zoon wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:Yeah it's definitely an interesting avenue of research but, as you say, it's still in its infancy so it's definitely worthwhile to be cautious in the claims we make about the ability of neuroscience to explain thoughts and behaviors. Sort of related, if you get the chance I think you'd enjoy reading "
Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience" which criticises the increasing trend of "neurobabble" (a criticism of bad science and bad reporting, not of neuroscience as a whole). It even has a chapter on using neuroimaging for lie detection.
As that book emphasises, neuroscience so far doesn’t tell us in any detail what people are thinking, but it does now make vividly clear that thoughts have a physical basis, rather as the pictures of Earth from space gave a vivid appreciation of facts that had been known for a long time.
Sort of, but only in an uncontroversial way. Everybody accepts that thoughts have a physical basis, even substance dualists accept that the brain is necessary for thoughts. The difficult question is whether the brain
produces those thoughts, of which neuroscience has no way of answering. (To avoid accusations here or an off-topic line of discussion, I obviously accept that substance dualism is ridiculous).
zoon wrote:?The idea that consciousness is special, a separate state of matter or of being, comes from the historical accident that thoughts are for practical purposes private, we cannot (yet) read each other’s brains as the mechanisms they are. We are correct in supposing that our thoughts are not known to other people, we are not correct if we assume further that the privacy of thoughts is some essential feature of the universe.
Maybe that's where the idea comes from but again, neuroscience has no way of determining where thoughts actually come from. It just tells us that the brain is necessary for thoughts and not that it is sufficient.
The idea that it's "in the brain therefore it's objective" or "it's in the brain so the brain explains this behavior" is really nonsensical. Before we ever do any research we know that our political or musical preferences (for example) are going to be physically represented in the brain somewhere because, even if we're dualists, we understand that the brain is necessary for the control of those preferences. This isn't really an "explanation" for the behavior though.
It's like when that neuroscience research was misrepresented by journalists and they tried to claim that spiritual experiences, or near-death experiences, or whatever, weren't "real" because they were just firing in the brain. Well, no shit it's physically represented in the brain - how can someone experience or remember an experience without using their brain? It just doesn't tell us whether the neuroscientific results are representations of some so-called divine or supernatural experience, or whether the experience was entirely fabricated by the brain.
There are a couple of posts that explain this idea better than I can:
Brain Scans Prove that the Brain Does StuffSo we already know that HSDD “has a physical origin”, but only in the sense that everything does; being a Democrat or a Republican has a physical origin; being Christian or Muslim has a physical origin; speaking French as opposed to English has a physical origin; etc. etc. None of which is interesting or surprising in the slightest.
The point is that the fact that something is physical doesn’t stop it being also psychological. Because psychology happens in the brain. Suppose you see a massive bear roaring and charging towards you, and as a result, you feel scared. The fear has a physical basis, and plenty of physical correlates like raised blood pressure, adrenaline release, etc.
But if someone asks “Why are you scared?”, you would answer “Because there’s a bear about to eat us”, and you’d be right. Someone who came along and said, no, your anxiety is purely physical – I can measure all these physiological differences between you and a normal person – would be an idiot (and eaten).
And:
The Mismeasure of Neuroscience:
Nevertheless, there are two general issues that I’m concerned about whenever discussions of “the neuroscience of X” come up: one has to do with an apparent confusion (in some people’s minds) regarding what exactly one establishes when one discovers a neural correlate for a particular human behavior; the other has to do with what can (and cannot) be learned from studies of brain damage, be it accidental or as the result of surgery to alleviate neurological problems.
Let’s begin with what exactly follows from studies showing that X has been demonstrated to have a neural correlate (where X can be moral decision making, political leanings, sexual habits, or consciousness itself). The refrain one often hears when these studies are published is that neuroscientists have “explained” X, a conclusion that is presented more like the explaining away (philosophically, the elimination) of X. You think you are making an ethical decision? Ah!, but that’s just the orbital and medial sectors of the prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus region of your brain in action. You think you are having a spiritual experience while engaging in deep prayer or meditation? Silly you, that’s just the combined action of your right medial orbitofrontal cortex, right middle temporal cortex, right inferior and superior parietal lobules, right caudate, left medial prefrontal cortex, left anterior cingulate cortex, left inferior parietal lobule, left insula, left caudate, and left brainstem (did I leave anything out?).
I could keep going, but I think you get the point. The fact is, of course, that anything at all which we experience, whether it does or does not have causal determinants in the outside world, has to be experienced through our brains. Which means that you will find neural correlates for literally everything that human beings do or think. Because that’s what the brain is for: to do stuff and think about stuff.