Reddit mentions of Brain & Behavior: An Introduction to Biological Psychology

Thanks for the links. I haven't had time to read them front to back, but from reading the first page or so of each, they look to me like reductionists.

The Crick and Koch paper says early on that "Our own view is that it is a plausible working assumption that some activity of the brain is all that is necessary to produce consciousness, and that this is the best line to follow unless and until there is clear decisive evidence to the contrary (as opposed to arguments from ignorance)." They are saying that conscious awareness is a brain process or the result of a brain process (depending on how they would parse the semantics).

Ramachandran and Hirstein say that "all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, even what we regard as our intimate self—arises exclusively from the activity of little wisps of protoplasm in the brain." Later they say that "Our theory should be seen as complementing rather than replacing a host of other recent biological approaches to the problem..." and they go on to list a number of authors, some of whom I know to be taking reductionist viewpoints (Churchland, Llinas, Damasio). They also say that qualia might be transferable between brains - an exciting idea, but one that sounds pretty reductionist to me.

Is there something these authors say later in their papers that suggests a non-reductionist viewpoint?

>I am of course an amateur in matters of neuroscience as well, but I don't think you can claim much knowledge of whatever consensus exists, if you didn't know that both Crick and Ramachandran took subjectivity as being real.

Wait, hang on. You seem to be attacking a straw-man here. Reductionists do take subjectivity as being 'real'. They just think it will be explained by underlying neurological mechanisms. To illustrate with a couple historical parallels, when the phenomenon of light was reduced to the theory of electromagnetism, we didn't stop believing in light; we just understood it better. When heat was reduced to mean molecular energy, we didn't become heat-skeptics. A successful reduction actually vindicates the higher level phenomenon, showing that it's a "real thing" after all, by explaining it as a case of the application of more general principles. Those who think subjectivity is not real would be eliminativists, though I can't think of many serious philosophers or scientists dealing with this subject who take this position (possible exception: Susan Blackmore?). It is commonly thought that Paul and Pat Churchland are eliminativists with respect to conscious awareness, but this is dead wrong - they are eliminativists with respect to the propositional attitudes but reductionists when it comes to consciousness. Paul has done quite a bit of work on the neural mechanisms of qualia.

With respect to the neuroscientific consensus, I'll quote from a fairly standard textbook, Brain and Behavior by Bob Garrett. "Most, thought not all, neuroscientists believe that we should think of the mind...[as] simply the collection of things that the brain does, such as thinking, sensing, planning, and feeling. But when we think, sense, plan, and feel, we get the compelling impression that there is a mind behind it all, guiding what we do. Most neuroscientists say this is just an illusion, that the sense of mind is nothing more than the awareness of what our brain is doing." This viewpoint does not eliminate awareness, but seeks to reductively explain it as a brain process.

>I think that you are mistaking the search for the neurological correlates of consciousness with reductionism.

These tend to go hand in hand. If one thinks that qualia are brain processes, one wants to know how these processes work in the brain.

>To find such correlates is not to reduce and is perfectly compatible, even complementary, with a whole host of positions including dualism, pansychism, and even idealism.

Logically compatible? Sure. They're also logically compatible with the possibility that the mind is operated by the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But the sense among reductionists and the neuroscientific community is that positions such as dualism and idealism are explanatorily unhelpful. To take another historical example, people used to believe that the planets were pushed through the sky by invisible angels (seriously). This is no longer believed because we now have laws of planetary motion that account for what we observe. What do you say to the philosopher who says that the laws of planetary motion are perfectly compatible with the angel theory? Probably just that we have no need for the angelic hypothesis. It is arguably non-falsifiable, and clearly gratuitous. Once you figure out how things work, magical theories just become uninteresting.