Via Bill Vallicella, Tyler Burge on neuro-pseudoscience:
Imagine that reports of the mid-20th-century breakthroughs in biology had focused entirely on quantum mechanical interactions among elementary particles. Imagine that the reports neglected to discuss the structure or functions of DNA. Inheritance would not have been understood. The level of explanation would have been wrong. Quantum mechanics lacks a notion of function, and its relation to biology is too complex to replace biological understanding. To understand biology, one must think in biological terms.
Discussing psychology in neural terms makes a similar mistake. Explanations of neural phenomena are not themselves explanations of psychological phenomena. Some expect the neural level to replace the psychological level. This expectation is as naive as expecting a single cure for cancer….
Correlations between localized neural activity and specific psychological phenomena are important facts. But they merely set the stage for explanation. Being purely descriptive, they explain nothing.
Neuroscientists have told us they’ve explained love, the enjoyment of music, morality, religion, and on and on. But their work, being purely correlational, descriptive, and on the wrong level of explanation, explains nothing.
Note also the comments near the end of this article about the state of scientific understanding of consciousness.
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Science cannot explain why it is that we move beyond the exchange of information in our communications and create art to express emotions and ideas that touch many others. It cannot explain when a man who adopts a child will love that one child as if it were his ‘own’. And it cannot explain sacrifice and devotion to others when there is no hope of a ‘payback’.
But, the existence of a soul in us all will explain all this.
Except that a soul cannot be “in” something in the equivocal sense – that’s Descartes’ mistake.
It’s easy to accept scientific pronouncements via the media when you don’t have a science degree and think that every scientific bit of knowledge is as certain as gravity and all scientists agree on everything. On the way to completing my science degree I noticed that there are a lot of PhDs that vehemently disagree on many issues, and a lot of research in journals is ambiguous with “lines” that look somewhat random. Of course, for the freshman and sophomores, the textbooks show perfectly straight or curved lines with an r-square of 1.