Constructive Neurophilosophy

Bennet and Hacker [2003] have discussed at large the regrettable state of the relationship between philosophy and neuroscience after Crick, Edelman and Zeki expressed, in different terms, their reticence to grant philosophy any competence in questions about conscience. While Edelman [2001,208] proposed the grounding of epistemology in neuroscience, Zeki [Bennet and Hacker, 2003, 398] went as far as to say that neuroscience will solve the problems of philosophy. Unfortunately, neuroscience has not been able to fulfill such an ambitious program, but its contributions to epistemology are certainly elucidating areas that for long remained obscure and contradictory.

A polemical situation like this is not new for the philosophy of science. The epistemological discussions raised by the Vienna Circle and their extensions and developments well through the XX century met similar objections, especially among physicists. But the problem has even deeper roots, and goes back to the distinction between philosophy and natural philosophy, or put in epistemological terms, the distinction between a philosophy based on metaphysical assumptions and which proceed exclusively by inference from those assumptions (pretty much like axiomatic mathematics, or like theology, or rational ethics), and an inductive philosophy based on experience and contrast of hypothesis by experiment. The monolithic concept of philosophy and philosophical argumentations used by Edelman and Zeki does not apply to philosophy more that it would apply to mathematics.

From a constructive point of view, mathematics and the rest of our epistemological thinking has its roots on biological grounds, a postulate that, although expressed by Kronecker [Bishop, 2012,2],  it took till the experimentations of Changeaux [Changeaux and Connes, 1995] and Dehaene [2001] to be widely accepted, and only among the different epistemological branches that spread from Brouwer’s intuitionism. If we understand by biology only neuroscience, Edelman’s thesis would be right, but it seems too narrow a definition, and highly imprecise, for not only neuroscience, but biology itself seems to be only understandable in a wider astrobiological conceptual frame. Such a frame has to include also the anthropological system, the emergent buffer introduced by human societies, so we find ourselves in a much more complex situation than the one devised by naïve neuroscience.

No doubt, neuroscience has very much to say in the psychological processes of the ego formation and the question of consciousness (and Edelman’s theory of global mappings is a proof of that), but its language lacks the expressive means to address it in a critically manner, i.e., neuroscience has not the means to investigate its own methodologies (ontoepistemological bases of the scientific method, protocols of valuation, etc.), and therefore, to give a meaningful theory of the processes of life. On the other hand, if neuroscience adopts other languages (like the language of epistemology) to express their theories and expand them in wider conceptual realms, such action would be philosophical, and the parochial distinctions of Crick, Edelman and Zeki would no longer have any meaning.

The epistemological reductionist seems to ignore the semantical implications of Tarski’s theorem, i.e., it ignores the notion of emergence of meaning. Theoretical terms do not have necesarilly the same meaning in theories which are sintactically reducible among them. To reduce one theory to another is to find a common symbolical representation for both of them, and that implies that both have the same capabilities of expression, and therefore that we are expressing basically the same thing in both theories, a realist ontology which ignores the historical dimension of our theories and which implies the belief in an underlying reality beyond human symbolization.

It does not have to be called philosophy, let us call it constructive neurophilosophy or systems biology, or any other name, but the epistemological work has to be done if we want to have meaningful argumentations. The process is double: axiomatic critique (of the principles and of the methods) and theoretical construction. The results and postulates of neuroscience are needed at both levels.

References

Bennet, M.R and Hacker, P.M.S. [2003]. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Blackwell Publishing. Malden, (MA-USA), Oxford (G.B) and Victoria (AUS).

Bishop, Errett. [2012] Foundations of Constructive Analysis. Ishi Press International. New York an Tokio.

Changeaux, J.P. and Connes, A. [1995] Conversations on Mind, Matter and Mathematics. Princeton University Press.

Dehaene, Stanislas.[2001]. The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics. Oxford University Press. New York.

Edelman, Gerald M., and Tononi, Giulio. [2001]. Consciousness. Penguin Books. London et alliae.