Reading on: Neuroscience, metaphysics and evolution
Churchland, Patricia Smith Brain-Wise: Studies in Neurophilosophy The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 2002 [abstract – 280 words]
Our brains are the products of biological evolution. Our cognitive capacities have been shaped by evolutionary pressures and bear the stamp of our long evolutionary history.
From the perspective of Darwinian evolution, therefore, any beyond-science metaphysics has to face a tough question: Would there have been evolutionary pressure for the emergence of a special faculty with a unique route to Absolute Metaphysical Truth? What could have been the nature of such pressure? Is there a plausible account consistent with natural selection that can explain how humans could come to have such a capacity?
Relative to what is now known, it is doubtful that any such account is forthcoming, even if one can envisage what such a capacity would be like. Consequently, we do best to resign ourselves to the probability that there is no special faculty whose exercise yields the Absolute, Error-Free, Beyond-Science Truths of the Universe. All we can do, though it is certainly no small thing, is to learn what the best available science says, mindful that it may embody errors, both large and small, and then subject it to criticism, refinement, and extension via more of the same — experimenting, theorizing, and thinking things through.
What metaphysical questions still remain to be resolved? In quantum physics fundamental issues about the nature of reality remain very much alive.
There is a mind-body problem only if the mind is nonphysical and the body is physical. if the mind is activity in the brain, then that particular problem, at least, does not exist. Other problems of exist, to be sure, but not the problem of the interaction between soul stuff and brain stuff.