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• W276553619 abstract "MEN WIRED FOR promiscuity. Laws of attraction linked to genes. Evolutionary impulse cause of obesity. Humans are 'hard-wired' to do unto others. The chemical that fosters team loyalty. No self control? Blame it on your brain. Such headlines are seen almost daily in North American newspapers and magazines, and reflect a deepening embrace of biology as the answer to the ancient question of what it means to be human. Nobel laureate Francis Crick put it succinctly: You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: you're nothing but a pack of neurons (3). Crick articulates in reductive and provocative terms the idea that to be human is to be a brain shaped by genes, sculpted over evolutionary history, and fine-tuned through experience; a brain from which all our instincts, perceptions, feelings, and actions arise; a brain that can be chemically altered to affect mental health, personality, and cognitive ability. This specific kind of reduction I call biologism because it claims that one dimension of human nature, our biology, is both foundational and sufficient for self-understanding. While biological perspectives may be helpful, the increasingly promulgated claim that they provide a complete account of human nature is a form of bad reduction because it simplifies the complexity of human nature in a manner that leaves out things that are essential to our experience of being human, such as self-awareness, free will, and meaning-making. Biologism reduces us to mere mechanism, narrows and alters the definition of normality, pathologizes and medicalizes human diversity, minimizes the importance of context and community, and paradoxically denies human subjectivity and agency. Further, biologism does not merely describe human nature, it has the potential to change that nature. While many scientists do not subscribe to this claim, some influential ones do, feeding an increasingly pervasive and relatively uncritical cultural vision of human-as-brain. Only through critical awareness of the sources and consequences of biologism can we make appropriate use of brain research and distribute our energies and resources to more holistic and effective means to self-understanding and healing. Biologism is a specific extension of the claim that human rationality applied through the methods of the natural sciences is the One True Way to Really Know anything, including what it is to be human. Those who hold this worldview argue that objective knowledge is both possible and sufficient. Thus emerged a strong scientism; the claim that if something in not amenable to scientific scrutiny we cannot with confidence accept its existence as real, and it cannot be truly known. It is no accident that the specific form this scientism takes in our present context is biologistic in flavor. Biological phenomena are much more amenable to scientific scrutiny than subjective or experiential phenomena. Also the articulate public intellectuals who currently promote this view include evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett, neuroscientist Sam Harris, and biologist Edward O. Wilson. This particular type of scientistic objectivism has its roots in the positivism developed by Auguste Comte in the early nineteenth century. He claimed that religion and philosophy were early and primitive stages in humanity's progression toward 'positive knowledge,' to be replaced by science. Comte was sold on the Enlightenment view that the entire cosmos, including human experience and behavior, is a mechanism subject to (ultimately mathematical) laws that could be discovered through the systematic application of human rationality. Comte believed that using natural scientific methods to examine human experience and behavior would enable us to predict and control that behavior, and to develop social structures and policies that would bring forth peace, health, and human flourishing. …" @default.
• W276553619 created "2016-06-24" @default.
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• W276553619 date "2013-03-22" @default.
• W276553619 modified "2023-09-27" @default.
• W276553619 title "Losing Our Humanity: Biologism, Bad Reduction, and Father Brown" @default.
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