Philosophy and Scientism: The Explanatory Power of Cognitive Neuroscience

In the public mind, neuroscience has become the most celebrated branch of science. The claims made in neuroscience are often exaggerated and hasty. I want to identify the genuine achievements and the confusions of neuroscience and examine their claims. Scientism is an attempt to extend science beyond the domain in which it has explanatory power and to apply the methods of the natural sciences to phenomena that require other methods of explanation. The result of scientism is counterfeit explanations and intellectual deception.

The scientific achievements of the past 400 years have transformed our understanding of the world; the natural sciences freed us from the dominance of theologism—the application of theology beyond its domain of efficacy—and enabled us to understand the natural world with the aid of powerful, empirically testable theories and the laws of nature. The scientific understanding of the world is certainly one of the greatest intellectual achievements of humankind. In the face of falsehood, the sciences are equipped with more sophisticated and testable theories. However, every source of truth can also become a source of illusion and intellectual confusion. The natural sciences are not sufficiently equipped against this problem, because conceptual confusions cannot be corrected by the method of empirical testing. Scientism is one of the great sources of illusion and intellectual confusion. These problems can only be eliminated through the method of conceptual analysis. Of course, whether such analysis is carried out by the scientists themselves—scientists who possess such an ability—or by philosophers makes no difference, because we are not dealing with a union dispute. Rather, the issue is different kinds of rational inquiry; empirical and conceptual. The scientistic approach is well evident in two quotations I will provide. Wilfrid Sellars—the American philosopher—states that, in the dimension of explaining and understanding the world, science is the measure of all things, of what exists and what does not exist. Richard Dawkins—the English scientist—says that science is the only way to understand the real world.

From the perspective of scientism advocates, science provides the best description of the world, and the methods of the natural sciences offer the best way to discover truths about the world. The understanding of the explanatory limitations of the natural sciences within the empirical realm emerged in the nineteenth century, a century in which historicist self-consciousness dawned. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it became clear to many German hermeneutic thinkers—such as Schleiermacher—and late nineteenth-century historicists—such as Rickert and Dilthey—that the methods of inquiry into history, culture, and society differ from those employed in the natural sciences. No amount of chemistry, biology, or physics can explain to us why Hannibal did not attack Rome after the Battle of Cannae, or why Democritus is depicted wearing boots in Raphael's painting—The School of Athens. Yet we know the answers to these questions. Similarly, no amount of natural science can explain to us: What is the mind? How is the mind related to the body? What is it that possesses body, mind, and spirit? Yet we also know the answers to these questions. The natural sciences are the best source for explaining physical, chemical, and biological phenomena. However, they lack the capacity to explain history, political economy, culture, and society, let alone the conceptual questions examined in philosophy. Moreover, we do not turn to science to explain routine daily activities—why you and I are here, why I walked instead of coming by car. These points regarding the limits of scientific explanatory power are still not fully understood. Scientists in various scientific branches have exhibited the hubris of scientism. Their overreaches are usually neither foolish nor easily identifiable. The scientism latent in the sciences, in line with its explanatory power, leads scientists to venture beyond the domain of science. This can only be curbed through comprehensive arguments that delve into details, not through the dogmatic denial of their peculiar claims. If we show that a hypothetical scientific explanation of a phenomenon is a form of scientism, we have not shown that the explanation employed is incorrect—indeed, if we show it is incorrect, it would motivate scientists to improve their efforts and provide a correct explanation—rather, we have shown that the explanation employed is incoherent in some way, has a logical or conceptual problem, the type of explanation offered is inappropriate for the phenomenon under investigation, or in some cases, the question posed is unintelligible. For this, we need, above all, philosophical inquiry that demonstrates they have crossed the boundaries of meaningfulness.

The twenty-first century promises to be the century of neuroscience. Neuroscience is constantly in the headlines of the mass media, and its hypothetical findings are eagerly pursued by journalists. Because of the buzz surrounding cognitive neuroscience, we rarely hear about the real advances in neuroscience that have taken place in the treatment of brain diseases, neuropharmacology, and neurosurgery. Cognitive neuroscientists, equipped with brain scanners and intoxicated by magnetic resonance imaging, claim to have made the most astonishing discoveries. They claim to have shown that the mind is the brain, or at least that the unconscious mind is the brain, or that we humans have no free will. Or that the window for performing any action is merely one hundred and fifty milliseconds—that is, the time from when we become aware that the brain has become aware of its decision to act until the muscles of our body contract to perform the action we intended to carry out—a claim made by Benjamin Libet. They claim that the brain believes, thinks, decides, and interprets the information it receives. The brain possesses knowledge and stores what it knows. With the growing, frenzied enthusiasm for neuroscience, some scientists like Ramachandran explain aesthetic appreciation by referring to neural reactions. Rather than enumerating these absurdities one by one, I want to examine the conceptual errors present in the writings of some neuroscientists. Cognitive neuroscientists are often conceptually confused; their confusion is often subtle but correctable. Some of the questions they raise are sometimes meaningless, some of the empirical tests they conduct are sometimes incoherent, and sometimes the results of their tests do not demonstrate what they claim they do. My aim is not to discredit neuroscience, but to eradicate the conceptual confusions within it. I believe that the advances likely to be made in neuroscience in the coming decades will help reduce the damage of Alzheimer's, cure Parkinson's disease, and treat schizophrenia. What cognitive neuroscience cannot access are: solving the problem of free will—this problem is solved, we have free will, and the arguments against free will are fallacious. It will not unveil the mysteries of consciousness, for there are only pseudo-mysteries about it built upon conceptual confusions. Nor will cognitive neuroscience explain the relationship between body and mind, because no such relationship exists (I will explain this further below). These are all conceptual and philosophical questions, not empirical ones; these questions cannot be answered by neuroscience, just as mathematical theorems cannot be solved by experimental physics. The analogy between mathematics and philosophy is an important one.

There is a striking fact in the history of thought: we have tried to build our understanding of ourselves based on our machines. Plato likened the human soul to a chariot with two horses and a charioteer; Descartes used the model of the mechanical machines of his time to understand animals, declaring that animals are non-conscious biological machines. Descartes believed that the human body is also such a machine, but one controlled by the mind. When I was a young boy, the human brain was likened to a telephone exchange, and the mind to the operator connecting calls at the exchange. Today, the brain is likened to a computer, and the mind to the software of this hardware (the brain). The power of these analogies is considerable, and the confusions that arise from them are by no means insignificant. Richard Dawkins has stated that each of us is a machine, albeit far more complex than the machines we know; Colin Blakemore agrees with him, in his view we are machines, but machines so wonderfully designed that no one could take offense at being called a machine.

Of course, calling a person a machine is insulting, because machines are not persons, they have no minds, no commitments, and no rights; they cannot act on reasons—though there are reasons why they do what they do—and they cannot grasp emotions or exercise reason. What machines can do—we have designed them to be able to do certain things—is to present us with the results of calculations without a person performing them. We are not biological machines; let me remind you of a few striking conceptual differences. Machines are designed; humans and animals are not designed. It is meaningful to speak of the “good” for animals and humans, and there are complex conditions that can lead to their well-being; for machines, “good” or “well-being” is meaningless. Although there may be conditions that are good for a machine and others that are bad for it, what is good for a machine—for instance, being regularly oiled or not being exposed to rain—is preventative, that is, it prevents the machine from breaking down. But what is good for a human or an animal leads to an increase in their well-being and welfare. By contrast, what improves a machine’s performance does not increase its welfare or well-being, because machines have no welfare or well-being. Machines have settings; humans and animals do not have settings, though humans and animals can be controlled in different ways. The purpose of a machine is the purpose for which it was designed, but animal species do not exist for a purpose. Humans and animals have their own purposes, which are whatever outcomes they pursue. But machines do not have purposes of their own. Humans and animals are alive, and their life cycles have characteristics; machines are neither alive nor dead, they have no life or life cycle. Humans and animals can be healthy, or succeed, or flourish, and may suffer from illness; machines do not have these properties, and one can only speak of their good or bad condition for doing what they are supposed to do. Machines break down, but unlike us, they do not die. Machines are neither conscious nor unconscious; they are simply machines.

We need not, like science-fiction writers and some journalists, worry about machines taking over the world. We need only worry that governments with more advanced machines will destroy our civil liberties and lead us into the nightmare utopia of a “Brave New World.” We are beings with minds; inanimate objects and machines do not have minds. What about other animals? Crabs and mollusks, fish, lions, and elephants? What kind of question is this? Do animals have minds? Certainly, this question is not like asking whether animals get Parkinson’s disease. Rather, it is more like asking whether animals have voices. That is, in order to answer such a question, we must first determine for ourselves—who have both minds and voices—what conditions and reasons must exist for us to attribute a mind or a voice to a living being? Having a voice is clear enough; it is linked to the ability to sing and to employ it alongside music, to employ it in a speech; we can voluntarily modulate our voice, lower its intensity, and so on. Having a mind, however, is a more complex matter. The efforts of different cultures to describe the index of living beings—such as breathing and warm blood—became linked to the effort to answer a question of equal difficulty, namely, what is the index of human mental life; soul, mind, psyche, ghost. Philosophical thought about human nature and human capacities, at the very beginning of philosophy’s formation, branched into two. Aristotle considered the mind to possess a spectrum of abilities that characterized rational beings; individuals with a rational mind can act on reasons, and only by having a rational mind can one grasp truths, understand logic and mathematics, and acquire moral virtues. Thus, only beings with the potential for self-consciousness can reflect on their own thoughts, actions, feelings, motives, character, and goals. Moreover, only beings with minds can have a conception of their own biography or history, their past, and social identity. If we pay a little attention, we realize that all these abilities depend on possessing language skills. These abilities are necessarily the abilities of beings that have language. The alternative approach to the mind, advanced most notably by Plato and Augustine and pursued in the modern era by Descartes, considers the mind as a separate category or substance that is attached to the body but can, in principle, be separated from it. Descartes considered the essence of mind to be thought or consciousness and, astonishingly, denied that animals are conscious beings. For Descartes, animals are biological machines that not only lack the capacity for reason but also lack consciousness and thought. For Descartes, for a human to have a mind intermingled with their body, having perception, thinking, feeling, and having desires is essential, and thereby, the mind directs the body to fulfill its desires. Descartes was mistaken in limiting consciousness to humans, and his reasons, which I have not mentioned, are weak. Nevertheless, his conception of mind replaced the Aristotelian conception and came to dominate modern thought. One of the characteristics of Cartesian dualism is that psychological properties are attributed to the mind, not to the body. Descartes asked, what relation does the body, which is merely extended matter, have with the mind? To him, this idea was like attributing a mind to a machine. Descartes believed that psychological properties belong to the mind. The mind—not the body—is conscious or unconscious, thinks and reasons, perceives feelings and has perception, knows and remembers, forms our intentions and executes them.

Advances in neuroscience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took shape in the shadow of Descartes. Most neuroscientists before the Second World War—including the Newton of neuroscience, Charles Sherrington—were staunch Cartesian dualists. In the mid-twentieth century, partly because of psychological behaviorism, which flourished between the two world wars, and partly because of the attacks on Cartesian dualism by Wittgenstein and Ryle, the brain sciences turned away from dualism. They turned to a degenerate form of monism. They argued that the mind is not an immaterial substance, but a material part of the material substance that is the animal; the mind is the brain; and the mental properties we commonly attribute to humans and animals—for example, when we say they perceive, feel anger, or have expectations—must ultimately be explained by reference to the brain. It is the brain that desires, thinks, and decides. What neuroscientists effectively did after the Second World War was to retain the Cartesian concept of mind but replace the immaterial, ethereal mind with the brain. That is, the Cartesian conception of the relationship between mind and body, mental properties and physical behavior, will and action, remained intact. However, this time it was the brain that commanded the body, not the immaterial mind. Let me clarify this intellectual aberration with a few examples. Francis Crick, who won the Nobel Prize for DNA, argued that what you see is not what is really there, but what your brain believes is there. Your brain, drawing on its past experiences and the ambiguous information provided by your eyes, makes the best possible interpretation it can. The brain combines information and provides the most probable interpretation made possible by putting these clues together. Thus, 'seeing' is the belief the brain holds, the interpretation it makes, and the reliance it places on its past experiences. Another Nobel laureate, Gerald Edelman, argued that the brain categorizes, discriminates, and 'recursively relates semantics to phenomenological chains and creates syntactic correspondence by treating rules within memory as objects for conceptual manipulation.' I cannot pretend to understand this statement! Colin Blakemore—a prominent British neuroscientist—maintained that the brain acquires its knowledge through an inductive process akin to that employed in the classical scientific method. Neurons present arguments to the brain based on the features they detect, and the brain constructs perceptual hypotheses based on them. So, in his view, the brain possesses knowledge, thinks inductively, and forms hypotheses. Antonio Damasio states that our brains make decisions, and Benjamin Libet says the brain decides and initiates action before the person is aware of it.

In fact, these individuals ascribe psychological characteristics to the brain so that they can thereby explain psychological activities or the problems that occur in these activities. This incoherent approach is very common in cognitive neuroscience. Let us take a step back. I said that the characteristic of the Cartesian attitude toward the mind is that mental properties are attributed to the mind, and of course this approach is more acceptable than the approach that attributes mental properties to the body. But this too was a great mistake; my mind does not think, I think; my mind does not feel pain in its image of the body, I feel pain in my hand or foot and not in the image of my body in my brain or mind. When we say a thought came to my mind, it means an idea occurred to me, not that something happened to my mind. In all cases where psychological characteristics are attributed to the mind, it is metaphorical. We humans are not a substance separate from our bodies, but rather subjects with mental characteristics. When we ascribe the same set of psychological characteristics to the brain and not to the mind, we not only do not help the conceptual confusion, we make it worse. To say that the brain is the subject of psychological characteristics is not false, but rather unintelligible. There is no such thing as a brain that thinks, believes, knows, and remembers, let alone a brain that intends and decides. The various dysfunctions of humans in their behaviors cannot be explained by referring to whether their brain knows or does not know a particular thing. Why is this so? Why should neuroscientists not use language in this way? Let me explain. We ascribe psychological characteristics to a living being based on its behavior. We say an animal is in pain if it exhibits pain behavior. If it exhibits behaviors related to desire and inclination, we say it wants something; when it obtains what it wants, its behavior shows us that it is happy – like when a dog wags its tail as a sign of joy – we encounter humans who are engaged in thought activities, playing chess, calculating, reasoning; when humans make appropriate plans and necessary preparations or when they declare their intention, we say they have an intention; and when people, through their reactions in various life situations, display states, we say they are frightened, happy, or have become interested in something. In all these cases, the living being as a whole is the subject of psychological characteristics. Because the living being as a whole – and not just a part of it like the brain – reveals the psychological characteristic in its behavior. In contrast, brains do not behave; they do not cry, scream, or moan; there is no such thing as a brain gathering its thoughts because it has no thought or mind; it is humans who have minds. Brains cannot think or reason; we do not have thinking and non-thinking brains; only humans can think about what they are doing or should do, they may act carefully or carelessly, and they may think before acting or act spontaneously. These are conceptual truths. This is not because the brain has difficulties in thinking or feeling fear and having hope; it is because ascribing such characteristics to the brain makes no sense at all. I have previously called this mistake the mereological fallacy; mereology is the logic of parts and wholes. The mereological fallacy in neuroscience is the incoherence of ascribing something to a part of a being when that characteristic can only be attributed to the being as a whole. Of course, the mereological fallacy also applies to machines. Airplanes cannot fly without an engine, yet it is the airplane that flies, not its engine. Humans and animals cannot do any of the things they can do without a brain; without a brain they would die, but it is these beings as a whole that manifest their psychological abilities, not their brains. It is true that without a brain we cannot walk, but we walk with our legs, not with our brain. Without a brain we cannot think and reason, yet it is we who think and reason, not our brain. Therefore, the brain is not the mind, although if we did not have a brain, we would not have a mind either.

So what is the mind, and how is it related to the body? The mind is not a thing—of any kind—and precisely for this reason, it is not related to the body. Since the mind is not a category, asking what the mind is is misleading. It is exactly like asking what “for the sake of” is, as when a mother tells her child, “Do this for my sake,” and the child asks, “What is ‘for the sake of’?” So what is the right question that would dispel the confusions? The correct question is this: What must be true of a living being for us to say it has a mind? The answer is clear: it must be a living being with a range of distinguishable capacities that are manifested in its behavior. What kind of capacities? Consciousness is not the only thing meant; most living beings, from lizards to lions, have a sleep-wake cycle, meaning they are sometimes conscious and sometimes unconscious. Is this a reason to say they have minds, that they can think and reason, have imagination, and understand the difference between good and bad? All evolved beings have perceptual capacities and can therefore be aware of something whenever it attracts their attention, but this does not mean we apply the term “mind” to frogs and fish, or even to cats and dogs. We can say whatever we want by classifying them as sentient beings, meaning they feel pain, have desires, pursue their goals, perceive their environment, and some features of the environment attract their attention. Animality is a necessary condition for having a mind, but it is not sufficient. Many animals have the ability to recognize themselves in a mirror; scientists have become very excited by this fact. They mistakenly assume that if a being recognizes itself in a mirror, it is aware of its own existence, and when you are aware of your own existence, you have a kind of self-consciousness. These scientists have also mistakenly concluded that apes, elephants, dolphins, and crows are not only conscious but also possess self-consciousness. And surely, if an animal has the capacity for self-consciousness, it also has a mind. But this conclusion is the result of confusion. If a being can recognize itself in a mirror, that is not the same as recognizing one’s own self in the mirror. The ability to identify one’s own reactions is not a kind of self-consciousness. This ability requires no conception of oneself, let alone entailing a conception of what a person is. An animal can look at itself without a mirror, not mistake itself for another animal, and not take its own foot or paw to be the same as the foot or paw of another kind of creature. But this does not lead us to say that it is to some degree self-conscious. The fact that some animals can recognize a remarkable number of their physical characteristics—for instance, their face in a mirror—does not signify an increase in that animal’s self-consciousness. Rather, it merely shows an increase in its intelligence in reacting to what is visible. So how can we distinguish between animals that are said to have minds and those that do not? Should we, following Descartes and the moderns, look to consciousness as the criterion, or, following the Aristotelians, limit ourselves to beings that have a rational will? I believe we should follow Aristotle, with two conditions. Having a mind is specific to a being that can reason, think, feel, and act on the basis of reasons, and are therefore free agents who are responsible for what they do. The first condition is that this characteristic is exclusive to living beings that have advanced language, and the second condition is that the skill in employing the concepts cultivated in language is saturated with our other animal capacities (perception, affection, and action), because our perception, feeling, and action are only intelligible under the concepts we use for these three.

If having a mind is dependent on exercising a range of rational capacities and personal rational will, it is clear that the idea that the mind is the brain is incoherent. Neither the abilities nor the activities we perform in the course of life are objects, let alone the object that is the brain. Human beings have minds, meaning they have a distinctive range of capacities, reason, and will. If human beings did not have brains, they would not have these capacities either, but it is human beings who have these capacities, not their brains. It is people who can think, reason, and know, want something and strive to obtain it, act with intentionality, and be responsible for their behavior. A human being or a person is not a brain inside a skull. The misunderstandings we have examined are very deep. I have addressed the attempts of neuroscientists to solve conceptual problems that can only be resolved through conceptual analysis—not through empirical tests and theorizing.

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Philosophy and Scientism: The Explanatory Power of Cognitive Neuroscience

Peter Hacker (British philosopher, professor at the University of Oxford, specializing in the philosophy of mind and language)

Translated by Zuhair Bagheri Noaparast

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