For our on-going series of wicked book reviews, an excerpt:
Caruso and Flanagan make lots of big claims as if they expressed generally accepted and scientifically grounded facts, such as "the mind is the brain" (p. 4) or that
for most ordinary folk and many members of the nonscientific academy, the idea that humans are animals and that the mind is the brain is destabilizing and disenchanting, quite possibly nauseating, a source of dread, fear, and trembling, sickness unto death even. (pp. 4f.)
To my mind, this sentence at best resembles an involuntary caricature of existentialism. On what grounds do they make such claims? Did they carry out surveys (and how on earth can they warrant their bold assertion that the "existentialists were sociologically naïve" (p. 15))? Do they realize that pretty much no one in the history of philosophy ever doubted that humans are animals? Are they aware that Hegel, for example, in his philosophy of nature in the Encyclopedia argues that there can be no "Geist" (no mindedness) without neural circuits, which was, of course, a known fact for centuries before the introduction of the very idea of the humanities or "Geisteswissenschaften," as they are called in my neck of the woods? Neuroexistentialism is supposed to be a consequence of such insights as "the universe is causally closed, and the mind is the brain." (p. 8) However, how do Caruso and Flanagan know these extraordinary facts given that science is nowhere near having settled such large metaphysical issues? Neuroscience, as I know it from my own collaborations with neuroscientists, has not discovered that the mind is the brain. For one thing, it is not. At most, mental processes are associated with certain subsystems of the brain. Be that as it may, Caruso and Flanagan write as if the hard problem of consciousness were solved or as if we knew what the minimal neural correlate of consciousness was (we do not). They seem to be aware of the fact that their scientific claims are, to put it mildly, exaggerations of the current state of scientific knowledge, as is evidenced by their more cautious (but still erroneous, or at least completely unsubstantiated) claim that "mind-science advances under the guidance of the regulative idea that the mind is the brain" (p. 9).
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