Eventi
Seminario
Gerhard Dalenoort,Groningen, The Netherlands The importance of a multidisciplinary approach to problems of mind and brain
28/06/2010 ore 09:30 - Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, via Balbi 4, aula G
Understanding mind and brain requires knowledge of, and insight into the physiology and anatomy of the human body, particularly the brain, on the one hand, and into the functional aspects, like cognition, emotions, perception, the psychology of social processes and of disorders, and language on the other hand. The metaphor of the computer (artificial intelligence) can be useful to provide insight into the problems as such, but the solutions (working programs) can be misleading, since it is possible to understand a computer program, independently of knowledge of the underlying programs (e.g. compilers, machine code). In the case of the computer, there must be people who know about the fundamental relations between different levels of aggregation (description), even if they do not have to be experts on the higher level. In living systems there are also clear effects of cognition on bodily states, and reverse.
Already in 1873 Du Bois Reymond argued that we can not know what consciousness is. The only sensible types of questions are how mental states (qualia) can emerge from the biological processes: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions at the lower level for the phenomena at the higher level to occur. It will be argued that this question is not different from the same question for comparable questions in physics, chemistry, and biology. There are no fundamental differences between the epistemologies of the different domains. For example we cannot know what gravity is, we can only discover how it shows up, and what types of physical processes it causes. One may argue that we even have a closer knowledge of consciousness than of gravity, with a consequent difference of the epistemology involved.
Systematic comparison of the science-theoretical and epistemological aspects of systems studied by the different natural sciences is useful, even necessary.
Segnalato da Alberto Greco, Facoltà Lettere e Filosofia, DISA, Lab. di Psicologia e Scienze Cognitive