Friday, November 26, 2010

Domasio's new book

Unfortunately, starting from neuroscience, as Antonia Domasio does (see, for instance, this review by Ned Block) in his new book Self Comes to Mind; Constructing the Consious Brain, ignores the most interesting phenomena of mind and consiousness.  Better to look at something like Thomas Ogden in The Primitive Edge of Experience, or many other interesting places.  Neuroscience has made many advances, but once they start trying to talk coherently about dreaming or phenomenal experience we are left with little.  Call it a sort of mind/brain dualism if you want, but I don't think we need to come to any ontological conclusions here.  That, I think modern philosophy has shown, is an intractable problem.

That said, I appreciate Domasio's emphasis on the old brain...the brainstem, cerebellum and other such primitive structures.