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Chapter 1a: Reductive materialism

Materialism can be defined as the conviction that all beings that exist are made of matter, or at least that human nature is so constituted that the individual ceases to exist with the death of the body.  These positions are not the target of this chapter.  Rather, a somewhat extreme version called reductive materialism is all that I mean to address here.  The alternative that I will propose--we'll call it holism--will serve as a common sense position that we can use to evaluate reductive and other positions.

Reductive materialism claims that a human individual (and other animals) is nothing more than a collection of chemicals and that human action is nothing more than the complex chemical and mechanical interactions of those parts.  The whole that we call a human being is quite literally the sum of all of its parts.

This position is frequently called mechanistic because a machine really is the collection of its own parts.  If we see it as a whole, that is only because we impose our own interpretation upon many items that happen to have been brought together to serve our own purposes.  It makes sense to talk of machines as individuals, for we often interact with the machine as if it were a whole rather than with just one part in isolation from the others.  We think and talk of humans and other organisms as wholes too.  But we are deceiving ourselves, say reductive materialists, if we think of humans and other organisms as anything more than complex machines.

Why would anyone object to the reductive, mechanistic understanding of human nature?  One objection would be that we are able to know unchanging truths, such as the truths of mathematics, so that there must be something unchanging--and hence immaterial--about the human mind.  That is an interesting approach that deserves serious consideration.  But that is not the approach being offered here.  For objecting in that way may make it seem that we are stuck in a dilemma: on one side is reductive materialism and on the other is dualism, which posits the mind or soul as an immaterial thing that somehow interacts with the body.  I will argue later on that this is a false dilemma.  For the present, however, I propose that we look at how humans go about conducting their daily affairs and solving day-to-day problems.  This approach will give us a basis for criticizing reductive materialism without committing to dualism.


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