Neurophilosophy
Makes rocket science seem easy
Neurophilosophy is the philosophic study of neuroscience.Neuroscience studies the brain in a variety of ways, from observations of brain damaged people to many sorts of brain scans. We have all seen the sorts of images the brain scans give - various regions of the brain mapped with different colors. Lots of us have seen lurid "This is your brain on love (or crack or kitten or whatever)." stories in mass media.
Neurophilosophers think about whether those stories make any sense. (Hint: they don't)
The problem neuroscientists face is a bootstrap problem - they can get vast amounts of data but how does that data become meaningful?
And to get the pretty pictures the neuroscientists have to make assumptions about the nature of the data they gather.
And the philosophers wonder whether the pictures tell us anything about how the brain works.
Instead, maybe the pictures are purely artifacts of the assumptions that enable the pictures.
So, instead of "This is your brain in love" we get the much reduced statement "This is the kind of picture we get from the data when you are in love".
See the difference? The former is talking about something objective. The latter is talking about interpreting data according to assumptions.
It is easy to slip into dismissiveness here. After all, what is the use of pretty pictures of assumptions? And by extension - what is the use of neuroscience? The criticisms are pretty scathing. Critics ask for even one instance where neuro-imaging has informed psychology. As the old lady used to say; "Whar's the beef?"
But think about it - isn't that just a cheap shot?
Isn't a bit like a spectator calling an Olympic skier a bum because he fell attempting something that most of us think is impossible?
For one thing, there is a lack of respect for the tools at our disposal. Those tools are fabulous and give us information never before available. They open a new world.
And what happens when one enters a new world as a baby? We all did it? Remember? Of course not. When you first came into the world nothing made sense. And how did we learn? Well not via philosophy for sure.
Neuroscience gives us information about that. We are born with way more neuronal connections than we need. Essentially everything is connected to everything else. With experience; like seeing and waving limbs and hearing some neuronal connections are strengthened and others die away from lack of use.
Our experience literally sculpts our brains. Neuroscience tells us this.
Isn't that important to philosophy?
So neuroscience as a discipline is facing the same sort of problem we all faced as babies. How to make sense of a flood of data that is not in itself meaningful. They are starting from scratch and doing whatever they can. They are imagining ways of interpreting the data they get - and one must expect the initial attempts will be crude.
The neurophilosophers do good work by reminding just how crude the work is now and preventing hubris among neuroscientists. But one wonders how the philosophers will react when the neuroscientists get it figured out? Will they become like creation scientists; denying the obvious?
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.