In this paper I show that computational neuroscience provides an important new approach to traditional problems in philosophy such as the relation between mental states and brain states (the mind-body or mind-brain problem), to determinism and free will, and helps one with the ‘hard’ problem, the phenomenal aspects of consciousness.One of the themes of the paper and of my book Neuroculture: on...
The mind-body problem is one of the main centers of reflexion of contemporary philosophy. Generally coming from the supposed failure of the Cartesian interactionist dualism, most philosophers of the mind adopt a physicalist ontology. However, according to Popper, this one seems to meet with insuperable difficulties: it can’t give physicalist explanation of rationality and freedom, of qualia; it...
There is an obvious gap between Ruyer’s early “pan-mechanism”, developed in the Esquisse d’une philosophie de la structure (1930), and the panpsychism one finds in his mature work. We will see that working within the field of the former gave Ruyer the occasion to find what he identified to be the “great natural way of philosophy”. This consists of searching in humans the trace of the mode of...