- At the end of his book on Wittgenstein, Frank tells a story about a philosophical paper (imagined or real, it is not clear) with the title “Qualia and Materialism —Closing the Explanatory Gap.” The premise of the paper is twofold: first, there is a gap between how we experience the world — our subjective, conscious experiences (qualia) — and the scientific explanation of the material forces that constitute nature; and, second, that such a gap can potentially be closed through one, overarching theoretical explanation. Frank goes on to point out that if we can imagine such a paper, then we can also imagine papers called “The Big Bang and Me — Closing the Explanatory Gap” or “Natural Selection and Me — Closing the Explanatory Gap.”
The point he's trying to make is that science can only solve problems that are accessible to investigation by the scientific method. Some problems don't meet those criteria, but that doesn't stop neuroscientists, and popsci fans from imagining that everything can be explained by the almighty neuron. It's a fascinating but sad new chapter in science. Read anything by John Searle or Daniel Dennett (probably the two most famous philosophers who think in this way) to get a sense of what I'm talking about. When you and your spouse are in an argument, or a relative dies, or you're trying to create a new piece of art, the last thing you need is for someone to tell you that you lack agency. Yet that's where we find ourselves in modern neuroscience. It's banal and pedantic.
I am against dualism. Determinism is moot, and IMO probably not correct. Anyway, arguing over it is as silly as arguing over whether God exists. Person A says yes, and person B says no, but neither has any evidence aside from their personal feeling.
I'm curious what you mean by that. Are you referring to the structure of neural connections being the magic insight into cognition? Neural networks being the one true solution to intelligence? Or something altogether different?Some problems don't meet those criteria, but that doesn't stop neuroscientists, and popsci fans from imagining that everything can be explained by the almighty neuron
I'll keep that in mind for future neuro-y conferences. Most of what I care about is the biochemistry / medical angle of neurons, but it's hard not to wonder how exactly the brain is working through those processes. I had a teacher describe cognitive neuroscience last week as pre-paradigmatic last week. I think he hopes the BRAIN initiative has enough success to transform neuroscience is a similar manner to how the HGP did genetics -> genomics. But I'm not sure how much any of that can play into cracking the philosophy of cognition. I've kinda just taken to the "consciousness is an illusion" school of thought and otherwise neglected that world of questions.
Yeah, the two things I'm keeping my eye on there are in situ proteomics / transcriptomics and expansion microscopy. Both I know have gotten a lot of funding from the initiative and have a lot of potential to change unrelated fields. Maybe it'll be like the moon and we'll brag about all the other tech that fell out of the concentrated funding / innovation. But I also am pretty curious how much information people will be able to extract if / when the real connectomic datasets start rolling out.
Can you state what one of these problems are? What is something that exists, that is unable to be investigated? There is a lot more than imagining going on. There are lots of studies, research, and so on, about how neurons, and neural networks emulated in computers, produce very life-like behavior. Absolutely irrelevant to what is true or not. Neuroscience is concerned with what is true, not how a person who lost a family member feels.problems that are accessible to investigation by the scientific method.
that doesn't stop neuroscientists, and popsci fans from imagining that everything can be explained by the almighty neuron.
When you and your spouse are in an argument, or a relative dies, or you're trying to create a new piece of art, the last thing you need is for someone to tell you that you lack agency.
I've been working on a theory that seems to be controversial online. It's a personal theory with no backing, built entirely from my experience, but it goes a bit like this - I think many people use god to close that gap between our understanding and reality. My background religion has man eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which was once a knowledge far beyond our actual grasp without also having eternal life from the tree of life. This was the creation of the knowledge gap as we can say what's good or evil, but don't have the farsight (both forward and backward) to know if our decisions were actually correct. When we took this good and evil knowledge on ourselves, we set ourselves apart from the other animals and started down a rather harsh path. As time has marched on from our realization, we created tools to simulate the power of the tree of life. First it was spoken stories, which allowed knowledge to exist for more time than a single human could harbor it. Next was writing, which made passed knowledge more exact. Next was language in the form of religion which used speech and writing to pass down the knowledge of good and evil, but also created a framework that people could interpret in situations that didn't have preexisting stories. Religion was limited to the timeframe of the spoken and written story and so science started to develop. The laws of science give us good guidelines as to the way of all things, both forward and backward in time, far beyond the life of our species and our planet. This knowledge we apply to our knowledge of good and evil, though it can seem so vast that nihilism becomes a viable option. With science comes philosophy, which creates a new moral language that can be tested more externally than the internally tested religion. It's a steady march forward that seeks to close the gap between our knowledge and reality, but while the gap is getting smaller it is still always there - a deep unknown that we cannot control. This is what I image when people speak to me about god. When their perception of what should be does not match with what is god can act as a tightrope over that void, allowing individuals to traverse from one side to the other and live a richer life. That's the idea so far. I'm sure there are gaping holes in it.
Yes. The first of which is that philosophy predates science by hundreds of years. You should consider that and rework. It's a non-trivial point, IMO. Science and philosophy have to work reciprocally, but they aren't the same thing, and each has unique contributions to our understanding of the world.That's the idea so far. I'm sure there are gaping holes in it.