X-Phi (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Saturday, March 14, 2009, 14:04 (5530 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George has kindly drawn our attention to a wide-ranging article on "x-phi" ... experimental philosophy, which combines brain-scanning, questionnaires about people's ethics and intuitions, and field studies of how people behave in certain situations. - It seems to me that any activity that gets us thinking more closely about ourselves is to be welcomed, and it's good to see some of Mark's earlier ethical questions subsumed under the collective name of "trolley-ology". On the subject of mind v. matter, Neil Levy says most of us are "intuitive dualists; we think mind and matter are distinct substances." But most philosophers of the mind "believe (put simplistically) that there is no fundamental difference between mind and matter." Presumably this is the section that George regards as providing support for his own view, which coincides with the latter. I'm not quite sure what is meant by a "philosopher of the mind", "believe" puts the right emphasis on the element of faith, "simplistically" covers a wide area of possible omissions, and "fundamental" still allows for differences and tricky definitions. Science can discover which areas of the brain are associated with which activities, and which chemicals are discharged because of those activities, but it's not the brain that triggers the activities. The brain doesn't fall in love, worry us into a heart attack over the prospect of bankruptcy, or mourn someone's death. So what does? - A week or so ago, there was a fascinating article in The Guardian about ants. It was full of revealing parallels, which may or may not be seen as supporting George's view. Researchers at Bristol University have shown that "groups of neurons in the primate brain seem to make decisions in roughly the same way as an ant colony." Edward O. Wilson (Harvard) and Bert Hoelldobler (Arizona) propose a new class of life: the superorganism, and in their book of the same name, they compare "each ant in a colony with a cell, say, in the human body, each one specialised for a task and working (to its own probable death) for the good of the organism as a whole [...] Extending the analogy further, Hoelldobler says a superorganism has a sort of intelligence where an ant colony acts as a problem-solving unit (or even a simple brain)." - The implications of all this are intriguing. As the researchers point out, we ourselves are a mass of cells that act independently. There are colonies of living things looking after my immune system, my circulation, my digestion etc. and "I" don't tell them what to do. Yet they are all part of me, and so I too am a superorganism (my wife will never believe it). Can we then extend the image still further? Is the ant colony and are we a microcosm of a superorganism we call the universe?