Brain

This century is seeing an exponential increase in knowledge in scientific disciplines like neuroscience, behavioural biology, and artificial intelligence. That scientific understanding can, in turn, guide our philosophical thinking in ways it couldn’t before — not by replacing philosophy with science, but by giving philosophical questions something more solid to push against.

The brain is the hardware of our mind and our thoughts. It provides the interface to both the external world and the internal one, shaping how we perceive, how we categorise, how we react, how we remember. Understanding the brain reveals a few things about being human that were only half visible until recently. Early developmental templates are extraordinarily hard to change later in life — much of what we take as temperament or preference was laid down before anyone had a say. Some regions, like the frontal cortex, stay more malleable and carry the weight of our later adjustments. Our thinking is at once enabled and constrained by the specific neural architecture that carries it; we don’t think in general, we think in the brain we happen to have.

From that, something quietly important follows. We are all only ever right to some extent, and always wrong about at least something. The hardware that thinks our thoughts was assembled under conditions none of us chose, shaped by genes, by childhood, by language, by culture, by luck. No one speaks from nowhere. That calls for humility — not the performed kind, but the working kind: a willingness to hold one’s own positions loosely enough to have them changed by a better argument.

It also calls for openness to different perspectives. Mutual respect across different thought systems, cultures, and individual perspectives isn’t a nice-to-have — it is a direct consequence of taking seriously that no single perspective is absolutely correct. Each has value depending on context and circumstance. Difference is not a bug in the thinking apparatus. It is one of the ways the apparatus compensates for its own limits.

Understanding the thinking machine can lead to a better comprehension of thinking itself. It promotes a style of philosophical contemplation that is grounded in scientific insight rather than pure speculation. Studying how the brain works helps us see why we think the way we do, how our biases and limitations emerge, and what possibilities exist for expanding the reach of human understanding — individually through learning, collectively through the ways we structure knowledge and share it.

This doesn’t diminish the wonder of consciousness or reduce philosophy to biology. Quite the opposite. It gives philosophy a firmer floor to stand on while asking the oldest questions. What is it like to be a thing that thinks? What can such a thing actually know? How should it live with others of its kind? These questions don’t go away when science gets better. They get sharper.

This post is from an earlier moment in the walk(28/11/2024). This post is part of the preamble, about happening before SPLectrum saw the light of day.

Photo: the blowup / Unsplash