What led you, as a philosopher, to neuroscience?
The questions I was interested in as a philosophy graduate student were really questions about the human mind, about the nature of learning and perception, about what it is for something to be conscious, about the difference between the actions we call voluntary and actions we call involuntary - the free-will problem.
As time went on, it became increasingly clear to me that these were really questions about the brain and that I needed to know the nuts and bolts of the brain, what neurons were and how they talked to each other. The more neuroscience I knew, the more it seemed to me that we really had the key to understanding the nature of the mind via neuroscience. That is not to say that we had a key that you could use independently of psychology - behavioral descriptions - but that it was a crucial element.
I was always unconvinced by arguments that, in addition to the brain, there is a non-physical soul, and it’s the soul that makes decisions, the soul that feels and thinks. If you’re unconvinced of that, then the nature of the brain and its organization have to be relevant in understanding these fundamental questions that philosophers are interested in.
Was it uncomfortable for you, coming from a philosophy background, to challenge the tradition of mind-body duality?
Not for me personally, because I don’t think that distinction of mind and body, or brain, ever seemed terribly plausible. I was always part of that tradition that says that complexity is not predictable from looking at the constituents, but put them together in certain ways, and you get these really extraordinary properties. The mental properties for perception, for knowledge, for learning, for memory all had to come out of the complexity of the organization of matter.
Interview.2: Neural Networks: Biology and Technology
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