Ethics at the Mind-Brain Intersection

    Over 2,500 years ago, Gautama Buddha said: “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world” (Kornfield, 1993, 4). This bold statement is a testament to the stature and power of the mind according to the Buddha. Moreover, the Buddha taught a path to enlightenment (known as the Eight-Fold Path) of which a major component is ethics. As Roger Walsh explains, “The great secret of ethics is as the Buddha pointed out: ‘Whatever you do, you do to yourself’ (Walsh, 1999, 121). Modern-day researcher and “neurotheologist” Andrew Newberg maintains:

Because we can never get outside ourselves, we must make assumptions – usually lots of them – to make sense of the world “out there….” God may exist, but we could experience God – or anything else, for that matter – only through the functioning of our brains. …Every individual also seems to have an abiding need to construct moral, spiritual, and scientific beliefs that explain the workings of the universe. So a belief itself is a fundamental, essential component of the human brain (Newberg, 2006, 8).

From this, it appears that ethics have much to do with the mind and the way it is understood and conceived. What are some of the ways these kinds of influences express themselves in the modern world?


    As part and parcel in the rise of human civilization, reflection on experience and meaning has been one of the most enduring traits of human beings across cultures and epochs. As these reflections became more sophisticated, philosophies describing what it means to live, how people should lead their lives and relate to one another emerged and spawned the domain of human inquiry and participation known as ethics. In the west, the first orientation (widely viewed as the inception of the western moral philosophy tradition) was that of virtue ethics, chiefly developed and extrapolated by Plato and Aristotle starting around the 5th century BC. Virtue ethics flourished during ancient times and emphasized balance or harmony of character traits with nature as proper living (e.g. the Aristotelian notion of means between vices of depravity and excess). Along with ethical inquiries (which answered questions of why with prescriptive injunctions of ought), philosophers contemplated the nature of how one can act in a way that is informed by thought. According to Morton Hunt, “the philosophers [of this time] did not use the term ‘psychology’ (which did not exist until AD 1520) or regard it as a distinct area of knowledge… Nonetheless, they identified and offered hypotheses about nearly all the significant problems that have concerned scholars and scientists ever since… [including]: How are mind and body connected? Is mind part of soul, and if so can it exist apart from the body?” (Hunt, 1993, 6). In the 17th century AD, French philosopher René Descartes too mused over the relationship between mind and body, laying the foundations of the mind-body problem from a more modern, scientific perspective that is still at the forefront of philosophical inquiry into psychology. Contention between two major contemporary perspectives on the interface between mind and brain/body – autonomous and neurocomputational mind conceptions – is now bearing upon ethical understanding in ever more direct and influential ways.
    In Philosophy of Psychology: Contemporary Readings, José Bermúdez presents and categorizes the contemporary approaches to the interface problem[1] as four distinct conceptions that fall along a spectrum from mind and body being distinct and irreducible to one-another (autonomous mind) to the mind-body distinction ultimately constituting one and the same phenomenon, which can in turn constrain the explanada of “commonsense” psychological theories through their co-evolution with neuropsychological understanding of subpersonal levels[2]. The autonomous mind thinkers don’t have a workable solution to the interface problem, not because they believe that it is somehow beyond our capacities for understanding but simply because it is not really a problem in the first place: “these theorists all think that the enterprise of making sense of the thoughts and behavior of other people is a fundamentally different type of explanatory project from the enterprise of trying to understand the neural and psychological basis of cognition and behavior” (Bermúdez, 2006, 5). This means that, for whatever defense of this position is offered (there are several), the work of understanding subpersonal levels (such as research in neurophysiology) will never fundamentally come into contact with or influence the work of understanding personal-level phenomena (such as the influence desire and belief has on one’s understanding of and behavior in the world). The attempt to revise understanding at personal levels through reference to the subpersonal levels, they maintain, is misled and “…does not provide further explanation… [but] merely changes the subject” (Bermúdez, 2006, 6).
    The autonomous mind perspective has been, in various incarnations, the preeminent approach to moral philosophy throughout pre-modern history. The other side has in fact not been available, and even in the time of Descartes, when pondering the mind-body problem, he was not thinking so much of implications, constraints and reformations knowledge of the brain’s inner workings might have on conceptions of and about the mind (his conclusion to the mind-body problem consisted in the interaction of this dualism at the juncture constituted by the pineal gland). Philosophers pondered questions of appropriateness by reason and emotion, with personal level observation being at the forefront of influence in knowledge. Issues of causality, lying at the core of the mind-body problem, were inferred by these kinds of data and shaped a vast array of conclusions through the ancient times up until the rise of empiricism in the late 17th century and consequent developments of scientific methodology. These changes, which in part marked the outset of the modern age, began to disclose influential conclusions about the world and criticize prior conclusions. Causality is still at the forefront of philosophical debates. A recent Philosophical Review article by John Gibbons entitled Mental Causation without Downward Causation serves as a principled testament and an example of autonomous thinking in this area:

Of course, it’s a psychological question which kinds are psychological kinds. So it’s a psychological question which questions are psychological questions. But if our initial hunch [that mental causation occurs without downward causation] is correct, then what’s systematically connected to your noticing that p is not merely the fact that p is true. It’s the fact that p is interesting, obvious, or what have you. These certainly look like psychological kinds. You couldn’t make reference to something’s being interesting, obvious, or surprising in your definition if you were trying to give a reductive analysis of the mental…. [It’s] only when philosophers are talking about psychology that the existence of the external world is supposed to be irrelevant. When psychologists are doing psychology, our interaction with the world is actually the point. See, for example, the nearest psychology book” (Gibbons, 2006, 101).

With this theoretical description of interface constrains of causality, Gibbons is pointing out the irreducibility of the mental to the physical. He further elucidates the point as follows: “If there’s a property of the cause at the same level as the property of the effect, generality will favor it. So, for example, the mental properties of the cause are responsible for the mental properties of the effect, while the physical properties of the cause are responsible for the physical properties of the effect” (Gibbons, 2006, 103). According to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, “Believing that reductions by finitely stable definitions are thus out of reach, many authors have tried to express the view that mental properties are still somehow physical by saying that they nonetheless supervene on the physical properties of the organisms that have them” (Teller, 2005, 779).
    While there is still much debate over the exact nature of the distinctness of mind from physical realities, and although physicalism and materialism are certainly prominent in contemporary thought, there is also a very broad philosophical consensus in reference to such irreducibility. Ken Wilber distinguishes some of the qualities in which this consensus is based:

…The mind exists within the vital body, but the mind goes beyond the body in so many ways: while the body feels its own feelings, the cognition of the mind takes the role of others, and thus expands consciousness from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric; the mind knits together past and future, and thus rises above the impulsiveness of the body’s instincts; while the mind conceives the world of what might be and what should be, the body slumbers in its naïve present (Wilber, 1999, 538).

Experiential phenomena, the domain of phenomenology and psychology, indeed looks very different from observations empirically disclosing physical and biological phenomena, the domain of physics and biology. Bermúdez likewise acknowledges this point: “…no amount of neurophysiological and neuropsychological research establishing neural correlates for conscious personal-level psychological states could possibly entail the truth of the claim that psychological states are identical to brain states” (Bermúdez, 2005, 14). Attempts to prove otherwise by inferring mental properties from physical observations have hitherto failed, with the former, in various ways, always and unavoidably serving as an a priori reference point of the latter. Material/scientific reductionisms (which are very widespread to this day – the author of my 2007 Biopsychology text (Kalat, 2007) adopts identity theory and references physics to wholly discredit dualism![3]) that deny such a distinction are not only misled but a major threat to ethics. Cartesian dualism is indeed, for the most part, rejected in academia. Hunt reiterates Raymond Fancher’s description: “…the interaction between body and soul was said [by Descartes] to be deducible through a combination of anatomical inference, psychological introspection, and a peculiarly empty logical analysis…” (Hunt, 1993, 68). This rejection, however, is rooted not in the idea of the distinctness or qualitative differentiation of mind and brain/body per se, but in the idea of their exclusivism, for it is not the case that these two entities are separate. They are, instead and even in their differential distinctiveness, undoubtedly very closely related. As Bermúdez suggests, “no self-respecting dualist would want to rule out the possibility, for example, that there might be neural correlates for non-physical mental states” and on that account claims that “…the most plausible contemporary version of dualism, the property of dualism propounded by David Chalmers, incorporates a program for studying the physical correlates and counterparts of non-physical phenomenal properties (Chalmers 1996)” (Bermúdez, 2005, 15). Still, however, reductionism as a solution to this problem of separateness – whether to materialism or phenomenal idealism such as that of Berkeley: “to be is to be perceived” – is very problematic, and in a way that has widespread yet fallacious consequences in the moral domain. This is especially apparent in the case of will-as-autonomy.
    Volition or will is at the core of much ethical theory. Most of the major ethical theories, from the proper inhabitance of character traits in virtue ethics to the essential role of reason and duty in deontology, from adherence to doctrine through faith in divine law to consideration of expected outcomes to result in the most widespread amount of happiness possible in utilitarianism, from acceptance of limitations and proper engagement of the amenable in stoicism to recognition of and proper abidance among perspectival contexts of values in moral relativism, by virtue of their province as prescriptive frameworks, imply that through acceptance of a certain understanding there exists a capacity to more fully participate in the ethical life. In Kant’s deontological theory, for example, the will is relevant in ethical determinations only when it is an efferent movement of reason, according to the categorical imperative, for only reason can partake in the moral domain and only reason has the capacity to be influenced by a priori notions apart from circumstance:

Everyone must admit that a law, if it is to hold morally (i.e., as a ground of obligation), must imply absolute necessity… He must concede that the ground of obligation here must not be sought in the nature of man or in the circumstances in which he is placed but a priori solely in the concepts of pure reason, and that every precept which rests on principles of mere experience, even a precept which is in certain respects universal, so far as it leans in the least on empirical grounds (perhaps only in regard to the motive involved) may be called a practical rule but never a moral law (Kant, 1997, 5).

This kind of grounding for morality lies furthest from notions that the physical can account in full for the mental. To be sure, one of Kant’s major conclusions is that the human capacity to participate in reason this way (a rational being) points to being of two worlds: “…first, as belonging to the world of sense, under the laws of nature (heteronomy), and, second, as belonging to the intelligible world under laws which, independent of nature, are not empirical but founded on reason alone” (Kant, 1997, 70). So with freedom or autonomy of will, which for Kant is the supreme principle of morality – “Autonomy of the will is that property of it by which it is a law to itself independent of any property of the objects of its volition” (Kant, 1997, 57) – plays a crucial role in the ethical domain, and the threat of determinism is its most antonymous disputant.
    If existence, wholly vested in circumstance and consequence, as the idea of determinism suggests, is an unyielding, predetermined unfolding of a causal machine – in the words of William James, “[Determinism] professes that… any other future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or shadow of turning” (James, 2005, 3) – it hasn’t much place for various everyday affairs that demonstrate potentials of human beings, especially in endeavors the motivating forces of which, experienced as clearly as the sight of a brain (and indeed the very existence of brains), are not found in the world of matter and biology and movement of survivalist drives. Verily, it appears that the more “distinctly human” a gesture, the further its capacity from being moved merely by evolutionarily molded impulses. Curious is such a prospect where even amidst the very mechanisms through which we come to know the world, the capacities to reflect and act upon it, “possibilities that fail to get realized are… pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all” (James, 2005, 4).
    This is quite a predicament, for while both determinism and indeterminism are stances on the nature of the way things are they cannot be resolved via empirical demonstration: “If we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the possibility question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up” (James, 2005, 5). Furthermore, both sides can be framed rationally and thus logic likewise falls short of a definitive answer (hence the persistence of the “freedom/determinism” debate). Determinism has very direct and severe implications for the prescriptive domain of ethics, for it collapses properties of ought or should into properties of is. It is important to point out, however, that these implications are in the way of understanding ethics, for if the universe is determined with no room for autonomous causes whatsoever, even the workings of the mind are wholly shaped and predetermined. Even fluctuations in human history are seen as displays of necessity through the lens of determinism. Various theories, in domains of ethics and elsewhere, in being adopted and subsequently reformed through experience and reason, unfold precisely as they should, for should is equated with can (necessity), and can with is. Thus, what human beings perceive as fault or error must be an intrinsic part of the universe.
    Yet errors, illusions, and especially dysfunctions and therapeutic efforts are explored because what we discover and the effort we make seems to make a difference. The forceful claim of the necessity of determinism as it is drawn from the unity of existence that could not unfold otherwise in every detail takes on a much more diluted form in the face of such phenomena. Reason and debate and progress certainly appear to contain more than can be inferred or deduced from looking at the mechanistic possibilities of physical interactions among sub-atomic particles. As James enthusiastically maintains:

…I myself believe that all the magnificent achievements of mathematical and physical science – our doctrines of evolution, of uniformity of law, and the rest – proceed from our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the crude order of our experience. The world has shown itself, to a great extent, plastic to this demand of ours for rationality. How much farther it will show itself plastic no one can say. Our only means of finding out is to try; and I, for one, feel as free to try conceptions of moral as of mechanical or of logical rationality (James, 2005, 2).

Our reason widely leads to the belief that there are possibilities, that there is autonomous capacity. Even if probability is just a notion born of the human inability to account for all the variables and possibility an illusion, this illusion tends to disclose reality in such a rich and impenetrable fashion that it is perceived as overflowing with possibilities to the mind. And so, let us go on with the assumption of indeterminism, for not only does that allow the conversation to continue but if it is inconsistent with the actual workings of the universe it simultaneously cannot be, and even though it might be wrong, it cannot be, because human beings are then constrained by and condemned to such assumptions.
    With autonomous capacity providing a means for variance within consequential and deterministic constraints, the brain-mind or personal-subpersonal interaction can indeed serve as a medium for ethical thought and action. The assumption of indeterminacy redeems choice as an act of will rather than a mere consequence of mechanistic weight. However, because human beings are necessarily embodied circumstantial influence has an unavoidable role to play. It has been one of the central critiques of Kant’s deontology that maxims occur in and are never disembodied from the a posteriori world of causes, conditions and consequences, and are thus inextricably related to other facets of morality in one’s choices and actions. As Lakeoff and Johnson point out:

…The ways in which our rationality is embodied makes anything like full autonomy impossible. There are two reasons. First, many of our concepts arise from built-in constraints on the body, for example, spatial-relations concepts. Second, as we learn our concepts, they become parts of our bodies. Learned concepts are embodied via permanent or very long-term changes in our synapses. Much of our conceptual system, so deeply embodied, cannot become unlearned or overridden, at least not by some act of will and almost never quickly and easily (Johnson, 1999, 537).

Interestingly, the extent of embodied constraints seems to oscillate between origins in varying proportions of mind and of body as it moves through alternative conceptions. Kant’s deontology theoretically works primarily at the level of mind, whereas consequentialist theories such as utilitarianism, in being focused on experience and behavior, causality and outcome, draw more on empirical, bodily data to arrive at conclusions to ethical situations: “The only self-renunciation which [utilitarianism] applauds is devotion to the happiness, or to some of the means of happiness, of others, either of mankind collectively or of individuals within the limits imposed by the collective interests of mankind” (Mill, 2001,17). Furthermore, as Bolender points out:

We have automatic emotional reactions of approval or disapproval to many social situations. In quite a few cases, moral judgments are nothing more than expressions of these automatic emotional responses. In other cases, moral judgments are less emotional, more a matter of calmly trying to arrive at general principles and deriving specific moral conclusions from them. However, even in these latter cases, automatic emotional responses help to shape our moral principles… it is plausible that moral emotions result from a set of specialized and informationally encapsulated cognitive mechanisms containing innate information about social situations. That is, moral emotions do not result from general-purpose, cognitively penetrated, initially content-free mental mechanisms (Bolender, 2003, 233).

Yet, still, automatic emotions of approval or disapproval that can be said to motivate, influence and even to a great extent constrain one’s moral judgments and actions are nevertheless influenced and arguably rewired and shaped by higher-level considerations of appropriateness and ought, from the top-down. Nevertheless, the criticism continues to bear on pure autonomy as such. In a present-day book review, Clark et al. relates the issue to cognitive science:

Recent work in cognitive science is challenging the idea that moral understanding and moral knowledge involve the application of general rules to specific situations via logical inferences. Rather, work in cognitive science indicates that moral understanding and moral knowledge may be more like perception than logical reasoning. If actual human moral understanding is not a matter of making logical inferences from general rules of moral conduct using rules of logic, this would severely constrain possible reasonable accounts of morality, including the sorts of rule-based accounts that have played a central role in ethical theory (Clark, 1996, 447).

This is the juncture at which ethical theory begins to be informed by these kinds of modern, scientific approaches.
    Neurocomputational perspectives bring the threat to ethical domains not from possible insight into determinism (this is impossible, as we have seen), but insofar as they may reduce moral considerations from choice on the personal level and render the individual impotent in the face of conditioned impulses. The implication is in movement of responsibility for action, from processes of individual autonomy to chemical and mechanical influences; possibilities shaped by circumstances largely outside of the reach of volition. Central to the stoic philosophy of Epictetus is the postulate “Some things are up to us and some are not up to us” (Epictetus, 1983). What is not really up to us is what neuropsychological research is capable of revealing. As Bermúdez points out, “…neurophilosophers are inspired by research into artificial neural networks…. The de facto significance in our everyday cognitive life of commonsense psychological explanation is simply a reflection of our ignorance of the real origins and causes of our action – an ignorance that will only be properly addressed at the neuroscientific level” (Bermúdez, 2005, 39). This begins to once again sound reminiscent of determinism. Yet, in holding to our assumption of some degree of autonomy, how does the move of mind-brain explanada from the autonomous to neurocomputational mind perspectives redefine ethical conceptions?
    Neuronal modeling primarily consists of increasingly keen specificity of correlates between biological functions of the brain and psychological functions of the mind, and their interdependencies (usually, from the neurocomputational perspective, the reliance of psychology on biology). Human beings are inherently limited. Therefore, their capacity for appropriate action is likewise variable and limited. A major aim of neuroscience is vested in the exploration of correlates, as close to concrete interactions as possible, between psychological phenomena and neuronal mechanisms. In so doing, it explores and attempts to reveal the contours of these limitations, as they are mediated by the biological deductions and inferences disclosed by its methods. Thusly, ideals and oughts, as experienced in the domain of reason, are explored through their imbeddedness in the potentials and possibilities of the is, which underlies or co-exists with that domain. Patricia Churchland, one of the foremost researchers in the field, explains the endeavor of neurobiology as it relates to morals as follows:

Exploring the neural roots of moral cognition promises to give us more informed theories of moral reasoning, help us identify moral pathologies so they might be alleviated or avoided, and allow us to improve our moral education and training. The experimental literature can shed light on traditional issues in moral psychology, and is critical for the enterprise of naturalizing ethics – of showing how our ability to grasp norms, reason about them, and act on them is a brain-based ability that can be explored using scientific methods (Casebeer, 2003, 170).

While a very confident statement, from the research so far these are plausible ends. Withal, this approach may be striving to cover more ground than its reach allows. The existence and operation of psychological properties, subjective and phenomenological domains, in serving as reference points of all neuropsychological exploration and explanation, cannot be ruled out or somehow dismissed, for these properties are themselves inextricable factors of this understanding. It is always in terms of this relationship that these mechanisms are understood. To “biologise” the mind, therefore, consists not merely in its reduction to underlying biological processes but, precisely because these processes underlie it, in its understanding in terms of biology.
    But how might perspectives offered by the neurocomputationalists more directly redefine morality? An article entitled On the Morality of Artificial Agents authored by Floridi and Sanders provides an illustrative example:

Morality may be thought of as a ‘threshold’ defined on the observables in the interface determining the [level of abstraction] under consideration. An agent is morally good if its actions all respect that threshold; and it is morally evil if some action violates it. That view is particularly informative when the agent constitutes a software or digital system, and the observables are numerical. …In conclusion, this approach facilitates the discussion of the morality of agents not only in Cyberspace but also in the biosphere, where animals can be considered moral agents without their having to display free will, emotions or mental states, and in social contexts, where systems like organizations can play the role of moral agents. The primary ‘cost’ of this facility is the extension of the class of agents and moral agents to embrace [artificial agents] (Floridi, 2004).

Again, this determinedly moves in a direction away from individual choice. In the final analysis it is this threatening gesture that seems to be the primary cost – being equated with artificial agents – of the neurocomputational perspective. Wilber provides an insightful comment about research into brain states that points to a more harmonious prospect for the relationship between neurocomputational and autonomous approaches:

What [research involving relationship of brain states and states of consciousness, and electronic induction of brain-wave patterns] will show us, I believe, is that certain brain states more easily allow certain consciousness states, but do not determine them. Exactly what this relationship is will be a major field of research, and will become a profound tool for exploring the mind/body problem (Wilber, 1992, 416).

Similarly, neurobiological research may indeed reveal much of what Churchland expects. However, it may do so without consequences quite as drastic as the description offered by Bermúdez: “The mind should be modeled as a complex system that may well resist understanding in terms of the crude tools of commonsense psychology” (Bermúdez, 2005, 39). While neuroscience certainly reveals a different part of the picture, it does not necessarily do so at the expense of commonsense psychological language. In fact, as I have argued, the autonomous mind thinkers are likely to be correct in asserting the domain of psychology as in many ways impenetrable by subpersonal levels of explanation.
    From this, it seems sufficiently clear that these perspectives are not mutually exclusive. The very presence of multiple perspectives, the possibility of seeing something from both multiple angles and understanding it in multiple ways from the same angle, while certainly not ruling out the possibility of error, likewise does not rule out the possibility of logical relevance and truth existing in a multitude of even apparently irreconcilable dimensions. Indeed, one of the most notable contributions of postmodern thinkers has been the explicit demonstration of the crucial role that contextual and perspectival dimensions occupy in one’s worldview, and how that influences everything from knowing and understanding to, as a psychological subsequent, behavior. As Lyotard concludes his reflections on the postmodern condition: “Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return to terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality… Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name” (Lyotard, 1984, 82). Similarly, in his musings on shifting roles of knowledge in the information age, Weinberger suggests that “It was much more straight forward so long as we believed in essentialism – the idea that everything is defined by clear and knowable traits that make it into what it is.… Essentialism makes the world seem more manageable, but it can lead us to miss what’s really going on” (Weinberger, 2007, 116-118). Perhaps many of these approaches and theoretical prescriptions are quite appropriate in certain contexts and to certain perspectives, but answers as to the exact roles they ought to occupy and the extents to which they might require revision are left up to the way knowledge continues to interact and unfold in relevant spheres of human inquiry.
    The uninhibited embrace of processes that cannot be contained by pat answers or solutions but shift with circumstance and unfolding is possible only when there are no distinct ends for our means. Yet with the human capacity to conceive, to discover and to know, there is a drive to have the pat answer, the law extending beyond the realm of instances that put one at the precipice of uncertainty even as they come into being. Nevertheless, the seemingly boundless mystery that surrounds us cannot be used as an excuse to be passive to our abilities, though it can surely accompany the ways we hold and participate in them. It appears quite plausible that discoveries in neuroscience about basic structures/functional constraints on which moral guidance is based may very well inform or reveal various extents of one’s ability to participate in and align his or her behavior with certain philosophically theorized, ethical conceptions, ideals, principles, imperatives and so on. Likewise, philosophy will without doubt not only guide such endeavors – such as their methodologies and ethical boundaries – but also reveal certain limits, within assumptions and otherwise, beyond which they cannot extend. In any event ethics are still alive and well, as Kluger eloquently concludes in a recent article in Time magazine:

For grossly imperfect creatures like us, morality may be the steepest of all developmental mountains. Our opposable thumbs and big brains gave us the tools to dominate the planet, but wisdom comes more slowly than physical hardware. We surely have a lot of killing and savagery ahead of us before we fully civilize ourselves. The hope – a realistic one, perhaps – is that the struggles still to come are fewer than those left behind (Kluger, 2007, 60).

Through the quest for understanding civility, novelty is often found in exceptions: a going beyond conceptions in light of their limitations. Beliefs, whether led by reason or authority, empirical methodology or faith-based doctrine, will always mediate the way and kinds of these limitations are seen; and their amalgam, moving through endless and endlessly interacting contexts, will yield futures that likewise reveal limits in the way knowledge is understood, how that understanding bears on how we ought to act, and how it moves us through the world.


Notes

[1] Bermúdez defines the interface problem with the following question: “How does commonsense psychological explanation interface with the explanations of cognition and mental operation given by scientific psychology, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience and the other levels in the explanatory hierarchy?” (Bermúdez, 2006, 4).

[2] I will work with these ends of the spectrum because it will be necessary to speak to the thesis on this level of generality.

[3] Kalat concludes the first module of the text thusly: “…not to say that ‘your brain physiology controls you’ any more than one should say that ‘you control your brain.’ Rather, your brain is you” (Kalat, 2007, 10). Yet, to further promote a contention to this, the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy maintains a very dissonant point: “Do the social sciences, especially psychology, in principle reduce to physics? This prospect would support the so-called identity theory… Many (though by no means all) are now skeptical about the prospects for identifying mental properties, and the properties of other special sciences, with complex physical properties” (Teller, 2005, 779).


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