Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Rediscovering the Mind 36No general agreement has emerged among psychologists as to howfar reductionism should be carried, most will readily concedethat our actions have hormonal, neurological, and physiologicalcomponents. Although Sagan’s premise lies within a generaltradition in psychology, it is radical in aiming at completeexplanation in terms of the underlying level. This goal I taketo be the thrust of his phrase “and nothing more.”At the time various schools of psychology were attemptingto reduce their science to biology, other life scientists werealso looking for more basic levels of explanation. Their outlookcan be seen in the writings of a popular spokesman of molecularbiology, Francis Crick. In his book, Of Molecules and Men, acontemporary attack on vitalism – the doctrine that biologyneeds to be explained in terms of life forces lying outside thedomain of physics – Crick states: “The ultimate aim of themodern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology interms of physics and chemistry.” He goes on to say that byphysics and chemistry he refers to the atomic level, where areknowledge is secure. By use of the italicized all, he expressesthe position of radical reductionism that has been the dominantviewpoint among an entire generation of biochemists andmolecular biologists.* * *If we now combine psychological and biological reductionism andassume they are going to overlap, we end up with a sequence ofexplanation going from mind to anatomy and physiology, to cellphysiology, to molecular biology, to atomic physics. All thisknowledge is assumed to rest on a firm bedrock of understandingthe laws of quantum physics, the newest and most complete theoryof atomic structures and processes. Within this context,psychology becomes a branch of physics, a result that may causesome unease among both groups of professionals.This attempt to explain everything about human beings interms of the first principles of physical science is not a newidea and had reached a definitive position in the views of themid-nineteenth-century European physiologists. A representativeof that school, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, set forth his extremeopinions in the introduction to an 1848 book on animalelectricity. He wrote that “if our methods only were sufficient,an analytical mechanics (Newtonian physics) of general lifeprocesses would be possible and fundamentally would reach evento the problem of the freedom of the will.”There is a certain hubris in the words of these earlysavants that was picked up by Thomas Huxley and his colleaguesin their defense of Darwinism and, even today, echoes in thetheories of modern reduction-