The question of the nature of the relationship between mental processes and activity in the brain is not the prerogative of philosophers. All professional scientists involved in studying the human brain must, one way or another, decide this question for themselves. The dominant approach in the modern scientific worldview is reductionism, which holds that mental states can in principle be reduced to activity in the brain. Here I review some of the data obtained in recent years that shed light on the nature of the relationship between the content of mental processes and cerebral activity. These data on the encoding of sensory and semantic linguistic information, as well as more complex information related to the content of abstract concepts, show that the cerebral activity accompanying the extraction of meaning is widely distributed and probabilistic in nature and does not correspond to the nature of mental content, which is generally certain and holistic. Thus, currently available empirical data indicate that reductionism cannot reasonably be seen as a viable option and the only variant possible within the framework of materialism is that of recognizing mentality as an emergent entity.
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Translated from Zhurnal Vysshei Nervnoi Deyatel’nosti imeni I. P. Pavlova, Vol. 72, No. 6, pp. 800–825, November–December, 2022.
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Knyazev, G.G. The Encoding of Meaning in Cerebral Activity. Neurosci Behav Physi 53, 554–571 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11055-023-01454-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11055-023-01454-0