One of the most commented on segments of Jimmy Chin and Chai Vasarelyhi‘s ‘Free Solo‘–the film that details Alex Honnold‘s incredible free solo climb of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park–is that of the MRI of Honnold’s brain. This MRI is performed in an attempt to solve the mystery of how Honnold is able toContinue reading “That Alex Honnold MRI In ‘Free Solo’”
Tag Archives: reductionism
Neuroscience’s Inference Problem And The Perils Of Scientific Reduction
In Science’s Inference Problem: When Data Doesn’t Mean What We Think It Does, while reviewing Jerome Kagan‘s Five Constraints on Predicting Behavior, James Ryerson writes: Perhaps the most difficult challenge Kagan describes is the mismatching of the respective concepts and terminologies of brain science and psychology. Because neuroscientists lack a “rich biological vocabulary” for the varietyContinue reading “Neuroscience’s Inference Problem And The Perils Of Scientific Reduction”
Neil deGrasse Tyson And The Perils Of Facile Reductionism
You know the shtick by now–or at least, twitterers and tweeters do. Every few weeks, Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of America’s most popular public ‘scientific’ intellectuals, decides that it is time to describe some social construct in scientific language to show how ‘arbitrary’ and ‘made-up’ it all is–compared to the sheer factitude, the amazing reality-groundedContinue reading “Neil deGrasse Tyson And The Perils Of Facile Reductionism”
Szasz On The Myth Of Mental Illness
This semester, in my Landmarks in Philosophy class, I used Thomas Szasz‘s The Myth of Mental Illness as one of the three texts on the reading list (The other two were Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and William James’ Pragmatism.) Szasz’s argument that mental illness does not exist, that psychiatry is aContinue reading “Szasz On The Myth Of Mental Illness”
Tony Judt On A Pair Of Intellectual Sins
In The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and The French Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998, p. 121), Tony Judt writes of Albert Camus: One of the things that he had to come to dislike the most about Parisian intellectuals was their conviction that they had something to say about everything, and that everythingContinue reading “Tony Judt On A Pair Of Intellectual Sins”
Pigliucci And Shaw On The Allegedly Useful Reduction
Massimo Pigliucci critiques the uncritical reductionism that the conflation of philosophy and science brings in its wake, using as a jumping-off point, Tamsin Shaw’s essay in the New York Review of Books, which addresses psychologists’ claims “that human beings are not rational, but rather rationalizing, and that one of the things we rationalize most about isContinue reading “Pigliucci And Shaw On The Allegedly Useful Reduction”
Being Reductive About Sport (And How Silly It Is)
Some folks dislike sport. I use the word ‘dislike’ advisedly; the members of this cohort are not offering critical, politically tinged analysis of sport’s entanglement with big business and its value schemas; they are not exposing sport’s use as an ideology promulgating system, it’s supposed facilitation of political disengagement; they are not critiquing sport forContinue reading “Being Reductive About Sport (And How Silly It Is)”
The Laziness of Reductionist Analyses
In his review of David Luke‘s translation of Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger and Other Stories W. H. Auden wrote, Polar opposites as in appearance they look, the two literary doctrines of Naturalism and Art-for-Art’s-Sake, as propounded by Zola and Mallarmé, are really both expressions of the same megalomania. The aesthete is, at least, frank aboutContinue reading “The Laziness of Reductionist Analyses”
Samir Chopra 