Coda

2018 ◽  
pp. 277-280
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Ongoing Study ◽  
Human History ◽  
The Public ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Mind

This concluding chapter reflects on the lessons presented by this volume as a whole and considers the ongoing study into the origins of humanity in the post-1970s era. In the decades after, readers have not lost their passion for epic evolutionary dramas in which the entirety of human history unfolds before their eyes. Yet when students today respond to the question “What makes us human?” they are far more likely to invoke neurological facts than paleontological ones. The public battlefield over violence and cooperation has since shifted to new ground in the mind and brain sciences. Despite the apparent polarization of scientists writing about human nature into culture- and biology-oriented positions, the intellectual landscape defined by scientists working on the interaction between culture and biology has continued to flourish.

scholarly journals ‘It’s All Done With Mirrors’: V.S. Ramachandran and the Material Culture of Phantom Limb Research

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 342-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Guenther
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Mirror Neurons ◽  
Phantom Limb ◽  
Mirror Therapy ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Mirror Box ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Dualistic Ontology ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Phantom Limbs

This article examines the material culture of neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran’s research into phantom limbs. In the 1990s Ramachandran used a ‘mirror box’ to ‘resurrect’ phantom limbs and thus to treat the pain that often accompanied them. The experimental success of his mirror therapy led Ramachandran to see mirrors as a useful model of brain function, a tendency that explains his attraction to work on ‘mirror neurons’. I argue that Ramachandran’s fascination with and repeated appeal to the mirror can be explained by the way it allowed him to confront a perennial problem in the mind and brain sciences, that of the relationship between a supposedly immaterial mind and a material brain. By producing what Ramachandran called a ‘virtual reality’, relating in varied and complex ways to the material world, the mirror reproduced a form of psycho-physical parallelism and dualistic ontology, while conforming to the materialist norms of neuroscience today.

Human nature without a soul?

2004 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
MALCOLM JEEVES
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Cognitive Neuroscience ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
Neural Substrates ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The Past ◽  
Neural Processes ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Mind ◽  
To Receive

Rapid developments in neuroscience over the past four decades continue to receive wide media attention. Each new reported advance points to ever tightening links between mind and brain. For many centuries, what is today called ‘mind-talk’ was familiar as ‘soul-talk’. Since, for some, the possession of a soul is what makes us human, the challenges of cognitive neuroscience directly address this. This paper affords the non-specialist a brief overview of some of the scientific evidence pointing to the ever tightening of the mind-brain links and explores its wider implications for our understanding of human nature. In particular it brings together the findings from so-called bottom-up research, in which we observe changes in behaviour and cognition resulting from experimental interventions in neural processes, with top-down research where we track changes in neural substrates accompanying habitual modes of cognition or behaviour. Further reflection alerts one to how the dualist views widely held by New Agers, some humanists and many religious people, contrast with the views of academic philosophers, theologians and biblical scholars, who agree in emphasizing the unity of the person.

scholarly journals Consciousness: The last 50 years (and the next)

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 239821281881601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anil K. Seth
Keyword(s):  
Neurological Disorders ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
States Of Consciousness ◽  
Neuronal Mechanisms ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Global States

The mind and brain sciences began with consciousness as a central concern. But for much of the 20th century, ideological and methodological concerns relegated its empirical study to the margins. Since the 1990s, studying consciousness has regained a legitimacy and momentum befitting its status as the primary feature of our mental lives. Nowadays, consciousness science encompasses a rich interdisciplinary mixture drawing together philosophical, theoretical, computational, experimental, and clinical perspectives, with neuroscience its central discipline. Researchers have learned a great deal about the neural mechanisms underlying global states of consciousness, distinctions between conscious and unconscious perception, and self-consciousness. Further progress will depend on specifying closer explanatory mappings between (first-person subjective) phenomenological descriptions and (third-person objective) descriptions of (embodied and embedded) neuronal mechanisms. Such progress will help reframe our understanding of our place in nature and accelerate clinical approaches to a wide range of psychiatric and neurological disorders.

scholarly journals nature of human nature

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
André C Pieterse
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Scientific Research ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Physical Characteristics ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Comprehensive Understanding ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Mind

This article will argue from a Scriptural viewpoint that human nature is not reducible to a set of individual physical characteristics but is embodied and all the qualities of being human are mutually dependent. The substance for this statement is rooted in the biblical confession about the characteristics of the resurrected Body of Christ. This premise could assist the sciences in their quest to define human nature, specifically relating to the mind/brain problem. In addition, it could contribute to the need for consilience and lead scientific research into a more comprehensive understanding of the human mind and brain and its embedded nature.

Integrating Mind and Brain Science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
The Core ◽  
Psychological Science ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Primary Strategy

There is growing appreciation that understanding the complex relationship between neuroscience and psychological science is of fundamental importance to achieving progress across these scientific domains. One primary strategy for addressing this issue centers around understanding the nature of explanation in these different domains. This chapter provides a field guide to some of the core topics that have shaped and continue to influence the debate about explanation and integration across the mind and brain sciences. In addition to surveying the overall intellectual terrain, it also introduces the main proposals defended in the individual chapters included in the volume and highlights important similarities and differences between them.

Of Means and Ends: Mind and Brain Science in the Twentieth Century

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Stephen T. Casper
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Brain Science ◽  
American Science ◽  
Means And Ends ◽  
Introductory Article ◽  
Brain Sciences ◽  
Epistemic Culture ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Recent Tendency

What role does context play in the mind and brain sciences? This introductory article, “Of Means and Ends,” explores that question through its focus on the ways scientists and physicians engaged with and constructed technology in the mind and brain sciences in the twentieth century. This topical issue addresses how scientists, physicians, and psychologists came to see the ends of technology as important in-and-of themselves. In so doing, the authors of these essays offer an interpretation of historian Paul Forman's revisionist and highly contextualist chronology of the twentieth century, which presents the comparatively recent tendency to aggrandize the ends of technology as evidence of a major, epochal transformation in the epistemic culture of twentieth-century American science. This collection of papers suggests that it was in the vanguard of such fields as psychology, psychiatry, and neurophysiology in North America and Europe that the ends and applications of technology became important in-and-of themselves.

Curiosity

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Morgan ◽  
Philip Stokoe
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Emotional Development ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy ◽  
Genetic Aspect ◽  
The Mind

James Fisher's work on curiosity and the authors' own thinking in this area are described. Fisher's view of curiosity, as a genetic aspect of human nature, and as the essential driver causing the development of the mind and of consciousness, is restated. The focus of curiosity is emotion, and emotion is meaningful. Thus curiosity serves to represent symbolically the meaning of our experience. The authors agree with Fisher, Bion, and Britton that the impulse to curiosity stands alongside the impulse to pleasure, and that the tension between these two impulses affects and guides our psychological and emotional development. The fields of couple psychoanalytic psychotherapy and organisational consultancy are drawn on to demonstrate the centrality of curiosity and to indicate its essential role in the development of a creative couple stage of identity. The importance of anxiety in either stimulating or de-activating curiosity is described. The authors emphasise the balance between the pleasure impulse and the impulse to curiosity by showing that L and H can be seen as the former, while K pertains to the latter. Where anxiety closes down curiosity, it is argued that this is an example of L and H dominating K, and is another way to describe the paranoid-schizoid position.

A chronology of Distributed Adaptive Control

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul F. M. J. Verschure
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Control ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Integration Framework ◽  
The Social ◽  
Distributed Adaptive Control ◽  
Core Components ◽  
Mind And Brain ◽  
Convergent Validation ◽  
The Mind ◽  
And Behavior

This chapter presents the Distributed Adaptive Control (DAC) theory of the mind and brain of living machines. DAC provides an explanatory framework for biological brains and an integration framework for synthetic ones. DAC builds on several themes presented in the handbook: it integrates different perspectives on mind and brain, exemplifies the synthetic method in understanding living machines, answers well-defined constraints faced by living machines, and provides a route for the convergent validation of anatomy, physiology, and behavior in our explanation of biological living machines. DAC addresses the fundamental question of how a living machine can obtain, retain, and express valid knowledge of its world. We look at the core components of DAC, specific benchmarks derived from the engagement with the physical and the social world (the H4W and the H5W problems) in foraging and human–robot interaction tasks. Lastly we address how DAC targets the UTEM benchmark and the relation with contemporary developments in AI.

Freud and Human Nature. Ilman DilmanFreud and the Mind. Ilman Dilman

Ethics ◽  
1985 ◽  
Vol 96 (1) ◽  
pp. 198-200
Author(s):  
Gordon D. Marino
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
The Mind
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