Neurosynthesis

Abstract

Having no specific environment or niche of their own, humans are not immediately at home in the world; they have yet to make the world their home. Having bodies not adapted to any definite Umwelt, humans must build mediating artificial structures to complement their biologically unfinished organisms, texture their environment, and create their habitat. By so doing they make themselves better attuned to the preexisting world and at the same time adjust the world to their own tune. Thus, equipped with their generalised organs and specialised technology humans have spread all over the earth, and have confronted a great variety of environments. The central role in this expansion and adaptation belongs to the big brain, the nervous system whose structure and operation support the “generalised” design of the species biologically specialised for artefact making and using. Nonetheless, the structure and operation of the human nervous system must not be seen as a prefabricated divine gift but as the result of the long evolutionary development in which archaic structures have been retained and amended rather than discarded. So the human nervous system shares with the nervous systems of other higher animals important common features. According to the naturalistic view these shared traits, as well as some elements specific to humans, constitute another biological, unavoidable, and restraining frame, however “unfinished” it might be, for the development of knowledge.