Neuroscience lives in the shadow of consciousness itself. Science has few if any tools to study what consciousness actually “Is.” It may turn out that our neurological system is the TV tuner circuitry for something like the “prana” or “chi” that ancient philosophies described. We don’t have the tools to measure that and because it borders on the spiritual, it would be the kiss of career death for a scientist to postulate ideas around “Life Force Energy” or the actual nature of consciousness if those ideas smacked of spirituality and such existed in a subtler realm than we have tools to measure.
But such may indeed be the case. Physics keeps running deeper down a rabbit hole where things like Dark Energy and Dark Matter, which were recently undreamed of, are now thought to comprise more of the universe than we can see. Who knows how far down the rabbit hole both our physical universe and conscious existence go?
El Cid
“It may turn out that our neurological system is the TV tuner circuitry…physics keeps running deeper”
Excellent point. I have always considered it to be so. The brain itself seems to be the tool and the lab for it. But has to be prepared through strict sustained discipline, character building, and focus as the prophets and saints of old did it.
Physics is indeed the ultimate science. Beyond it lies ‘Consciousness, Spirituality and the Mind’ the right side of the brain that seems taboo to science and the ‘Kiss of Death’ to grant seeking scientists. But they will eventually be daring there…
urstoff
Is there no debate about the value of large-scale computational models that make up the sub-field of computational neuroscience? I would think that some neuroscientists see them as premature or a waste of time (for practical or philosophical reasons), but that’s just a guess. On the more philosophical side, is there no debate about just what exactly constitutes a representation in the brain? Is it a dynamic pattern of neural firings? Is it specific neurons that are tuned to specific stimuli? And you can probably graft contemporary philosophical debates of consciousness onto those neuroscientists who think there are or are not such things as neural correlates of consciousness.
El Cid
Excellent point. I have always considered it to be so. The brain itself seems to be the tool and the lab for it. But has to be prepared through strict sustained discipline, character building, and focus as the prophets and saints of old did it.
Rob Barton
embodied-ism?
http://jayarava.blogspot.com Jayarava
This paper by Thomas Metzinger seems to get at some of the problems I envisage in philosophy of mind – the limitations imposed by legacy concepts that are holding back our progress in the neurosciences. The redefining of problems based on observation and analysis of what we see rather than what we have traditionally assumed to be the case.
I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion, for example, that “consciousness” is a wholly unhelpful concept that only leads us into Cartesian divisions. Like the “self” (qua entity or homunculus), when we go looking for “consciousness” we find nothing. If instead we just look and describe what we see it is not what we thought we would see.
Anonymouse
From localist to distributed processing was quite the paradigm shift, wasn’t it?
vcabq
Psychologists often deride neuroscience for its lack of philosophy and speculation. In my view, the ideas in psychology are so big only because the data is so small. A few behaviors, some reaction times, introspections, etc. are used to inform sometimes fantastic theories and debates. Religion offers an extreme case of this. How many angels can dance on a pin? You can argue for as few or as many as you like, we’ve never observed it, so have no data. By contrast, neuroscience is rooted in hard evidence, and typically a lot of it. This greatly limits how grand the ideas can be in neuroscience, since it can be hard to account for all of the evidence with a simplistic set of rules. I for one appreciate its honesty and focus on reality. This makes the union of psychology and neuroscience harder than it should be though.
eikofried
I honestly think Psychology is an extremely diverse field, and one shouldn’t generalize from small social psych experiments to the rest of the discipline. Lots of large-scale studies and very good methods being used in parts of the field.
Sönke Zürner
I seems self-evident that theories about the ‘psyche’–in contradistinction to the brain–are going to be both more diverse and more constitutive of the account given, though not for the reason you suggest (viz. fewer data). If anything the ill-defined boundaries of psychology means that there is a greater variety of what counts as a datum (a ‘given’ of experience understood as including introspection). There is more descriptive-phenomenological, definitional, and theoretical work to be done by psychology.
It is not fewer data that encourages a plethora of theoretical approaches, but the fact that the subject matter (is it the mind, psyche, behavior, cognition, personality, the central nervous system?) is ambi-valent. The number of theoretical approaches mirrors the diversity of fields/systems ‘drawn’ by theories of the psychical.
If you replace ‘neuroscience’ by the ‘philosophy of mind’ you will discover no want of theoretical diversity.
Perhaps it is the need to account for intentional states that complicates and diversifies the theoretical work of psychology and philosophy of mind (of the mind-brain relationship).
I suspect the dearth of theoretical schools in neuroscience is sympomatic of the biological approach to organic systems per se because the business of empirical research limits the range of hypotheses to those that can be tested, and the range of explanations to mechanismic/causal ones. Or aspires to do so. Psychology, on the other hand, encompasses, among other things, rational psychology: an introspective-analytical discourse/dialectic about emotions–the order of pathe articulated by Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, psychoanalytic theory, etc.
