It was refreshing to read Matthew Cobb’s overview of the state of brain theorising (Your brain is not a computer, The long read, 27 February). Recent advances in brain imaging have led to startling developments in how the mind can control a robotic arm, but this only raises the hoary old question of how the mind relates to the brain: how, for example, hopes, fears, beliefs and aspirations produce the behavioural outcomes that they invariably do.
Reductionist and representationalist views of the brain still fail to address, never mind resolve, such questions, and any reductionist statement is self-refuting the moment that it is uttered: either that statement was predetermined, probabilistic or randomly generated. Whether it is true or false will never be answered by any reductionist theorising or brain science.
While no one would seriously consider that brain activity is unrelated to cognitions, emotions or behaviours, no one has yet developed a comprehensive discourse that could embrace on the one hand, mental states, and on the other, brain states with which they might be correlated. Even if this should one day become possible, it cannot explain at a causal level what is going on. How can my intention to write this letter result in its appearance in the physical world?
Physicists have dared to inhabit a bizarre world where a particle appears to “know” what another particle is doing. This is not merely action at a distance; this is information being transmitted by an unknown mechanism through an unknown medium. Just because it is described as “quantum entanglement” does not mean that it is in any way understood. Similarly, an invariable correlation of a brain state with a mental event or vice versa has never been causally explained by any neuroscientist.
Cobb ends by suggesting that a new framework may emerge involving cross-disciplinary research. I would further suggest that until materialist and mentalistic discourses can be subsumed under a coherent conceptual framework, the mind/brain problem is unlikely to yield to either scientific or philosophical examination.
Dr Allan Dodds
Consultant neuropsychologist, Bramcote, Nottingham
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