Professor Kleiner on Neurobabble and Aristotle

Professor Harrison Kleiner at Philosophy@Utah State has a nice post about Neurobabble and Aristotle:

“Neurobabble” is the excited talk of a certain kind of materialist who takes every new discovery in neuroscience to be a demonstration of the the mind’s reducibility to the neural processes.

I'll post more on Neurobabble in time. It is the conflation of levels of explanation in science. It assumes that the identification of a material correlation with a mental act provides a significantly deeper understanding of that act, and even that the correlation between material process and mental act demonstrates the reducibility of the mental act to the material process. 


Neurobabble is analogous to asserting that a chemical analysis of the ink used to publish a book containing the play Hamlet provides insight into Shakespeare's meaning. Materialists (like Steven Novella) take it even one step further: they assert (by analogy) that the chemical analysis of the ink would provide a complete explanation for Shakespeare, without remainder. 


The fallacy is obvious.


Kleiner notes that, unlike materialism, Thomistic dualism provides a rich conceptual framework for the philosophical and neuroscientific understanding of the brain/mind relation without the materialistic or Cartesian dualist fallacies:

Since the Aristotelian-Thomist position requires bodily activity as a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for acts of the human intellect, the A-T gladly accepts the findings of modern neuro-science, “not as a reluctant concession forced on the theory by the successes of modern neuroscience, but, on the contrary, precisely as a prediction of the A-T position as it has been understood from the beginning.  Were Aristotle and Aquinas to be made familiar with the sorts of neuroscientific discoveries frantically trumpeted by materialists as if they should be an embarrassment to the dualist, they would respond, with a shrug: “Of course.  Told you so.””

[Philosopher Ed] Feser concludes, “The fact is that Aristotelian-Thomistic hylemorphic dualism is the theory most clearly consistent with all of the philosophical and neuroscientific evidence.”

The materialist view of nature is an impoverished philosophical error. It stems from atheist dogmatism. Nowhere is the inadequacy of that feeble worldview more obvious than it is in the understanding of the mind-brain relation.