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Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language

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What happens when you put a neuroscientist, a Wittgenstein scholar, a self-described teleofuctionalist and a qualiaphile in the same ring? Well, for one thing, there's barely enough space for neutral corners but the arguments, rebuttals and discourse among these four erudite persons couldn't be more entertaining. Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, arguing for the existence of a human consciousness residing in the whole person, are taken on by Daniel Dennett and John Searle, who argue that the locus and milieu of consciousness lies solely in the brain. With an introduction and arguably biased conclusion by Daniel Robinson, this concise but informative book must be admired for its detail and descriptive character. Debates between weak and strong emergence abound: are we reducible to our component parts, or is there a complex confluence at work that produces consciousness? What causes it all: firing neurons and chemical combinations, or a mysterious alliance of constituent parts, brain/mind/body/environment? Are qualia simply qualities of objects or interpersonal properties of phenomenological experience?

All this and more, it's confrontational, it's accessible and it's neuroscience, cognition, philosophy, psychology, and linguistics all rolled together for the sake of consideration and understanding. This book, more than anything, serves as the impetus to further explore themes in neuroscience and consciousness. All four contributors offer their own insights in a wide range of independent publications.

Granted, Bennett and Hacker were the impetus behind this book's creation, but I feel they could have allowed more back-and-forth with Dennett and Searle, their two primary interlocutors. Instead, they republish sections of their own original arguments to give some context to Dennett and Searles' responses, which don't differ except in tone from their positions at the conference from which the book came. Then the book grants Bennett and Hacker another answer (composed, so far as I could tell, of almost willful misreadings of Searle's and Dennetts' criticisms), then a conclusion from a "referee" who, naturally, mostly judges them to have come out ahead in the argument. I expected more interlocution, but instead it seems to be a vehicle for Hacker and Bennett's position.

That philosophy should unravel conceptual confusions in neuroscience or other sciences is a principal theme of the authors of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, which book is in the presently reviewed one discussed by those authors, Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, and defended by them in response to criticisms by Daniel Dennett and John Searle.

However, major conceptual confusion characterizes the arguments of authors Bennett and Hacker themselves.

Let me begin by noting that all of these authors appear to subscribe to physicalism, describable as holding that all reality is reducible to physical phenomena. Consequently it is understandable that they will aim to fit their arguments into that straightjacket. A well-known expression of this attitude is the intense opposition to Cartesian dualism, the view by Descartes that mind and body, or mind and matter, are two distinct substances.

How derided this view is by the authors can be seen from the manner in which they speak of it: "crippling Cartesianism" (p.75, Dennett), "find themselves in bed with Descartes" (p.100, Searle), "the long, dark shadow of Descartes" (p.159, Bennett and Hacker). Only the commentator in the book, Daniel Robinson, expresses (pp.192-3) reservations about "how many kinds of different sorts of 'stuff' might be constitutive of all reality", but he considers such questions "best to leave unanswered".

They need not be left unanswered in philosophy, which with the aid of logic is here to try to resolve them. I may immodestly note that I deal with such questions in my On Proof for Existence of God, and Other Reflective Inquiries, but now I wish to point out confusions by the principal reviewed authors, whose object is to prevent confusion.

In their arguments they contend (p.208, note 6) that "the idea that the mind is a SUBSTANCE [I capitalized italics] of any kind is not coherent", i.e. that it makes no "sense" to speak of mind as contrasted with the body. But the authors are confused by words. "Substance" is usually defined by the likes of "essential nature", and the main issue, regardless of words used, is whether there is an entity customarily termed "mind" which is distinct from the body. The entity in question is obviously, in Descartes' and other discussions of interaction between mind and body, consciousness--leaving aside particulars like recent propounding of an unconscious. And it certainly makes sense to inquire about the relation between conscious and bodily occurrences.

But the most prominent area of confusion by the authors is in their primary contention of a "mereological fallacy" (e.g. p.22), regarding "the logic of part/whole relations". The authors repeatedly contend such as: "psychological predicates are ascribable to the whole animal, not to its constituent parts". The underlying dispute is with neuroscientists who ascribe "psychological predicates" to the brain, and the presently discussed authors insist: "Human beings, but not their brains, can be said to be thoughtful or to be thoughtless; animals, but not their brains..., can be said to see, hear, smell and taste things..." And the authors repeat: "psychological predicates apply paradigmatically to the HUMAN BEING (OR ANIMAL) AS A WHOLE, and NOT to the body or its parts".

It should be noted that the shift to the brain by neuroscientists is done from the traditional "mind" or consciousness, since the latter does not lend itself to their physical scrutiny. And the turn by the discussed authors to the "whole" of the animal is evidently born of the like physicalist presupposition that one cannot speak of a mind separate from the body. Ironically, their phrase "psychological predicates" itself relies on the word "psyche" for "soul", and it is easy to see that their arguments correspondingly confuse the concepts involved.

It is not the "whole" of the human or animal that thinks, sees, hears, smells and tastes things. The arm does not take part in thinking, or the leg in seeing. It is indeed a truism that it is the conscious part in us that performs those tasks, enlisting in cases some of the body. Try as they may, thinkers cannot dismiss the role of consciousness in our lives.