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When Matter Awakens. The open mind and its enemies| old_uid | 1710 |
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| title | When Matter Awakens. The open mind and its enemies |
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| start_date | 2006/11/07 |
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| schedule | 17h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | The 21st century has seen neuroscience develop rapidly and a new academic discipline emerge: neuroethics, the attempt to explain moral judgment in partly neurobiological terms. Neuroethics inspires hope as well as apprehension, and historic awareness is essential in order to determine the nature and raison d’être of this young research area. The aim in this lecture is to present neuroethics together with a dynamic model of the human brain and mind upon which neuroethics can fruitfully be constructed. Scientific theories about human nature and mind in the 19th and 20th centuries were occasionally caught in two major traps: ideological hijacking and psychophobia, notably in the form of naïve eliminativism, and naïve cognitivism. To avoid them, neuroethics needs to build on the sound scientific and philosophical foundations of informed materialism, that (1) adopts an evolutionary view of consciousness as an irreducible part of biological reality, an evolved function of the brain and a suitable object of scientific study; (2) acknowledges that adequate understanding of conscious, subjective experience must take both subjective information obtained by self-reflection and objective information obtained from anatomical and physiological observations and measurements into account; and (3) depicts the brain as a consciously and unconsciously autonomously active, plastic, projective and narrative organ evolved in socio-cultural-biological symbiosis; and (4) posits emotion as the hallmark of consciousness. Emotions made matter awaken and enabled it to produce a dynamic, flexible and open mind. As depicted by informed materialism, the neuronal person is truly awake, in the deepest sense of the word. |
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| responsibles | Fagot-Largeault, Changeux |
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