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Mazes of the mind: The philosophy of neuroscience | Iain McGilchrist, Colin Blakemore, Bryan Appleyard
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- [00:04]
Colin Blakemore
Every aspect of human behavior, experience, action behavior, interactions with others, knowledge of the world and so on, is a product of the brain. There is nothing else.
- [00:13]
Ian McGilchrist
It's all about the relationships between things in what looks a lot more like consciousness as the primary thing out of which matter arises.
- [00:22]
Alli (Host)
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's world biggest ideas. It's just Alli today and we have an episode called Mazes of the the Philosophy of Neuroscience. This is a golden piece from our archive as it was recorded in 2011. Yet curiously, perhaps many of the main topics of conversations still ring true today. The basic premise of this discussion is whether neuroscience can help us answer complex questions around consciousness, art and free will. Or if it's all just a bunch of neuro trash. On the panel discussing these questions are Ian McGilchrist, a psychiatrist best known for his best selling book the Master and his the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist and neurobiologist now past who specialized in brain development. And finally Brian Appleyard, a journalist who has written and commentated across a variety of news outlets and published the Brain Is Wider Than the why Simple Solutions Don't Work in a Complex World. Without further ado, let's hand it over to our host, the post realist philosopher Hilary Lawson to delve into the philosophy of the brain.
- [02:02]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
Welcome to this morning's Mazes of the Mind. This morning we're going to be talking about neuroscience. Neuroscience has been grabbing the headlines with claims that it can explain, well, almost everything from why some of us believe in God to why some of us are criminals. But are these claims realistic or fanciful? And that's the issue we're going to be addressing this morning. And we've got a really spectacular panel here to cast their light on these questions. So first of all, as Brian Appleyard at the end who is one of Britain's leading journalists and writers, he's won the feature writer of the year award, I think three times. He's the columnist and critic for the Sunday Times and he's written a range of books on the, on everything from science to art to human experience. Ian McGilchrist is a consultant psychiatrist and he wrote a book called the Master and His Emissary which was described as a landmark book about the nature of the brain. He research neuroimaging at St. John's Hopkins and I think he's been a fellow of All Souls a number of times. And Colin Blakemore, who has been a leading figure in neuroscience for 30 or 40 years. His early work on cats brains and the plasticity of vision had a profound impact on the field, had a lasting effect on the field. And he's currently a professor both at Oxford and Warwick. So I'm going to give each of the panelists four minutes to put their opening point of view and then we will have a panel discussion and in the usual way, we'll open it up to questions from the audience. So, without further ado, let's kick off with Brian.
- [04:15]
Brian Appleyard
I had a brain scan recently, an FMRI scan as part of research for a book. This was extremely trying. It lasted about two and a quarter hours. And this was because I was doing various tests about my personality, about my profession and so on. This was purely nothing medical at all. It was purely to do with find, taking readings from my brain, comparing them with what is known about other brain functions and so on. Now, apart from the fact that I came out of this thing giggling and hallucinating, I've been in there so long, what was one of the things that was I noticed? There were several things that I noticed about this. First of all, the. The neuroscientist who was doing it, Larry Parsons, when he was explaining the results, said, at this point, you are accessing such and such an area, or you are accessing this emotional area you are accessing. Now, first of all, that points up to a problem with what we're talking about here, because I thought they were looking at me. But if he's saying you are accessing, then the you has somehow vanished from the scanner and has gone somewhere else. So now this may be a problem of language because it's. There's a sort of intrinsic dualism in our language between the idea of me and the idea of my physical self. So it's intrinsic to language to talk in a dualistic mode, and especially this. Neuroscience or FMRI scans in particular, highlight this oddity of our consciousness, that we can talk about our physical brain as if it belongs to somebody else. Somebody called you. That's the first point. The second point is I was happy to find that I produced some very odd results which didn't coordinate in a lot of areas with other people's results. This was a great satisfaction to me, obviously, but also it was striking that some very quite subtle things came out of this. There was a thing where I had to look at cartoons that were funny, but to get a baseline reading, they showed me cartoons that weren't funny. The funny thing about unfunny cartoons is they're funny because you're looking at something that is intrinsically not supposed to be funny, which is a funny thing to do. And it was striking that they do have. You do get a clear series of signals apparently from people finding things funny. Now I.
- [07:00]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
It's.
- [07:01]
Brian Appleyard
But the point about that is as. As Larry said, is you could get two. You could have two people who had exactly the same pattern of firings on the FMRI machine, but that you couldn't say they're in the same. They had the same, Found the same thing funny, were in the same mind state. This is a second sort of. It's a philosopher's problem, but I think it's a real problem. Sorry, Philosophers do talk about real things sometimes. Yeah, but it was. It suggests that there is a difference between the physical condition of the brain, insofar as we can see it at the moment, and the mind state, what we feel in our minds. So there still seems to be this discontinuity between the mind and the brain. Now, the FMRI machine is the reason we're here, really. It's because there was plenty of research in the brain before the FMRI machine came along. But this has sort of caused neuroscience to explode all over the place. It's become a thing in popular culture. It's become a thing in every ripoff. Artists, neuromarketing, neuroeconomics, neuro, interpretations of art, neuro, neuro, everything. Everybody's got terribly excited about this. This is either premature or simply wrong. We just don't know enough to sort of base anything significant on, say, how you market something by sticking people in the scanner. So that's the reason we're here now. That is to say simply that it's hyped at the moment, and I think everybody would agree that. And it's penetrated politics. I meant to say as well that behavioral, economic, economists have become very interested in it and people are speculating that we can now see human behavior at the individual level rather than the broad statistical level, and that this would influence politics, it would influence justice as well, for example. Now, this isn't on the horizon anytime soon, but it is in the popular consciousness. And neuroscience has now become the big science of the moment. It follows physics and biology. And the big science of any moment always claims everything. Physics claimed we would have the theory of everything, and physics was everything. Then biology comes along. This is the story of life. This will explain everything, and so on. Now neuroscience is taking over from that. So simply, on that basis, there should be a degree of skepticism about larger claims about it. But I've probably said too much.
- [09:33]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
Thank you, Ibran. Ian.
- [09:36]
Ian McGilchrist
Well, neuroscience is terribly important. It tells us a lot, but it can't tell us everything. And it certainly can't tell us what we are or what mind is. It helps to map the territory of our experience from a certain point of view. It's just a level of description. It's not the basic level of description. I'm often asked to go and talk to people in various parts of the humanities about the applications of neuroscience in those areas. And what saddens me is that they think that somehow neuroscience will tell them something basic, primary, or more profound about the nature of what it is they're doing. I tell them they're the experts on what they're doing, but that neuroscience can piggyback on it to learn certain things about statistical probabilities of areas of the brain that might be related with certain human experiences, but they simply don't have the explanatory power to tell us what is going on or what we are. And that's just a category mistake in philosophy. It's not a matter of limited knowledge. It doesn't matter how long we carry on pushing this particular line of argument. So I think we should be grateful to neuroscience for all the things it does illuminate, and it does illuminate very much. Those of you who know my own work will know that I have benefited from the painstaking work of literally thousands of researchers who have looked at the brain. And it does tell us certain things, and it tells us some things that are really quite important. For example, I think it has enlarged our respect for the unconscious mind. And I think also, obviously, in my case, I believe it has helped to explain why evolution has gone to trouble to segregate areas of consciousness which attend to the world in different ways. Now, that is very interesting. And things can be deduced from it, but they can't tell us about what the nature of attention is in the first place and how the world comes into being through our conscious use of our brains. So it asymptotically approaches, and with more and more research, it will more closely asymptotically approach a line beyond which it. It can't go. And there is a chasm between that and what we want to know about ourselves. So I think we should be appropriately respectful of it, grateful to it, and interested in it, and there's nothing in it to be afraid of. For those of us who are fans of the human species and how wonderful we are, the Problem is when scientists, who often don't have very good grounding in philosophy, make philosophical conclusions about it, we simply don't follow from the data. And in that sense, it can get passed into the popular culture in a way which I think is damaging and leads us to believe that we are the playthings of genes and chemical processes and so forth. We're not the playthings of them. They're important parts of who we are. We shouldn't get dualistic about it.
- [12:49]
Colin Blakemore
Colin Okay, I agree with a lot of what Brian and Ian have said about the state of our capacity through neuroscience to give convincing and useful accounts of how human beings work. However, I'd like you just to do a thought experiment and put yourself in the position of an aspiring astronomer in the 16th century and think about the scale of the explanatory problems that they faced. There are two components to their difficulty. One is a whole set of, as it were, behavioral phenomena. Seasons, movements of heavenly bodies, planets, apparently unpredictable things like thunderstorms or the appearance of comets or whatever whole mass of stuff that the universe does. And on the other hand, the difficulty of observing the components of it that might provide an explanation for what's going on. Invention of telescopes helps enormously. Discovery of radio frequency activity in the nervous system and devices to capture that and so on. The apparatus to gather information about the components of the universe has improved progressively to the point where I suspect that Brian and Ian would agree that we have, you know, a fairly full view of how the cosmos works, probably of how it started, of the forces that operate on matter, how matter was formed. They know, even if they couldn't do it themselves, there are people around who can give good accounts, predictive accounts of the movements of all the heavenly bodies and so on. Well, I would posit that neuroscience is very much in the state of 16th century astronomy. There are this whole set of extraordinary phenomena. People who go around, do things, make decisions, emote, say that they're having conscious experiences, treat themselves as if they were persons, and have an internalized, subjective account of their lives. And then there's the brain. 10 to the 11 nerve cells as much again, glial cells, 10 to the 4, 10 to the 3 connections onto every cell, 10 to the 15 connections altogether in the brain. That's an enormously large number. A million connections for every second of your life. And indeed, many of them are changing constantly, all the time bubbling confusion in there of new connections being formed on the basis of experience. It is a very, very complicated challenge to provide an account in the sort of way that astrophysicists have provided account of the universe, an account of behavior and experience in terms of the brain. But I would say, and I would not make excessive claims and Brian is absolutely right, many do. Neuro hype is a prevalent disease amongst neuroscientists and external observers of neuroscience who are excited by it. But I would say in judging where we are in neuroscience, always ask yourself the question, what is the explanatory alternative? It's very easy to make fun, as people did of Galileo and Copernicus, of the naivety of the ideas that they were putting forward, the way in which they conflicted with common sense or religious interpretations of the universe. And you know, and they were punished for that. Don't punish the neuroscientists for not being able yet to provide the full description that we want. Always ask yourself what could be the alternative, except that this extraordinarily complex physical thing inside our head actually does it all. Does it all. Everything about a person running their lives, interacting with other people, generating states of subjective awareness, creating the illusory account of ourselves, which is what consciousness is.
- [16:55]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
Just come back to you. Just media on that. You were saying that you felt you were in lots of agreement with Ian and Brian there. But you do want to claim, do you not, that neuroscience is able to tell us things about how we think and what our behavior?
- [17:19]
Colin Blakemore
Well, I would say not is, but will be. You can, you know, you can, you can give hand waving accounts. You, you, you name a characteristic of human behavior or experience like say, I don't know, fear or love or creativity or whatever, and I could give the kind of handwriting which you would begin to criticize because it would look like, you know, a low quality article in the Sunday Times or something with lots of, with lots of PET scans and stubborn MRIs with blobs on them as, as if it was an explanation. And I would agree with you completely, it is not an explanation. But you know, it's like this kinds of images that Galileo was looking at in his crummy telescope. We're not.
- [17:58]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
Okay, so, so we're on the way.
- [17:59]
Colin Blakemore
It could be. Absolutely. And I would say again, if it's not, then, then we're really in trouble because there is no alternative. There's no alternative.
- [18:09]
Brian Appleyard
What do you mean by there is no alternative?
- [18:10]
Colin Blakemore
Well, I mean, start to elaborate. I mean, I'll put the hypothesis that everything about humanity, every aspect of human behavior, experience, action behavior, interactions with others, knowledge of the world and so on, is a product of the brain. There is nothing else. Right, yeah. Now I know you disagree with that, but what I want to know if there isn't, if there is something else, what's the something?
- [18:32]
Brian Appleyard
Sorry, we've had this discussion before.
- [18:35]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
No, we'd never have guessed.
- [18:37]
Brian Appleyard
No, Cohen always thinks I'm slightly more extreme than I am. But I have no problem with the idea that you would come up with some neuroscientific account of the brain which told you everything neuroscience can tell you. First point, I would say when you keep saying there is no alternative, you weaken your case because it makes it sound a bit weird. No alternative to what? I mean, physicists said there was no alternative to the fact that we were all basically quarks or whatever. I mean these are sort of question begging statements. I mean, if so, I'm fine with there is no alternative to studying the brain because it's the brain. But I'm a bit puzzled by why you're so vehement about saying it's just because you're a neuroscientist, I guess, but I'm a bit puzzled about that. But the point I think both Ian and I would agree on is there are difficulties about this which are not the same as the difficulties of looking at the cosmos. And because we are the people looking the star, we're not exam when we examine a star, the star is not shifting all over the place, thinking about itself, mulling over its position in the universe and the rest of it. But when we're looking at ourselves, that's precisely what we are doing. Sorry, Ian, probably say this better than.
- [19:58]
Ian McGilchrist
Well, no, that's right. But I think whenever we're providing explanations, we're providing explanations within a framework or within the system. And sometimes that's taken for granted and it's so obvious that it's not even clear to the person who's making the statement what that is. And I think that the parallel that you set up Colin with the, with the Galileo and so forth is doing an awful lot of work for you rhetorically on the basis that Galileo was proved to be right. Actually there's an interesting story there because it's always set up that there was a huge antagonism between him and the Church, which is a very much more interesting story to be told about that. But anyway, Galileo was right about what he claimed. But the fact is that that was a kind of expansion of knowledge within a certain system that didn't require any kind of frame shift. But the one that we're talking about, I think the difference between you and me and between you and Brian is that you're saying that it's only a matter of time. In other words, more knowledge of this kind will give us this kind of answer. And I'm saying no more knowledge will tell us lots more about the system that we've described, the model that we've set up, but it doesn't actually help us understand what that model is comparing itself with. You can only understand something you see by saying it's like something else that you already understand better. When we say I understand something, it means, oh, I see, it's like that, which I think I understand already. And in other words, all understanding is based on a model that is either explicit or taken for granted.
- [21:38]
Colin Blakemore
And it's.
- [21:39]
Ian McGilchrist
When it's not explicit, it's usually the machine model without being spoken. And as Dan Dennett says, you know, there's no such thing as philosophy free science. It's not the philosophy doesn't get on board, it's just that it gets smuggled in without being inspected.
- [21:51]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
Well, maybe, maybe we should, maybe we should just try and unpack the issues here. I mean, I think it's pretty clear where the sides are, but let's try and unpack the issues and let's start with just thinking about what we're talking about here. In terms of what does neuroscience consist of in terms of the data, Are we predominantly. In terms of the current debate, are we talking about the scans?
- [22:17]
Colin Blakemore
Well, this is one of the problems this discussion often does distill to discussions of particular scans with blobs on. And there's a lot to object to about that line of evidence. The events that matter in the nervous system in terms of encoding and transmitting information are on the scale of sub millimeter and sub millisecond. The FMRI scan has a temporal resolution of the order of seconds because all it's doing is measuring changes in blood flow and that's slow and spatial resolution at best of the order of millimeters. So you're using a device, a very poor quality telescope, as it were, to look at an object. You can't resolve it. You can't resolve the events that matter. You can measure something. You can measure this blob of increase of blood flow and get very excited about it. Brian rightly says, well, you could look at two brain scans which appear to be identical. If they belong to different people. They could actually be having different thoughts or be in different states. Well, yes, but when you're looking at the brain. Brain scan, you're not looking at everything in the details of the organization of the brain that matters in creating those two different states of mind. But if you could. And all I would posit is that there must be differences. If one person has one particular state, another person has another state. There must be something about those two brains which is different. Whether we can actually get to the point of being able to define it is a different matter.
- [23:39]
Brian Appleyard
I'm not. This is not disagreeing with you. I'm just making a point about what you're saying. The. We're all avoiding any idea that we're not materialists in. In a different way, in slightly different ways. I know you're not exactly making that. But for the moment, bear with me what you're. What you're saying. There is that there is no possibility that this thing does not reside in the physically observable structure of the brain. No. And obviously you believe that. Now, I don't know. I don't know what to say about that. I think there are. I think Ian's pointed out there are immaterial things in our lives, systems, minds and so on, which we call immaterial because they don't seem to be accessible to material examination. But I'm not coming down on either side of this one because. Perhaps because I don't get it, I'm not sure. But the assumption that Colin is making is a relatively new assumption in human history, which is that there is no nothing that cannot be, that is not physically identifiable in the world. That there is nothing but matter in the world. Therefore.
- [24:51]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
So let's just. Let's actually look at the detail of this. So we've got this scan in front of us and let's imagine that there aren't problems with how sophisticated the scan is in terms of a blood flow, let's say, so that we don't get into an argument about the current technology. Let's suppose we have a perfect scan of blood flow in the brain which is precisely accurate. Now what do you think, Brian? We can draw from that?
- [25:21]
Colin Blakemore
No, I think you'd have to put the question another way. You have to have perfect knowledge of the electrical and physical chemical state of every neuron in the brain. Then would you have any predict? You couldn't predict.
- [25:33]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
That's a whole nother layer.
- [25:35]
Colin Blakemore
But we'd all agree on your first question. The answer is it wouldn't work.
- [25:38]
Ian McGilchrist
And there's also a problem with your concept of the perfect scan because actually every person will scan differently and they will scan differently on different occasions. And also the context of the thing you're asking them to do will change what you find when you scan. So there are legion of problems but.
- [25:55]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
I was simply just there isn't such.
- [25:57]
Colin Blakemore
A thing as a perfect tease out.
- [25:58]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
Work where we really stand ultimately in relation to the data. Let us suppose, and I think this was cognitive let us suppose that the blood flow scans are as accurate as we can make them and indeed let's throw in what Colin has just said that we have full detail of the neuronal physiology now let's suppose we have that. What do you think? I'll both of you in turn, what do you think if we had that we could draw about what is going on in the brain as a result of that.
- [26:34]
Brian Appleyard
The short answer is I don't know. There's a sort of series of problems within the question which are to do with if you've got, you know, it's very hard to imagine that somebody would say to me here is everything that's going on in your brain at this particular moment and this is exactly what you were thinking and I know you're going to have a cup of tea, that sort of thing. I mean that's the sort of level we're talking about here where you have complete knowledge of what's going on in the brain. Now but the problems with that, I mean I, I, I'm, I'm prepared to be knocked down on this one because I don't know what I'm talking about but in a sense I can see a problem with that which is that there's always this idea in, in mathematics for example where post Newton, post Newtonian mathematics where he said can't remember French guy's name. Anyway, French guy's name said, you know when I know the position of every particle in the universe at any given moment I can then say what the next thing that will happen. Now this is a kind of scientific dream which finally causality flows through everything and we can observe it. Now all I'm saying is that that didn't turn out to be work out quite according to plan so there's, it's the same problem but Ian could probably do that.
- [27:51]
Ian McGilchrist
Well one of the paradoxical things in the present era is that biology still espouses a mechanical vision of the world that the rest of science long ago left behind and moved on from. And we have the strange situation that in the life sciences we live in an inanimate world whereas in the rest of science we live in an animate universe. It is quite extreme, extraordinary really what is matter? You see it's taken for granted by some scientists, maybe not by Colin, but it sounds as though he might be taking it for granted that matter is something simple and straightforward, but it's not at all. In fact, if matter gives rise to mind, then that needs to sophisticate very rapidly. What we think matter is, it's capable of consciousness. And if that's the case, then we need to be thinking more widely. And if you look at physics, there isn't a certain particulate system. There are no. There are no simple facts of bodies that are material and have a place in the system in the way that neuroscience is now suggesting, which is a sort of mechanistic one. It's a probabilistic universe which is to do with relationships. And it's all about the relationships between things in what looks a lot more like consciousness as the primary thing out of which matter arises than the other way around. And that may sound rather obstruct, but I haven't got chapter and verse here, but I can quote several physicists who would say the universe is in fact immaterial. The Copenhagen vision of physics doesn't just map the extremes of the small and the very large, but works across the whole range. And Newtonian mechanics works in the middle ground. Now, the problem is that neuroscientists are looking in this middle ground and thinking they see a system that explains everything, but matter is not as straightforward as it looks.
- [29:52]
Colin Blakemore
The there's an. It's very easy to criticize reductionist scientific accounts of complex phenomena by the declaration that they cannot be predictive. And that's an. I think you find very few people who would object to that view. But there's a very big difference between being able, in principle at least, to give a complete cogent backward account of what has led to a present state compared with being able to say, knowing what that present state is. I'll tell you what's going to happen even in a few milliseconds time, let alone a few hundred years time. The problem is that quantum indeterminacy, the essential unpredictability of quantum events, means that you can't go forward, you can't tell precisely what will happen because of little deviations from step to step forwards with choices, as it were, at a molecular level, about what will happen. So there is no contradiction in terms of essential reducibility. There's no contradiction between being able to give a full account of why something has happened in causal terms, physical terms, and not being able to. To predict where that thing will be in the future. They're both totally, they're completely compatible with each other. So I'd like to see not arguments about the unpredictability of the future as being, as it were, the case for something non material in brain function, but accounts about the inability to work backwards and say why an animal has got to the state that it is. And I think we're getting very good. You know, you can knock it, it's an extremely difficult piece of science and it's very primitive in its state of development. But come back next year and the year after and in 100 years time and the accounts will get more and more, more and more convincing. But if they will, they will, you know, so you're.
- [31:37]
Brian Appleyard
The lack of predictability must mean something. I mean I, I told you about.
- [31:42]
Colin Blakemore
The quantum indeterminacy of the, of the atomic events that underlie all actions in the universe. You can't predict forwards.
- [31:50]
Brian Appleyard
I know, but I think that's conceptually statistical terms. That's a very conceptually radical thing to say and it doesn't, it casts doubts on the, the.
- [31:59]
Colin Blakemore
But you won't find any scientists who would object to that.
- [32:04]
Brian Appleyard
I know it's factual, but conceptually what you're saying is that, sorry, this is getting away from the brain, but not really conceptually. The fact that you can't predict anything about the future does sort of rather make your. Predict your causal chains a bit specialized. In other words, they make the other causal chains of which you know nothing.
- [32:23]
Colin Blakemore
Well, no, no, no, no. What I'm saying is because you cannot predict forward, but I think in principle can define backwards why anything has happened, therefore there's no magic, as it were in the system. There's no. But I think you would claim there's some kind of extra something in brain system when you talk about things like mind, I mean what is mind? Tell us what mind is, if it is not the word that historically we have developed to give an account to each other of how other people behave.
- [32:55]
Ian McGilchrist
It's the primary fact out of which our knowledge of the brain and everything else comes.
- [32:59]
Colin Blakemore
What mind is.
- [33:00]
Ian McGilchrist
It's easy to ask questions that can't be answered. Tell me what time is.
- [33:05]
Colin Blakemore
Well, not a physicist, I'm not a physicist, but I know people who.
- [33:10]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
But isn't there a fundamental difference here that as I, I mean maybe Colin, you're going to disagree with my summary of you, but you are wanting to say that mind and brain are one. You go, sorry, I'm not.
- [33:25]
Colin Blakemore
No, no.
- [33:26]
Brian Appleyard
All right.
- [33:26]
Colin Blakemore
Now one of the big problems, and it was the same in the history of astronomy as well is that we come equipped with a whole lot of lexical baggage, which is the hypothesis, which we have evolved culturally about how we work. Words like thought and belief and will and intention and mind. There's a kind of folk theory of how our brains work, which has been worked out by us interacting with each other. It's represented somehow, some internal representation of the world. But why should we believe that the job of our brains is to generate a representation of how our brains work? For us, we have a kind of model. We think that other people have minds, they have selves inside their minds. They're propelled by an internal ego, just going around, looking at things, making decisions about what to do, initiating actions, having an ethical sense, judgment, conscience, and all of those things. We all have those views, and they're created by our brains. Why should it be that our brains, through evolution, have developed the power to give us a complete representation of how our brains work?
- [34:37]
Ian McGilchrist
The phrase created by brain.
- [34:38]
Colin Blakemore
So, you know, just finish the point. We've got all these words, and it's very difficult to detach ourselves from those words which carry theoretical interpretation of how our brains work and say, let's get rid of all that garbage that, that history and try and come up with a complete new hypothesis about how brains really work, which will in the end even account for how words like thought and mind and intention are generated.
- [35:03]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
But what is your understanding? Suppose we had that picture of how the brain worked. Would there still be an issue of the relationship between brain and mind? Or would you think if you had a complete description of the brain, that you would then have a description of the mind?
- [35:21]
Colin Blakemore
You'd have a description of what it is about, what is happening in a brain. When the person with the brain says, well, you know, I have a mind in the same way that, you know, you can look at the. What happened this morning. It happens every morning. The sun rose, and I don't mind using that terminology, the sun rose. In parallel, I can have it were an account which is based on my knowledge of, of the universe. Sun didn't rise, the earth rotated literally on its axis that I could see the sun. And I can simultaneously entertain those two interpretations of what happening and what's happening. The common sense view, the sun's rising, I use the same words, and we always will use this. We'll always use the word mind, but it's different sun. But we will in parallel have a growing account of what's actually happening in our brains that makes us do things.
- [36:07]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
But in that example, if we see the sun rising, we have the experience of seeing the sun. That's something that's happening in our mind, the experience of seeing the sun. And that's a different thing somehow from saying outside in the physical world. I'm going to tell you that the sun is rising and there appears to be a gap there. Now, I was just trying to clarify that if you think you have a complete picture of the brain, do you think you therefore have a picture of the mind? I. E. The. And I. I think you do in principle.
- [36:39]
Colin Blakemore
In which case that is not to say brains and minds are the same.
- [36:42]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
Okay.
- [36:42]
Colin Blakemore
From what I understand of your meaning of mind.
- [36:45]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
So, Ian, do you.
- [36:47]
Colin Blakemore
Would you take a similar view?
- [36:49]
Ian McGilchrist
I think I got a bit lost to. Similar view to which bit of what?
- [36:53]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
Well, to the notion that if you, if you have a complete account of the brain, you would have a picture of what the mind? You would have a picture of the mind?
- [37:01]
Ian McGilchrist
No, but what you would have is more and more detailed knowledge of brain events that accompany mental states. And that can be very interesting and informative. My problem is that, for example, we hear with great excitement that when you have a religious experience, this bit of the brain lights up. When you make an ethical decision, this bit of the brain lights up. When you fall in love, this bit of the brain lights up. I can tell you now that everything you do from filling the car with gas and eating a cheese sandwich, the grain will light up in various places. It doesn't explain what filling the car with gas or eating a cheese sandwich is at all like what they are at all. It just tells us that certain bits of the brain are going to get involved in this process. Fine. And this is awfully useful stuff and I actually welcome it. And the more we have of it, the better. My problem is with the idea that it's only a matter of time before this will unlock certain mysteries and questions which simply. It has no power to address. It's just a category mistake to suppose that it will ever be able to do that. And Collins says if we come back in 10 years, 50 years, 100 years, we'll find that things have, you know, explain things. They will have. They will. Within a certain set of parameters and within a certain explanatory model, they will have filled in a lot of detail, but they won't have broken out of that to explain, explain what's going on elsewhere outside the model. And actually what happens if you take situations in the past, because Colin's fond of historical parallels, what happens if you look back is we used to think that mathematics would be able to provide a full description of any particular system. But in fact, Godel proved not that mathematics simply hasn't found a way, that there will never be a system that will be able to account for all the propositions that are true within it. In physics, we used to think we were getting close to being able to know things with certainty, but actually, the more we know, the more we understand how uncertain we are and the more we understand the limits of our knowledge. I would say when you're in the infancy of a science, you are arrogant and you think you understand more than you do. But as things progress, I think if you come back in 100 years, we'll find scientists, I hope, a lot more sophisticated, a lot more educated in the humanities, and a lot more humble about what it is that they're going to be able to tell us.
- [39:21]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
Okay, so having somehow, I hope, cleared the differences in that underlying. Let's look at the. The. Some concrete examples or some specific claims that have been made. What do we think that the neuroscience tells us about free will. Or might tell us about free will if it developed?
- [39:51]
Colin Blakemore
I'm. I'm thinking about what I say very carefully because it's again, so easy to shoot down the apparent sort of naivety of the evidence. But there is, in a variety of situations now, very good evidence that the brain becomes active in a way that indicates that a person is moving towards acting. And when you act, there's only. Sherington says there's only one thing that people can do, and that is move muscles. It's the only thing we can do in the world. There's nothing else we can do in the world except moving muscles, whether it's moving your eyes to look at things or speaking or touching things. So you can see the activity in the brain that precedes the signals that go down to make muscles move. And in a lot of situations, it's quite clear that that activity begins to develop before you. The resident ego inside your head gets the feeling that you've decided to do something. And this is in situations from the very simplest and therefore the most easily criticized, like deciding that you're going to press a button when you're at liberty to do it whenever you like, right through, you know, to deciding how to play in a complex card game, how to pick from cards, when there are different probabilities associated with each decision, your brain is, as it were, getting the answer subconsciously before you have twigged. And when you twig you say, oh, I've decided to do something. Well, how do you interpret that? If it were not the case, we would be up against a much more challenging scientific or philosophical question. Because I don't think there will be any deviation even in this panel from the statement that mental states have something to do with brain activity and that mental states don't, as it were, cause brains. Brain states in the brain. Being in a certain state of activity has associated with it particular experiences, mental states. So it is inevitable. Mental states must follow brain states. And Dennett has said this very clearly. It's irrelevant to the question of freedom of will that your sense of a decision to do something follows the brain activity which indicates you've already decided to do it. It must be that way. It doesn't mean that the brain processes which you're not yet aware of aren't themselves in a sense free. There could be some internal mechanism in the brain, heaven knows what it would be that gives freedom of the type we'd all recognize as being what we would like to feel we have. But it's detached in time from the sense of making that decision to do something. You recognize the data and you recognize the arguments. Do you take an exception to.
- [42:36]
Brian Appleyard
I'm not sure I didn't quite understand what you were saying last time, but you're referring to Benjamin Libet.
- [42:41]
Colin Blakemore
Well, that line of work is a very rich. It's a very rich area of data.
- [42:47]
Brian Appleyard
One of the things that struck me in. Correct me if I'm wrong, but with Libet, Libet did these experiments where you decide to push a button and the. It detected. He detected activity in the brain before you were consciously aware of the decision to do it. My first thought when I read about that was, well, something is happening in the brain before the decision, but does that something that's happening actually encode the decision? Because if it doesn't, it's just something else. It's just some preparatory movement in the brain. And I, I know I've never found an answer to that. There is a much more complex argument about Libet which I can't tell you because I read it once, understood it, and I've forgotten it, but Ted Honerich is here and he did it. Ted Tolerik philosopher did it. But I.
- [43:33]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
Whether we have, speaking later on, whether.
- [43:36]
Brian Appleyard
We, Whether we have free will or not is. Feels very important to us because it seems to be. But I would ask this question of free will, not necessarily of Colin, but of the idea of free will, which is the sort of wittgenstein approach, which is you say, all right, so maybe we don't have free will. What would the world be like if I didn't have free will? How could I interact with other people? What meaning wouldn't my words have? All these things. And if you actually take the view that we have no free will, you have to be locked up. You can't interact with people if you seriously embrace that view. So what I'm saying is that it seems to me that free will is one of those things like imputing consciousness to others and so on, which is so embedded in our language. It's actually quite difficult to conceive of a world without it. So in a sense, the question of whether it's true or not is almost secondary. The primary question is how would we imagine a world without it? And if we can't imagine a world without it, it's all pretty academic to say it's not true.
- [44:42]
Colin Blakemore
Of course, some people would say that if there were not free will, then you should not be locked up because it's not free will. You can't have any responsibility.
- [44:49]
Brian Appleyard
I know. I noticed you mentioned justice in here.
- [44:53]
Ian McGilchrist
I think these experiments are interesting. I don't think they should be dismissed. I think they're wonderfully revealing of how limited the range of our conscious focus of attention is. I think that, in fact, what they sophisticate is our concept of who we are. And if I didn't make the decision, then who did? I obviously made the decision. It's just that a lot of my most sophisticated thinking goes on unconsciously. And that's something we've known for a very long time. And I shouldn't have thought it was exactly revolutionary information. Very little of what we know is going on in our minds is something we're aware of at the time. Doesn't mean we can't bring it to consciousness, make ourselves aware of it, go over the processes. But consciousness is like a beam that can only be focused in one or two places at a time. Things come and go from the focus of attention. And when they're not there, we say they're unfoctious. It doesn't mean to say they. That they're going on in something that lacks consciousness. Because consciousness is a slippery term. I refer you to Adam Zeman's wonderful book on this subject. There are at least five different meanings of it that we haven't got time to differentiate. But, you know, our minds are conscious, even the unconscious parts of their. Working away and making decisions, making judgments. And, you know, that's absolutely fine. That's just an important part of who we are. And the more we understand that, the better, because it's in fact believing that it's all due to a decision that we're making is part of how we've got ourselves into the sort of fix we're in now.
- [46:30]
Brian Appleyard
Could I just add one thing? It's very what you were saying links to what I said right at the beginning where the neuroscientist was saying, you are accessing errors in fields.
- [46:40]
Ian McGilchrist
Yes, absolutely.
- [46:41]
Brian Appleyard
Because the idea that there is this view that is separate question then becomes who is deluded?
- [46:45]
Colin Blakemore
Yes.
- [46:47]
Brian Appleyard
So if itself is an illusion, who's deluded? I mean, and these are the sort of arguments, these are the sort of arguments that, that spin around science and philosophy and, and you don't notice that they're being inserted into the conversation. But anyway, sorry, I just wanted to.
- [47:05]
Hilary Lawson (Host)
Add that it's been a fascinating discussion. I'm sure we we could carry on for at least another hour. I'd like to thank Colin and Brian and Ian.
- [47:17]
Alli (Host)
Thank you for listening to Philosophy for our times. I hope you found that an interesting discussion. I definitely did, and hope that neuroscience and philosophy can keep being in conversation without one overly dominating over the other. If you enjoyed that episode, please do subscribe or contact us if you have any thoughts. The email is in the show Notes. Also, do visit IAI TV for thousands more talks, debates, articles from thinkers like these. In the meantime, see you next week. Bye. VRBO Last minute deals make chasing fresh.
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