Erik Hoel, host of The Intrinsic Perspective, discusses the history and neglect of studying consciousness in neuroscience, the challenges of understanding neuroscience and consciousness, the concept of the brain as modular, and the future of writing online.
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insights INSIGHT
Neuroscience's Lack of a Unifying Theory
Neuroscience, unlike biology or physics, lacks a unifying theory of brain function, hindering its progress.
It focuses on specific mechanisms without a clear understanding of how the brain creates consciousness.
insights INSIGHT
Evolution of Language, Not Minds
Julian Jaynes's bicameral mind theory posits consciousness emerged after the Bronze Age.
A more plausible explanation is that language for describing minds evolved, not minds themselves.
insights INSIGHT
Limitations of Neuroscientific Methods
Neuroscientific methods struggle to understand complex systems, even a simple microchip.
Applying these methods to the brain may also yield limited insights without a theory of consciousness.
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Today, Razib talks to Erik Hoel, host of the Substack The Intrinsic Perspective and author of The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science. An academic neuroscientist by training, in The World Behind the World Hoel outlines the emergence of modern neuroscience, and where it went wrong in terms of the field’s researchers' focus. But first, Hoel discusses human understanding of the mind, and how it has changed over time. He gives his take on Julian Jayne’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, and explains that it is unlikely that consciousness emerged after the Bronze Age as posited in the book. Instead, The World Behind the World argues that the differentiation between the inner world and the outer world, the intrinsic perspective of literature and psychology and the extrinsic perspective of physics and biology arose with the Classical Greeks 2,500 years ago. Hoel also observes that a modern perspective on one’s inner world and psychological complexity so evident in Greco-Roman texts rapidly fades again after the fall of Rome and the regression during the Dark Ages, when literacy declined and text became refocused exclusively on the functional external world, whether it be tax records or agronomy manuals.
The World Behind the World is a book-length argument fleshing out Hoel’s contention that understanding consciousness is, and must be, at the heart of neuroscience. Though studies of the biology and chemistry of axons and glial cells make sense from a reductionistic perspective, Hoel makes a convincing case that contemporary neuroscience models fail to understand how the brain works. The World Behind the World suggests modern neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic, like biology before evolution or physics before Newtonian mechanics: merely a collection of fascinating observations and detailed mechanisms. Hoel maintains that a true neuroscience theory with consciousness as its center and organizing principle is necessary to understand how the intrinsic world emerged and functions.
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