뇌과학과 철학: Patricia S. Churchland 의 "Brain-Wise"에서

Patricia Smith Churchland, "Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy" (2002)

 

 

철학자 Patricia Churchland 의 이 책을 나는 철학서라기보다는

뇌과학  또는 신경과학(neuroscience) 책으로 읽었다. 철학자가

아니지만 내  생각에, 대학 철학과 학생들이 읽어서 좋을 책이다.

얼마 전 포스트에는, Patricia Churchland 의 뇌과학에 관한 또

다른 책에서 몇 구절을  인용했었다: "Touching A Nerv" (2013).

 

Churchland 가 말한 "graying philosophy"가 내게는 '신경철학

neurophilosophy'이나 '생태철학,' '사회철학' 같은 용어에서도

보이고 우리 일반인이 뇌과학이나 생태학의 최근 이론에 대해

이해, 해석하려고 '생각해보는' 것을 철학자는 우리가 잠시 '철학

하는' 거라는 데서도 느껴진다. 분석철학의 시대가 보인 게 결국

철학의 'graying'이 아니었나 싶다.

 

"[P]hilosophy of mind conducted with no understanding of

neurons and the brain is likely to be sterile. Neurophilosophy,

as a result, focuses on problems at the intersection of a greening

neuroscience and a graying philosophy. (p 3)

 

"[P]hilosophy ... is quintessentially the place for synthesizing

results and integrating theories across disciplinary domains. (p 3)

 

"Under this description, we are all philosophers from time to

time. Certainly, scientists have their philosophical hours. (p4)

 

"In spirit of C. S. Peirce, he[W. V. O. Quine] defended the idea,

scandalous to philosophers even in the 1960s, that there is no

first philosophy. There is nothing firmer and more fundamental

than science itself.... Science, in Quine's view, is actually

rigorous ad systematic common sense in the context of cultural

evolution. (p 39)

 

"The more we undestand about brains, their evolutionary

development, and how they learn about their world, the more

plausible that the pragmatists are on the right track concerning

the scope and limits of metaphysics. (p 40)

 

"That falsity and conviction coexist should not surprise us.

Certainty, after all, is but a cognitive-emotive state of the brain,

one such state among many other cognitive-emotive states of

the brain. (p 42)

 

"[W]e shall explore questions about consciousness, free will, and

the self as questions about the mind/brain, and we will see that

a yoing science is discovering things about the nature of the

brain/mind that we could never have discovered through

reflection and introspection alone. (p43)

 

"What exactly is it that the brain constructs that enables me to

think of myself? (p 59)

 

"Evolutionary biology, moreover, suggests a very general answer

to the question of why brains might construct a self-concept: it

plays a role in the neuronal organization used to coordinate

movement with needs, perceptions, and memories. (p 62)

 

"Although the self-representational capacities ... such as

consciously recollecting one's earlier life events or consciously

wondering about one's motives or preferences, seem to be the

obvious center of the self, they are likely evolution's extensions

and elaborations of the rudimentary self model rooted in the

autonomic and somatic sensory system. (p 105)

 

"Perhaps the most important consequence of [American

philosopher Wilfrid] Sellar's idea is that it liberated philosophers

from the entrenched assumption that how we think about our

own and other's minds is a strictly philosophical, a priori,

Platonic, and nonempirical matter. His proposal made it not only

acceptable but necessary for philosophers to look outward to

psychology, neuroscience, and biology in general to try to

understand how the brain represents its own activities and

capacities. (p112)

 

"Especially since Kant, an important question is how much the

brain itself contributes to the character of what is represented....

If brain organization dictates the general form of experience,

what do we actually know about the real world? I regard these

as problems not for pre-Darwinian, a priori epistemology, but

for post-Darwinian neuroepistemology. (p 271)

 

"[I]dealism, with its admiration for a priori and introspective

strategies, seems to have made little progress on nature and

basis of knowledge." (p 367)

 

* '(Part) III Religion' 에서의 인용은 생략한다. 정치, 종교 이야기를

피해서 좋은 그런 맥락에서다.