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Mazes of the Mind

The philosophy of neuroscience

Bryan Appleyard, Colin Blakemore, Iain McGilchrist.

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The Debate

Bryan Appleyard, Iain McGilchrist, Colin Blakemore. Hilary Lawson chairs.

Neuroscience promises answers to profound philosophical questions and offers a radical new description of human behaviour. But can it hope to account for issues as complex as the origins of consciousness and the nature of art? Or is this all just neurotrash?

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dllt on 20/04/2012 1:13am

Pure science involves the creation of unambiguously defined models that coincide with experimentally measurable observations. In that sense, Colin's assertion that we can and likely will attain an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the structure and processes in the brain is correct.

The argument about whether neuroscience can explain such concepts as "mind", "thought", "conscience", "soul" or any emotion, is fundamentally flawed and ultimately irrelevant for the simple reason that none of these have a precise definition and therefore could never be unambiguously corroborated. In other words, there is no possibility that "any" model, theory or explanation, whether scientific or philosophical could ever sufficiently describe them. It is not a flaw in science but rather a limitation (albeit a beautiful one) of language.

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Michel_Dagebert on 07/02/2012 9:53am

The workings of the mind may not be invisible, thanks to modern neuroscience technology, but they are certainly transluscent. Blakemore overstates his case, I think...

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