(Adapted from an upcoming publication)

We are fickle creatures. At times, it seems we are nothing but savage beasts, desiring nothing less than total dominance over nature — a quest to know how everything works, and how to control it. At other times, we appear to be nobel creatures made in the image of God, on a quest to understand why this complex universe is the way it is. We vacillate between these parts of ourselves day-by-day, second-by-second. This is what makes us uniquely, wonderfully human.

But, this dual nature — the simultaneous need to understand both how and why, can be confusing. How addresses the question, “what is the relationship between A and B?” Why asks the question, “Does A cause B?” This is even more confusing when we allow ourselves to equivocate in our language. How many times have we all said “This is how it works” when what you really meant was why?

Modern neuroscience has developed amazing tools to understand better how the mind works. We can see bloodflow in the brain. We can track the heritability of mental states across generations and between siblings and twins. We have even mapped the human genome, and are beginning to discover relationships between specific genes and resulting behavior.

What we haven’t done, and can never do through research, is definitively answer questions about why. Rather, we answer questions about how, and then attempt to deduce an answer to why. Even then, we often get the how wrong. Sometimes we get it more right than others.

What’s important is keeping our minds open to the fact that the why’s are always in flux (as are the hows). If you doubt this, just look at the side effect label of numerous psychotropic drugs. SSRIs, used in some patients to treat panic disorder, can elicit panic attacks in others. Some antidepressants, such as Wellbutrin, have been shown to cause depression in certain populations.

In an age where research has provided data faster than we can come up with answers about why it all works, it’s important to remember how “backward” our field was a few decades ago, and imagine how backward must be to our colleagues a few decades from now.

More Information

For an in-depth look at engaging in a healthy form of Reductionist science, I recommend Marko Barendregt and J. F. Hans van Rappard’s 2004 paper, Reductionism Revisted: On the Role of Reduction in Psychology.

They suggest that virtually all of the controversy surrounding reductionism really lies in the ontological arguments — that is, questions of why, and offer an alternative form of reductionist thought that acknowledges it’s limitations and explores how we can bridge gaps between various theories by simply exploring the common base relationships between them.