In Chapter 9 of his book Networks of the Brain, Sporns notes the strong impact of reductionist thinking in modern neuroscience and its ultimate shortcomings in accounting for mind:
There have been many false starts in the attempt to link brain and cognition. One such failure is neuroreductionism, a view that fully substitutes all mental phenomena by neural mechanisms, summarized in the catchphrase "You are nothing but a pack of neurons," or, put more eloquently, "'You', your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules" (Crick, 1994). The problematic nature of this statement lies not in the materialist stance that rightfully puts mental states on a physical basis but rather in the phrase "no more than," which implies that the elementary properties of cells and molecules can explain all there is to know about mind and cognition. Reductionism can be spectacularly successful when it traces complex phenomena to their root cause, and yet it consistently falls short as a theoretical framework for the operation of complex systems because it cannot explain their emergent and collective properties. (180)Sporns' argument echoes arguments from Edgar Morin that I have noted in previous posts that reductionist science has been "spectacularly successful [in] tracing complex phenomena to their root cause," yet has consistently fallen "short as a theoretical framework for the operation of complex systems because it cannot explain their emergent and collective properties."
I think I detect a similar reductionism at work in most educational theories, which reduce knowledge and learning to the functions of a single mind. Even the social constructivists still limit knowledge created in a group to the knowing of a single mind. This concept of knowledge and learning can be spectacularly successful in helping us trace the complex phenomena of learning back to the behaviors of a single individual, but it fails to provide us with a theoretical framework to account for the ability of a network of strangers to so accurately guess the weight of an ox in a rural English fair, as James Surowiecki describes in his book The Wisdom of Crowds. How does the crowd know the weight of the ox when obviously so few of the individuals in the crowd had even the remotest notion of how much the animal weighed? What emergent properties were at work that produced knowledge that no one person had? For Sporns, this question might be phrased: what emergent properties are at work to produce mind when no one neuron has mind? Reductionism fails us just here. When we collect enough neurons in one place and interconnect them, then new structures and functions emerge—not out of nothing, but into something that wasn't there before. Likewise, when we collect enough students in one place and interconnect them, then do new structures and functions emerge?
I think Carl Bereiter is questioning this specific reductionist tendency in education when he says in the Preface to his book Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age (2002): "What is being challenged is the basic conception of the mind as a container of objects—beliefs, desires, conjectures, remembered events, and the like—which the mind works on in cognition" (1). If Bereiter is correct, then knowledge and learning cannot be reduced to a single mind containing a complicated collection of chunks of knowledge and other cognitive objects and upon which the individual mind operates to create its mental picture of the universe.
I'm somewhat curious that the concept of emergence is not more prominent in our CCK11 conversations. I wonder why.