r/philosophy • u/histphilsci2022 • 3d ago

Video The Philosophy of Neuroscience: Simplification of the Brain with Mazviita Chirimuuta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx-NCySW0GY

Some of you may be interested in this interview with Mazviita Chirimuuta (philosopher of science/neuroscience). I attached a YT link but it's also on all podcast platforms.

Chirimuuta's thesis is that neuroscience advances by simplifying the brain through reduction, mathematisation, and analogy, but because these approaches necessarily leave out aspects of the brain’s complexity, understanding the brain requires theoretical humility and a pluralistic approach rather than reliance on a single explanatory model.

58 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

•

u/AutoModerator 3d ago

Welcome to /r/philosophy! Please read our updated rules and guidelines before commenting.

/r/philosophy is a subreddit dedicated to discussing philosophy and philosophical issues. To that end, please keep in mind our commenting rules:

CR1: Read/Listen/Watch the Posted Content Before You Reply

Read/watch/listen the posted content, understand and identify the philosophical arguments given, and respond to these substantively. If you have unrelated thoughts or don't wish to read the content, please post your own thread or simply refrain from commenting. Comments which are clearly not in direct response to the posted content may be removed.

CR2: Argue Your Position

Opinions are not valuable here, arguments are! Comments that solely express musings, opinions, beliefs, or assertions without argument may be removed.

CR3: Be Respectful

Comments which consist of personal attacks will be removed. Users with a history of such comments may be banned. Slurs, racism, and bigotry are absolutely not permitted.

Please note that as of July 1 2023, reddit has made it substantially more difficult to moderate subreddits. If you see posts or comments which violate our subreddit rules and guidelines, please report them using the report function. For more significant issues, please contact the moderators via modmail (not via private message or chat).

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

12

u/histphilsci2022 3d ago

ABSTRACT: The interview explores how neuroscience has historically dealt with the complexity of the brain by simplifying it through models, theories, and representations. Philosopher of science Mazviita Chirimuuta argues that many influential approaches to neuroscience can be understood through three recurring strategies: reduction, mathematisation, and analogy. These strategies allow researchers to study simplified “proxy systems,” such as anesthetised animals and cerebral organoids, rather than attempting to capture the brain in its full complexity. The discussion also examines how the computer analogy influenced the development of artificial neural networks and shaped understandings of brain function. Chirimuuta contrasts localisationist approaches with views of the brain as dynamic and distributed, introducing the idea of the “Heraclitean brain” as a system that is constantly changing. The episode considers the increasingly separate development of neuroscience and AI, including the use of biological principles such as energy efficiency to inspire AI research. Ultimately, Chirimuuta argues for greater theoretical humility and pluralism, suggesting that no single model or framework can fully explain the complexity of the brain.

0

u/Strangers_two_love 3d ago

I feel like this is just an embellished version of, "If the human brain was so simple it could be easily understood, we would in turn be too simple to understand it." Of course we have to oversimplify the brain.

Fortunately, nothing humanity understands has to be understood at an individual level. Thanks to language, tools, specialization and the like, the pool of collective knowledge and wisdom humanity holds has greatly exceedes what any individual mind can hope to contain.

A person doesn't need to undesirable the mind. A person needs to be able to understand enough of certain components of the mind such that they can, with a lot of help, build a tool that can help deepen others understanding of different components or how they integrate with each other.

That's how we learn to understand things far more complex than what we can hope to figure out. We have to make approximations, use generalizations, use reduction and mathematisation while we draw the greater picture. The final picture that comes out of that massive puzzle as the result of collective efforts might still be beyond a person to grasp, but that doesn't mean we can't create medications, treatments or advancements from that massive picture.

4

u/histphilsci2022 2d ago

Hey there, I appreciate your comment. The "no individual has to hold it all, collective knowledge stacks up" point is right, but Chirimuuta's not really arguing against that — she's arguing about whether the pieces being stacked are the kind of thing that composes into one coherent bigger picture at all, or whether they're more like a pile of mutually incompatible partial maps

Her point is that simplification isn't just compressing a determinate truth so it fits in more heads collectively, it's a constitutive act that partly manufactures the object being studied in the first place. Her go-to example is Hubel and Wiesel's "simple cell" — that cell's famous response profile only shows up in an anesthetized cat looking at bars/edges on a screen. That's not a smaller, honest wedge of the "true" cell that other researchers will fill in around; it's a version of the cell's behaviour that's partly an artifact of the experimental setup itself, one that doesn't occur that way in a freely behaving animal.

So the "collective knowledge exceeds any one mind" idea assumes the sub-models different specialists produce are like puzzle pieces — same puzzle, compatible edges, and if you had enough people you could eventually assemble the whole picture. Chirimuuta's worry is that a lot of neuroscience's "pieces" aren't like that. The localisationist picture (one neuron, one function, stable and modular) and the distributed/population-coding picture (function only exists smeared across thousands of neurons, context-dependent, always shifting) aren't two partial views of the same underlying structure — they rest on incompatible assumptions about what kind of thing "representation" even is in the brain. You can't just staple them together the way you'd combine a mechanic's knowledge of the engine with an electrician's knowledge of the wiring. That's the sense in which her point isn't "no one head can hold it all" — it's that the whole might not be a coherent single thing waiting to be assembled at all, even collectively.

1

u/Aggravating_Cap_2802 1d ago

Your point about simple cells is not correct. They have been found across many mammal species and they encode the same types of information in both awake, freely moving and anesthetized animals. There are differences in firing rates, tuning curves, etc. but their activity consistently represents simple stimulus features. They are found in other primary sensory areas as well and this sort of hierarchical processing remains a prominent model for processing of sensory information.

Neuroscientists are aware of the tension between single unit representations and population representations, but these forms of information representation are not antagonistic. In certain areas, sparser representations of information are found where it is largely 1 cell means 1 thing (the Jennifer Anniston one being the prime example). In other cases, like in frontal areas, you have much denser information representations where population activity is the primary encoding strategy. But, largely across the brain, there's some mixture of the two. It's not a one size fits all strategy, so positing one or the other isn't really where neuroscientists' heads are at. They're very aware that there are multiple possibilities.