By Joseph Green

Editor’s note: In coming weeks, we will be featuring excerpts from the important new book Minding the Brain: Models of the Mind, Information, and Empirical Science (Discovery Institute Press, 2023). In this excerpt, neuroscientist Joseph Green separates the hype from reality when it comes to current brain research.

Neuroscience is one of the fastest growing scientific fields. Increasing our understanding of how the brain works is often regarded as one of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century. Recent neuroscientific discoveries have been celebrated step by step in the media as a result of their significance. Yet, to this day, no major technology company has been able to turn scientific knowledge of the brain into profits. Engineering the brain has proven extremely difficult and no mind-reading devices or mind-controlled tools have yet been invented. The day when the brain is an engineered system still seems a long way off.

The gap between popular expectations of neuroscientific knowledge and our ability to manipulate the brain as an engineered system is an important one rarely addressed. Here we explore the latest neuroscience and neurotechnology discoveries in an attempt to chart the current scientific frontier of this fast-evolving field of science. The popular expectation of high-performance neurotechnology, often based on the technocratic propaganda of eminent entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk, is probably misplaced. Though heady claims have recently been made, mind-reading devices and artificial memories incorporated into brain networks are still more a part of science fiction films than science.

Intellectual Pressure vs. Scientific Evidence

Our next step will be to determine when this frontier is likely to impact philosophical debates within philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Philosophical problems related to the mind-body problem, which for centuries have been out of reach for scientists, may now seem to fall within the sphere of neuroscience. But is that really the case? In reality, even in the most optimistic case, neuroscience may be decades away from being able to inform critical ideas in philosophy of mind. In other words, philosophical theories addressing the mind-body problem are, for the most part, unlikely to be validated or invalidated by neuroscientific findings in the upcoming years.

Due to this distance between the frontier of neuroscience and most philosophical theories, it follows that no specific philosophical theory should be preferred over another on the basis of scientific findings. This is not to say that no matter what scientific findings are made in the future, the science will still underdetermine the philosophy (a position termed the “autonomy thesis”), but rather that at present scientific theories do not constrain most philosophical ones.

This implies that the current dogma that pervades neuroscience — materialist monism that can be simply stated as “we are nothing but our brains”— is established by intellectual pressure rather than solid scientific evidence.