Are we thinking what we are?

The primary interest of contemporary Continental philosophy, according to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, is the study of man as ‘a self-interpreting animal.’  While most people believe that Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) began modern philosophy, scientific experiments on human beings only began in the mid-nineteenth century.

The ethical track record of such research is troubled at best.

Ethics aside, there is also the basic problem of establishing objectivity when a subject tries to gain objective knowledge over himself.  This is a problem that no methodology of neutrality can overcome.  We cannot break from our humanity to gain objective knowledge.  It is a different order of problem than the knowledge of the world in general.

There isn’t only an insuperable problem of bias.  There is also the huge problem of making scientific judgments without considering the whole nature of the ‘object’ concerned, in this case mankind.  While those questions are religious questions, they also play into what we understand to be an objective point-of-view.

There are also huge questions about the claimed scientific basis of these studies.

The famous German physicist Werner Heisenberg commented that the astrophysical worldview of contemporary science delivers not so much knowledge of the universe as how it affects the instruments that measure it. This article reflects upon that.

“In the popular imagination, the invention of MRI and the images it produces are part of a revolution in understanding the mind and the brain. The wonders of fMRI are everywhere: pictures of the brain “lighting up” when you think, drink or have an orgasm. (Nothing literally “lights up” of course – the splashes of colour scattered over grey pictures of the brain are ways of representing statistical analyses of the MRI data. Literally speaking, the brain is all dark within.) It has seemed to many people that the technology behind these images provides a key to understanding the link between consciousness and the brain, by locating more or less precisely where conscious experience and awareness is located, perhaps even finding its “neural correlate”.”

The mystery surrounding the relationship of the mind (and human personhood) to the body and brain remains, to the great frustrations of the materialists who think that thinking is an epiphenomenological response, a sort of phosphorescent ‘lighting up.’

Truly we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

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