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All of the research you describe can be safely bundled into the same category as "dead salmon shows brain activity on an fMRI if you squint hard enough." It's p

All of the research you describe can be safely bundled into the same category as "dead salmon shows brain activity on an fMRI if you squint hard enough." It's phrenology for the 21st century, except with dyes and MRIs instead of head shaped calipers. The second you say the words "conscious mind", you leave the realm of science. At best, "consciousness" is an abstraction used by psychiatrists and laypeople over much deeper, more complex, and less understood concepts in neuroscience. The field has yet to differentiate the roles neural plasticity plays between newborns, the average college student, and brain trauma victims - let alone grapple with the implication that our brains are the result of a billion years of evolution. The nature of human intelligence is far wilder than you or I can imagine, Horatio, but publish-or-perish cannon fodder is clearly not the answer.

corin_ 6y ago
Why does our not fully (or even close to fully) understanding how the brain works mean conscious vs subconscious is unscientific? Is all mental health research unscientific based on the same logic? My understanding is that it's conclusive that some of our brain's processes we feel we are controlling (conscious thinking), while others happen in the background without us realising. The fact that we don't understand everything that makes that the case doesn't stop that being the case.
- vinceguidry 6y ago
  You're making a common mistake, that of equating "scientific" with "good". Science is a particular method for learning about the world, not a marker of moral worth. I don't want to get too far into the epistemological weeds here, but there are plenty of other, perfectly valid ways to understand the world, many of which are used and studied in academia. The easiest examples to point to are philosophy and mathematics. Mathematicians are not scientists, neither are philosophers.
  - corin_ 6y ago
    I may well be misunderstanding a definition of science, but no I wasn't confusing it with "good". I don't know what the best definition of science is, but here's the first one Google suggests: > "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment." Can you explain what excludes the studying of human behaviour or mental health from how you define "science"?
    - ses1984 6y ago
      You can apply science to human behavior and mental health. The problem is trying to integrate that work into theories of consciousness, you start to blur the lines between science and philosophy.
      - corin_ 6y ago
        I agree that it can be approached from non-scientific angles (I'd hazard a guess that any subject that can be considered scientific can be approached unscientifically - sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not), but I think(?) you're agreeing with me in my responding to this comment: > The second you say the words "conscious mind", you leave the realm of science.
    - vinceguidry 6y ago
      This is what I meant by "getting into the epistemological weeds" heh. I'll requote your definition with emphasis. > the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. All three of the italicized aspects are not how the mind is studied. The mind is not a physical object. It cannot be observed or experimented with in a systematic way. You can obtain three samples of three different kinds of steel and perform a destructive test on all three of them, then when you're done you can obtain more. This is materials science and you can get paid a lot of money to do it. There is "neuroscience" where you do the same thing, with neurons. Neurons are not minds. You'll never learn how a mind works by studying neurons, any more than you can learn how a building works by studying steel. If you're looking to learn how a building works, steel is just one of the hundreds of topics you need to understand. There is no "building science" and there is no "mind science", because buildings and minds are not physical, natural things. They're unnatural things, conjured up by human invention and imagination. Physically speaking, i.e. according to the best observation techniques the field of neuroscience can come up with, a newborn, a brain trauma victim, and a college student are all identical as your parent notes. This deficiency in understanding is what the commenter you were responding to was pointing to. People thinking they can understand the mind by doing fMRIs. And thinking any kind of rigorous exploration and study as "science" leads to this kind of mistake. Another example, computer science isn't science. It's math. Computers are deterministic, there's no point in running experiments. Computers are not natural, nor are they physical. Silicon is, and you can study that by running experiments and observing the results. To get epistemic, knowledge comprises justified true beliefs. Science is a type of justification. There are other kinds. If you use other forms of justification, then you don't get scientific knowledge out of it, overloading science makes people believe that all knowledge that comes out of academia is scientific, i.e. made through repeated experimentation and observation, such that we can rely on it to not fail on us.
- akiselev 6y ago
  > Is all mental health research unscientific based on the same logic? Mental health research is focused on clinical outcomes so it's not the same as basic research on consciousness. All of these fMRI studies have been useless for the latter because they're blunt tools - perfect for studying tumor blood flow or correlating which parts of the brain are kinda-sorta active during some extreme scenario (stuck in an fMRI "for science") - but useless for actually probing the nature of the mind. They tell us that there is "something" there that can be loosely called the "conscious" and "subconscious" mind in academically trained company but it's still trying to shoehorn late 19th century ideas to cutting edge neuroscience - it comes down to selling grant proposals using familiar colloquialisms. We could very well find out tomorrow that there are higher level networks within the brain that make the separation meaningless and you'd still see grant writers overuse them any chance they get. > My understanding is that it's conclusive that some of our brain's processes we feel we are controlling (conscious thinking), while others happen in the background without us realising. The fact that we don't understand everything that makes that the case doesn't stop that being the case. These papers are a lot worse than "we don't understand everything." They're often times actively harmful to our understanding. The brain is so complex that fMRI studies are the scientific research equivalent of a full body CT scan. The older you are, the more likely you are to find something that looks like a tumor. By the time one is in their 50s, full body scans are more likely to result in serious complications from unnecessary biopsies than find a malignant growth. Likewise, the more complex the brain the more room you have to find spurious correlations in fMRIs in just about any scenario where the subject is conscious or even dead if the researcher is really bad at statistics - which most are. This makes them the perfect tool for scientists under pressure to publish or perish, but not for studying the brain.
kingkawn 6y ago
Not knowing something is not intellectual justification for being broadly dismissive. To come to know new things requires being broadly open.
fouc 6y ago
Isn't "conscious mind" just shorthand for "frontal lobes" ? If we can detect the brain solving a variety of things without ever hitting the frontal lobes then that's pretty interesting.
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  In fact, some such high level decision making processes that involve the prefrontal cortex can occur unconsciously. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00121/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.0012...
hackinthebochs 6y ago
I'm struggling to come up with something more substantive to say in response, but this is a bad take and it needs to be said. Studies that demonstrate high level brain activity without the corresponding conscious experience are important in that they help to constrain where and how conscious experience is generated. Platitudes about human intelligence have no utility here.
- collyw 6y ago
  > conscious experience is generated Is there any evidence that it is generated?
  - tomc1985 6y ago
    What else could it be?
  - hackinthebochs 6y ago
    It seems to come and go with life, wakefulness, blows to the head, etc. It can be modulated through stimulating brain cells or destructive damage. Yes, there's a lot of evidence that the brain generates consciousness.
  - LASR 6y ago
    As opposed to what? It being “really there” ?
- raincom 6y ago
  The poster you responding to is correct to a large extent. Yes, you can record waves, and you can even classify them like N170. Responses can be 'localized'; however, one has to be a bit careful. Even many researchers say it is new phrenology: for instance, William R. Uttal wrote a book on it, called "The New Phrenology. The limits of localizing cognitive processes in the Brain". This book is not based on philosophical arguments, but based on the research done by cognitive neuroscientists. I am yet to come across a substantial criticism against Uttal's book. Just because localization is at most one can do, it is not cure to solve all puzzles/problems.
phkahler 6y ago
Funny about that fish. As soon as I hear "neuroscience" or "neoroplasticity" it triggers my BS detector. The former because it's used to add credibility to a lot of really fuzzy stuff and the later because it's a big fancy word for being able to learn or change. That's not to say I automatically regard something as BS because of those words, but they increase my level of scrutiny.
sollewitt 6y ago
The core assumption in cognitive neuroscience is that cognition is centered in the activity of the brain. The second is that neuronal activation corresponds to function. After that it's about finding proxies for measuring activation. Which part of that makes the field junk science?

corin_ 6y ago

Why does our not fully (or even close to fully) understanding how the brain works mean conscious vs subconscious is unscientific? Is all mental health research unscientific based on the same logic? My understanding is that it's conclusive that some of our brain's processes we feel we are controlling (conscious thinking), while others happen in the background without us realising. The fact that we don't understand everything that makes that the case doesn't stop that being the case.

vinceguidry 6y ago
You're making a common mistake, that of equating "scientific" with "good". Science is a particular method for learning about the world, not a marker of moral worth. I don't want to get too far into the epistemological weeds here, but there are plenty of other, perfectly valid ways to understand the world, many of which are used and studied in academia. The easiest examples to point to are philosophy and mathematics. Mathematicians are not scientists, neither are philosophers.
- corin_ 6y ago
  I may well be misunderstanding a definition of science, but no I wasn't confusing it with "good". I don't know what the best definition of science is, but here's the first one Google suggests: > "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment." Can you explain what excludes the studying of human behaviour or mental health from how you define "science"?
  - ses1984 6y ago
    You can apply science to human behavior and mental health. The problem is trying to integrate that work into theories of consciousness, you start to blur the lines between science and philosophy.
    - corin_ 6y ago
      I agree that it can be approached from non-scientific angles (I'd hazard a guess that any subject that can be considered scientific can be approached unscientifically - sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not), but I think(?) you're agreeing with me in my responding to this comment: > The second you say the words "conscious mind", you leave the realm of science.
  - vinceguidry 6y ago
    This is what I meant by "getting into the epistemological weeds" heh. I'll requote your definition with emphasis. > the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. All three of the italicized aspects are not how the mind is studied. The mind is not a physical object. It cannot be observed or experimented with in a systematic way. You can obtain three samples of three different kinds of steel and perform a destructive test on all three of them, then when you're done you can obtain more. This is materials science and you can get paid a lot of money to do it. There is "neuroscience" where you do the same thing, with neurons. Neurons are not minds. You'll never learn how a mind works by studying neurons, any more than you can learn how a building works by studying steel. If you're looking to learn how a building works, steel is just one of the hundreds of topics you need to understand. There is no "building science" and there is no "mind science", because buildings and minds are not physical, natural things. They're unnatural things, conjured up by human invention and imagination. Physically speaking, i.e. according to the best observation techniques the field of neuroscience can come up with, a newborn, a brain trauma victim, and a college student are all identical as your parent notes. This deficiency in understanding is what the commenter you were responding to was pointing to. People thinking they can understand the mind by doing fMRIs. And thinking any kind of rigorous exploration and study as "science" leads to this kind of mistake. Another example, computer science isn't science. It's math. Computers are deterministic, there's no point in running experiments. Computers are not natural, nor are they physical. Silicon is, and you can study that by running experiments and observing the results. To get epistemic, knowledge comprises justified true beliefs. Science is a type of justification. There are other kinds. If you use other forms of justification, then you don't get scientific knowledge out of it, overloading science makes people believe that all knowledge that comes out of academia is scientific, i.e. made through repeated experimentation and observation, such that we can rely on it to not fail on us.
akiselev 6y ago
> Is all mental health research unscientific based on the same logic? Mental health research is focused on clinical outcomes so it's not the same as basic research on consciousness. All of these fMRI studies have been useless for the latter because they're blunt tools - perfect for studying tumor blood flow or correlating which parts of the brain are kinda-sorta active during some extreme scenario (stuck in an fMRI "for science") - but useless for actually probing the nature of the mind. They tell us that there is "something" there that can be loosely called the "conscious" and "subconscious" mind in academically trained company but it's still trying to shoehorn late 19th century ideas to cutting edge neuroscience - it comes down to selling grant proposals using familiar colloquialisms. We could very well find out tomorrow that there are higher level networks within the brain that make the separation meaningless and you'd still see grant writers overuse them any chance they get. > My understanding is that it's conclusive that some of our brain's processes we feel we are controlling (conscious thinking), while others happen in the background without us realising. The fact that we don't understand everything that makes that the case doesn't stop that being the case. These papers are a lot worse than "we don't understand everything." They're often times actively harmful to our understanding. The brain is so complex that fMRI studies are the scientific research equivalent of a full body CT scan. The older you are, the more likely you are to find something that looks like a tumor. By the time one is in their 50s, full body scans are more likely to result in serious complications from unnecessary biopsies than find a malignant growth. Likewise, the more complex the brain the more room you have to find spurious correlations in fMRIs in just about any scenario where the subject is conscious or even dead if the researcher is really bad at statistics - which most are. This makes them the perfect tool for scientists under pressure to publish or perish, but not for studying the brain.

kingkawn 6y ago

Not knowing something is not intellectual justification for being broadly dismissive. To come to know new things requires being broadly open.

fouc 6y ago

Isn't "conscious mind" just shorthand for "frontal lobes" ? If we can detect the brain solving a variety of things without ever hitting the frontal lobes then that's pretty interesting.

hackinthebochs 6y ago
In fact, some such high level decision making processes that involve the prefrontal cortex can occur unconsciously. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00121/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.0012...

hackinthebochs 6y ago

I'm struggling to come up with something more substantive to say in response, but this is a bad take and it needs to be said. Studies that demonstrate high level brain activity without the corresponding conscious experience are important in that they help to constrain where and how conscious experience is generated. Platitudes about human intelligence have no utility here.

collyw 6y ago
> conscious experience is generated Is there any evidence that it is generated?
- tomc1985 6y ago
  What else could it be?
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  It seems to come and go with life, wakefulness, blows to the head, etc. It can be modulated through stimulating brain cells or destructive damage. Yes, there's a lot of evidence that the brain generates consciousness.
- LASR 6y ago
  As opposed to what? It being “really there” ?
raincom 6y ago
The poster you responding to is correct to a large extent. Yes, you can record waves, and you can even classify them like N170. Responses can be 'localized'; however, one has to be a bit careful. Even many researchers say it is new phrenology: for instance, William R. Uttal wrote a book on it, called "The New Phrenology. The limits of localizing cognitive processes in the Brain". This book is not based on philosophical arguments, but based on the research done by cognitive neuroscientists. I am yet to come across a substantial criticism against Uttal's book. Just because localization is at most one can do, it is not cure to solve all puzzles/problems.

phkahler 6y ago

Funny about that fish. As soon as I hear "neuroscience" or "neoroplasticity" it triggers my BS detector. The former because it's used to add credibility to a lot of really fuzzy stuff and the later because it's a big fancy word for being able to learn or change. That's not to say I automatically regard something as BS because of those words, but they increase my level of scrutiny.

sollewitt 6y ago

The core assumption in cognitive neuroscience is that cognition is centered in the activity of the brain. The second is that neuronal activation corresponds to function. After that it's about finding proxies for measuring activation. Which part of that makes the field junk science?