Brain drain

• Brain drain

  • It seems to me that aesthetics, criticism, musicology and law are real disciplines, but not sciences. They are not concerned with explaining some aspect of the human condition but with understanding it, according to its own internal procedures. Rebrand them as branches of neuroscience and you don’t necessarily increase knowledge: in fact you might lose it.
  • Brain imaging won’t help you to analyse Bach’s Art of Fugue or to interpret King Lear any more than it will unravel the concept of legal responsibility or deliver a proof of Goldbach’s conjecture; it won’t help you to understand the concept of God or to evaluate the proofs for His existence, nor will it show you why justice is a virtue and cowardice a vice. And it cannot fail to encourage the superstition which says that I am not a whole human being with mental and physical powers, but merely a brain in a box.
  • neuroenvy, which consist of a vast collection of answers, with no memory of the questions.
  • Traditional attempts to understand consciousness were bedevilled by the ‘homunculus fallacy’, according to which consciousness is the work of the soul, the mind, the self, the inner entity that thinks and sees and feels and which is the real me inside. We cast no light on the consciousness of a human being simply by redescribing it as the consciousness of some inner homunculus. On the contrary, by placing that homunculus in some private, inaccessible and possibly immaterial realm, we merely compound the mystery
  • The homunculus is no longer a soul, but a brain, which ‘processes information’, ‘maps the world’, ‘constructs a picture’ of reality, and so on — all expressions that we understand, only because they describe conscious processes with which we are familiar. To describe the resulting ‘science’ as an explanation of consciousness, when it merely reads back into the explanation the feature that needs to be explained, is not just unjustified — it is profoundly misleading, in creating the impression that consciousness is a feature of the brain, and not of the person.
  • the conclusion depends on forgetting what the question might have been. It looks significant only if we assume that an event in a brain is identical with a decision of a person, that an action is voluntary if and only if preceded by a mental episode of the right kind, that intentions and volitions are ‘felt’ episodes of a subject which can be precisely dated
  • We can be conceptualised in two ways: as organisms and as objects of personal interaction. The first way employs the concept ‘human being’, and derives our behaviour from a biological science of man. The second way employs the concept ‘person’, which is not the concept of a natural kind, but of an entity that relates to others in a familiar but complex way that we know intuitively but find hard to describe. Through the concept of the person, and the associated notions of freedom, responsibility, reason for action, right, duty, justice and guilt, we gain the description under which human beings are seen, by those who respond to them as they truly are.
  • we understand people by facing them, by arguing with them, by understanding their reasons, aspirations and plans.
  • Most of our questions about persons and their doings are about interpretation: what did he mean by that? What did her words imply? What is signified by the hand of Michelangelo’s David? Those are real questions, which invite disciplined answers
  • But how do we move from the one concept of information to the other? How do we explain the emergence of thoughts about something from processes that reside in the transformation of visually encoded data? Cognitive science doesn’t tell us. And computer models of the brain won’t tell us either.
  • When it comes to the subtle features of the human condition, to the byways of culpability and the secrets of happiness and grief, we need guidance and study if we are to interpret things correctly. That is what the humanities provide,

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