No Philosophy of Neuroscience?

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In Discover, Neuroskeptic wonders why neuroscience has apparently never had any “big ideas” or schools of thought growing out of fundamentally different approaches.

“By ‘big’ ideas, I mean schools of thought, philosophies, or movements,” he writes. “Psychology has had, and continues to have, plenty of them: behaviorism, cognitivism, Freudianism, social constructionism, to name a few. But whenever I’ve tried to think of the neuroscience equivalents of these big ideas, I’ve drawn a blank.”

Where Are The Big Ideas in Neuroscience? (Part 1) (Discover, April 19, 2015)

2 COMMENTS

  1. Bio-psychiatry is one of those which supposedly grows out of neuroscience. Problem is that it is as much informed by real neuroscience is as racists and fascists were informed by genetics and evolutionary theory. I think one has to be careful with “philosophies growing out of” any given biological or otehr science – they tend to have little to do with science and a lot to do with pretty hideous elements of human nature.

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  2. Problem is that the whole basis of neuroscience is uncertain, because it is not clear that the brain, being a collection of complex molecular process constituting trillions of semi-autonomous cells, could conceivably be the substrate within which consciousness emerges, or if consciousness is conveyed in the energetic transmissions that pervade the physical architecture radiating out from the central nervous system, or if, as many quantum phycicists suggest, whether awareness, or consciousness, is actually the fundamental actual dimension within which matter takes place as an appearance but not in essence. So just imagine the implications. You don’t know if the brain is a mere instrument for conscious intelligence, whether it is the origin or mere recorder of the impressions in consciousness. So what can neuroscience say actually? All it can hope to do is follow neurochemical and bioelectrical flows and correlate these and any structural and functional (behavioural) changes with the content of subjective experience. Yet correlation is not causation so we have not grasped as a society how vapid, superficial and so far rather irrelevant neuroscience is to an understanding of life or consciousness. The same too can be said of the neo-Darwinist position on evolution through natural selection of genes, and the wrong prejudices and pretentions of both neo-Darwinism and neuroscience is fundamental to the whole architecture of Western rationalist and empiricist science and thought. Ah well – every blancmange must collapse eventually.

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