Friday, February 20, 2009

Reductionism and neuroscience

Continuing my last blog on voodoo and neuroscience,it occurs to me that the attribution of conscious thoughts, memory, emotions and percptions solely to neural activity represents the height of arrogance by neuroscientists. All psychological processes can be "explained" on many levels--subjective, neurological, chemical, genetic. How can any one level be considered as a primary cause of these processes?
Attempting to attribute any level as the the origin of a psychological process would be equivalent to solving the chicken or the egg riddle. It can't be done. How do you explain the fact that new brain areas sometimes assume the function previously handled by damaged areas? Neuroscientists perform an important function in putting one piece of the puzzle together, but they are not psychologists. As we have already noted, nor are they statisticians.

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