Email This Post AC Grayling on what brain research is doing for philosophy
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Neuroscience, psychology and philosophy here meet in richly promising combination, giving rise in the usage of its proponents to a new name: neurophilosophy. The armchair speculations of traditional philosophical enquiry here yield place to something with a more solid basis and some surprising and suggestive findings already to hand. Even before fMRI studies on decision and volition began to suggest that these are pre-conscious processes, we knew that people whose brain hemispheres had been separated by commissurotomy seemed to be two sometimes competing centres of selfhood; and studies of brain chemistry have provided insights into the nature of mental disturbance, emotion and social bonding (the voles of Patricia Churchland are a now familiar example of the last).
Without question, empirical neuroscience is teaching us much already, and will teach us vastly more along these lines as time goes by. It is an important project. It is not either sceptical or critical of this project to say, nevertheless, that a sense of proportion has to be kept regarding its philosophical promise. For when one thinks about persons, their characters, what they know and believe, the frameworks of concepts that organise their view of the world and their attitudes and responses to it, and the way they give weight to competing reasons for action, the neurophilosophical approach is only going to be part of the story, because in principle it cannot be the whole story. The reason is that minds have to be understood “broadly” as opposed to “narrowly”, in the same sense that we speak of “broad content” and “narrow content” in relation to mental content generally. For instance, individuating (“picking out”) referential thoughts necessarily involves mention of the referents of the thoughts; thus, to individuate a thought of a chair from the thought of a book necessitates reference to the chair and the book outside the thinker’s head.
The implication is that the character and content of one’s mind is the result of its interaction with the social and physical settings in which it became functional and increasingly mature. Any individual mind is accordingly the manufacture of a community of minds and of input from the world; it grows by continuous feedback in interaction with parents, teachers, the community, and the physical environment. Therefore to identify what a person knows and believes, and to describe how he thinks, is to see him as a node in a complex of relationships with other minds and a manifold of accompanying external stimuli. The point might illustratively be put by saying that a mind is the product of many brains in interaction; that externally-caused excitations – many of them from other brains – of some subset of sensory surfaces (fingertip dendrites, rods and cones, taste buds, ear drums) are necessary conditions for mental life, to which ineliminable reference must be made in explaining mental content; in short, that mind is brain plugged into two kinds of environment, social and physical, and a brain not thus plugged in is not the seat of a mind.
Perhaps this is obvious enough, but if so it does not seem to have been given full weight even in the preliminary indications that fMRI gives us about the nature of volition, decision, the place of emotion in reasoning, and like matters of philosophical significance. For example: experiments which suggest that decisions are reached some time (split seconds are aeons in neurological terms) before a subject is aware of having made a decision, take the form of choosing which button to press after receiving a given stimulus. Such decisions are a far cry from deciding where to invest one’s savings or whether to accept a certain job offer. Likewise, the suggestion that moral responses are hard-wired and amygdala-based fails to take into account the way moral attitudes change in individuals and societies over time and as a result of discussion and information.
Again: this is not to call neuropsychology and neurophilosophy into question; it is merely a reminder that questions about mind are not exhaustible by investigation of the brain; there is here still work for philosophy, without a prefixed “neuro”, to do.
Further reading
Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy, Patricia Smith Churchland (MIT Press, 2002)
AC Grayling is professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London
Read all fifty ideas and more in the special 50th issue of tpm
Neuroscience doesn’t, can’t, tell us anything about self-hood or experience of course. Even if the scientists won’t admit it, the neuroscience lab techs who correlate flesh with experience in their construction of neurophysiological structures from reports of people’s experience DO know it.
Wittgenstein is supposed to have made one of the first worthwhile philosophical advances in overturning the Cartesianian inventionion/assumption of internal mental states.
Now, it looks as though neuroscience is taking us back to the good old days of myth and magic.
Neurophilosophy might easily be shrugged off as pseudoscience’s attempt to look respectable, if it wasn’t for the fact that there are too many of them about now. Their early doubts that the public might see through the hype hasn’t been born out, so we can expect them to get bolder.
[...] Grayling on neurophilosophy Here’s a brief view of neurophilosophy from Anthony Grayling in The Philosopher’s Magazine. [...]
Neuroscience’s relationship to self and experience can be seen analogous to physics’ relationship to playing tennis (the force and angle at which to serve accurately etc can all be calculated), or to chemistry’s relationship to cooking. The later’s relationship is more distant than the former so the distance between neurobiology and experience is likely to be even greater, much greater, but the relationship remains irrefutable, and a joining of the disciplines into whatever u want to call it: be it “neurophilosophy” can only be seen as a step in the right direction to me.
*reverse tht “former and latter”
There is no relationship between chemistry and cooking. No examination of a chemical(s) will tell us that it is cooked well unless we have already non-chemically identified it as such.
There is no epistemological exchange r relationship between elements involved in a reduction. There is only the fixing of associations.
That said, it should be evident without recourse to philosophy that the brain can yield no information on self or experience. To think that it does yield it is animism or magical thinking.
The point that fMRI only shows us a brain in comparative isolation is unarguable. But can’t the same charge be laid at many philosophical approaches as well.
Any analytical discipline starts by isolating subjects from their environment - the proof comes when conclusions are extended to the real world.
Results in Behavioural Economics suggest that Investment decisions can in fact be highly determined by subconscious factors. So there may be more truth than we suspect to the idea that these decisions were made for us.
To say that neuroscience cannot say anything about self-hood or experience betrays a bias unless properly justified. I don’t see why John Jones thinks it cannot, because he has not given a clear justification.
Science cannot answer questions about why is the color blue “blue”, or what is “blue-ness” (phenomenologically, not in terms of the physical details), but I don’t see how the answers to such questions can enlighten us about the human condition
[...] “Ideas of the century: Neurophilosophy,” The Philosophers’ Magazine, by A.C. Grayling [...]
Yuki,
The justification that brain science can yield nothing of self or experience, is given empirically and logically.
Empirically, all physical representations of the physical brain are conceptually, and spatially, delineated out of reports of our experience.
Logically, this means (and, like logic, does not entail nor not entail) that any experiential facts or concepts that we get out of the brain must necessarilly be founded from what we have already read into it.
Brain is the container; mind is the content. The hard drive on my computer is not the same as my ideas on that hard drive. Of course if the hard drive gets damaged my ideas, or access to them, may get lost. But if there’s a problem with the logic or morality of my ideas, examining the hard drive won’t solve it.
We have to be clear on what a brain is.
A brain is an object that is delineated from reports of experience. A picture of a brain, (or even a real brain), on its own grounds, isn’t a picture of anything. It is a random selection of physical structures, it identifies nothing, nor does anything identify it.
That is why the Brain is not a container, and why MRI scans of a single brain do not even show us a brain. A brain is the name we give to a conceptual composite. But then objects are like that. The limits of objects are created in different ways. We need to remember the way we create this object we call brain, and not read our own creation into it.
So, no, the brain does not tell us anything about self or experience because self and experience delineate, identify, manifest, create, the brain.
When was neutral monism rejected as a serious possibility?
John wrote, “self and experience delineate, identify, manifest, create, the brain.” This sounds like a description of mind. Are brain and mind the same thing, a “conceptual composite”? Can we change our brain the same way we can change our mind?
Interesting thoughts, Peter.
Can we change our brain like we change our mind? When we learn a new language, or allow a thought or action to become repetitive, we are changing our brain circuitry and chemistry.
Thinking of the mind-brain ie. a single entity made up of two parts, is probably the most accurate way of describing it, according to what we know thus far.
The difficulty lies in studying it as a single entity and in this day we are all acutely aware of the need to do so.
Where do we start? Terminology, research methods? And, should we?
Cheryl, I think studying the brain/mind as a single entity is what’s causing so much trouble in biological psychiatry. Isn’t this like the computer technician arguing that my hard drive and the essays on my hard drive are a single entity?
Peter, are you arguing for Cartesian dualism and interactionism? How do you handle the delicate issue of explaining how an immaterial mind can interact with the material substance of the body or brain? And yes we can change our brain, although perhaps not as easily as we change our minds. Research has shown that neurogenesis continues throughout the lifespan, even beyond the brain’s full development.