A friend of the podcast pointed me to today's column in the NYTimes Gray Matter by Alisa Quart about a backlash against neuroscience, particularly popular accounts of it throughout mainstream media from Malcom Gladwell on tipping points to Chris Mooney on the "republican brain" to Eben Alexander on the neuroscience of heaven. These all follow the general theme of over-simplification and over-extrapolation of, in this case, neuro-scientific studies. (Alexander would seem to be something of an exception here. He's using his cred as a scientist to give authority to his personal testimony regarding a near-death experience. He's not pointing to a double-blind study or anything. He's just saying "I saw heaven when I was in a coma and since I'm smart and I'm a neuro-scientist, you should believe me.")
Quart concludes her column:
It’s not hard to understand why neuroscience is so appealing. We all seek shortcuts to enlightenment. It’s reassuring to believe that brain images and machine analysis will reveal the fundamental truth about our minds and their contents. But as the neuro doubters make plain, we may be asking too much of neuroscience, expecting that its explanations will be definitive. Yet it’s hard to imagine that any functional magnetic resonance imaging or chemical map will ever explain “The Golden Bowl” or heaven. Or that brain imaging, no matter how sophisticated and precise, will ever tell us what women really want.
I haven't done and exhaustive search, but it seems to me that this sort of over-reaching isn't anything new to science, especially popularization of scientific research. Relativity and quantum mechanics had all sorts of such issues in the first half of the 20th century as people tried to fold new scientific understandings into our broader understanding of human experience (some might say they still do). In the 1800s, electricity was both a parlor trick and a connection to the beyond through unseen waves. This is the century of biology and the brain (if you read the media), so we have all these shortcuts and rather simple-minded speculations there now.
-Dylan
dmf says
November 26, 2012 at 8:17 amraises all kinds of issues about how to bring complex issues/ideas into the public realm without reducing them to often misleading soundbites whether in undergrad classes, news, blogospheres, and or governmental processes. The social theorist Stephen Turner has done excellent work on cog-sci and ethics as well as looking into the role of experts in a democracy, a show around his work (esp. his social theories of practices book) would be most welcome: http://faculty.cas.usf.edu/sturner5/
dmf says
November 26, 2012 at 8:18 amon the more serious end of the neuro-philo spectrum:
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-neurofeminist/
Michael says
November 26, 2012 at 8:30 amWell, the cult of AI would be another example after the introduction of affordable and fast computers. (I remember all the books in the 80s, for example. One difference maybe: the books might have been a bit more sober and sophisticated than the neuro-books, but maybe I’m just approaching old fart status;-))
Michael from Switzerland
rinky says
November 26, 2012 at 8:58 amAnother example would be mapping the human genome, which in a similar way was misunderstood, over-sold & the subject of many column inches ten years or so ago.
But, what do you want to do? The reason why all these things are written about is because they’re exciting & new. No surprise that some people get over-excited, particularly those who need to make a living by writing about stuff like this. Then some other people feel the need to form a backlash, and others get over-excited about that. Round we go again. Eventually, some smart-arse adds a comment to a blog post and… oh wait, that’s me.
–R.
Nate Johnson says
November 26, 2012 at 11:34 amI’d be really interested in finding out what PEL thinks of something by Gerald Edelman. I’ve read one of his books: Wider Than The Sky. It’s small, but dense and fairly technical, by my standards, but well written. At this point, I’d almost certainly have to reread it to talk about it, but it has added to my grasp of consciousness as much, or more than, any other source. At the same time, I don’t remember reading it and then thinking that it was overreaching or that it could or wanted to explain things that probably don’t have anything to do with Neuroscience.
-Nate
p.s. I didn’t read all of The Tipping Point, but I don’t remember it having a lot of neuroscience in it. Does Gladwell try to explain the phenomena he terms ‘the tipping point’ through some neuro-scientific means? Also, what is the general opinion of Gladwell?
Dylan Casey says
November 26, 2012 at 11:49 amHaven’t heard of Gerald Edelmen — have to look him up.
I’ve read “Outliers” by Gladwell and, while I’d say that he plays a little fast and loose with some scientific research, he’s not the most egregious one out there by a long shot.
dmf says
November 26, 2012 at 3:05 pmhe’s quite good (Edelmen not Gladwell) and I’d be interested in your take on him but he’s a serious scientist and not a pop writer/reporter. Bloggingheads has started a new Mind series to keep an eye on: http://bloggingheads.tv/programs/current/mind-report
Daniel Horne says
November 26, 2012 at 4:33 pmThis is a great recommendation, Nate, thanks! I find this stuff very relevant to the Nagel reading going on in the Not School Forums.
For anyone curious about Edelman but lacking quality reading time, check out this 2008 lecture on YouTube:
http://youtu.be/ovHv3yZM4KE
and here’s a link to the PowerPoint that accompanied his lecture:
http://www.wkdialogue.ch/fileadmin/original_presentations/wkd_20060914_edelmann.pdf
Frank Callo says
December 3, 2012 at 8:32 amI remember taking a grad level “philosophy of mind” course at UT. We met in a conference room type setting, big table with the prof (Cathy Bohstead) at one end of the table, her TA at the other and the class arrayed down both sides. On one side of the table there were all the cognitive science, computer engineering and evolutionary biology types, on the other were a few poets, a few buddhists and a few soon to be seminarians (I sat an the latter side).
It seemed that a lot of our discussion centered around whether there was anything more to say about the mind than what could be said about the brain. I always found myself saying things like: “saying that all mental phenomena have quantifiable biological correlates proves that there is no mind beyond the brain is like saying that because all visual phenomena have biological correlates is like saying that there is no light”.
The hard core materialist/reductionist turn in philosophy seems to me to be a kind of intellectual cowardliness. We don’t want the scientists to laugh at us (and withhold funding to our departments) so we better not sould like we might believe in spooky things like the soul, or god, or the tao or platonic ideals. If you believe that the axioms of mathematics are not simply epiphenomena of our complex brain then you have already granted ontological status to something that has no physical correlates of any known kind. We can’t ay much about the “nature” of the plus sign (as in 5 + 5 = 10) but we don’t doubt that it represents something big R REAL. To say (as some neuro sci folks seem to) that the propositions of “folk psychology” such as the existence of things like love, volition, etc. must be completely exhausted by bio-chemical correlates is simply rediculous. When a machine “adds” numbers and when my brain “adds numbers” they are, or at least strongly seem to be doing the same thing in very different ways. The thing they are both doing is something that is different from their functional activity while they are doing it.
Understand, I think it is really important and interesting to know what is going on when I fall in love or feel depressed BUT this isn’t all there is to the story. Philosophy shoud not assume that thee is nothing but widgets in the world. If it does than what is the point of even having it as a distinct dicipline/practice, just let the scientists do the work.