Will the mind ever be fully explained by neuroscience? A good discussion from IAI, capably chaired by Barry C. Smith.

Raymond Tallis puts intentionality at the centre of the question of the mind (quite rightly, I think). Neuroscience will never explain meaning or the other forms of intentionality, so it will never tell us about essential aspects of the mind.

Susanna Martinez-Conde says we should not fear reductive explanation. Knowing how an illusion works can enhance our appreciation rather than undermining it. Our brains are designed to find meanings, and will do so even in a chaotic world.

Markus Gabriel says we are not just a pack of neurons – trivially, because we are complete animals, but more interestingly because of the contents of our mind – he broadly agrees that intentionality is essential. London is not contained in my head, so aliens could not decipher from my neurons that I was thinking I was in London. He adds the conceot of geist – the capacity to live according to a conception of ourselves as a certain kind of being – which is essential to humanity, but relies on our unique mental powers.

Martinez-Conde points out that we can have the experience of being in London without in fact being there; Tallis dismisses such ‘brain in a vat’ ideas; for the brain to do that it must have had real experiences and there must be scientists controlling what happens in the vat. The mind is irreducibly social.

My sympathies are mainly with Tallis, but against him it can be pointed out that while neuroscience has no satisfactory account of intentionality, he hasn’t got one either. While the subject remains a mystery, it remains possible that a remarkable new insight that resolves it all will come out of neuroscience. The case against that possibility, I think, rests mainly on a sense of incredulity: the physical is just not the sort of thing that could ever explain the mental. We find this in Brentano of course, and perhaps as far back as Leibniz’s mill, or in the Cartesian point that mental things have no extension. But we ought to admit that this incredulity is really just an intuition, or if you like, a failure to be able to imagine. It puzzles me sometimes that numbers, those extensionless abstract concepts, can nevertheless drive the behaviour of a computer. But surely it would be weird to say they don’t, or that how computers do arithmetic must remain an unfathomable mystery.