I always like to start a philosophical conversation with a story to set the tone. Said story tends to be about a debate I had with my IB psychology teacher. I’m an aspiring neuroscientist, here to poke at your brain and confine my view of YOU to it. I’m a reductionist; that is the goal of science. She on the other hand is concerned for the mental wellbeing of all other immediate parties concerned; that is probably the role of a teacher and I give credit to her. Who won is irrelevant, all I can say is the lesson ended before I could drive home my point. It started, as most arguments with me tend to start nowadays, along the lines of:
“Very soon we’ll be able to reduce everything, our sense of self, likes, dislikes, hopes, dreams and even love itself, down to the ever blind cellular and molecular mechanisms of our brains…just you wait.”
Paraphrased? Yes. Exaggerated? Absolutely! On with the show…
“But Josiah, we may never be able to explain everything in terms of neuroscience… and I personally think we shouldn’t.”
Reeling from the shock and horror felt through every single scientific materialist bone in my body, I enquired as to what possible reason could there be for us not to demonstrate to the world that we are nothing but the hunk of nerve cells floating around in our skulls. Her answer was as follows:
“Because that would just be biological reductionism… what will we do once we’ve totally diminished human experience to next to nothing?”
To her credit, she gave me something to think on, meditate on even. Had it not been for the bell ringing (I suppose one could argue the teacher was saved by the bell this time) and my friend Jessica dragging me out, I suppose my answer would’ve been articulated somewhat like this:
Suppose we confirm the hard truth we were working towards what then? What’s the initial fallout? Most major world religions fall into a frenzy, their central tenets falsified, their grips on followers gone and the hope of many turned to dust. Alright… what then? Well look on the bright side, we now understand what had eluded our knowledge for many millennia. Quite an achievement to say the least. It only gets better from here on out. Think about every time we made a major discovery in science, not too long after we began to utilize it. Think of germ theory, and how many lives we’ve saved since we stopped believing the myths of “bad blood” or even worse “evil demons”. Think of the electron and how many hours you’ve spent on your computer, phone, MacBook, and how far less efficient the world would be if we weren’t creating what is essentially a network of gates for these subatomic particles to cross or not cross. Why will explaining the mechanisms behind consciousness, rationality, and emotion be any different?
Imagine then what we’d be able to manipulate, how many suicides we could prevent due to poor mental health, how much we could advance our intellect; the ways in which we can mold the human experience would be endless! There is so much to do!
We’re reeling from the flurry of blows we’ve had since the scientific revolution:
“At least the sun revolves around us”
Oh, wait, no it doesn’t…
“At least we’re the center of the universe”
No, we’re not…
“At least we’re not another animal”
Wrong again, we’re hopelessly alike with our primate cousins…
“Do we not even have a part of us that can’t be measured?”
Not for much longer son… not for much longer…
It would seem that as part of growing up as a species we learned that we weren’t as special as we thought we were. Like a child maturing and finding that they’re no longer the center of attention, we’re having to adjust. In fact, that is what we’ll continue to do, but once we truly accept that we are no more than the sum of our cells and molecules, we will accomplish great things.
Perhaps we never started off as special but by utilizing the knowledge we’ll gain over the coming decades; we can be the tinkerer that cared. We may not have a loving father that can wipe away our tears but once we advance in our science, in our wisdom, and in our morals, not only will we be able to wipe away our own tears but by then we may never need to.
And after all that work is done, you yourself will be a God my son…
And all will be set right, after we revolutionized the human experience beyond what we can comprehend we would’ve taken the long way home, but home we will be nonetheless.
But for now, this is just a letter from a sixteen-year-old boy on a spinning marble in a lonely corner of the Universe, and hopefully, someday, someone will find the time to write back.
