The fallacy of universal causation

I'm a bit down on myself today. I'm not sure why, and it doesn't really matter anyway. My habit has been to examine my navel and find a just so story to rationalise my mood, but lately I haven't found that very helpful. It seems more sensible to think fuck it and wait for it to pass.

Positivism was part of my mental furniture even before I knew the word existed -- growing up in an increasingly secular, technocratic culture, I metabolised a belief that investigation and observation were the only real sources of knowledge. This belief got embedded in every replenished cell in my body from the age of 12 until now.

Later, I hooked this unstated intellectual framework up to another energising concept: hierarchical reductionism -- if I could only analyse everything by breaking it down into ever-smaller pieces, I could understand everything. (Given my implicit commitment to positivism, it never occurred to me to wonder whether this reductionist project would actually be of any benefit to me. But never mind.)

These combined approaches worked well for me, in lots of contexts -- mechanics, model-making, politics, economics, computing, history -- and I sought to apply them in as many fields of intellectual endeavour as I could. At the same time, I harboured a continued romantic belief in the untouchability of human emotional/intellectual/aesthetic experience: that is, I thought that there was something unique, mysterious and...non-physical, I guess, about the individual human being and their consciousness. Something that couldn't be probed or touched by science. This fed my love of literature, and my attachment to humanist/romantic individuality, and it also informed my belief that love was the greatest thing, the ultimate expression of what we are, and what we seek to achieve.

Later, when I got interested in neuroscience in the late 1980s, my reductionist programme returned with a vengeance: I was fascinated by the electro-chemical buzz of neurones, dendrites, and synapses, and I was enthralled by the idea that if we could only understand the function of each cell and their trillions of interconnections, we could understand consciousness 'from the bottom up'. Increasingly, though, I found that I crashed into a wall: we could understand the processes at the low level (chemicals and electricity dancing around each other), and the processes at the top level (behaviours, moods, big chunks of the brain that 'did' particular things). When I started my History M.Sc., I was playing around with the idea of studying neuropsychology as a way of understanding history and causation -- the idea being that if we could only understand the historical actors and all the influences that played on them we could properly understand why stuff happened. Ambitious, eh? :-)

But these reductionist models broke down for me in the middle, where the very small components meshed and created the higher order organisation and patterns. (I may have been the victim of my own limited intellect, or of the mechanical/positivist models that had dominated my -- largely Newtonian -- thinking. Maybe.) Anyway, the upshot was that I went back to the 'we're a mystery' way of thinking about our minds, convinced (by despair?) that it was all too big and complicated ever to understand. That's where I've been for a little while, but I think I might buy some more books about neuroscience and get myself up to date: it's such a rich and thrilling subject.

Anyway. This is a long way of saying that you can think too much (I never thought I'd ever say that). Sometimes simplicity, acceptance -- or just getting pissed and forgetting about it -- can be the best approaches, rather than seeking some non-existent explanation/kernel of truth way up your arse.