Beware the Fausts of Neuroscience

April 2012

As in contemporary art, critics of a certain age, aching to keep up, can be the first to hop aboard. A.S. Byatt is among those Tallis admonishes for being dazzled by neuro-lit crit. Mirror neurons, she has suggested, help explain the appeal of John Donne's erotic poem "On His Mistress Going To Bed". Here she is in a radio interview on the same theme:

If Shakespeare had met a mirror neuron he would have loved it...Because of the word mirror, partly because you can take that out of a quite other vocabulary: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?" And you can put it together with little blobs of brain matter which are in most people's idea formless, and you find form moving around in the brain and the eye and the mirror and — oh, he would have loved it!

A danger of neuroaesthetics will be the vaporous artspeak it can induce. This is not to say that mirror neurons or other discoveries cannot fire the artistic imagination or inspire a passing critical insight. But it is mirrors as a source of empathy that appeal to the social idealist or Utopian dreamer, which is why they make an appearance in the neuro-Arcadia evoked by the Cambridge neuroscientist Simon Baron-Cohen in his Zero Degrees of Empathy (Penguin, 2011). "Empathy circuits", he claims to have established (others disagree), exist in the brain. Terms like "evil" should therefore be abolished in favour of degrees of positive or negative empathy, and cultivating positive empathy could solve many of our problems, including the Arab-Israel dispute. Once again the human animal is destined to graze peaceably on the sunny uplands, this time through the development of the brain's intrinsic capacity for fellow feeling.

Baron-Cohen must have been fortunate in his schooling. In the state sector empathy rather than facts, feeling as distinct from knowledge, have been at the core of educational theory for decades, with the results we have seen. When professors like him climb into the pulpit to preach a new science of feelings, a brave new godless world in which no one is responsible for anything and all we need is to teach folk to be nicer to one another, it's time to take cover. My own empathy with humanity recedes each time I am promised a new edition of the New Man.

Baron-Cohen's Panglossian tone invites yet more scepticism: empathy is an under-utilised resource...Empathy is a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble...I hope you have been persuaded that this resource is a better way to resolve problems than the alternative, such as guns, laws or religion."

We ought not to smile, yet it is easy to imagine a film starring his cousin Sacha as a crazed scientist with a fetching grin. Essentially his is a sentimental vision, reminiscent of H.G. Wells's childlike Eloi in The Time Machine, and for discriminating reviewers like Andrew Scull in the Times Literary Supplement the book is indeed "all a bit of scientific magic". Yet quite a few critics rather liked it — why argue against empathy? — which suggests that the market for neuroscientific self-improvement is there. It won't include Marilynne Robinson, who prefers to see us as something more than an "optimised ape", albeit a feelie one.

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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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