Terminology question: Reductionism top-down vs. ...what, bottom-up?

Question

I want to focus on a terminology point rather than re-fighting the reductionism war. But I think I need to spell out the context for my question. I'm trying to be fair to both sides, and this is as concise as I've been able to get it. Everything in italics is background, and suggestions on how to tighten it (what can be left out) are welcome though I don't promise to accept them.

Please remember that I'm an untrained amateur and gained much of my (mis) understanding of philosophy from this site. Deep historical references ain't something I can do, and terminology is my-best-current-understanding.

Background:

Reductionism get a bad rep because sheer complexity of real-world objects and events is often too great to work back from them to their precise causes. But any engineer knows precise/complete reverse-engineering is more of a pain in the ass than designing the thing from first principles. In fact, when designing, the best approach is generally divide-and-conquer: break the problem into simpler pieces, then partition those, until you hit something simple enough to implement directly; than build back up.

We may never be able to apply reduction to something as complex as a specific human brain; it's hard enough for the simple but chaotic Three-Body Problem. However, we can build a perfectly accurate model of how the three bodies interact, and understand why perturbation of the initial state alters the final state so much.

Non-physicalists (meaning those who believe the mind can't be fully accounted for by the body) complain that physicalism can't yet show how to reduce the mind to its components. (Though as I understand it their approach can't yet do so either.)

Physicalists counter that reduction is a red herring. it isn't necessary to reduce a magnificently intractable complex system if the model can be built up from components; that may not tell you the details of an individual mind or capture every last detail in a tractable form, but in time it should reach the same resulting model a successful reduction would, or one that is equivalent. And it's a much more practical research plan.

I'm looking for a name to call this bottom-up alternative to reduction, so I can answer "you can't reduce" with "So? That's the wrong approach for something this complicated. We can get the same end result more easily via XXXXX. And after all, that's closer to how evolution would have built the system in the first place, since mutation has no goals and selection works with what it gets."

Question:

What can I/we call this divide-and-conquer alternative to reduction? Composition? Conduction? Comduction or conposition? Compilation? Assembly? Integration? Summation? Engineering? A la carte?...

Is there an official term already in use which recognizes that the reductionism coin has an opposite face and names it?

Answer 1

The inverse you've described is still reductionism.

Reducibility is an ontological commitment; reductionism is holding to that ontological commitment, not an assertion of practical capability. It doesn't matter which direction you map between more fundamental properties or phenomena and more complex ones. The claim is that there exists such a mapping.

Answer 2

Synthesis is a good word. It describes both the physical processes by which a chemical coumpound is produced from some precursors in the wild or in the lab, and the mental processes by which we try to model the behavior of a complex system by seeing how the different elements fit and play together.

In the latter sense, synthesis is the movement of thought going in the opposite direction of analysis -- which is very close to what you call reductionism. Analysis breaks down (mentally) a whole into its constituing elements, while synthesis does the opposite: it (mentally) reconstructs a whole from its elements.

According to some neurologists, the left brain would be specialised in analysis, and the right brain is specialized in synthesis.

Another good word is emergence, explored here.

Answer 3

What you are proposing is just reductionism. Reductionism is not a research plan; it is an ontological position. Reductionists do not necessarily claim that they have a fully-detailed account of how one thing can be reduced to another, and criticisms of reductionism are not necessarily about the lack of such a plan. A reductionist is just someone who says that some category of thing can be explained as a special configuration or presentation, or effect of some other category of thing.

Let's take the example of reducing heat to the motion of molecules and atoms as an example of a successful reduction. This example is often brought up in these discussions by people who don't really seem to get the anti-reductionist point. The reductionist will argue that there was a time when no one had any idea how heat could be reduced to motion. Yet heat can be reduced to motion, so, the argument goes, therefore just because we have no idea how to reduce the mind to physics doesn't imply that no such reduction is possible.

But if you examine the two cases, some very important differences emerge. First, the relationship between heat and motion was noted long before the modern theory of atoms and molecules. I don't know how far this goes back, but I know that Francis Bacon was suggesting that heat can be reduced to motion in the early seventeenth century. He demonstrated how heat and motion are related by examples such as how the pounding of metal with a hammer makes an object heat up.

So even if people didn't have a specific account of how heat and motion are related, the conversion of one to the other has always been apparent. And this is possible because heat and motion are both physical things. They exist in a shared universe of physical properties. They both have an area in which they occur. They both change the area in which they occur. They are both apparent to the senses.

Compare with the mind. The mind doesn't have a physical location. You might want to say that it's the physical body, but imagine a drone operator where the mind is far away from the body. There is no way to know that the mind actually inhabits the body as opposed to being some remote thing operating the body like a drone. I'm not suggesting this is a real physical possibility; I'm only saying that the logical possibility shows that the mind itself doesn't have a location.

Furthermore the mind doesn't have a size, a temperature, a color, or any other physical property other than time (the mind does operate in time in sync with the body). What properties does the mind have? Well, it has an attitude--it can be happy or sad, peaceful or angry. It has intentions, purposes. It has attention and intentionality, the ability to direct its attention to other things. Nothing in the physical world has properties like this.

When reducing heat to motion, it was possible to comprehend how this might work, even for people who didn't know about atoms and molecules. They could see that one physical property could transform into another. In the case of the mental and the physical, no one has any idea how such a thing might be possible. What configuration of atoms gives rise to an attitude without the pre-existence of a mind? What quantum state gives rise to an intention? What physical relationship is equivalent to intentionality? No one has any idea how this might be possible even in fantasy. There is just no connection. No handle to turn one thing into another.

Materialists point to advances in our understanding of the brain as progress in their program, but it's not. People have known about alcohol and other mood-altering drugs and about brain injuries from time immemorial. We've always known that the mind is effected by the physical and that the physical is effected by the mind. All we are learning from brain studies is where these influences are located. We still have no idea how to describe the sensation of a buzz in physical terms. Even if we could perfectly describe the conditions associated with a buzz in physical terms, that would not be the same as describing the buzz itself. Someone who never drank could know all there is to know about the chemistry of drinking without knowing what a buzz is.

So that is the fundamental problem with physical reductionism. It's not the lack of a detailed reduction of mind to body. It's not even the lack of a research program for such a reduction. It's the lack of a starting point. No one has any idea where even to begin to look for the relationship needed to reduce the mental to the physical.

Answer 4

The term "to reduce" in reductionism does not stem from the English meaning "to lessen, to make smaller", but stem from Latin, and means obly "to be inferrable from" or "to be derivable from".

So instead of reducing B to A, one can infer B from A, or derive B from A. One could extrapolate B from A, or project A onto something to get B.

As an example, hard contour shadows reduce to a light source and an obstacle. When you have the light source and the obstacle, you can reproduce the shadows, but if you have only the shadows, you can only guess at the light source and obstacles (hinting at the allegory of the cave https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave ).

However the problem with the question is that any "bottom-up" approach is not automatically reductionist or non-reductionist. Emergentism allows for the (strong) emergence of properties or phenomena of a whole that do NOT derive from the properties of the parts, and there is no reason why this should not be attempted in the same bottom up way as with reductionist beliefs.

An alchemist might try to turn lead into gold in baby steps, (maybe turning wine into water first as a smaller challenge). The CIA might research mind superpowers with smaller steps first, such as playing the good old guess my weight and age game from the carnival (just a hairs breadth from remote assassinations really).

So as others pointed out, investigating things bottom up is not necessarily anyi-redctionist, but also not necessarily reductionist.