Barry C Smith is a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck and Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. His interests range from the philosophy of wine to Chomskyan theory of mind and language.
Here, he discusses free will, philosophy of mind, and our changing conception of consciousness thanks to recent advances in neuroscience.
Do you think that neuroscience can tell us what the mind is?
I think neuroscience can give us a bigger and more precise account of the many things that go on in the mind. For a long time we've relied on what we consciously have access to, or the use of mind in language and in thought and in all the things that we’re aware of. But there are many aspects of mind that are slightly hidden from our own view and I think that neuroscience has done a good job of opening up and casting light on that and showing us some of the inner workings, the hidden workings, of the mind.
What are these things that we can’t find ourselves that neuroscience is helping us with?
When you think of how you process information visually you think, “I just see things”, and you might think that’s very different from, say, hearing things. But what you don’t realise is that sometimes the brain puts together information from seeing and hearing to affect what you actually experience. So there’s an interplay, there’s a cross-talk between our senses,
For example, when you are looking at people speak you can better hear what they are saying when you are able to see their mouth moving, because in fact you are influenced in what you hear them saying by the signals you are getting through the eyes.
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