The Data of Mind and the Blindness of Faith

by Denis Larrivee

Francis Bacon’s ‘Great Instauration’ articulates the philosophical principles that would come to ground the shape of scientific reason; through these he also made plain the purpose for their adoption. Written in 1620, Bacon asserted therein

…a way must be opened for human understanding entirely different from any hitherto known… in order that the mind may exercise over the nature of things the authority which properly belongs to it….

Together with Descartes, autonomy for the exercise of power over nature thus came to be embraced as the norm motivating the extraction of natural principle through the pursuit of science.

To open the way to the new understanding Bacon refashioned the prevailing scholastic notion that regarded purpose as embedded in nature and instead affirmed that purpose was inscribed by the exercise of authority, which directed nature to the end proscribed for it. The transposition of purpose – aka final cause – from its lodging within nature to that acquired through extrinsic imposition, was achieved by a redaction of the scholastic causal order, which has since grounded natural investigation. The complex effect of this redaction on the autonomy that motivated nature’s subjugation has only become apparent with the advent of modern neuroscience, however, again calling into question the siting of purpose.

Heir to these redactions, modern neuroscience has faithfully conveyed Bacon’s characterization of the natural world, invoking a posteriori, efficient causal influences as the mode by which cognition is structured. The explanatory success of a variety of basic empirical discoveries has, in fact, reinforced his conception, including such elementary neural features as action potential generation, coding spike trains, vesicular neurotransmitter release, and the like, all of which illustrate the contiguous and extrinsic nature of associations that yield successive neural events. The confirmation of efficient causal influences in basic processes of neuroscientific operation, however, has also been upwardly extended in the assertion that large scale neural events are themselves mechanistically confined.

This is illustrated, for example, in the understanding used to explicate the somatic integrity thesis, which advances a mechanistic claim on the body’s unification and has generally served as the philosophical linchpin for brain death assessments. In Craver and Tabery’s approach to neural function, generally conceded to be a retrieval of the Cartesian, machine based, inertial contact paradigm—neural mechanisms are understood to ‘do’ something, that is, they are productive of some event. Accordingly, models of neural mechanisms are noted for the asymmetry and extrinsic character of their causal flow. The action potential mechanism that often serves as an archetype is posited, for example, to induce synaptic vesicle release by means of consecutive causal and extrinsic associations. The induction of vesicular release, therefore, is underpinned by the notion of continuity between cause and effect, since gaps would require additional factors as explanans; hence, causal interactions are here seen to entail contiguity and temporal succession. Using this paradigm, large-scale neuronal events have also been understood to flow from a causal nexus constituted, typically, by a suite of cognitive regulatory processes. Accordingly, the somatic integrity thesis depicts the body as a cluster of organized systems that are unified by the brain’s regulation. Anatomically and physiologically the source of this integration is explicitly referenced to neural processes confined to the cranium – so also the individual.

Analogously, other higher order neural operations are also seen as mechanistic outputs tracing their regulation to causal nexi within the brain. To avoid the explanatory circularity implicit in efficient, contiguous associations—neural feedbacks, for instance—such operations are typically parcelled into discrete functional categories, which are then investigated independent of their relation to global behaviour. As a matter of praxis, mechanistic models are thus constructed by segregating higher order behaviours from the brain’s global operation, the latter conceived as having extrinsic oversight.

Perception, for example, has been widely understood to be an extrinsic operation by which the brain independently generates representations of the world; that is, such representations are regarded as causally and extrinsically constructed by the brain, a posteriori. While evidence of top down influences on the awareness of perception have in fact been shown to occur, e.g., attentional regulation, top down influences are claimed to extend even to the manipulation of the nature of such representations, yielding loosely or even unrelated representations of the external world. Worded otherwise, what is perceived to be ‘out there’ is understood to be interpretively manipulated solely by the brain, a position that has been endorsed not only in modern neuroscience but as a historical legacy from the Idealist philosophers who succeeded Bacon and Descartes. Francis Crick, for example, is unequivocal.

What you see is not what is really there, it is what your brain believes is there.

Given the supposition that the brain regulates perceived events independent of their external reality, this has the deductive consequence of laying perception open to an unknown and highly variable account of reality. Metzinger, particularly, is noted for extending this notion to its logical extreme, where the brain is seen to operate independently of all external influence.

Conscious experience is like a tunnel ... first our brains generate a world simulation, so perfect that we do not recognize it ... and then a construct of ourselves interacting with it, a selective and extreme representation of information.

Unsurprisingly, this deductive position was expressed centuries earlier with even greater clarity by Kant, an assiduous disciple of Descartes.

...appearances are only representations of things that exist without cognition of what they might be in themselves. A mere representation, however, they stand under no law of connection at all except that which the connecting faculty prescribes….

Despite the inherent variability of perceptual observations that is the result of such logic, by carefully circumscribing the processes of perception a constellation of studies are now used to demonstrate the grounding of perception in mechanistic accounts; that is, as a top down, extrinsically modulated brain function. Beginning with George Wald’s discovery of the light receptive protein rhodopsin, and the molecular events of signal transduction, which evoke sensory receptor potentials and on to population coding, these studies are used to illustrate the presence of consecutive steps that generate the neural activity patterns that underlie perceptual awareness. Reprised from global brain operation, therefore, such studies claim the presence of only contiguous and extrinsic causal relations in perceptual processes; hence, they are stated to demonstrate the grounding of perception in a posteriori causal relations alone.

By extension, emotions—arguably equally complex— have also been classed within mechanistic paradigms, a claim reinforced by, among other observations, the demonstration of binding shifts between emotional responses and particular memories by neuromodulation. The lesson taken from these studies is that emotions are similarly subject to Bacon’s postulates and the notions of contemporary neuroscientific interpreters. Distinctions that may be claimed for subjectivity and emotional feelings, therefore, have been explained on the basis of degree and not of kind, a message amplified in the general claim that humans share through their neural activity in the same sorts of neural processes underwriting apparently similar emotional events seen in animals or even duplicated in neurotechnological devices. Such a claim, clearly, has bearing on human ontological status, which is therefore made subject to the lack of a clear ‘exceptionalness’ criterion by which the human can be distinguished from the material world. The absence of such distinction, conversely and further, has led to the conclusion that the human being, and the behavioural features and emotional inclinations to which he is privy, is exceptionless.

The move to ontology that is apparent in these conclusions, is coherent as the expression of a consistently invoked principle on the perceived natural order, and the culmination of a trajectory initiated by Bacon’s revision of the older Scholastic understanding. The logical conundrum exposed in the ontological claim, however, reveals the flawed outcome of this pursuit, exacerbated by a dichotomy of praxis that contrasts the level of interrogation evoked via the principle with that directed to the principle. What modern neuroscience makes apparent, therefore, is that in staging this dichotomy there are untoward consequences neither foreseen by the master nor intended by the disciple. Bacon’s redaction of the scholastic causal order and his substitution of motivation for metaphysic failed due to his failure to value the arguments that had first sited final purpose to nature. In consequence, it exposed the ground for its challenge in studies of the material order of the human mind, which emerged in the 21st century.

Embedded in nature, the drive to autonomy may be understood as the logical inference on a purposeful reality; removed from nature for the sake of its control, autonomy is no longer manifestly present in the natural domain. Harvard’s Wegner, for instance, personifies this logic in his fervent denial of behavioural autonomy.

Writing in 1979, Karol Wojtyla noted that the order of nature was not coincident with the order of biology, a statement directly referencing the general scientific perspective on the natural world.

…The expression ‘the order of nature’ and ‘the biological order’ must not be confused or regarded as identical; the ‘biological order’ does indeed mean the same as the order of nature but only in so far as this is accessible to the methods of empirical and descriptive natural science…..The ‘biological order,’ as a product of the human intellect which abstracts its elements from a larger reality, has man for its immediate author. The claim to autonomy ….is a short jump from this…….’

Wojtyla apparently meant by this that while the order of nature was impressed with the totality of reality, the order of biology reflected only man’s abstraction of nature, which reduced reality to a selected interpretation. The consequence of this partial view is in finding that by subjugating the natural world, nature comes to exercise control over man. As a part of the metaphysical order, however, the drive to autonomy reflects an upward striving to personal freedom that attains a pinnacle in the human condition. When removed from nature for the sake of its control, though, purpose is itself lost and autonomy denied. For Bacon’s heirs, thus, in lieu of an understanding of autonomy, only blind faith in its motivation remains.