This is how the writer Kasra has described what he calls the philosophy of mechanism:
The world is fundamentally dead, predetermined, and unwittingly, imperturbably subject to the progression of math equations.1
This mechanistic view of the world, then, shows us a world that is dreary and dead. I’ve heard similar worries from others, that they can’t see how such a world could make sense of the things we value, like love and beauty. Some professional philosophers have implied that if the universe is made up of small parts (e.g. fundamental particles) that combine to create everything, we lose meaning, personhood, and freedom. These concepts, they think, cannot survive if they are not fundamental. They’re not the type of thing amenable to deconstruction. Like a frog, if you dissect it, you kill it.
This comes from a mistake: the idea that mechanistic explanations are equivalent to elimination. If something doesn’t have an essence irreducible to the parts and their organization, it doesn’t exist.
On the contrary, I think understanding the parts that make something work gives a deeper understanding. These sorts of explanations often lead to a picture at odds with how we commonly think about a phenomenon, but that can and should deepen our appreciation of it, not eliminate it. True understanding doesn’t come from sticking your head in the sand, and if a deeper understanding threatens your concept, it deserves to be threatened.
Mechanism doesn’t mean elimination
Scientists try to understand how things work. Often, this takes the form of looking for mechanisms: the description of the parts and relationships between the parts that make up some phenomenon.
Investigating the mechanisms that make the world work has been incredibly successful for expanding our knowledge of the world.
Mechanism is essentially opening something up and looking at the parts and how they’re organized to create the whole. Sometimes, this reveals that things are different than they seem.
I recently came across this post on Threads:
What’s interesting about this post is the claim that “You’ve never touched anything in your life.”
This is wrong—or at least, isn’t a very useful conception of “touch”. It’s just that the mechanisms of touch are a bit different than we thought! It turns out the electromagnetic field of the electrons in the table pushing back on the electromagnetic field of the electrons in your hand is why your hand stops. This is the explanation for why two macroscopic things, like hands and tables, can’t share a space.
We can go further, and talk about the feeling of touch. The repulsion of these electron fields opens ion channels in the mechanoreceptors in your skin, converting the repulsion into electrical signals that go to your brain. Again, we could say “You don’t really feel the table, there’s just a cascade of electrical signaling stimulated by the mechanical distortion of ion channels in certain nerves”. And again, we could respond: but that’s just a part of what the sensation of touch is.
This doesn’t mean solidity or touch don’t exist, we’ve just explained what is happening when we touch something.
The odd thing, though, is that this feels like a different phenomenon. We’re used to thinking of touch as where two physical things come in contact and can’t move because they can’t occupy the same physical space.
But understanding the physics or science of touch doesn’t mean you can suddenly put your hand through a table or make tactile sensations disappear. You can still feel and grasp things. We just need to reconceptualize touch. The phenomenon hasn’t been eliminated, we’ve just been given a new perspective with which to look at it.
Of elimination and life
Understanding mechanism does, sometimes, involve a form of elimination. One famous example is vitalism, the idea that what differentiates life from non-life is some additional forces or substance that non-life lacks. Non-living matter doesn’t move on its own, but living things do, so it was thought life must play by different rules. Perhaps it has a vital spark, an extra substance that explains these differences.
But today, biochemistry has given us an understanding of how molecular compounds, put together in the right way, can produce the complex behaviors of life.
We’ve eliminated the vital spark, but life still exists. Eliminating one potential explanation for a phenomenon doesn’t eliminate the phenomenon being explained. Life just has far more parts and complexity than we once thought. There isn’t just one special ingredient that makes life what it is, but rather an incredibly intricate dance of different molecular parts, organized in ways fine-tuned by evolution to create the seemingly physics-defying behavior of life.
If you want, you can describe all of this in a negative way. What a magical world it would be if there really was a vital spark in life, an extra ingredient that separated us living beings from non-life. The elimination of the vital spark can then be described as a sort of demotion. We are “just” a bag of chemicals.
But take a second to recognize what this really means. Life still exists, and learning the mechanisms behind it has taught us just how truly, mind-bogglingly complex life is.
Far from demoting life, understanding the mechanisms behind life should leave us in awe of it. There’s staggering complexity in the meekest of bacteria.
Beyond being awe-inspiring, this offers us unlimited opportunities to probe deeper and understand the mechanisms behind each part.
What I love about this is that it’s simultaneously incredibly complex, but also understandable. Every line in that diagram is a chemical reaction, and you can learn about what the chemicals involved are and why they happen. Then you can zoom out and understand what role that one chemical reaction plays in making the whole. You can zoom out further, and understand how this one small component, metabolism, relates to higher-level behaviors of life, like movement and foraging.
You can spend a lifetime learning about the mechanisms of life, and there would still be more to learn. Each piece about the world you learn expands the shores of your knowledge, giving you more surface area to find connections between things, and putting more on the edge of your understanding: the place where wonder and curiosity live.
There isn’t one simple ingredient, like a drop of vital spirit, that makes a bacterium what it is. Within that single cell is a whole universe. The universe is rich in complexity. How lucky we are that we’re able to investigate and explore that complexity and, if we’re willing to spend the time, understand it.
When mechanism leaves something out
One problem mechanistic explanations often run into is being overly reductive. Bad explanations can leave something out.
Imagine summarizing the biochemistry of life by saying it’s just chemicals. This is true, but only in the most vacuous way. It identifies the types of entities at play inside life, but does nothing to explain what’s actually important: the organization and interactions of those chemicals.
You can take the chemicals that make up a cell and put them on a petri dish, but that doesn’t give you a cell. Mechanism is just as much about the organization and relation of the parts as about the parts themselves.
Every night, I sing a lullaby while doing bedtime for my son. You could say that song is just air pressure variations. That’s partly true—if you want to understand music, understanding that sound is air pressure is certainly part of the mechanistic explanation. But this explanation feels overly reductive because it leaves out everything that makes the song have meaning.
The air pressure variation has an effect on my son’s inner ear, where that air pressure is transformed into electrical signals, transmitted to the brain. The sounds take on meaning as the brain categorizes the frequencies and words in the organization of those air pressure variations. Those meanings interact with memories stored in the brain as synaptic connections. That meaning evokes feelings of comfort at hearing my familiar voice and the familiar song.
By leaving out the most important part—the way “air pressure variation” takes on meaning through its effect on a person—we can drain a song of meaning. It becomes mere physics. But if we recognize that this is just part of the picture, and that what makes a song valuable to us is related to the psychological mechanisms within us, we can retain the meaning of the song while marveling at the complexity of the process of hearing the song.
Organization matters. Identifying the relevant parts matters. We shouldn’t be afraid of exploring the parts that make something up, but we should keep in mind the old improv dictum: “Yes, and…” Songs are air pressure variations, and have rhythm, beat, semantics, and organization that speaks to us in profound ways.
Having a deep understanding of something means being able to recognize it and explain it from many different angles. If your concept of something is threatened by seeing it in a different light, you don’t really understand that concept. Just as understanding touch at a deeper level doesn’t make your hand go through walls, understanding music as variations in air pressure doesn’t diminish the meaning or significance it can have.
A cold dead universe full of wonder and meaning
Some people think certain concepts, like consciousness or meaning, really are like the vital spark of life: they require some special ingredient, an essence, to explain them. I don’t agree with that. Something doesn’t need to be a black box we can’t peer into for it to really exist.
But just like touch and life, explaining consciousness wouldn’t eliminate it. If consciousness doesn’t have a special ingredient, like a soul or some extra-physical property of the universe, a mechanistic explanation doesn’t eliminate it. There’s still a phenomenon to be explained. The science of consciousness is fascinating, and to some people it feels like the theories miss the mark. Maybe they’re not complete yet, but I think the biggest barrier people have is more like the touch example: it’s sometimes hard to see a phenomenon we’re so familiar with described in a way we’re so unfamiliar with.
It may take time to really grok how something that feels so familiar can simultaneously be explained in a way that feels so foreign. But learning a new way to look at something doesn’t eliminate it, it makes your understanding more robust.
What a wonderful thing it would be, if we could indulge our curiosity and feel wonder at exploring how consciousness and meaning come to be. I certainly feel this way when I learn bits of cognitive science that seem like part of the puzzle. Exploring the pieces, unafraid of elimination, allows us to see ourselves in a new light.
In contrast to the way it’s often portrayed, a mechanistic world is full of wonders to dig into, awe-inspiring complexity, and things to learn that turn our understanding upside down. This view doesn’t drain anything of meaning unless you leave out the part of the mechanism that does the valuing—us, our psychologies, our minds.
A mechanistic world is full of opportunities to feel wonder as we probe deeper and expand our understanding, and we can learn to see the world with new lenses as we understand the pieces that make up the whole. We shouldn’t miss the forest for the trees, but we should also notice that there are trees, and the trees have roots, leaves, and bark.
We are lucky to live in such a dreary, dead universe.
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Not to nitpick, since I think Kasra is talking about more classical mechanistic views, but the “predetermined” bit is not in line with modern views of mechanism. The very first item on the list of things that “Mechanisms Are Not” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is “deterministic”. Mechanisms can involve stochasticity/indeterminism.
This analysis is relevant to the common trope of denying free will. Because there are mechanisms at work and they limit our capacity for self-direction, the imagination boggles at the task of creating a mechanism with a self-modifying capacity for choice. Yet, like Achilles really catching the tortoise, it really does happen.
I agree whole heartedly with this great piece. Especially with consciousness, which is a hot-topic with regard to AI. So many writers reject theism while strangely clinging to the notion of a vital-spark which converts the non-conscious to conscious. But viewing consciousness as a continuum of states & observable characteristics subject to a mechanistic understanding more closely matches the animal world (including us).