Certainly believe cognition is physically realized & that the brain plays a central role. But I doubt brain activity explains everything about human behavior, because human behaviour is contextualized. That means, part of explanans must extend to outside skull into the world.
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Replying to @IrisVanRooij @neurograce and
That is aside from the fact that ‘explanation’ is itself a cognitive activity. Explanations must be graspable by human minds. It is thus not clear that everything can be explained (by humans) at every or any level (of detail).
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Replying to @IrisVanRooij @chazfirestone and
This to me just comes down to a difference in use of "explanation" in this case. I'm OK with saying something is so difficult to explain it's essentially unexplainable. That's dif than something being, on principle, unexplainable in terms of something else.
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Replying to @neurograce @IrisVanRooij and
I guess it boils to whether you believe the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, whether you believe emergent phenomena exist, right?
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Replying to @o_guest @neurograce and
I haven't read this paper in years but I recall it helped me structure my own thoughts on this issue in a more coherent way: Bersini, H. (2012). Emergent phenomena belong only to biology. Synthese, 185(2), 257-272.https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-010-9724-4 …
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Replying to @o_guest @neurograce and
I haven't read this literature in years... I spent the whole of 2008/9 really geeking out on top-down, bottom-up, mid-out analyses (saw Iris use this last term/made me smile), as an UG in CS. Nobody in CS is a dualist but they certainly believe in levels of abstraction.
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Replying to @o_guest @neurograce and
But anyway, my point is that yes, you can probably explain stuff in terms of quantum mechanics for every subject. There could be a theory of economics that explained it using QM... but would that be a useful account? I would argue: no.
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Replying to @o_guest @neurograce and
In fact I made this point before. "Nevertheless, fMRI has proven useful in understanding neural representations that are consequential to behavior. Perhaps this success suggests that the appropriate level for relating brain to behavior is close to what fMRI measures.
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Replying to @o_guest @neurograce and
This does not mean lower-level efforts do not have utility when the details are of interest. However, fMRI’s success might mean that when one is interested in the nature of computations carried out by the brain, the level of analysis where fMRI applies may be preferred.
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Replying to @o_guest @neurograce and
To draw an analogy, one could construct a theory of macroeconomics based on quantum physics, but it would be incredibly cumbersome and no more predictive nor explanatory than a theory that contained abstract concepts such as money and supply.
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Reductionism, while seductive, is not always the best path forward."https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.21397 …
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Replying to @o_guest @neurograce and
I agree with some of what youve said but not that fmri is a good way to link behavior to biology. IMO, It's one of many approaches and not particularly good for understanding mechanisms.
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Replying to @bradpwyble @neurograce and
We don't have to agree. Unlike what a lot of non-scientists believe, science actually progresses because we all have different views on stuff.
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