The material basis of function in the brain: Connections to philosophy of biology and phenomenology

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

Introduction 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.