Philosophy of Cultural Neuroscience

Joan Y. Chiao, Joan Y. Chiao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351371858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filosofía social

The goal of this volume is to highlight theoretical and methodological advances in cultural neuroscience and the implications of theoretical and empirical advances in cultural neuroscience for philosophy. The study of cultural and biological factors that contribute to human behavior has been an important inquiry for centuries, and recent advances in the field of cultural neuroscience allow for novel insights into how cultural and biological factors shape mind, brain and behavior. Theoretical and empirical advances in cultural neuroscience, which investigate the origins of culture, may shed light on philosophical issues of the mind and science.

Part I

1

Dualism

Earliest notions of the human mind consisted of the mind as existing independent of the body. According to Descartes, the mind exists because of the experience of conscious thought (Kim, 2011). Consciousness and the capacity to reason are cornerstones of the human mind. Cartesian dualism assumes that the human mind and mental states experienced as consciousness may occur without relation or regard to the human body. Rather, Cartesian dualism suggests that the feeling of what it is like is experienced as dependent with the body through a transformation of conscious experience within a central spatial location or brain part, such as the pineal gland, into bodily states that cause mental states.

Substance dualism posits that the world is comprised of two fundamental substances, mental substances and material substances (Table 1.1). Mental substance, such as the mind, is responsible for thought, consciousness and other mental capacities, while material substance, such as the body, is a spatial expansion of the mind into space. The person is a being with a mind and a body, and minds have a quality of distinction from the body. The mind may exist as an immaterial object, with properties that exist in an immaterial, nonphysical sense without location in space. The body may exist as a material object, with properties that exist in a material, physical sense with location in space. Qualities of the mind may be in continuous interaction with qualities of the body in the world.

Property dualism refers to the mental properties of a system that are distinct and irreducible to its physical properties. Property dualism holds that the mind has a set of mental properties that do not exist within physical space. Yet dualism allows for the theory of a mental coordinate system, such that mental states exist within a mental space and are located in relation to one another. This mental coordinate system reflects the property of the mind that is distinct from physical space that is existent in the physical world. Relations between mental states within the mental coordinate system may follow rules and norms that are systematic and distinct from those of the relations between physical states within the physical coordinate system. The mind as independent of the body is governed by a mental world with characteristics that are distinct from that of the physical world. Accessibility across the mental and physical world may be accomplished through a particular position allowing for a continuity of states of the mind with states of the body.

Table 1.1 Dualism, Where M_N = Mental State, P_N = Physical State

	Mental	Physical
Substance Dualism	MN ≈ PN	PN ≈ MN
Property Dualism	MN ≠ PN	PN ≠ MN

Dualistic Stance in Cultural Neuroscience

Given the mutual importance of culture in shaping the mind and the mind as a primary means for cultural niche construction, dualism assumes that the acquisition and maintenance of human culture in the mind may occur without the body or a physical representation in the world. Cultural reproduction of knowledge systems and beliefs without a physical or material representation within the world may seem implausible, yet from a dualistic perspective, the possibility of an existence of the human mind without the body may have some advantages.

Cultural differences in the mind support the notion of distinct mental states that are shared based on physical properties of the environment and geography. Culture is thought to affect and reflect a range of mental properties, from perception and cognition to emotion and social cognition. One of the predominant cultural systems of thought is analytic and holistic thinking (Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). Cultural psychologists propose that cultural differences in thinking occur due to ecological factors. Analytic and holistic thinking characterize how people think about the relation between focal and contextual information in Western and Eastern cultural contexts. Analytic processing involves perceiving and encoding information more within the central aspects of a scene, whereas holistic processing entails perceiving and encoding information more from the contextual or surrounding areas of a scene.

Empirical studies comparing the thinking styles of Westerners and East Asians show that Westerners are more inclined to demonstrate an analytic method of thinking; by contrast, East Asians are more likely to show a holistic manner of thinking. The analytic–holistic distinction in cultural and cognitive science reflects an epistemological stance concerning patterns of distinct conscious states or representations arising from philosophical tradition and ecological conditions in the physical world that differ in the East and West. Cultural differences in thinking styles also reflect variation in knowledge of the physical world. Analytic thought is associated with dispositional explanations, while holistic thought is associated with situation-based explanations.

Cultural differences may be observable in the mind from behavior and conscious experience but not necessarily at the computational level of analysis related to its physical implementation, such as within the brain or genome. A dualistic explanation suggests that the mental states across cultures may vary, as inferred from behavior and conscious experience, but this does not necessarily entail differences in physical states across cultures. Relatedly, cultural differences at one level of organization of physical states (e.g., networks) may not necessarily relate to cultural differences in another level of organization of physical states within the brain or genome (e.g., molecules; Churchland & Sejnowski, 1992).

At the same time, cultural differences may occur in the body or physical representations of the mind, such as the brain or genome, but that are not observed or relatable to the mind based on behavior and conscious experience. A dualistic interpretation of cultural difference in physical states is such that physical state differences may occur in the absence of differences in mental states and related behavior. While culture may influence the physical states of organization of the nervous system at the computational level of physical implementation, corresponding mental states that occur simultaneously at the higher computational levels of abstraction or algorithm may remain unaffected by one’s culture (Marr, 1982).

Relatedly, a cultural change in thinking styles, such as when acculturating from the heritage to the host culture, may involve acquiring positive attitudes and beliefs about a novel cultural group; yet such changes in mental states brought about by learning cultural knowledge are not necessarily related or associated with changes in physical states of the body. Thus, acculturation or cultural change in mental states may occur without simultaneous changes or effects to the brain or body.

Acculturation may cause changes in mental states of social and emotional processes that are associated with varying levels of changes in bodily states in the world. Acculturation reflects a social process that allows for changes in the mental states of the individual to correspond with mental states of the group. Distinct strategies of acculturation allow for variation in levels of changes in culture-based mental state that are associated with culture-based bodily state. The strategy of integration of heritage and host culture attitudes relies on the acquisition of culture-based mental states (Berry, 2006). Association of culture-based mental states with positive mental properties allows for the maintenance of heritage and host culture as well as the building of relationships among groups. Acculturation strategies of integration also further culture-based mental state changes to occur simultaneously with culture-based bodily state changes dependent on the kind of relationships among groups.

Given the noted importance of the human brain in regulating the body, it remains unclear how the human mind might exist without the body. Neuropsychologists examined this question with the development of a rare medical operation to section the corpus callosum and anterior commissure, presumably as a treatment for intractable epilepsy. With this neuropsychological syndrome, known as split brain, patients maintained intact cerebral hemispheres, though without the connection between the two (Gazzaniga & Le Doux, 1978).

Within the dualistic notion, if the mind is distinct from the body, with an independent structure and function, changes made to the connection between the cerebral hemispheres would not necessarily affect the mind. Tests were designed to determine the functionality of the two cerebral hemispheres, and several hypotheses were suggested. One hypothesis was that there may result two intact minds from one due to the disconnection of the two hemispheres (Sperry, 1984). Another hypothesis is that both minds would be present within the same body. Yet neuropsychologists observed several changes to mental processes underlying behavior in split-brain patients from performance on different neuropsychological tests. The cerebral hemispheres demonstrate lateralized functional specialization, such that the normal right hemisphere is necessary for language abilities. Thus, structural changes in the split-brain patients cause functional changes in the mind. Evidence from split-brain patients supports the notion that the human mind may exist with changes to the body; however, functionality of mental states may be changed from the initial state of knowledge caused by the change in bodily state.

Ideal notions of the human mind and brain as existing as discrete entities simplify the adaptive mapping of mental and neural states throughout the evolutionary and developmental timescales. Neuropsychological patients and convergent evidence from other neuroscience techniques show that mental states and neural states can appear to exist independently, but regularity in changes of identity relations suggests that functionalism guides the mapping of mental and neural states.

Genes represent the physical constitution and processes for the biological reproduction of living things. If a dualistic stance is assumed, then presumably the mind may exist and reproduce in the absence of genetics, and thus its structure and function occur without necessary effect on biological reproduction. Recent advances in neurogenetics show that human brain function is regulated by specific genes. Different variants of the same gene produce variable brain states during the same mental task. However, if some gradation of dualism is assumed, people carrying different variants of a gene important in regulating brain function may not necessarily show simultaneous differences in mental or behavioral performance, while genetic differences in neural function were observed. That is, genes may regulate neural function in parallel with a psychological process. Yet the algorithms that produce changes in physical mechanisms such as genetic and neural function operate in parallel rather than as a unified mechanism of the mental mechanisms that performs during a given psychological process. One possible explanation is that genetic influences on brain activity occur relatively distal to mental processing and subsequent behavior. Hence, when genes are regulating brain activity, simultaneous changes to behavior may not be necessarily observable.

More generally, neurogenetic evidence shows that mechanistic or physical explanations for the human brain do not necessarily entail explanations of the human mind or behavior. While some may consider the discovery of genetic regulation of the human brain as evidence that the dualistic position is weak, empirical work suggests that the detection of a change in both human mind and brain due to the same gene is relatively difficult, and thus, the dualist position that the human mind is an autonomous entity from the human brain cannot necessarily be falsified by discovery of genetic influences on the human brain.

As a philosophical belief, dualism represents a relation between representational systems of folk knowledge about the social and physical worlds (e.g., naïve psychology and naïve physics) as independent from one another. Whereas in recent evolutionary history, when dualism emerged as a precursory belief system about the relation of the social world and the physical world, the role of dualism in the ontogeny of folk knowledge is developmentally distinct (Bloom, 2004). Behavioral studies of young children show that at first, they perceive the human mind as interdependent with its physical instantiation, the human brain ( Johnson & Wellman, 1982). However, by early childhood, they categorize mental and physical acts as differentially dependent on the mind (Lillard, 1996). Mental actions (e.g., think about clapping) are categorized as requiring a mind, whereas physical actions (e.g., clap with your hands) are not. Furthermore, when asked to consider the consequences of a brain transplant, young children do not consider a brain transplant as necessarily entailing a mind transplant ( Johnson, 1990). Hence, they perceive the mind and brain dualistically or independently during early childhood.

Nevertheless, by late childhood to adolescence, children’s beliefs about the mind and brain are nuanced. When asked to attribute mental states to living entities during the prenatal period, children and adolescents distinguish the mental capacities present during early and late prenatal developmental periods. For smaller physical entities, fewer mental capacities are ascribed as relative to larger physical entities (Emmons & Kelemen, 2015). These findings suggest the child’s mind relies logically on a linear relation between inferred mental complexity and observed physical growth in social concepts of a human mind and brain by adolescence.

By adulthood, people perceive the human mind and body interdependently as a singular entity, with the brain as the cause for conscious human experience. To an adult, a brain transplant may necessarily involve a transfer of self and identity as well as a transfer of its physical instantiation ( Johnson, 1990). When the brain is intact but the mind appears weak or incapacitated, the person is considered to suffer from an abnormal condition, or a “vegetative state,” so as to imply that the existing relation between mind and brain is damaged or atypical and treatment to the mind is appropriate (Shallice, 1997). If the brain is damaged, weakened mental states are predicted (e.g., coma or minimal consciousness). Notably, when provided neuroscientific evidence of the mind to people with little or no knowledge of the brain, adult belief in the explanation of the mind is strengthened, even if the explanation is not logical (Weisberg, Keil, Goodstein, Rawson, & Gray, 2008). Interestingly, however, experts may rely less on neuroscientific evidence of the mind, sugges...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Index