As a philosophy major, what initially geeked me about the brain is that we could begin to understand philosophical problems in the material terms from which they arise. My work has shown that the British Empiricists were right, to a certain extent. Other work has shown that different forms of moralizing - utilitarian and the categorical imperative - use different brain systems. That's the story of philosophy in my eyes - asking questions and postulating answers well before the tools were available to address them. The great fracturing of science into different disciplines reflects how those questions have been addressed as the proper tools have emerged in the history of science.
A fun game is thinking about what philosophers would be doing if they had today's shoulders to stand upon. Descartes no doubt would be in robotics. Hume a neuroscientist. Spinoza in computer science. Heidegger wandering the streets. Kant a Republican. Even more fun to think about is whether the structure of their brains led them to their conclusions - less free thought than self-discovery. Sort of like how Picasso is thought to have painted with brain damage.
Of course, that historical perspective doesn't address the current state of the field. To me, the modern philosophers are struggling to maintain their "privileged" grip on problem spaces. And that's why I do neuroscience!
Is it a journey of self-discovery? Or were those people simply the right people to make the observations they did?
I would be careful with cause and effect. It may be that brain structures allow one person, say, a greater ability to see in the dark and notice the tiger that is about to pounce while another cannot. But the tiger is not a result of that person. The observation of the tiger is a result of brain structure or whatever. The tiger exists with or without the person noticing it.
This is beginning to set off my BS alarm, but suffice it to say that philosophers seem to have made discoveries quite apart from the structure of their brains or personalities. They've also indulged in a lot of pontificating and wondering about based on their unique brain structures, no doubt. But I would be careful in using neuroscience to explain philosophy. I've read some studies that show that some brains are more conservative than others, and some are more liberal. This might be really cool in 100 years once all the noise comes out of the experiments, but for now, it poses more of a danger than a benefit to the layreader, imo. We're just at the stage of correlation. Nobody that I know of is talking about causation for some of these higher-order effects.
> different forms of moralizing - utilitarian and the categorical imperative - use different brain systems.
Whenever a neuroscientist gets involved in these debates, I see a lot of claims like this. "Thinking about x uses brain system y, therefore [some outrageous claim]."
In this case, you seem to be suggesting that the brain activity proves "both types of morality are wired into us," but that doesn't follow at all. Brain activity doesn't tell us whether utilitarianism or the categorical imperative accurately model what is really happening in the brain, or whether the corresponding thoughts and behaviors are innate or learned.
Wired or not wired, we have no idea. That would involve very expensive longitudinal (or perhaps genetic) studies. And the claims you see are no doubt filtered by the popular press. Be careful with sweeping generalizations there. But don't ignore the fact that very good work has already been done, and we know much more than we did even five years ago - even for something as seemingly ephemeral as "morality" (though we'll never get to "why" - that's a space I'm happy to leave to armchair philosophers around the interent).
What we know is that solving different sorts of moral problems (of the JS Mills or Kant type) involves different brain systems. And these experiments were conducted by a Ph.D. in philosophy who bemoaned the state of the modern field, and went on to do excellent neuroimaging work.
It is actually a scientific documented phenomenon that many people believe outrageous claims as long as they seem to be justified by random neurobabble . PDF: "The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations" http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Edls73/Assets/Weisberg-neuro%20ex...
Quote:
"Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation
of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the
underlying logic of this explanation."
I know this exists because I've seen to happen and I shudder every time. But it's not just just "neurobabble". It's possible to obfuscate in any domain. The problem is: You can never be certain of what's babble and what's real without doing the intellectual heavy lifting yourself. In neuroscience, my ability to see a poorly designed study is only as good as the methods and theories get closer to what I know. So I decline being a reviewer of manuscripts if I don't know enough to sufficiently judge them.
Short, simple story (which is tough for an academic!): Sensory brain systems support perceptual knowledge. That is, when you think about apples you activate regions involved in perceiving taste and color. For cotton, you rely more on tactile areas used during touch. And thinking about the sound of a shotgun activates a sound region. These patterns even seem to explain how you understand television when you're watching the Discovery Channel vs Martha Stewart vs This Old House (work we're preparing for publishing). Your brain appears to simulate the experience as if you were right there participating in it whether you're dealing with a word, picture, or video.
Now that "British Empiricist" story only seems to work for perceptual concepts. When things get more abstract, it breaks down (as the Rationalists pointed out). For instance, I would love to figure out how the squishy grey stuff can produce a concept like "infinity". But we're even making centipede steps there. For instance, we have a paper out showing that even for simple facts about animals, the use of language to code knowledge helps to overcome perceptual inadequacies and these facts seem to rely more on the frontal lobe.
That all said, we're going to spend a long time refining all of these accounts and none will fully explain the meanderings of the great philosophers. The point is we are making progress (and answering some philosophical problems) and I could spend the rest of my life simply trying to understand how the brain supports our knowledge of the world.
For more see:
Goldberg, R.F., Perfetti, C.A., Fiez, J.A., Schneider, W. (2007). Selective retrieval of abstract semantic knowledge in the left prefrontal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 3790-3798.
Goldberg, R.F., Perfetti, C.A., Schneider, W. (2006). Distinct and common cortical activations for multimodal semantic categories. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 6, 214-222.
Goldberg, R.F., Perfetti, C.A., Schneider, W. (2006). Perceptual knowledge retrieval activates sensory brain regions. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 4917-4921.
If you'd like a .pdf, send me a note at robg AT psych dot upenn dot edu
Russell can be read as a critique of PG. As he says, there is value simply in doing the thought experiments of philosophy even when this does not lead towards any greater knowledge of truth. In theory, this should allow one to greater appreciate what one does NOT know, which could (and, in my view, should) make one more humble.
However, part of the problem of philosophy is it occasionally makes truth claims about the nature of its work and designs. This most philosophy profs to teach it as if it is a science, which it is not. If one viewed the ramblings of philosophers as more akin to the musings of the great poets presumably there could be greater appreciation all around.
Still, there must be selectivity of some sort. With PG, I also wouldn't advise anyone to read through the collected works of Berkeley. Russell's history unfortunately also isn't great, although, IMHO, it is worth reading.
If philosophy is to "enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation," how do you explain George W. Bush's relatively high marks for Philosophy 15b?
A fun game is thinking about what philosophers would be doing if they had today's shoulders to stand upon. Descartes no doubt would be in robotics. Hume a neuroscientist. Spinoza in computer science. Heidegger wandering the streets. Kant a Republican. Even more fun to think about is whether the structure of their brains led them to their conclusions - less free thought than self-discovery. Sort of like how Picasso is thought to have painted with brain damage.
Of course, that historical perspective doesn't address the current state of the field. To me, the modern philosophers are struggling to maintain their "privileged" grip on problem spaces. And that's why I do neuroscience!