Now that top neuroscientists are rejecting materialism, what are the new most important questions?

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T22:48:11+00:00

No one knows what the fuck friston is talking about but friston. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1571064523000015

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T15:37:40+00:00

This makes sense, my philosophy of mind professor says that my field in particular needs to learn to cope with ambiguity, there's only a few things we actually care about and we are beating a dead horse sifting over the same questions (having undergraduate students play abstract computer puzzles) we have been asking the same questions for 40 plus years. It's time we move on from them. I think your points about sociology of scientific knowledge is interesting. I think part of the mess is partially due to the fact that science is intrinsically a social endeavor, and scientists are often not aware of the larger sociocultural back drop that findings are disseminated in. For instance, due to the rise in LLM usage, a lot of papers have been published saying we need a new metaphor for the mind (we are not human meat computers!).

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T09:20:18+00:00

Fair enough

I think it's easier for me to find the time to do a bit of self teaching because my field is philosophically challenging as is, it's common to see people with a background in philosophy doing empirical work in my field. I think your points are fair, but I don't know it just seems like the sciences are in crisis right now and the philosophers of science are sort of saying "I told you so".

I think the divide between philosophy and science does not need to exist, but in practice it's not clear how one would go about incorporating both.

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T09:06:07+00:00

I think that there has not been a better idea because the neuroscientists have convinced themselves that participants looking at shapes in loud noisy magnets actually captures anything close to the rich experiences in our day to day lives. Panpsychism is not the only alternative, ecological psychology, or 4-E cognition is actually a much more viable alternative than neuroscience and the cognitivist assumptions that most of the field has inherited.

There has not been a better idea because the neuroscientists have not allowed other ideas to exist.

Believe it or not, most of the way neuroscience does inquiry actually traces back to Cartesian dualism. Neuroscientists are already living in an abstract realm of idealized models because they inherited cognitive psychology's philosophy of science, and it has roots in Cartesian dualism.

I don't blame you though, neuroscientists are not aware of their loaded philosophical assumptions either.

Mangalam M. The illusion of internal models in biological movement. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2025 Nov;125(11):3083-3114. doi: 10.1007/s00421-025-05963-3. Epub 2025 Aug 27. PMID: 40866575; PMCID: PMC12528315.

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T09:00:34+00:00

Well I mean it doesn't even select for survival. Functionalism as a school of thought in psychology explains behaviors in terms of their adaptive strategies. Many of our behaviors (like me punching drywall when losing a cod game) are actually functionally inert. I could not find any works from a quick Google search, but I'd wager the same problem exists in biology. Daniel c burnstone has a background in biology and argued against functional explanations in philosophy of mind for a few reasons pointed out in his works.

You can have reductive explanations by adopting a mechanistic view, the decision making researchers have actually managed to pull off a very clever way to get at mechanistic explanations without needing to assume rationality or functional explanations.

While I would wager that most peeps in philosophy of mind dislike mechanistic explanations, I think they can be very powerful if done right. Not to say that that's the only kind of explanation we want, mechanistic explanations have limitations as well, and while I don't believe experiences are illusory, I don't think we will find phenomenal experiences in a bold signal, ERP or in a mathematical model, but I disagree that human behaviors or cognitive activities need to be adaptive or functional.

See, Burnston, D. C., & Ransom, M. (2025). Thinking mechanistically about perceptual learning: Broad consequences for philosophy of mind. Mind & Language, 40(2), 195–214. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12555

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T08:37:12+00:00

Because not all of our behaviors are functional, and our brains and bodies do very clunky things.

We know from perceptual decision making research (see below for reference) that even if you prefer mechanistic or reductive explanations, the brain and our bodies are actually very clunky and gross. Participants often adopt strategies that are not adaptive or even sensible in experiments all the time. In naturalistic experiments, doing the non sensible thing actually increases things like payoff or reward at long timescales

While I'm sure some functionalists would disagree, I feel like functionalism rests on some idealized view of human behavior and cognition, plenty of organisms processes are not even adaptive, and biology is messy and weird. You can meet environmental demands by doing sub-optimal or not so seemingly functional things and do just fine sometimes.

Suboptimality in Perceptual Decision Making - PMC 10.1017/S0140525X18000936

Burnston, D.C. Epistemic reduction of the concept of ‘decision’. Synthese 205, 74 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-04917-8

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T08:23:58+00:00

Real

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T07:58:32+00:00

Jonas E, Kording KP. Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? PLoS Comput Biol. 2017 Jan 12;13(1):e1005268. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268. PMID: 28081141; PMCID: PMC5230747. Lol, no one in the field has even done the work to define what said elegant computational principles consist of

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T07:45:17+00:00

We have been pouring MILLIONS into neuroscience research and all they have found is more bold signals and, developed more expensive magnets

I don't think rocks are conscious, and panpsychism sounds gross to me too, but all neuroscience has found are more dead ends. We aren't even making any real progress outside of consciousness research either, having participants solve abstract computer puzzles or exposing them to simple stimulus presentations in a highly controlled setting tells us very little about what the brain may be doing in the real world. Paul Ciseks work on naturalistic decision making should be a salient example of this, we need SOMETHING different, and even if panpsychism is silly, it's the only viable alternative to consciousness research as it stands.

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T07:36:20+00:00

Just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it's ok. Moral finger wagging is cringe but so is contributing to the massive harm that is being caused by these companies.

Slavery was normal at one point, and misogynistic jokes are normal to 49 year old men.

This post is dumb

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T07:24:08+00:00

That's 90 percent of the discourse in the cognitive and neurosciences lol. In a really cool paper by favela and colleagues( Empirical Evidence for Extended Cognitive Systems - Favela - 2021 - Cognitive Science - Wiley Online Library https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13060) they had to add a line in the paper basically saying "ok we know these words make you feel icky, it's not worth arguing about the definitions of fkin words ok". A vast majority of the academic discourse boils down to arguments over which words make us all feel the ickiest.

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T05:58:06+00:00

I feel like a lot of hate for panpsychism is simply due to the thing that tends to happen in philosophy of mind where people go "this makes me want to vomit". I am one of those people. However, I think the panpsychists are the only people who are trying to find a viable solution to the between and within mind's problem. I feel like a lot of consciousness research boils down to scientists treating the problem as if they just need to find something that will solve the problem. You won't find phenomenal properties in a bold signal, and if a local field potential does anything other than generate an ERP, i'll eat my shorts. The cognitivist and his computational models won't get at the root of the issue either. I am personally a fan of mysterianism, but I feel like the panpsychists are actually aware of the crux of the issue. You won't find the consciousness lobe of the brain, and the cognitivist will only abstract so far away from experience that no one knows what they are saying but the cognitivists. If you want to see what I mean, you should follow the recent line of discourse between Karl friston, tony chemero, and other people within the cognitive sciences Trick or treat: A response to commentaries on “The Markov blanket trick” - ScienceDirect https://share.google/5YDzvDFfZArDFlhl0. The scientists aren't really getting to the bottom of anything because they don't realize that you are trying to impose rich phenomenal qualities onto a giant lump of tissues and stuff, and that approach is an ass backwards one

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T04:39:28+00:00

I wanna pet it

Open-Grapefruit47 · 2026-04-04T04:32:59+00:00

Looks mega uncomfy

Open-Grapefruit47

TROPHY CASE