Unifying brain and mind may seem like a reasonable objective to most biologists. Why are some of your philosophy colleagues uncomfortable with this synthesis you call neurophilosophy?
Part of it is that science discovers that the reality behind the appearances is quite different from what we though. Aristotle thought, for pretty good reasons, that an object is not going to keep moving unless you keep a force applied to it. Giving that up based on the Newtonian framework means accepting a very different picture of the nature of kinetics. And similarly, thinking that things come into being in a Darwinian fashion rather than at the moment of creation is, for some people, very counterintuitive.
I think that some people worry that the next step is that science is going to say, "You aren’t what you thought you were." I think lots of us find that hard. "It’s one thing to have a counterintuitive theory of motion but I don’t want a counterintuitive theory of myself; there can’t be a counterintuitive theory of me because I’m the best authority for how I work."
Also, I think that some people think that if science is applied to humans, then the dignity of humans is at stake. I actually take a very different view, that some of the very damaging superstitions we have about humans may actually be replaced by much more caring, more humanitarian hypotheses or approaches, in just the way that it is really much more humanitarian to have a pharmacological way of treating a schizophrenic that to put that person on a dung pile in order to chase the demons out.
As in other places in our universe, I think that scientific understanding of the mind will actually promote humanitarian values rather than detract from them.
Maybe the other thing that worries some philosophers is that these questions about the mind have been their property for a long time. It’s a turf thing. But I think the coming generation of graduate students and young faculty in philosophy find it obvious that scientific data on the brain are relevant to our understanding of the mind. In the meantime, the turf thing continues.
A leading critic of neurophilosophy makes an argument something like this: "Sure the brain is probably all there is, but you will never explain consciousness, the painfulness of pain, and so forth in terms of neurons, in terms of ions passing back and forth across membranes, etc." My response is, that’s an argument from, "I can’t imagine." So what if you can’t imagine it? That’s a fact about you. That’s not a fact about what we can and can’t discover. I am unimpressed with that argument.
As neurophilosophy brings the brain and mind closer, how will this change how we view ourselves as a species?
Maybe in a general way, one could say that we are learning increasingly how much similarity there is between us and other animals. And that many aspects of our behavior are rooted in our evolutionary past via evolution of the brain.
The brain has many of the aspects has because we had to survive. I don’t think we should find this alarming or sad; I think that we should revel in it.
But at the same time, there are things that make us different. Just as there are things chimpanzees can do that we can’t do, there are things we can do that they can’t do. It would be nice to know what the difference is.
One hypotheses is that what makes our intelligence possible is allowing the nervous system to mature at different rates. In our case, immaturity in the brain is extended for quite a long time. And things the developed brain learned earlier can be useful in teaching the brain later. Perhaps these developmental delays enable us to do more complicated things.
So it’s not that we’re rational, and other animals are not; it’s quantitative difference partly related to the developmental timing that prolongs brain development. That understanding might even have the effect of allowing people to have more regard for other species and less of the attitude that, "we are the greatest, so we get to squash all the others."
Evolution doesn’t start from scratch. It has to be gradual, to some degree. A small difference in some aspect of an organism can make the things as a whole look like it’s got vastly different properties. Our brains are so similar to chimpanzee brains, but some relatively small difference in developmental timing magnifies into very different properties.
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