Complexity and hermeneutic phenomenology
Date
2008-12
Authors
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Publisher
Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University
Abstract
This thesis argues that the study of the brain as a system, which includes the disciplines of
cognitive science and neuroscience, is a kind of textual exegesis, like literary criticism.
Through research in scientific modeling in the 20th and early 21st centuries, anong with the
advances of nonlinear science, and both cognitive science and neuroscience, along with the
work of Aristotle, Saussure, and Paul Ricoeur, I argue that the parts of the brain have
multiple functions, like words have multiple uses. Ricoeur, through Aristotle, argues that
words only have meaning in the act of predication, the sentence. Likewise, a brain act must
corporately employ a certain set of parts in the brain system. Using Aristotle, I make the
case that human cognition cannot be reduced to mere brain events because the parts, the
whole, and the context are integrally important to understanding the function of any given
brain process. It follows then that to understand any given brain event we need to know the
fullness of human experience as lived experience, not lab experience. Science should
progress from what is best known to what is least known. The methodology of reductionist
neuroscience does the exact opposite, at times leading to the denial of personhood or even
intelligence. I advocate that the relationship between the phenomenology of human
experience (which Merleau-Ponty explored famously) and brain science should be that of
data to model. When neuroscience interprets the brain as separated from the lived human
world, it “reads into the text” in a sense. The lived human world must intersect intimately with
whatever the brain and body are doing. The cognitive science research project has
traditionally required the researcher to artificially segment human experience into it pure
material constituents and then reassemble it. Is the creature reanimated at the end of the
dissections really human consciousness? I will suggest that we not assemble the whole out
of the parts; rather human brain science should be an exegesis inward. So, brain activities
are aspects of human acts, because they are performed by humans, as humans, and
interpreting them is a human activity.
Description
Thesis (DPhil (Philosophy))--Stellenbosch University, 2008.
Keywords
Phenomenology, Complexity, Hermeneutics, Neuroscience