The Intersection of Neuroscience and Philosophy - On Our Mind

greetings bill mably from UCSD neuroscience is here on the next edition of on our mind and I'm here with Patricia Churchland who's professor of philosophy here at UCSD and I've had a chance to take a look and really to enjoy a recent book that she's written the title of the book is touching a nerve the self is brain and I thought we might begin our interview Patricia welcome thank you by really reading for our listeners from the first paragraph my brain and I are inseparable I am Who I am because my brain is what it is even so I often think about my brain in terms of different from those I use when thinking about myself I think about my brain as that and about myself as me I think about my brain is having neurons but I think of me as having a memory still I know that my memory is all about the neurons in my brain lately I think about my brain and more intimate terms as me a beautiful beginning to a very lovely book Patricia welcome tell us about it tell us about your brain and you well you know neuroscience especially over the last several decades has developed to a point where we can really begin to see these links between high-level concepts like the self or like memory and basic neurobiological concepts having to do with individual neurons and how they function and I think I mean this is a very new time in history of science and in the history of humans understanding their themselves in a neurobiological terms and I find that absolutely amazing a new paradigm really it is a new paradigm and in some ways the old paradigm a weave in with the new in some ways it's going to fall apart we don't know exactly how it's going to turn out but what we are discovering about the brain is so important how we think about ourselves and how we think about how we connect to other people how does a farm girl become a philosopher well you know these things are always full of luck and chance and funny decisions made when you don't know what else to do and I started in philosophy I think because I really thought that philosophy was going to address questions about the nature of the mind and that it would allow us to make progress on the nature of how we acquire knowledge about the world how we think how we reason and then I realized that philosophy as its practiced in the 20th century really isn't about the nature of things that largely it was about the nature of words and so once I was in graduate school I sort of began a shift from the way philosophy is practiced to kind of reaching back into the traditional a tradition of Aristotle and Hume and Kant to the asking those kinds of questions but asking them in the context of this new developing framework in neuroscience and of course psychology as well and you're influenced by Aristotle and naturalist Aristotle but that how did how do you compare the Plato story to the Aristotle story these two men who were linked as the most prominent philosophers of that age how are they different and how has the Aristotelian doctrine moved farther along than the Platonic doctrine what plato of course had these really rather mystical ideas about things that the nature of knowledge was somehow having a relationship to this very abstract realm where by virtue of how the intellect works we reach into that realm and we grasp those truths now Aristotle was Plato's student and Aristotle I think because he grew up in a very practical family his father was a physician and because I think he realized that there was much to be discovered by looking at the nature of things and making observations even though he was Plato's student Plato was such a grand powerful figure aristotle really took things in a very different direction and although you know he made some observations were made some claims about the nature of things that turned out to be wrong at least he saw that observation test experiment generating naturalistic hypotheses was the way to go so seeing is such an important part of science I mean the story of the nervous system is really one of the evolution of thought in concert with technology it's all of science truth it's certainly for the brain the idea that you discover something about the brain enlightens your ability to interpret what the brain does and that issue of technology and concept of tool an idea very much go hand in hand so is that where do we go with this now where are we now in the tool concept dialog that is of course a very beautiful point that there is this kind of coevolution between technology and science and you know sometimes people say well you know if I didn't take neuroscience so long to get started and of course the answer is that you needed a whole lot of physics and a whole lot of chemistry and in particular you needed the understanding of electricity which we really didn't have until Faraday you needed all that in place in order to make any sense of the brain but then the question that you're asking is so what kinds of technologies are going to or do we in our wildest dreams hope will take us into the future and of course as you know I think the one of the great hopes of this brain mapping project behind which Obama has has put his weight is that we will find ways of accessing a very particular level and that's the level between the level of the single cell and the level of the system that's the level of a circuit how do we identify circuits what exactly is it that circuits do that allow me to see a shape or to recognize a face or to smell a smell or to make a decision because that's the circuit level property sounds like a very neuro scientific way of thinking about the brain yeah but let me go back to the fact that you're a professor of philosophy and so let me let me read from your book again I began to learn neuroscience in the mid 1970s after having begun ocurred philosophy this transition was motivated by the realization that if mental processes are actual actually processes of the brain then you can't really understand the mind without understanding how the brain work and then you brain works then you talk about your husband Paul and you say to the exasperation of many of our philosophical colleagues we pursued the idea that the nature of consciousness language use thought and feelings would be illuminated by understanding the brain how upsetting for your colleagues talk about that and your and your and the responses to you and a and actually how this impacted the development of your career as a philosopher yes I mean it was very interesting to me because many colleagues in philosophy both where we were in Winnipeg but also in America didn't think there was a non-physical soul so I thought they would they will agree with me that you need to understand the nature of the brain which has after all the thing that's performing these functions but it wasn't like that what they felt was that you psychology was okay because you could understand behavior and interpret behavior but neuroscience would never tell you anything about the nature of thought or reasoning or how it is that we compose sentences in length how we make decisions and that what I what we were doing what Paul and I were doing was just ridiculous and I I found that very shocking at the time but it's still true unfortunately as many philosophers that they find ways of saying neuroscience isn't really relevant mmm it's very nice of you to be interested but it's not really going to tell us it's not going to address the nature of higher function so but there for me there's only two options to understand that the first option is it isn't in the brain it isn't really going to be in the brain that we find the answers to the greatest questions of the human mind the other is gosh you guys are working at the single cell level and quite frankly word a very different level and we guess that the human mind will never be able to truly decipher the human mind which of it which of those two options does it does it turn out to be or is it both well you know I think those are kind of the two options but you know I I was greatly influenced by Francis Crick in in many ways because he by the time the night mid 1980s rolled around he was so interested in neuroscience and one of the things that the observation that he often made was that you can't tell by looking at a problem whether or not it's solvable so when philosophers said you'll never be able to understand the nature of meaning in language for example he'd say how can they know I mean it's not like problems come from Plato is heaven thing you're never going to solve me empirically so how would you know and I think that's a very philosophical question it's a very philosophical question and so I think that for many questions that philosophers want to take to themselves and say only we can really plumb the nature of the phenomenon and neuroscience will never do it you think how could they know especially if they are innocent of what we do know in neuroscience I mean if that's all sort of terra incognita to them how could they know that neuroscience could never advanced to tell us about the nature of decision-making and whether or not free will is something that we genuinely in normal conditions have but of course the other part of is is we can't tell either because it's the brain as you of course know better than I that the brain is so complex and there's so many bits and pieces and it's so dynamical in the same circuit depending on what individual neurons will do one thing and then we'll do another it may be really hard on the other hand I think what the last 15 or 20 years have told us is that some of the discoveries are such as to tell us something about the basic principles of the way things get done in nervous systems and that of course is terribly important and the complexity is there but there's nothing that says the complexity is impenetrable no and in fact the tools we have it seems to me are giving us more and more inside I think yeah I mean I had a biology teacher in the outback who who used to tell us that life was a special force and that you could never ever hope to explain the nature of living I mean he was vitalist you could never explain the nature of living us in terms of dead molecules how could you get living this itself out of the very dead molecule bla bla bla and I think many of the arguments about consciousness for example that we here never explain the nature of what it is to see blue or to to smell cinnamon maybe but maybe not yeah I mean how do we know that it's a lovely position to take that a priori we've just got a lot of great questions and not too many answers but that those questions are highly motivating we may never answer those questions but to presume that they aren't worth being asked is a very unscientific yes now I've got to ask you a question having talked about the brain and having great love for the brain I suppose one question that we have to ask is are we ready to say that neuroscience is going to trump philosophy is going to make it irrelevant are all of the wonders of the philosophical construction are all those wonderful things that we learn about what it is to be a good human are those things that are going to be readily reduced to oh it's this circuit operating in this way well you know it kind of depends on what the philosophical question is if the question is say about the nature of reasoning and decision-making then I think that neuroscience hand-holdin with psychology is where the greatest progress is likely to be made on the other hand I think there of course always are questions about the nature of living a life and but there I'm not so sure that philosophers have anything very special to contribute that is I think there are many people with considerable wisdom both within the Academy but also outside of the Academy and in in some ways the the problem of how to good lead a good life has been addressed many many times and the answers are basically essentially the same you need family and love and meaningful or satisfying work and Aristotle said that and what's his name dr. Phil on TV says that and then everybody else in any more or less agrees we and we do more or less agree now exactly how find meaningful work well sometimes you need to have you know some some advice from people but those are the things that make life worthwhile is there a risk knowing too much about the brain does brain knowledge make everything else secondary is it does knowing the brain open up possibilities that we don't want to look at you know I it's possible but I don't see it yet I mean I think for example in the domain of Psychiatry where we really still do not understand schizophrenia which afflicts 1% of the population and this is a young person's disease and I think you know there's a sense in which you could romanticize schizophrenia I guess if you had a mind to but from my perspective there's nothing romantic about it it's tragic it's devastating and to have insight into that disease so that we could intervene seems to me to be something devoutly to be desired so so when I think about neurological disorders that tends to be the way I feel about it but I also think new you might ask the same thing with regard to molecular biology I mean are there are they are their genes that we'd be better off knowing about not knowing about feather oh my guess is that knowledge is something to be much appreciated and something to be pursued there can be limits on how we're able to apply our knowledge absolutely but to deny the value of knowledge for its own sake will be a huge mistake I think it would be a huge mistake and I think it's always better to know than to not know even if at first it makes you uncomfortable usually there are ways then of dealing with a discomfort which normally has to with worrying about the implications of that knowledge but humans regulate those things and by and large we do not too bad a job you know one of the worries that one of the issues that are raised when we think about the brain and the mind the brain is the organ of the mind and and mind and soul are tied up with one another and how do we sort that out I loved in the book the question does this does the idea of the soul really deserve to be shelled might we have a soul as well as a brain and then toward the end of that section we can't be certain that no distinct soul science will ever flower but as things stand brain science seems to have the leg up on soil science I love the idea that one doesn't discount a whole new branch of science but that one centers one's ability to make observations very firmly in the brain waiting for new discoveries new tools new concepts to emerge your thoughts yes I absolutely agree I think that that it was probably would have seemed possible say at the turn of the 19th century to have a soul science where the idea was you would explain thinking and perceiving and understanding and so forth in terms of this non-physical thing but it never happened and I think it didn't happen because it probably isn't a real thing and you know that but what I say probably because you know we do have to have be open-minded about these things in science and we do have to be prepared for surprises but at the moment it looks as implausible as the idea that you know there are fairies or that there is vital spirit doesn't look like that patricia churchland a great pleasure being with you thank you for being here and thank you for joining us on our

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 22,464

Rating: 4.9375 out of 5

Keywords: neuroscience, philosophy, Patricia Churchland, neurobiology, Aristotle, brain mapping, soul

Id: annUiXMXVc0

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/elwing007]

This lady is where it's at. I freaking can't with the youtube comments from idiots tho, ugh (talking about @godney100...and all the other religious arguments that we know will come). Thanks for sharing.

I can't wait to see how this whole thing plays out, I have high hopes for neuroscience. It's a relatively underdeveloped science compared to the others and I think that's what makes people perceive it to have less potential than it actually does. That idea is changing however, with more interest that means more people, so more creativity. Creativity to expand neuroscience to a place where people don't see it going. My hope is that people will continue pursuit of the other sciences, giving the neuroscientists the tools they need to dig into life's deepest questions.

[u/balfazahr]

I watched a similar symposium that adressed the question "are you your brain?" from a philosophical point of view. The arguments were that you are NOT your brain, but it was still a very intriguing summit. It was held by I think Oxford. Ill try to find the link if anyone is interested