One weird trick for embracing reductionism
What improv can teach us about overcoming oversimplifications and deflationary explanations
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For some, reductionism—the practice of explaining a phenomenon by breaking it down into simpler parts—is a bad word.
That's understandable.
If you've ever spoken to a know-it-all or spent any time on the internet, you've likely heard lots of confident, overly-simplistic, reductive explanations from someone who has skimmed some Wikipedia pages.
Maybe you've heard someone claim all wars are fought over resources. Or that love is just a chemical (more on that later). Or claims of the form that all our behavior is due to x—where x depends on which overly-confident person you're talking to. I once heard someone claim we do everything because of fear, and it was fun to hear their tortured explanations of why hanging out with friends was motivated by fear.
We recognize these kinds of universal claims as dumb. They are "overly reductive" because they take something inherently complex and boil it down to a simple, often singular factor inappropriately.
Evolutionary psychology is (in)famous for giving reductive explanations of human behavior. The goal is to explain the evolutionary origins of our common actions. This is fine, obviously humans evolved and therefore we can apply an evolutionary lens to understanding aspects of humans.
The trouble comes in when very simple stories are applied to complex behaviors and accepted with limited evidence. For example, the idea that males engage in cunnilingus to sniff or taste for rival male sperm has been supported by the finding that males go down on females they find attractive for longer.
Call me old fashioned, but I don't see how "Guys go down on hot gals for longer" offers strong support for the statement "Guys go down on gals to sniff out other guys' jizz".
This feels like a case where there is some backbending trying to fit the behavior (cunnilingus) into a specific box (behavior is always an evolutionary product with a direct and simple connection to increasing reproductive fitness). Someone can only take this extremely limited observation as evidence if they're already searching for a simple "just-so" evolutionary story to explain the behavior.
These are bad explanations because they oversimplify.
The anti-reductionists
There are those whose anti-reductionist concerns extend far beyond oversimplification.
John Keats accused Newton of having "destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism". His poem Lamia laments the effects of science (called "cold philosophy"), saying:
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.
The concern of Keats and others like him isn't that scientific explanations might oversimplify, but by explaining "mysteries by rule and line" it has diminished those things. Unweaving the rainbow, in Keats’s view, destroys it.
Richard Dawkins wrote a book to address this sentiment and took the name for it from Keats: Unweaving the Rainbow. In it, he quotes Richard Feynman, addressing a friend who worried that scientifically studying a flower destroys its beauty:
The beauty that is there for you is also available for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn't so readily available to others. I can see the complicated interactions of the flower. The color of the flower is red. Does the fact that the plant has color mean that it evolved the color to attract insects? This adds a further question. Can insects see color? Do they have an aesthetic sense? And so on. I don't see how studying a flower ever detracts from its beauty. It only adds!
What Feynman is describing is cognitive wonder. By thinking about the flower's beauty, a door opens to explore new conceptual landscapes. But that door opening doesn't shut the door to sheer aesthetic appreciation.
Visual artists often report how learning to draw changes how they see the world. Paying attention to how something looks so you can draw it makes you see it in a different light, highlighting the shapes and relationships between visual features that go unnoticed by a non-artist.
Learning to look beyond the surface level of a natural phenomenon to understand the mechanisms underneath is similarly eye-opening.
I experienced a vivid example of this recently. A few months ago I learned how rainbows work (actually from reading Unweaving the Rainbow).
When light hits a water droplet, the light is refracted. Refraction is when a wave (like light) changes its angle as it travels through a different medium. When light travels through water, it bends slightly (hence why a straw in water, looked at from the right perspective, appears to "bend" at the point it touches the water).
But importantly, different wavelengths of light "bend" more or less—this is why a prism breaks white light down into different colors: the colors that make up white light split apart as they are "bent" at different angles.
Refraction is interesting in its own right (why the hell does light bend like that), but let's stay focused on rainbows.
When light hits a raindrop, it is first refracted (split into different colors). Then it is reflected off the back of the droplet.
That's not the end of the story, though. We see rainbows suspended in the air (as opposed to when we split light with a prism and see it projected onto a surface). Each raindrop is splitting the light, but the wavelength of light (and thus the color) that reaches you depends on the angle between you and that raindrop.
The rainbow is a product of millions (billions?) of raindrops. A band of raindrops within a specific angle range produces each of the colored bands.
As raindrops fall, the angle they are at with you changes, so the color they are sending to you changes and they become part of a different colored band. The rainbow is constant because it is replaced by the other raindrops falling, taking its place in the same angle-color band.
If you're standing at a different angle than me, the droplets reflecting the "yellow" band of the rainbow to me might be the same ones reflecting "violet" to you.
After learning all of this, rainbows still look as cool as they ever did to me. But now when I see them, I can think about the millions of water droplets refracting and reflecting color, and that the colors I see are from droplets constantly being replaced. Just as trying to draw can give a fresh perspective to the objects around us, thinking about how a rainbow works gives a fresh perspective to how optics and light work to create our visual world. There's so many interesting questions it opens up. It shifts to us thinking about our visual world as light waves instead of just accepting our perceptions without reflection (pun very much intended).
Rainbows are really fucking cool.
"Yes, and…"
The problem with the overly simplistic reductionist explanations is they're confidently wrong, boiling a complex phenomenon down and sticking it in a box that can't contain it.
The problem with anti-reductionism is it assumes that by explaining something in more basic terms, you've rejected or eliminated the higher-level phenomenon.
This is where we could all learn something from improv.
The core tenet of improv comedy is "yes, and…". If you haven't heard of this before, the idea is that whatever your fellow actor contributes to the scene, you accept it ("yes") and build upon it ("and").
So even if it's the woman who turns every scene into a raunchy sex joke or the guy who always wants to be a firefighter for some reason, you roll with whatever they add to the scene.
The idea here for the oversimplifying reductionists is simple: leave the door open for additional factors in the explanation, especially with complex human behaviors. Yes, wars may be over resources, and they may be over a number of other factors. Yes, evolutionary pressures have shaped sex acts in various ways, and that shaping is likely diverse, complex, and interacts with cultural and psychological influences.
For anti-reductionists, it's just affirming the higher-level phenomenon and adding to it. Yes, rainbows are beautiful, and it's caused by a really cool combination of light refraction and reflection in raindrops. Yes, flowers are beautiful, and we can appreciate and wonder about why they are shaped the way they are.
Deflationary explanations
Sometimes, reductionist explanations feel threatening not because they explain a phenomenon, but because they seem to lower the phenomenon in question, taking it from being something big and beautiful and showing it's "just" something crude.
Take, for example, bird song. We can appreciate the beauty of birds singing on a sunny day. "But," the downer can say, "birds are just singing to get laid."
This seems to deflate the beauty of a bird's song. The juxtaposition of the beauty of the sound with the crudeness of sex puts these perspectives in tension.
But also, it's pretty funny.
A "yes, and" approach allows us to see the beauty, humor, and wonder of a bird's song:
Bird songs are beautiful
Yes, and: they are behaviors for finding a mate for sexy times (lol)
Yes, and: mating itself is weird and wonderful, it's how species perpetuate themselves
Yes, and: birdsong evolved, so there is some story for how birdsong evolved as a solution to a problem birds faced in their reproductive environment
Yes, and: birds have a special apparatus, called a syrinx, to produce sounds—there is some physical story about how it works to produce the sounds we're familiar with, and a beauty in this natural instrument
Yes, and: there is some story about what we humans find beautiful and why
And so on. There are so many questions we can ponder. We can deflate something beautiful and wonderful by saying it's just something crude, but that only works if we ignore that there's so much more. Doors open when we dig deeper, doors to the weird and wonderful, that have their own beauty (and humor).
Love ❤️
The above was really just a warmup. When people feel reductionism is threatening, probably the most common concerns are about us, our behaviors, feelings, and the things we care about most.
So let's talk about love.
When I was a teenager, I spent some time on a philosophy forum. One day I got a private message from someone who referred to himself as a "philosophy rapper". He was upset because someone argued that love is just chemicals.
I don't remember how I responded, but this concern is pretty common. You can find threads on reddit about the same topic.
Saying love is a chemical reaction feels like it's attacking something at our core. Love is such an important part of being human, if it's just chemicals, it seems to rob us of significance.
Let's unpack this a bit. When people say love is just chemicals, it's unclear exactly what they mean. They could be referring to oxytocin (sometimes referred to as the "cuddle hormone"). Oxytocin plays an important role in bonding—to friends, romantic partners, and children.
But saying love is just oxytocin is too simple an explanation. Love comes in different forms—a one-dimensional explanation couldn’t explain the difference between them. We also know other neurotransmitters play a role in the feeling of love—norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin. But these chemicals on their own don't do anything—you can't just place them into a glass and expect the glass to experience love. It's their interaction with the complex tapestry of our neural circuits that makes the magic.
Thinking in terms of neurochemicals is one (not particularly useful) level of understanding love. All our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors can be said to be chemicals, since our brains use neurotransmitters to process information (and the cells making up our brains themselves are made of chemicals, just like every other physical thing). An explanation that says our beliefs are just chemicals isn't a very good explanation—this level of explanation misses out on the content of those beliefs and their interconnections, how they hang together to form a coherent worldview. It fails to explain how beliefs differ from each other. Similarly with love.
Yes, love is a chemical reaction, and it's a complicated psychological phenomenon. Romantic love involves physical attraction, caused by our complex histories, both genetic and cultural, that have shaped the psychology of who we are. Shared intimacy, values, and memories create complex relationships with the individuals we interact with. Just like beliefs, there is content to our loves.
Broad-based hormones like oxytocin subtly alter the processing taking place across the brain, "keeping score" of our interactions. When we meet a new friend we find we enjoy being around, bonding hormones help bring the relationship from a cold calculation of the value of being around someone to the wonderful feelings we have thinking about them.
Explaining love as just chemicals is deflationary—directing attention to something crude, the word "chemicals" drawing up images of industrial waste, synthesized fake flavorings, or caustic cleaning products.
But looked at another way, everything we think and feel is neurochemical. Every feeling we have, every thought, is a combination of neurotransmitters making their way across synaptic clefts. These chemical signals make up every thought, belief, and feeling we have—in an important sense, they are us.
Love being made up of the same types of neurochemical reactions as we are is fitting. In some sense, love is made up of the same stuff as the essential nature of our being. There's beauty in that, if we choose to see it.
Taking a "Yes, and" approach to understanding goes a long way. It allows us to see and accept the beauty in the world, while also accepting the humor, and lets us open the doors to wonder without fear of diminishing the magic.
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The wonder for me is that even if everything is "just" chemicals or "just" matter that means chemicals and matter are more amazing than we had previously thought. I love something the philosopher David Loy once wrote about Spinoza: if God is not other than the universe, this doesn't diminish God but elevates the universe. Thank you!
The "yes and..." principle seems like a good way to look at reduction. We don't have to reject the reality of the composite phenomenon, only that it's something fundamental. But I'm saying that as a fellow reductionist. I wonder if the people who do want to see that phenomenon as fundamental would be convinced.
I think the reaction is centered on the same way many of us we feel when seeing an animal dissected. There's a feeling of something being violated, of the animal being disrespected, of it being trivialized. It's even stronger when we see it done to a human body. It's why early human anatomists had to work in secret. I suspect a lot of people have that reaction when thinking about human experiences being reduced (with love being a particularly stark example).
But it can't hurt to try!