Neuroscience

I have read a great deal now on the neurological side and much on the anthropological side and on the philosophical side and we have had all these discussions and all the time I have the feeling that something may break. I mean that some little light at the end of the tunnel may be sensed or some flash of insight may come. I of course know very well that there is no guarantee it will come, but I have already got myself into this state of expectancy that something will come to my imagination which has some germ of truth about it in this most difficult field.

Although many philosophers used to dismiss the relevance of neuroscience on grounds that what mattered was “the software, not the hardware”, increasingly philosophers have come to recognize that understanding how the brain works is essential to understanding the mind.

The phenomenal world according to neuroscience is the result of the final transformations of sense data somewhere in the brain. Yet the brain itself belongs to that phenomenal world. R. D. Laing (1976) asks, "How, as a member of the set we have to account for, can it be used to account for the set as a whole, and all members of the set, including itself?"