Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

208 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
lism, they retreat into a vague and airy world in which nothing can be
pinned down. Even if one insists that a particular “whole” is more than the
“sum of its parts,” one must be able to itemize those parts and precisely
specify what “more” appears when they become a whole.
Another concept dear to the hearts of scientists is sometimes called
the “unity” of science and sometimes “reductionism.” The latter term has
been freighted with unpleasant semantic cargo because of its association
with the starker forms of materialism, whose advocates are called “NothingButters”
by opponents because of their constant refrain (“the brain is
nothing but a computer made of meat,” “the mind is nothing but firing
neurons,” and the like). It is not surprising, given the materialistic assumptions
of science, that reductionists attempt to explain everything in
materialistic terms, but the concept of “intertheoretic reduction,” as it is
called, does not in itself demand materialism. It is, in essence, merely an
application of Ockham’s razor, an attempt to find a single set of coherent
rules that governs everything. Or at least it would be if those who call
themselves reductionists really sought to understand different phenomena
and looked for a common explanation. In fact, reductionism is in practice
usually only a rather crude example of Kuhn’s “articulation” of paradigms.
They do not seek a common explanation; they merely assert the
sufficiency or their own paradigms. So computer scientists just declare
that the brain is “nothing but” a computer, and to the neurological scientists,
the mind is “nothing but” the brain. But there is no reason why that
set of laws must be mechanistic—as long as it meets the other requirements
mentioned above. So a science of spirit, a science of purpose or will,
must be deterministic, subject to observation and analysis, and capable of
predicting events that would not otherwise be likely. Preferably, it would
also be capable of integration into a larger conceptual framework: a Theory
of Everything, as it were. Conventional wisdom has it that notions like
mind and purpose invariably fail such tests, while matter passes them easily.
In fact, one of the ironies of the success of materialistic science is that it
has cast doubt on the very reality of matter. The nature of matter turns out
to be as problematical as that of mind, and mind may be as susceptible to
precise description as matter.
Mind, Matter, and Metaphysics
This dual perception of the relation of mind and matter has changed over
the centuries. There was a time when the philosophers were divided between
those who thought that the universe was composed of nothing but