explaining the brain mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience

[...]... on the verge of explaining the mysteries of consciousness, the illusion of free will, the frailty of human memory, and the nature of the self If neuroscience succeeds in these explanatory goals, it will revise our self-conception as radically as Copernicus’ decentering of the earth and Darwin’s humbling vision of our origins The second goal of neuroscience is to control the brain and the central nervous... Levels of Mechanisms 5 Causal Relevance at Higher Levels of Realization 6 Conclusion 7 The Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience 1 Introduction 2 Reduction and the History of Neuroscience 2.1 LTP’s origins: not a top-down search but intralevel integration 2.2 The mechanistic shift 2.3 Mechanism as a working hypothesis 3 Intralevel Integration and the Mosaic Unity of Neuroscience 3.1 The space of possible mechanisms. .. philosophy of neuroscience must face The philosophy of neuroscience lies at the intersection of the philosophy of science, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind It will show its worth only to the extent that it recognizes the distinctive concerns of these three fields and to the extent that it constructs the bridges required to connect them My neuroscience adviser once said of philosophy that he could not... number of nonmechanical parts The hubcaps, the mud flaps, and the fuzzy dice are features of a fine machine, but none of these is a part of any of its mechanisms If these features are removed, the machine changes, but the mechanisms remain the same Rather than starting with the machine analogy, it is better to start thinking about mechanisms with the help of an example Consider the mechanism by which a neuron... goals and standards of neuroscience There is now a large set of exemplars of successes and failures that students of neuroscience must learn: the Hodgkin and Huxley model, the neuron doctrine, Broca’s localization of the language faculty, Gall’s organology, McConnell’s purported demonstration of cannibalistic learning in planaria, and Eccles’s electrical models of synaptic transmission The philosopher of. .. system Neuroscience is driven in large part by the desire to diagnose and treat diseases, to repair brain damage, to enhance brain function, and to prevent the brain s decay This goal is evident in the many designer pharmaceuticals promising to ameliorate psychiatric and physiological symptoms, in the skill of the brain surgeon, and in the confidence of behavioral and psychiatric geneticists If neuroscience. .. that an understanding of nervous function requires identifying the elementary units at different levels of organization and understanding the relations between the different levels We can summarize this view with a more precise definition of the subject matter of contemporary neurobiology and of this book: Neurobiology is the study of nerve cells and associated cells and the ways that they are organized... biological theory of cognitive neuroscience is the best explanation for the mind and brain) The trivial doctrine is a wise bet, given that some theory in cognitive neuroscience will almost surely explain aspects of the mind But the explanatory success of neuroscience provides no support for the thesis that this explanatory theory will be exclusively biological, neural, molecular, or physical The successful... defend the view that they are explanatorily relevant because they are causally relevant 14 starting with neuroscience construct a scientific theory of the mind based directly on the structure and workings of the brain By ‘‘scientific’’ in this context, I mean a description based on the neuronal and phenotypic organization of an individual and formulated solely in terms of physical and chemical mechanisms. .. (drinking), drives (thirst), the working of bodily organs (conservation of urine in the kidneys), the flux of bodily molecules (such as the pituitary’s release of vasopressin), and swarms of ions (the concentration of salt in the blood) If one views neuroscience through the lens of explanation in physics and chemistry, one is tempted to organize multilevel explanations by sorting the different components .