know how a combination of neurons give rise to consciousness. This is because neurons interacting with each other create a new emergence behavior that can not be explained by linearity assumption.
Another example can be seen in “Game of Life”. A game of life is a two dimensional grid with each grid can be in the state of lit up or dead (Gershenson, 2011). These grids then can change its state in each step. There is a rule to govern this change of grid. For example, if a grid is surrounded by more than eight lit up grid, then its next state is lit up. There are other rules as well that make up this game. The result of these rules then can create a number of complex behaviors.
Lastly, I would like to talk about the shadow lurking behind reductionism, which is nihilism. “A reductionist approach to man tends to reify him, that is to say, to deal with a human being as if he were a mere res, a thing”. Such is what Victor Frankl said about Reductionism(Frankl, 1969). The end point of reductionism is nihilism. It allows us to see the individual tree in a forest and disregard the forest completely. Love in a reductionist view is just a mechanical chemistry that is happening in our body. In that view, we can no longer differentiate love that is caused by meaning and love that is caused by drugs.
It is even more dangerous that schools majorly teach about reductionist views. School will no longer humanize us. This is the reason why we find more and more people struggling to find meaning on this day. Humans have been reduced to atoms. What we find meaningful in this life, love, relationship, suffering, are reduced into a mere interaction of atoms without considering any emergence behaviors from those interactions.
Many scientists and philosophers propose that we should abandon reductionism and adopt holism. In my opinion this is also wrong. Reductionism, however doom it is, is not the culprit. Without reductionism we, humans, will never get to this point. There are things that reductionism can not solve, but there are also things that reductionism solved. We will never have computers, a machine that we used to simulate complex systems. We will never acquire many medicines that we use nowadays to treat our sickness.
What is dangerous is not reductionism. What is dangerous is if we only have one model/representation/view/perspective of things. Thus modeling in this sense is not only a matter of ontological but also epistemological. A forest can be seen as both a resource of the paper industry or a carbon sink. There is no true model of things/behavior/system/phenomenon, we should choose our own lens in which way to see the problem.
At this point of writing, I am in the middle of reading Heidegger. I think that there is some connection between Heidegger’s gestell and dasein to epistemology in science. However, I am not yet proficient to mention and connect reductionism and Heidegger.