Consciousness: Why Philosophy of Mind May No Longer Be Relevant to Neuroscience

If the purpose is to understand how the brain works, where in the brain is physicalism? Or, where in the brain is dualism? What part of the brain is materialism? How has the philosophy of mind defined the human mind, exactly for components within the cranium?

There would have been eras that physicalism, dualism, materialism, panpsychism and several other philosophical takes may have held court with descriptions of how the mind or body worked, but with advances in neuroscience, there is little to no fit for their expressions.

There are currently difficult problems of the mind like substance abuse, gambling addiction, mental disorders, and more. These are not problems that need more labels, but problems that, at minimum, any theory should state how the mind is operational while they are in effect and what could be done against their tides.

Even within neuroscience, how the brain works is simply not neurons, neural circuits, or a population of neuronsbecause if a cluster of neurons mechanizes a function, what exactly is the cluster doing that another cluster is not?

If it is stated that it is yet to be understood, then what theory of neural circuit has expressed why a [neurons] group specializes in a function? Neurons do not like changing, so to speak, they are close to solid [physical] forms, so it is unlikely that they are getting shaped in one direction that would indicate why they interpret a smell differently from the next, or a smell from a sound. Simply, neurons do not have direct anatomic changes to ensure a function, in contrast to another function. Even with synapses, when strong or weak, what must be definitive in every synapse?

Assuming the philosophy of mind had looked closely at clusters of neurons in the last century to base many of its takes, maybe it would have been ahead of science. So far, philosophy of mind is no longer ahead of neuroscience and may not even be much linked anymore, since the philosophy chooses what it wants but the science is vacant for an advance within the cranium.

The closest options to what the mind is and how the mind works is theorized to be the electrical and chemical signals of nerve cells, in sets, in clusters of neurons.

It is the configuration of the signals, their interactions, and features that could be zeroed in on for how the human mind works. There is no function of neurons—for the mind—that signals are not involved in. There is no synapse—chemical or electrical—that is absent of signals. Genes are not the human mind. The environment is not the human mind. Neurons are not the human mind. Elementary particles of physics are not the human mind. Neuroglia are not the human mind as well.

To answer questions about the human mind is to seek out what the mind might be in the cranium, not stray juxtapositions that, no matter how cutely described, cannot even answer for mental disorders, in the same mind for which several consciousness or philosophical stretches should define.

To properly evaluate any consciousness theory or philosophical theory of mind, questions—on what the mind is [in the cranium, not the mind of the universe], how it works distinctively and how it may explain or suggest solutions to mind problems—should be sought, not generalized neuroimaging, adversarial collaboration or vague correlates. It is like trying to understand how human memory works, with mentions of long-term, short-term and others, without naming relays across memory destinations or if the configuration of any memory is different from an emotion or a feeling, or the exact forms for which memories are associated.

There is a new book featured on The Transmitter, How did consciousness evolve? An excerpt from ‘A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds: The Evolution of Life and Consciousness’, stating that, "However, life is a scientifically observable phenomenon, while our subjective experiences are not accessible to third parties. Furthermore, for conscious subjects, their own life is an experiential phenomenon as well. One alternative to get away from the mind-body conundrum has been pan-psychism, which is an extension of the identity hypothesis, proposing that some degree of consciousness is a feature of the universe like energy or gravity are. Some other researchers, particularly physicists, have moved much farther, proposing that the source of consciousness relies on quantum mechanics. In this view, quantal superpositions of states in elementary particles would collapse wave functions into (proto-) moments of experience composed of basic qualia, the fundamental ‘particles’ of consciousness. However, despite the apparent relation between consciousness and complexity, how material mechanisms become transformed into a first-person qualitative experience poses a major problem for neuroscientific research, which is conceived to deal with second-person observable phenomena. Because the unobservable nature of subjective states by second parties severely limits their scientific study, some have decided to downplay them as an irrelevant illusion generated by our complex brain networks. Whether consciousness is or is not relevant for our decisions and behavior is a debatable issue, but the illusion argument does not really explain to me how subjectivity is in fact produced."

There is a recent paper in Nature, Neural populations in the language network differ in the size of their temporal receptive windows, stating that, "Despite long knowing what brain areas support language comprehension, our knowledge of the neural computations that these frontal and temporal regions implement remains limited. One important unresolved question concerns functional differences among the neural populations that comprise the language network. Neural populations exhibiting these profiles are interleaved across the language network, which suggests that all language regions have direct access to distinct, multiscale representations of linguistic input—a property that may be critical for the efficiency and robustness of language processing."