This is in reference to a 2011 lecture entitled “Plato’s Philosophy of Art”, given by Dr. James Grant of the University of London, Birkbeck. An audio recording of the lecture can be found at the bottom.

Today, Plato is probably known best for his work Republic, an outline of a highly idealistic and just city-state. Many remember bits and pieces from their Intro to Philosophy classes, but a criticism that is generally brushed over in discussion of the Republic is Plato’s flat-out renunciation of art. A prerequisite in understanding Plato’s position is realizing the role that art, and specifically poetry, played in Greek culture.

Poetry in the time of Plato played a similar role to the Bible in early American culture. Sections were recited at schools, in homes, and children were expected to memorize various passages for later recitation. Much like the Bible, these poems formed early moral backbones in young Greeks and were very much responsible for the development of certain cultural norms. It wasn’t so much a problem for Plato that art had such a grip on the cultural norms and moral fibers of a society, but rather that the artists themselves had no understanding of what they were representing, and thus inspired corrupt and destructive morals. In the eyes of Plato, the artist or poet was typically not the ideal moral character in any society, and thus should not have been in charge of dictating moral grounds or developing cultural norms. A second complaint Plato had about the role of the artist was that even if they were generally a moral and civilized human being, they were falsely representing reality through their art, something which Plato very much opposed to and which undermined a central theory in Platonism.

A mainstay in Platonic thought is the idea of ideal forms. The Theory of Forms posits that beyond the world we see, touch and hear, there is a world of fundamental reality, of pure truth and form. In this school of thought, the form of a bed, for example, is not its color, material, unmade sheets or mattress, but the essence of “bed” itself. Plato claims that the problem herein is that artists know nothing of form, especially painters. He claims that the painter only knows visual cues and expresses his ideas only through visual representation. Plato says that painters use tricks to inspire error in their weak viewers, making them think that there is a real world inside of the canvas, when there really is not. Dr. Grant elaborates with an example about a painter of a flute versus a flutist. He says that in the eyes of Plato, the flutist has a much deeper understanding of the form of a flute than the artist who represents a flute in a painting. It was this discrepancy in sincerity and honesty of knowledge that disturbed Plato most.

A modern approach in defending Plato’s dislike of art has to do with cognitive biases and more specifically with what we call the Availability Heuristic. The Availability Heuristic is the tendency of people to overestimate the likelihood of an event happening if an example of that event easily comes to mind. Illustrations of this bias include general over-estimations of dying in a plane crash following the attacks on September 11^th, an increased worry about shark attacks after the release of the movie Jaws in 1975 and the general assumption that all celebrities must regularly use cocaine because we see a few cases of celebrity drug binges on television. Similarly, art can affect our perception or reality in a similar way. Dr. Grant claims that perhaps the standardization of “story arcs” in movies and books have given the public an altered and idealized version of how reality works. When life does not, and Dr. Grant notes that it rarely does, follow the standard structure of a Western novel or the story arc of a modern romance film, the cognitive dissonance that arises many times leads to disappointment and sadness.

Duchamp's Urinal

Another example pertaining to art’s stranglehold on modern cultural norms is the accusation that excessive tobacco use in popular films is what led to the wide use of tobacco in everyday life. Still today, public health experts are advocating for the reduction of cigarette use in movies, though efforts have continually come up short due to large bribes from the very informed and aware tobacco companies. This horrible truth highlights why now, more than ever, we may indeed want to question who is doing the teaching in modern culture.

Whether or not Plato was right about art’s destructiveness to the moral fabric of society, the fact is that it does have a large impact. We should then begin to ask, what is the role of art in society? And if that role is very important, who can we trust as an artist? And is art a valuable source of knowledge? For now, these questions will be left out in the open for contemplation and analysis at a later point.

References

Plato’s Philosophy of Art – James Grant Ph.D

In this post, I attempt to present two major metaphysical accounts of space by Kant and Leibniz, then present some recent findings from cognitive neuroscience about the neural basis of spatial cognition in an attempt to understand more about the nature of space and the possible connection of philosophical theories to empirical observations.

Immanuel Kant’s account of space in his Prolegomena serves as a cornerstone for his thought and comes about in a discussion of the transcendental principles of mathematics that precedes remarks on the possibility of natural science and metaphysics. Kant begins his inquiry concerning the possibility of ‘pure’ mathematics with an appeal to the nature of mathematical knowledge, asserting that it rests upon no empirical basis, and thus is a purely synthetic product of pure reason (§6). He also argues that mathematical knowledge (pure mathematics) has the unique feature of first exhibiting its concepts in a priori intuition which in turn makes judgments in mathematics ‘intuitive’ (§7.281). For Kant, intuition is prior to our sensibility and the activity of reason since the former does not grasp ‘things in themselves,’ but rather only the things that can be perceived by the senses. Thus, what we can perceive is based on the form of our a priori intuition (§9). As such, we are only able to intuit and perceive things in the world within the framework naturally provided by the capabilities and character (literally the under–standing) of our understanding. Kant then takes our intuitions of space (and time) as concepts integral to pure mathematics and as necessary components of our intuition (§10.91).

Kant develops that geometry is based on this pure intuition of space (and arithmetic on that of time) and advances that even after removing all sensations and empirical intuitions, the intuitions of space and time remain, proving them as the a priori intuitions that precede any form of empirical experience or sensation (ibid.103). Thus, our experience of space and the means by which we do geometry is a component of our intuition for Kant and does not require the existence of direct objects of experience. Rather, our awareness of things as they appear in space is woven into our intuition and is a basic characteristic of our experience. Kant goes on to describe space as the “form of outer intuition of our sensibility” in that it is the thing in which we perceive things, i.e. that it is a transcendental condition for sensation (§13.317). By this, we arrive at our understanding of the arrangements of objects in the world not by an empirical encounter, but by the form of our intuition. Therefore, Kant’s account makes geometry an intuitive practice that utilizes a basic component of our pure a priori intuition as opposed to our rational activity. In support, Kant offers that we determine a geometrical concept, e.g. congruency, not through concepts formed by reason, but through relations that are apparent as a result of our pure intuition (ibid.325).

Kant’s theory stands in stark contrast to that of Leibniz, whose account of space is intelligible through arguments in his Discourse on Metaphysics and Monadology. In the former Leibniz foreshadows the concept of the monad in arguing, “each singular substance expresses the universe in its own way,” which develops that the constituent, most fundamental components of reality itself are unique and infinite in number and contain all things present, past and possible (DM.9). In the latter work, Leibniz reiterates that each monad must be different from each other because no two monads can be identical, further establishing the notion of an infinite number of infinite substances that make up the universe (M8-9). Accordingly, objects in the world are made up of monads, which are self contained and distinct from one another. Based on Leibniz’s theory, we arrive at a higher order reality in which everything is separate, distinct and self-contained and therefore, space comes about as a consequence of the existence of objects. That is, when we perceive Leibnizian space, we perceive a thing produced as a result of the existence of two other separate objects.

Leibniz’s account of space also has implications for geometry. By his theory, our perceptions of congruent things for example, become a comparison of two objects made in perception and understood actively by reason. Evidence for this can be found in Leibniz’s arguments concerning physics and causality. Leibniz believes that God constructed the world (with monads) and everything in it in the best possible way (M1,3). As such, the universe carries a predetermined and pre-established order of cause and effect (M6,7) and Leibniz argues that we come to understand nature by finding causes from effects by the use of reason (DM19). Therefore, geometry becomes a rational activity when viewed from a Leibnizian perspective because it is an investigation of that which exists. For Leibniz, we must necessarily invoke our understanding of the nature of objects in the world to do geometry, and this conflicts with the intuitive nature that Kant ascribes to geometry. For Kant, our knowledge (or ‘cognition’) of space is a result of the form of our intuition that comes before sensibility, which makes our understanding of geometry intuitive. For Leibniz, space exists only because discrete objects exist in the world and our understanding of geometry comes from rational manipulations of those objects. Nevertheless, both Kant and Leibniz provide accounts for space that necessarily involve an a priori component rather than perception alone.

Cognitive neuroscientists are now suggesting that spatial cognition is a complex interaction of multiple brain circuits in parallel that make use of both allocentric and egocentric processing of the external world. A pivotally important concept in understanding spatial cognition has been the investigation of representation in the brain. “Representation” is a term that has been used in philosophy for centuries, and science is now using the term to refer to the neural picture of the external world as observed by our brain monitoring and imaging technology. The investigation of representation in the brain essentially involves solving the puzzle of how the world itself is represented physically in the brain. With respect to spatial cognition, the discovery of grid cells in 2005 suggests that a euclidean space is encoded in the brain itself by neurons, and that activation and deactivation of grid cells plays a major role in representing the spatiality of the external world to the perceiver. The discovery of grid cells also suggested a mechanism for the perception of one’s own location that is continually updated by input from the external world, suggesting that, similar to visual perception, the representation of space in the brain itself is an active phenomenon that varies just as much as the visual field.

Most, if not all, of the work on spatial perception and grid cells is performed on rats and conclusions made are inductively applied to humans, which makes us doubt how accurately these mechanisms can apply to the human brain. I say this because while many other studies of physiological phenomena in rats or mice (e.g. those on the cardiovascular and immune systems) may be stronger due to the increased homology to humans present in those systems. In other words, I think that the human and the mouse/rat brain differ quite significantly, perhaps more so than other organs and that this reduces the strength of our inductive conclusions. However, interesting studies are now being performed on humans which place a subject in a virtual maze through a computer program and measure brain activity through noninvasive methods such as functional MRI (fMRI). Many recent studies are pointing to the hippocampus as a major player in way finding and general navigation through virtual mazes, which suggests that our spatial perception is an evolutionarily refined phenomenon, but also one that is fundamental to our basic neural make up. Interestingly, the neural phenomena change when scientists investigate spatial cognition relative to landmarks (i.e. objects) as compared to studies in simple maze navigation. In these object-centric experiments, subjects navigated mazes and were cued with objects present in the virtual environment that they had to collect and place in a distinct virtual location, either at a specific landmark or in a general bounded area. Brain scans in these studies showed both hippocampal and striatal activation during the performed tasks, with hippocampal activity associated with the boundary task and striatal activity associated with the landmark task. Further, separate studies in rats performing similar spatial boundary tasks reveal that the activation of hippocampal “place cells” fire in boundary-space tasks, which scientists think are creating a matched representation of distances and angles relative to the boundaries in the visual field. Results from striatal activation are still unclear and are being more closely investigated. It has also been suggested that the hippocampal and striatal circuits act in parallel rather than in series or in combination. This makes sense given that spatial cognition may involve both boundary and landmark elements, as when we have to hammer a nail into a specific location or plug something into a power outlet.

Relating the philosophy and neuroscience presented in this post, it seems that both Kantian and Leibnizian conceptions of space are compatible with neuroscientific findings about spatial cognition. Kant’s theory applies to the current understanding of hippocampal, boundary influenced tasks in that both suggest a holistic conception of space – that is, space can be understood as object independent. On the other hand, Leibnizian conceptions of space and the landmark results suggest a more object-dependent framework for spatial cognition. As spatial cognition and perception are our most direct means to accessing and interacting with the external world, both scientists and philosophers of the future ought to work together on this enormously complex problem in an effort to postulate how spatial phenomena as presented to us by the mind relate to neural phenomena in the brain. Perhaps then we will move closer to filling the explanatory gap between the mind and brain.

Prolegomena – Kant
Discourse on Metaphysics – Leibniz
The Monadology – Leibniz
Spatial Cognition and the Brain – Neil Burgess

One thing I have always struggled with in reading philosophy is the doctrine of Innatism, which holds that the human mind is born with ideas or knowledge. This belief, put forth most notably by Plato as his Theory of Forms and later by Descartes in his Meditations, is currently gaining neuroscientific evidence that could validate the belief that we are born with innate knowledge of our world.

The predominant belief and assumption about human learning and memory is that we are born as a “blank slate,” and we gain our knowledge and ideas through new experiences and our memory of them. This belief is known as Empiricism and, although dates back to Aristotle, has been supported by many famous philosophers such as John Locke and Francis Bacon. However, a study published in last March’s Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences (PNAS) may, to an extent, discredit this main theory of knowledge collection. The research, conducted by the Blue Brain Group in Switzerland, explored the remarkable similarities in the neuronal circuitry in the neocortices of all brains. The study, summarized in this article in PNAS, essentially “discovered a synaptic organizing principle that groups neurons in a manner that is common across animals and hence, independent of individual experiences.” This discovery may have huge implications on our understanding of learning, memory, and development. The groups of neurons, or cell assemblies, appear consistently in the Neocortices of animals and are essentially cellular “building blocks”. In many animals then, it may hold true that learning, perception, and memory are a result of putting these pieces together rather than forming new cell assemblies. According to Dr. Markram, “This could explain why we all share similar perceptions of physical reality, while our memories reflect our individual experience.” This is a remarkable example of the ways in which neuroscience and its research is revolutionizing our understanding of the ways in which we come to know and perceive our universe, while simultaneously answering major philosophical questions. While these findings may go against the incredibly popular empirical view of knowledge, they lend themselves very well to the notion of innate ideas. Plato and Descartes used this general theory to explain human reasoning. Plato believed that the human soul exists eternally, and exists in a “world of forms (or ideas)” before life; all learning is the process of remembering “shadows” of these forms here on Earth. While this idea is still a little out there for me at least (and it may take a little more scientific evidence to support that claim), Descartes’ claims seem very consistent with the Blue Brain Group’s findings.
Descartes proposed that the inborn ideas that we possess are those of geometric truths and all of our intelligence can be accessed through reason. Discussing ideas in his fifth meditation, he states “We come to know them by the power of our own native intelligence, without any sensory experience. All geometrical truths are of this sort — not just the most obvious ones, but all the others, however abstruse they may appear.” Another study supporting this notion is the result of research on “intuitive physics,” or the seeming understanding we possess of the physical behavior of objects in our universe without even thinking about it. In an article summarizing the study, Janese Silvey provides the example that “if a glass of milk falls off a table, a person will try to catch the cup but not the liquid spilling out. That person is reacting rather than consciously thinking about what to do.” The report on the actual experiment, by Susan Hespos and Kristy vanMarle, showed that infants possess expectations that, for example, objects still exist when they are hidden, and are surprised when these expectations are not met (surprise was indicated in the study by a longer looking time). Other experiments were conducted to demonstrate the understanding that infants from 2-5 months old have of cohesive properties, solidity of materials, and other basic physical characteristics of objects. The full report of the findings can be found here.
For me, the best news that comes out of this is that these new findings compromise both the philosophical doctrines of innatism and empiricism, opening up new discussions of exactly what knowledge and learning mean.

Markram’s Study on Synaptic Organization-PNAS

Physics for Infants-WIREs Cognitive Science

Descartes’ Theories of Innate Ideas-Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Plato’s Theory of Forms and Thoughts on Innate Ideas-Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Infants Understand More Than Thought-Columbia Daily Tribune

New Evidence for Innate Ideas-Blue Brain Group

Philosophy of Mind came into its most compelling forms during the age of modern philosophy beginning with René Descartes. Perhaps infamously, Descartes claimed that mind and body are two distinct substances – philosophical jargon for what exists without the aid of any other thing. For Descartes, the world was clearly and distinctly physical in one sense and entirely mental in another. This seems perplexing, and Descartes did concede that the mind and body were closely intertwined and appeared to act with respect to one another, but his arguments clearly press that they are not causally connected in any way. These notions of dualism seem nearly preposterous with the advent of modern science, but were nonetheless important in developing our thought about the mind in the modern era.

Dualism gave rise to other interesting, yet now strongly refuted movements. One of these was idealism, or the doctrine argued famously by George Berkeley that states that all that exists are either ‘ideas’ or minds that perceive them. In this sense, an idea is defined as that which is perceived, inclusive of information imprinted on the senses, passions and operations of the mind, and conceptions formed by imagination and memory. Importantly, Berkeley argues that these ideas exist ‘in the mind’ exclusively: that is, they are purely mental and all things are simply combinations and aggregations of ideas. These immaterial ‘ideas’ then, are the only objects of human knowledge under idealism, and this theory denies the existence of physical objects entirely! The notion seems preposterous, but there is a very interesting argument found within idealism that can throw our conception of perception for quite the proverbial loop.

One of the main arguments against idealism is the apparent true existence of material objects in the external world. Modern science has allowed us to know with a degree of certainty that we exist in a world that contains physical entities separate from our mental space. Bertrand Russsel, a physicalist, famously made such arguments for the existence of the material world. He coined the term ‘sense data’ to refer to that which we perceive from objects in the environment, e.g. the light rays reflecting off of them. In his thinking, this sense data is caused by an actual material object in the external world, thus endorsing the existence of physical objects. This certainly seems more plausible than idealism given our current level of understanding about the physical world. However, the idealist refute of physicalism draws on an idea called perceptual relativity that is interesting in itself and worth knowing about.

A simple philosophical approach to perception.

Perceptual relativity works similarly to the theory of relativity from physics, but applies it to perceptual content, and it is with this crafty syllogism that an idealist can argue that nothing really exists outside our own minds and ideas. If the idealist accepts that the objects perceived are ideas that exist only within the mind of the perceiver and those things are made up of more ideas which also only exist in the mind of the perceiver, it follows that each perceiver apprehends a different object entirely, rather than a different affection of the same object as a consequence of having different points of view. In other words, each person looking at a common object perceives an entirely unique object, just as if they were looking at two completely different things, e.g. a house and a boat. This seems absurd, but it is nonetheless effective for arguing the physical world out of existence. Taking ideas as exclusively mental phenomena, it remains logically valid to argue that each person perceives a different idea when looking at the same object in that different angles or in different levels of light and shadow make the object of each person’s perception unique to them alone.

Your may see squares A and B as different shades of grey. Look again - they are identical.

While the argument from perceptual relativity is interesting, it remains completely absurd in our modern context. Given that we can forcefully argue for the existence of the material world down to the level of molecules, atoms and subatomic particles that (perhaps) move faster than the speed of light, the idealist well seems to have run dry. It seems evident, if not universally true, that there is an external world filled with a variety of physical objects that exist in a space outside our minds. We may have thoughts of said objects and file them into our minds, but it by no means follows from this that an object solely exists in our minds and is not like the ideas of others about the same object. However, the flip side of this comfortable position would make an assertion about material objects themselves. What are they really made of? On a deep level, they are simply electricity – energetically favorable collisions of packets of energy that are perceived by our sense organs and constructed into a nice, organized stream of consciousness by our brains. To get even loftier, we’ve developed quite a system to differentiate all the different types of electricity out there by giving them names like tree, book or cheeseburger. These are really just ideas about the various clouds of electricity we interact with every day, so how far from idealism have we really come? Are our ideas about voltage simply existing within our own minds as a function of the information our brain is wiling to let us perceive?

What do you see?

References:

Treatise Concerning Human Knowledge – George Berkeley

The Problems Of Philosophy – Bertrand Russell

Most would agree that the most important of our basic senses is sight. Without it, many basic forms of communication fall apart, the vibrance of the world around us dulls, and our understanding and ability to sense the complexity of the physical world diminishes. Without the ability to see, it would logically be impossible to portray our surroundings artistically in a coherent and visually realistic manner…

…wait…what?

Esref was born without the privilege of sight. As a result, he never developed the thalamo-cortical projections from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) to the primary visual cortex necessary for sight perception. However, instead of letting his occipital lobe go to waste, Esref’s brain adapted by using that same cortical real estate for other senses, primarily touch.

With Esref’s enhanced sense of touch he claims he can, “see more with his fingers than sighted people can see with their eyes.” A bold statement: after all, Esref has no idea what seeing is like. Conversely, sighted people don’t know what the sense of touch is like when the visual cortex becomes involved, so can we really deny his claim? The circular nature of this subjective discussion renders both opinions null but it does raise the question: is a subjective experience a product of the sensory modality involved or is it a product of the cortical area involved? And what exactly is Esref subjectively perceiving when he is feeling his way through a landscape? Is it as vivid as the subjective experience that sighted people perceive? It seems this question is impossible to resolve but seeing the landscapes Esref paints makes one believe that he is indeed sensing the world just as vividly as the rest of us.

Esref provides a new perspective on perception which throws a kink into anyone’s previously held beliefs about subjective experience and raises many internal questions. Personally, this new perspective leaves me with one question in particular: we can all agree that the 2003 blockbuster Daredevil was horrible, but wasn’t the rooftop rain scene where the blind Ben Affleck uses the sound of the raindrops on Jennifer Garner’s face to create a mental construct of her one of the most forward thinking, cognitive science-inspired scenes in all of cinematography?

Foreshortening, convergence and drawings from a blind adult – Perception

You’re lying on a sandy beach on a hot sunny afternoon, enjoying a few hours of much needed laziness. As you open your eyes and confront the vastness of the ocean in front of you, light of 600nm wavelength hits your retina, kindling an impossibly long cascade of events in your brain: a molecule called retinal changes shape, neurons fire action potentials down the optic nerve, arrive at the lateral geniculate nucleus deep in the brain causing more action potentials in primary visual cortex in the back of your head, and so on ad infinitum. At some point, the mechanical wonder of 100 billion neurons working together produces something special: your experience of the color blue. What’s special is not that you can discriminate that color from others; nor that you are aware of it and paying attention to it. It is not notable that you can tell us about it, or assign a name to it. It’s that you have a subjective, qualitative experience of the color; there is something it is like to experience the color blue. Some philosophers call these experiences qualia – meaning “what kind” – but it is not important what kind of experience you are having, just that you are having one at all. Modern science hypothesizes that subjective experience is a product of the brain, but has no explanation for it.

The brain’s building blocks are neurons; their language is the action potential, an electrical impulse that relays information. Sensory molecules pick up information about the outside world and translate it into action potentials. The information is processed among many networks of neurons, and returns to the outside world via signals to muscles, which effect behavior. Somewhere between sensory molecules and muscles, the neurons organize to create systems for memory, attention, global access of information, self-awareness and language. How the brain achieves this feat is largely unknown, but neuroscientists are hard at work today trying to elucidate the mechanisms responsible. The philosopher David Chalmers calls these the “easy” problems of consciousness because science has the tools to ask questions about them and eventually solve them.

The easy problems have in common the fact that their explanation requires only a mechanism of their function; once we explain a mechanism by which neurons integrate information, for example, the problem of integration is solved. In contrast, experience, or the existence of qualia, is the “hard” problem of consciousness because it has no obvious function and is completely unmeasurable; science has no way of even proposing hypotheses about it.

Philosophical Zombies

Do you know that feeling you have when you fall in love? Most people describe it as something special, unexplainable, mysterious and wholly wonderful. Scientists will describe it in terms of molecules of oxytocin and vasopressin binding receptors on neurons in the midbrain. Surely love is not just a bunch of molecules running wild in your head? Yes and no. The molecules cause one to exhibit seriously strange behavior like not eating or sleeping, but out of their interactions emerges something more. That something is the feeling itself.

Physical rules and current neuroscientific evidence suggest that the brain should function as it does, but without producing feelings, sensations, or subjective experience; we should be philosophical zombies. Philosophical zombies are hypothetical beings that look and act exactly as humans do, but never actually have first-person qualitative experience of anything.

If a philosophical zombie met a nice girl, he would act as if he were in love. He would talk about his longing and joy, but he would not actually have that qualitative feeling of being in love. Even though they have brains just like ours, philosophical zombies are in essence robots – processing information, reporting mental states, having information of pains or emotions, having functional memory, but never actually having an experience of anything. There is nothing it is like to be a philosophical zombie; all processing goes on in the “subconscious.” This is exactly what science – in its current state – would predict. All cognitive processing should go on “in the dark,” without a conscious element.

Yet we obviously are not philosophical zombies. The processing that goes on in our brains is accompanied by a subjective experience. This experience is the most intimate thing you know – it’s almost impossible to imagine life without it – and for that reason, it is also the hardest thing to question or pinpoint in your own mind. Neuroscience hypothesizes that everything there is to your mind, including this subjective experience, is a product of physical events. But your experience itself is seemingly not physical; there is no thing, energy field, radiation or force that is your subjective experience that we currently know about. All we can measure are molecular events and electrical interactions among neurons. So where does experience come from and how can we study it?

Emergence

The answer may be found in the concept of emergence. From the interactions of a number of matching parts sometimes emerges a behavior or property that cannot be predicted from or reduced to the properties of the constituents. One such unexpected property comes from the simple behavior of individual ants, which produces a complex “society,” whose properties cannot be predicted from the behavior of individual ants. In fact, adding up the contributions of all individual ants does not produce an effect equal to the effect from the ant colony as a whole. Other examples of emergence include snowflakes, which assemble out of interactions among water molecules at low temperatures; temperature, which is based on molecular kinetics; the stock market, which has no central planning or regulation; human society; and subjective experience.

Subjective experience is an emergent property of the brain. As such, it cannot be predicted from our current knowledge of the brain, or reduced to its basal parts. Individual neurons are not aware of anything at all, but 100 billion of them working together are.

Modern neuroscientists aim to peek into the brain at higher and higher spatial and temporal resolutions with the goal of recording the electrical activities of vast numbers of neurons. Once they have recorded the activity, the thinking goes, the only remaining task will be to find out what the activity does. This logic is enticing, but falls short of a explaining the entirety of the brain’s features. One problem is that the entity that emerges – subjective experience – is qualitatively different from neurons and their activities, just as society emerges from interactions among individuals but is qualitatively different from individuals. Moreover, if we were to describe the activities of all individuals that comprise society, we would get no information about society; we would get noise from all the opposing actions. Likewise, if we describe the activities of all the neurons in the brain, all we get is activities of all the neurons in the brain.

An additional barrier is that subjective experience is closed off from outside observation. The contents of your experience are available only to you, and scientists have no way of collecting the data of experience directly. While some neuroscientists are satisfied with collecting first-person data via verbal (human subjects) or behavioral (animal subjects) reports, the fact is that as soon as the subject translates first-person experience into a report, the data becomes of third-person quality.

If aliens discovered earth, they would have no way of knowing that humans had anything going on between their ears beyond electricity and chemistry. This is why neuroscience is so exciting: the most magical machine in the universe is in your head, and we have the opportunity to find out what makes it so special. As neuroscience attracts increasing amounts of talent and funding, we must not forget the most mysterious, least tangible question about the brain.

This post originally appeared on guitchounts.com

A little self-education goes a long way. Let Richard Dawkins enlighten you (and if you’ve seen this already, it’s never a bad idea to brush up on the basics of life):

Crossing the gap at the wrong time can be devastating.

In the 1700s, David Hume proposed what has now become known widely as the Is-Ought Problem. He calls for caution in making statements about morality or what “ought” to be based on extrapolations of what “is” and that what ought to be does not necessarily follow from what is. The problem aptly applies to neuroscientists like Saxe whose research make strong suggestions about the neural basis of existence and attempts to bridge the is-ought gap. All of this research is establishing a large library of what “is” concerning the brain, but it also suggests that metaphysical concepts such as morality and meta-ethics can be reduced to neurological connections and connectivity. Hume stresses that while what is and what ought to be are important revelations in and of themselves, what ought to be need not follow from what is. Neuroscience must understand this separation as its advances begin to encroach on many of philosophy’s already well-established concepts.

Brain activity is only one component of our consciousness.

What I’m saying here is that modern neuroscience must use caution in making conclusions about human nature. Empirical evidence can certainly be used to help understand more abstract ideas, but the evidence and the ideas must remain seperate with respect to causality. Making discoveries about brain function and the empirical science behind things like emotion or judgment is a valiant and respectable scientific investigation. However, this pursuit must be kept separate and distinct from the pursuit of understanding how we ought to be or act. Our moral thought is something more abstract and multidimensional than connections between neurons and sequential acton potentials. While investigation of the science of the mind is important, it should not seek to explain our existence nor try to answer philosophy’s greatest problems with calculations and empirical data.

For reference:

The Is-Ought Problem – David Hume via Wikipedia

Theory of Mind TED Talk – Rebecca Saxe (MIT)

David Hume, Meta-Ethics – Wikipedia