I am just so bloody annoyed at how the claims and lingo of neuroscience have invaded both common speech and journalistic writing!
I feel incensed the way Blake was at the rationalists of his own day: How dare they demean happiness by calling it just dopamine! Do they really think that bliss is explained by seratonin?
I am of course not doubting the observations of the neuroscientists—of course, when we observe someone who is happy we also are able to observe an increase in dopamine. But observing the fact that they happen at the same time does not mean that we have found a sufficient explanation for happiness! Here again, scientists, and the masses who assimilate their ideas, have confused the question of 'how?' (as in, ''how does the brain work?") which is the quest of science, with the existential and spiritual question of 'why?'
I am not very dextrous with Aristotelian terminology, but to rephrase it as such: Science has partially described the material cause of human workings, but it does not—indeed, structurally cannot—touch the other three causes that make up the being of a thing! That is, what it's aim is, what it's orignal source is, etc. (see here for a primer on what I am talking about)
And yet—so many claim (more often tacitly than explicitly) that it does explain the human condition fully.
And I am torn with both pity and anger for all those who speak in such a way. That they think the depths of a human's heart can be encompassed with the names of a few chemicals. And anger - because they seek to demean my own being-in-this-world.
Ok, if i let the anger subside for a moment, I think I can see how this came about. In part because of an ever-increasing materialist outlook which has been devloping since Darwin. In part because of the proliferation of psycho-tropic medication which only imparts a chemical, and yet does effect an emotional change, but both of these things are understood too simply! Regarding meds, they do effect a degree of change in the taker, but unless the taker supplements this temporary boost (for they all of them wear off over time) with the hard-work of an existential quest to find meaning and happiness - they will remain despondent!
(I bet there are studies out there to back me up on this, but i don't know of them off-hand)
Also, I am stunned that people think the observations of neuroscientists are profound! We see some headline of 'when x people experienced y phenomenon, we noticed a difference in z part of their brain!'
Oh, really! you mean there is somthing mechanical happening as a result of actions taken by the will? Ok, that's kind of cool that we can see it, but when people think that the material happening is the explainer of the experience, they are just putting the bloody cart before the horse!
Mock on, mock on, MRI and CT scans.
5 comments:
Maybe something that happens is an interest in measurement and quantity even more so than in observability - since "they will know you are Christians by your love," and "let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your father in heaven" and suchlike passages.
Sometimes misattributed to Decartes, a quote like "Whatever exists at all exists in some amount" from E.L. Thorndike could shed light here, particularly as it comes from a section of his book subtitled The Measurement of Educational Products, and thereby reflects a perfectly common 13th-21st centuries attitude toward useful reality. I think the obvious silliness not so much to search for more elaborate layers to phenomena, but to ignore the surface and primary impact of things altogether. If I slap someone in the face, no one present will ever care about the neurology of the moment - the relational, physical, emotive, social, spiritual, historical meanings all emerge immediately, continuously, and impactfully without calling for the detectives to investigate the peripherals of neural pathways (unless, perhaps, I was suffering from brain damage at the time of the event - but even then, say, thinking of people we know in such states, the primary "meaning" is not about medication).
Hmmm.. I think you're right on. It's the *ignoring* of the first/surface/primary meaning that is most irritating to me.
good insight.
It seems others feel similiarly:
taken from an interesting article on boredom in the most recent issue of 'Commentary':
Boredom, neuroscientists believe, is thought to be experienced in the part of the brain called the “insula,” where other secondary emotions are experienced, and which a neurologist named Arthur D. Craig calls the region of the brain that stands at “a crossroad of time and desire.”
Having said this, one hasn’t said much. Brain studies, critics of them argue, are still roughly at the stage that physiology was before William Harvey in the 17th century discovered the circulatory system. Boredom is after all part of consciousness, and about consciousness the neurologists still have much less to tell us than do the poets and the philosophers.
-http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/duh-boring/
Oh man. The last thing I heard on NPR today was an interview with a guy who's life's research is to reverse the aging process. "We're 25 to 30 years away from the breakthrough we need; within our lifetimes."
Also, Wendell Berry has a great example, somewhere in his many mad farmer essays, of giving someone who's never seen water the formula for water but understands chemistry perfectly, and then asking them to identify it.
Or,
"God, how I hate the names/ of the body's chemicals and anatomy,/ the frore and glum department/ of its parts."
- wendell
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