This from a reader:
There’s a youngster here considering going to college to study neuroscience, and I’m doing my best to inoculate him against scientism while offering a case for dualism. I’ve offered broad worldview reasons why that would matter, but I’m not sure off the top of my head what I would say if he asked what professional difference it would make to be a dualist neuroscientist. The dualist would say that areas X and Y are associated with and bear some causal relationship with the mind’s being in state ABC, while the physicalist would say that areas X and Y constitute or realize or give rise to state ABC. Pharma would be just as effective, placebo effects aside, if one takes a physicalist rather than a dualist interpretation of the mind-body problem. Metaphysically and religiously, there are huge differences, but during the time I was intensely reflecting on the metaphysics of mind the question of what difference it might make to a neuroscientist qua neuroscientist never entered my mind. If you have any thoughts off the top of your…er, mind I would be most grateful.
Off the top of my 'head,' it seems to me that, with only three exceptions, it should make no difference at all to the practicing neuroscientist what philosophy of mind he accepts. Emergentist, epiphenomenalist, property dualist, hylomorphic dualist, substance dualist, type-type identity theorist, parallelist, occasionalist, functionalist, panpsychist, dual-aspect theorist, mysterian, idealist, -- whatever the position, I can't see it affecting the study of that most marvellous and most complex intercranial hunk of meat we call the brain.
Eliminativism, solipsism, and behaviorism are the exceptions.
One of the things that neuroscientists do is to determine the neural correlates of conscious states. To work out the correlations requires taking seriously the reports of a conscious test subject who reports sincerely from his first-person point of view on the content and quality of his experiences as different regions of his brain are artificially stimulated in various ways. Now if our neuroscientist is an eliminativist, then it seems to me that he cannot, consistently with his eliminativism, take seriously the verbal reports of the test subject. For if there are no mental states, then the reports are about precisely nothing. And you cannot correlate nothing with something.
Suppose now that our neuroscientist is a solipist. He believes in other brains, but not in other minds. He holds that his is the only mind. It seems that our solipsistic brain researcher could not, consistently with his solipsism, take seriously the reports of the test subject. He could not take them as being reports of anything. He could take them only as verbal behavior, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Something similar would seem to hold for the behaviorist neuroscientist. What the (analytical) behaviorist does it to identify mental states with behavior (linguistic or non-linguistic) and/or with dispositions to behave. Thus my belief that it is about to rain is nothing other than my rummaging for an umbrella in the closet, and the like. My feeling of pain is my grimacing, etc. The analytical behaviorist does not deny that they are beliefs and desires and sensory states such as pleasure and pain. His project is not eliminativist but identitarian. There are beliefs and desires and pains, he thinks; it is just that what they are are bits of behavior and/or behavioral dispositions.
But if my pain just is my grimacing, wincing, etc. , then the brain scientist has no need of my verbal reports. Stimulating the 'pain center' of my brain, he need merely look at my overt behavior.
One issue here is whether analytical behaviorism can be kept from collapsing into eliminative behaviorism. If mind is just behavior, then that is tantamount to saying that there is no mind. This, I take it, is the point of the old joke about the two behaviorist sex partners, "It was good for you, how was it for me?" If the feeling just is the behavior, then there is no feeling.
So my answer to my correspondent, just off the top of my 'head,' without having thought much about this issue, is that a neuroscientist's philosophy of mind, if he has one, should have no effect on his practice of neuroscience except in the three cases mentioned.
But here is another wrinkle that just occured to me. Consider scientism, which is not a position in the philosophy of mind, but a position in epistemology. If our neuroscientist were a scientisticist (to coin a term as barbarous as its nominatum), and thus one who held that only natural science is knowledge, then how could he credit the reports of his test subject given that these reports are made from the first-person point of view and are not about matters that are third-person verifiable?
If you poke around in my visual cortex and I report seeing red, and you credit my report as veridical, then you admit that there is a source of knowledge that is not natural-scientific, and thus you contradict your scientism.
So I tentatively suggest that no neuroscientist who investigates the neural correlates of consciousness can be a scientisticist!
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