![]() In these ways, philosophers can benefit tremendously by working with neuroscientists.Īt this juncture, philosophy and neuroscience are poised to work together, learn together, and advance together. Are moral beliefs based on emotion or reasoning? Do people have moral virtues and vices that remain stable across situations? Are moral judgments unified by a shared substrate in the brain? These questions (and many more) are asked by philosophers, and their answers depend on empirical claims that can and should be tested scientifically. Again, moral philosophy-including practical ethics, normative theory, and meta-ethics-often hinges on empirical assumptions that can be tested by neuroscience together with psychology. Philosophers worry about free will and responsibility, and their views can be tested against discoveries in the neuroscience of decision, action, self-control, and mental illness. Epistemologists try to develop theories of knowledge that need to take into account how information is processed in human brains, including the neural systems that enable perception, memory, and reasoning. ![]() Any approach to the philosophy of mind needs to be consistent with what we know about how the brain works, but neuroscience also affects many other central issues in philosophy. Philosophers also stand to gain insights from neuroscience. Thus, neuroscience can gain many benefits from working with philosophers. These philosophical theories could potentially provide the kind of framework that the BRAIN Initiative needs. Many profound and original answers have been proposed by philosophers in recent years, including not only subtle variations on reductionism but also forceful arguments against reductionism, as well as several sophisticated alternatives to reductionism that take neuroscience into account. This perennial problem has been reshaped in the context of twenty-first-century neuroscience into the question of how our brains can cause or realize our minds. Since Plato’s Phaedo, philosophers have repeatedly asked how our minds are related to our bodies. ![]() This relation is the bailiwick of philosophers. No matter how much neural data we amass and no matter how sophisticated or computationally powerful our statistical models become, the goal of endeavors such as the BRAIN Initiative will be out of reach unless we have a clear theoretical framework that reveals how the brain relates to the mind. Above and beyond these fundamental yet tractable practical difficulties rests a less discussed but equally pivotal challenge: that of understanding how answers about the brain can resolve questions about the mind and vice versa. Similarly, neuroscientists face the daunting task of systematizing, analyzing, and modeling enormous amounts of data. Part of the problem lies in the sheer difficulty of developing noninvasive technologies that are powerful and sensitive enough to allow us to measure brain activity in vivo and at different levels of complexity, from molecules to large-scale brain areas. This gap is no secret, as neuroscientists will be the first to admit. This Initiative hopes to enable us not only to understand better the relationship between the mind and the brain but also to “foster science and innovation” and “to inspire the next generation of scientists”- two of the so-called Grand Challenges of the twenty-first century.Įncouraging as this plan might sound, the truth is that we are far from possessing a detailed picture of how the brain works and even farther from understanding how brain functions relate to operations of the human mind. The White House confirmed this prominent position in April 2013 when it unveiled the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies-or BRAIN-Initiative ( es.gov/BRAIN). Whether this growth is due to its brilliant investigators from various disciplines, to its multiple synergistic research methods, or to its numerous promises of profound results, neuroscience is now the flagship among biological and medical sciences. The past few decades have witnessed an exponential increase in neuroscience research.
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