Beware the Fausts of Neuroscience

April 2012

Inevitably the discipline has spawned the new science — or parascience — of neuroaesthetics. Art will yield its mysteries as every aspect of creation and perception is explained by activity in different areas of the brain, with no artistic consciousness or self-awareness involved, since the brain subsumes both. On the means by which beauty is perceived doubts have long existed, though not for Professor Semir Zeki of University College, London: "The artist in a sense is a neuroscientist, exploring the potential and capacities of the brain, though with different tools. How such creations can arouse aesthetic experiences can only be fully understood in neural terms. Such an understanding is now well within our reach."

Like Tallis, Marilynne Robinson warns against the reductionism all this can involve, the "stripping away" of culture and consciousness and the "crusade" to debunk religion. For me the word "stripping" has a particular resonance. For many years my wife has restored Old Masters, often struggling to repair damage wreaked by past scientistic theories of restoration, when "objectivity" was all, subjectivity a dirty word, and the past something to be adjusted to meet the demands of the present. Again the effect was simplifying and reductive (removal of complex glazes, flattening of perspective, louder colours, synthetic varnishes). God knows what new injuries restorers bursting with neuroaesthetic conceits could inflict on a Renaissance canvas.

Ironically, a few decades ago it was the postmodernist fashion, laid down by Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty and others, to question the truth of science itself. Now neuroscience is said, sometimes by the same folk, to reveal the raw facts about humanity and its works. In literary criticism, forget the jargon of semiotics and prepare yourself to discover how axons and neurons help in the reading of a text.

It is not the first time scientific concepts or discoveries have influenced literature. A century or so ago many writers were fascinated by the idea of entropy (the second law of thermodynamics) as a metaphor for the dissolution of energy and subsequent chaos. Mirror neurons, currently fashionable in the arts community, carry a perkier, optimistic message. The excitement comes from the notion that because mirror neurons are activated by seeing someone doing something and doing it ourselves, human empathy is built into the brain. "It is ethics made easy," says Tallis. That mirror neurons were first located in monkeys and have yet to be conclusively shown to work in humans, and that a mirror is not conscious of the image it hosts, have done nothing to still the excitement.

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robert landbeck

April 5th, 2012
5:04 PM

The danger of 'scientism' is that it narrows perception in a linear fashion and too often strangles the imagination on the very nature of what might be possible, leaving reason subject to bias and prejudice and limiting it own potential for new discovery, even within the strict discipline of scrutiny that science demands.

XFunc_CaRteR

April 5th, 2012
4:04 AM

@michaelfarr: You've located the brain, but not the soul. By your thinking then, the music you hear through a radio comes from the battery, because if you remove the battery bit-by-bit, the radio will eventually stop playing.

BMerker

April 5th, 2012
12:04 AM

George Walden is to be congratulated on this sceptical look at the neurohype to which some in the discipline lend themselves. The nonsense about brain and moral responsibility is a case in point. The argument that you would be absolved of moral responsibility for a given act because there is a seamless causal neural path to it betrays a frightfully shallow understanding of what moral responsibility is all about. It amounts to a newfangled version of the old excuse "the devil made me do it". In brief, it is the fact that that causal path ran its course in YOUR particular brain, with your particular personal history, that makes you the AUTHOR of that behavior, and thus morally responsible for it. As a neuroscientist, I am embarrassed to hear arguments to the contrary.

Pulseguy

April 4th, 2012
11:04 PM

When I was quite young, say about ten or twelve, for some reason I was very interested in modern medical advances. Every day in my local newspaper there was a column on science and what new wonder drug had been discovered recently. This was in the early '60s. A few years went by and I noticed something. There were a constant stream of wonder drugs, but people kept getting sick. And, not getting better. The diseases of my childhood all still exist. Parkinson's, cancer, heart attacks, MS, MD, and all the rest. Very little has changed. If you get cancer now and they get it early enough, you survive, unless it is one of those types that keeps coming back, in which case you don't. If you get MS, and it is the type that moves quickly, in ten years or so you're in a wheel chair. Nothing much will come of this science. The body is far, far too complicated and our understanding of it is still in its infancy. We are not even close to understanding simple things, like hearing. Or, sight. There is no logical explanation for either of those two things. Yeah, we know rods and cones have something to do with colour and we know light hits the back of the eye, but how that converts into an image, is still a mystery. We don't understand thought. We don't even know what a thought is really. Suggesting we can look at very, very crude electrical impulses in a brain and are on the edge of being able to change behaviour is more than wrong. It is stupid. But, then, Dawkins is stupid, as are most of the science is king crowd.

Norman Hanscombe

April 4th, 2012
11:04 PM

A significant evolutionary advantage possessed by our species was its greater awareness of the world ‘out there’; but this left us with so many unanswered questions about that world. It’s unsurprising that the need to answer these questions (which had significant survival value) could lead to our propensity to fall back on blind faith in the various forms of ‘sacred beliefs’ which have provided, and continue to provide, stop gap ‘explanations’ for whatever was too complex for us to understand. I’d suggest this must have had great survival value in our early evolutionary history, and provides an explanation of why, even in modern times when we understand so much more about what makes us/the world tick, people continued to be so easily carried away with all sorts of amazing delusions. Cognitive dissonance played no small role in helping to foster our many delusions. Your article presents an excellent sketch of the changing face of some of the popular delusions I’ve been watching ever since WW II went beyond its Sino-Japanese entrée period. As a youngster I remember foolishly assuming that one day blind faith could be replaced via education with a more rational analysis of how we might attain a better world; but whatever hopes I held along those lines began dying out as I witnessed the 60s, when the international pastime in ‘educated’ circles became a contest to see who was best at throwing out the analytical baby, while hanging on desperately to the emotive bathwater.

Peter Penguin

April 4th, 2012
10:04 PM

Bravo. An extensive and trenchant elaboration of the arguments given above may be consulted here: http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/10/eliminative-materialism.htm...

blindboy

April 4th, 2012
10:04 PM

The driving force behind this and most other attacks on neuroscience is the fear that it will so thoroughly explain human nature that there will be no further room for the "soul", or whatever term you prefer for the immaterial, immeasurable ghost within. So the best way to read the criticism is as a defense of Western religions. Unfortunately for their position, history shows that science wins these battles. Copernicus, Newton and others debunked theological explanations for the movements of the planets and stars. The deciphering of the genetic code and our understanding of cells has made theological explanations of life redundant. So despite all the convoluted logic and conceptual puffery, non-scientific explanations of consciousness and identity are almost certain to follow. The sad thing is that the writer apparently once held a responsible position related to science. The world is no doubt a safer place now he is restricted to amateur punditry.

Sokpuppette

April 4th, 2012
9:04 PM

Wow. What a rhetorical mess... faux-deep platitudes, undecidable propositions, straw men, mystical crap, arguments from fiction, all leavened here and there with a legitimate cautionary point to make it less obvious what we're dealing with. I'll take my chances with the reductionists.

Peter Brawley

April 4th, 2012
9:04 PM

The reductionist, indeed the sensationalist, is Walden. Typical is his assertion that "many neuroscientists are materialists and reductionists for whom it is axiomatic that man is no more than an animal with a more evolved brain". First, "materialism" is now a shibboleth. The better term is physicalism, because it does not falsely imply that everything in our universe is matter. As the Wikipedia page on the subject says, it "incorporate[s] far more sophisticated notions of physicality than matter, for example wave/particle relationships and non-material forces produced by particles." Second, neuroscience is not reductionist, and many neurosciientists, including some whom Warren cites, are not reductionists. Many scientists, including many neuroscientists, understand perfectly well that it is not possible on present knowledge even to write a complete reduction of physics to chemistry, never mind to biology or psychology. Third, there may be a neuroscientist somethere who thinks neurobiology has axioms, but she exists at all, she is very much in a minority. Most neuroscientists understand that biology in general, and neurobiology and psychology in particular, are not axiomatic Fourth, no neuroscientist thinks "mind, consciousness and religion are figments of his intemperate imagination." The claim is just sensationalist nonsense. It is increasingly possible to read psychological processes from living brains. Some neuroscientists have high hopes of much progress along these lines in the next few decades. If just some of those hopes are realised, they will very likelty lead to some remedies that would look radical on today's knowledge. That is a something to celebrate, not to fear, and not to distort hysterically as Walden does.

pbasch

April 4th, 2012
9:04 PM

Interesting essay, but: You say, "...mind, consciousness and religion are figments of his intemperate imagination." That's not how I read the field. Religion, yes - that lives entirely in the imagination. "Mind" is too broad a word, like "society", or "truth" - it exists in a semantic sense. "Consciousness" clearly does exist, and is a function of our biology - brain and/or body. In fact, I don't see how "consciousness" could be a figment - simply having an imagination which can generate a figment is evidence of real consciousness.

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