Organisms are composed of organs, organs of cells and cells of molecules – a living apparatus. Or is there more? Can unconscious electrical stimuli in the nerves explain human consciousness? Or “free” will?
The physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond was a vehement advocate of a mechanistic, reductionist worldview in which life is explained by the interaction of its individual parts. The later rector of the University of Berlin had made a name for himself with his findings on the conduction of electrical stimuli in nerves and muscles. He tried to bring this “mechanism of animal movement” closer to the Berlin public on February 22, 1851, 172 years ago, in the “Association for Scientific Lectures” by turning his audience into a mind game prompted.
If a steamer ran aground on a foreign coast, and the local natives were now trying to understand what the unknown something was and how it could move, some would probably speculate that “white devils” had “souled” the ship. But someone would try to fathom “the secret of the miracle vehicle”: “Day after day he searches […] the cold, motionless remains of the ship’s hull […]recognizes the corrugated tree on which the wheels sat, the crooked pins and blueing rods, […] the cauldron with traces of firing beneath it; he lists various other organs of whose importance he has no idea; in a word, he investigates above all the construction of the machine whose operation he wishes to understand.”
The shipwreck, DuBois-Reymond explained to his audience, is like the animal corpses that physiologists examine in order to recognize the function, the “organic physics” of the animal machine from the structure of the organs, tissues and cells. With this mechanistic way of thinking, Du-Bois Reymond rejected the prevailing opinion at the time that there was a “Vis vitalis”, a force that makes life possible in the first place.
Nevertheless, Du-Bois Reymond, descendant of devout Huguenots, also saw the limitations of this view of life. For example, he doubted that it would ever be possible to explain scientifically how human consciousness arises. So far he has been right. “Knowledge” is limited to the limits of the scientific method, the reductionist approach
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