This project brings together two distinct perspectives on the mind and the brain, one based in neuroscience and the other in philosophy. The Co-PI (a neuroscientist) will bridge these perspectives by exploring connections between neuroscientific work on cellular mechanisms in the brain and work in phenomenology on the experience of the body in mind-like activities; the PI will do so in collaboration with the PI, a philosopher. The proposed project will serve to articulate and expand the conceptual underpinnings of neuroscience to fit new data using insights from phenomenology.
Intellectual merit Three central themes of neuroscience are at issue in this project. They are the following. The central purpose of the brain is to process information, neurons are the key functional constituents of the brain, and information processing is performed by patterns of neuron activation. The discovery of an active role for astrocytes and other non-neuronal elements in shaping the brain's activities is straining the central themes of neuroscience indicated above since these discoveries suggest that information processing may not be so easily divorced from other material elements such as the surrounding astrocytes and blood flow, the roles of particular molecules, or cellular processes within the neuron that make it possible. The Co-PI will draw parallels to similar debates in the nature of biological information, where it has been argued that genetic information is an oversimplification that is meaningless except in the particular cellular context in which it appears. The Co-PI will do so by exploring ways in which the phenomenologist's notion of embodiment may apply not just at the level of an individual organism, but at the cellular and cell-assembly level in the brain as well. Phenomenologist has long argued that mental activities like perception must also be intensely and intrinsically physical and bound to our bodies and engagement with their physical environments.
Potential Broader impacts The project promises to improve communication between the field of neuroscience and philosophy. It will provide an expanded definition of the core endeavor of neuroscience, and it will also provide an articulation of the advantages and dangers of a functionalist or computational approach to the brain that abstracts away the biological details of functions. The goal is to enhance awareness of these implications among scientists and philosophers, as well as sponsors of large new projects that depend on the computational approach, such as the Human Connectome Initiative of NIH.
Can the mind be understood in terms of biology? One reason to believe that it cannot comes from a long tradition of walling off the mind from the body. Most recently in philosophy and some areas of cognitive science this division has taken the form of isolating the the "computational" or "informational" aspects from the brain from its biological underpinnings. One of the motivations for this project was to reconnect the two domains, to show how psychological and philosophical investigations of mental function may benefit from taking into account the full biological architecture of the brain. The standard model in these investigations considers only neurons within the brain, and takes those neurons in turn to be important only insofar as they perform a role analagous to that of a signaling element in a computer. This model is an impoverished one given the increasingly rich picture of brain function that is emerging from contemporary cellular and molecular neuroscience. The goal of the project was to investigate the connections between the mental and the biological, as informed by neuroscience, and bringing to bear explanatory resources from phenomenology and philosophy of biology. Phenomenology is part of a tradition that has resisted the characteristic division between the mind and body or world, while philosophy of biology is an area of research that has looked at a very similar question in the world of the gene. Is the gene best understood as informational or rather as a material entity like the other material entities with which genes co-exist in every cell? One outcome of the project is a strategy to bridge the gap between the mental and the biological in the area of representation. A paradigmatic function of the brain is its ability to represent the world. Representation is fundamentally "mental" property,and often used interchangeably with "information processing". An interesting new way to model representation comes from evolutionary game theory, which shows how entities pursuing characteristically biological goals can give rise to signals that seem to be meaningful. Versions of this model have been applied to the question of whether genes carry information. In this project, we applied that model to the brain to show how representation (at least on one interpretation) can arise from biological features of a cell and its environment. The model yielded the somewhat surprising result that on one ascription of representations to cells in the brain, what is represented is the local state of the brain, rather than states of the external environment. Another outcome of this project is an accounting of how non-neuronal factors can affect brain function, in ways that challenge the dominant understanding in philosophy of mind and psychology. The dominant view abstracts away from biology in favor of a disembodied information-centric picture. The project showed ways that this infocentric view is likely to be inadequate if we want to understand how the brain/mind really works. Just as investigating epigenetic and environmental effects has been increasingly important in understand the course of genetic diseases, so understanding the brain in terms of its full biological complexity (rather than focusing too narrowly on neurons and neural signaling) might also help us better understand mental disorders.
