The Spontaneous Brain

Rather than answering the traditional mind-body problem, Georg Northoff argues that the question itself is flawed. By examining empirical neuroscience data and philosophical ontology, he concludes that mental features like consciousness should not be attributed to either mind or brain. Instead, they can be understood through the relationship between the brain and the world—the "world-brain relation." This approach renders the mind-body problem superfluous and replaces it with a "world-brain problem." Achieving this requires a fundamental shift in how we view both the brain and the world, amounting to a Copernican revolution in neuroscience and philosophy.

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Abstract

Mind vs Body? We traditionally attribute our mental features like consciousness to either mind or body – this amounts to the question for the relationship between mind or body, the mind-body problem. Various answers have been suggested to the mind-body problem in both philosophy and neuroscience. The neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher Georg Northoff takes a fundamentally different approach though. Instead of providing yet another answer, he questions the question itself. Do we really have to attribute mental features like consciousness to either mind or brain? Investigating both empirical data in neuroscience and ontological issues in philosophy, he comes to an amazing conclusion: we can replace mind including mind-body relation by investigating the relation of our brain to the world, the “world-brain relation”. This renders the mind-body problem simply superfluous. Instead, we are better off, on both empirical and ontological grounds, by addressing mental features like consciousness in terms of the relationship between world and brain, the “world-brain problem”, as he says. That is possible though only if we radically change our viewpoint on both brain and world – this amounts to nothing less than a true Copernican revolution in neuroscience and philosophy.