 This lecture is going to have lecture doc is going to have two parts The doc has two parts one is I'm going to attempt to define neurophilosophy Describe what it is and then in the second part. I'm going to give you an example of neurophilosophy research that I do for my PhD now It's a tricky field because it's pretty new and because it's so new it's likely that the definition is going to be highly debated But I'm going to try and give you a brief description of what it is So we have neuroscience, which is the study of the flesh inside the skull the little thing that we call the brain One of the most complex things we've ever encountered in the universe So it involves a study of the cells how the neurons work how neurons communicate with each other how the circuitry communicates with each other and The philosophy aspect of it I divide into two spots So philosophy is a field that you can find in the foundations of every field So philosophy of music philosophy of physics philosophy of science In neurophilosophy, we have the combination of philosophy of mind and philosophy of science So philosophy of mind is asking questions about the mind. What is the mind? What is the stuff of the mind made of what is the relationship between the mind and the brain? What is consciousness? What are memories? What are false memories? What is attention? What is perception? I'm getting yeah, I'm sure you get the idea by now Philosophy of science is asking questions about how science works So what is the scientific method? How do you define the scientific method? What is evidence? What is the hypothesis? How do you test the hypothesis? How do you make advancements in science? Do you ever make advancements in science and so on So when you have a Venn diagram of these three the intersection of them is What I would like to call neurophilosophy So you would find in the intersection between the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science You would find questions about what methods of study can be used to study the mind is introspection a viable method is the scientific method of psychology a viable method is neuroscience a good method and In the intersection between philosophy of mind and neuroscience we have questions about How neuroscientific data can help answer questions about the philosophy of mind Debates on perception cognition attention consciousness. I listed them earlier And questions here are about how the structure of the scientific method is applied in neuroscience and How hypothesis testing happens there? I work primarily in the area right in the center where the three of them combine And the question I ask for my thesis is how do we study the nature of concepts in Our mind using neuroscientific data and can we study them? So What is a concept and So i'm going to i'm going to ask you a few really broad questions to zone in on what a concept is How the first really huge question is how do you understand what i'm saying? I'm using words to communicate things to you and you're all Hopefully understanding what i'm saying and you all not along so i assume you are And each of the words how do you i'm guessing that each of the words contribute to the meaning of the sentence as well? it's and How do we understand the words right? so What is what does it mean for you to understand the meaning of these words and how are the meaning of these words represented in the brain? Now these are mammoth questions that i am obnoxious enough to try and answer in during my time so What does philosophy say about concepts right? Let's say you came across the written word yoda It is written there you read it And that's you and by virtue of some mechanism in the brain you are able to then Understand that the written word yoda refers to the thing in the world The thing yoda the person right? now It is in philosophy we say that it is by virtue of owning the concept that you are capable of Representing the thing in the world that you're capable of having the thought about yoda the capable of understanding what i'm saying when i say the words So you can have concepts of yoda tectonic plates clouds The sentence that i'm saying right now is composed of the concepts this sentence i'm saying right now okay cool now We define concepts as the elements of thought in philosophy So just to make it clear there are three different things here One is the representation of the thing in the world and there is the concept in our mind Yeah, and there's the thing in the world so What are some of the philosophical questions that we have fun asking when we talk about concepts some of them include what's inside a concept if the concept is a representation of This thing for example if i split that concept open what do i expect to find inside it And what is the structure of the concept and how does the concept work? Now there are two main schools of thought and as all things with philosophy is difficult to draw a line between these schools of thought So it's a spectrum between empiricism and rationalism and people almost never find themselves Properly in the spectrum. They're always somewhere in between so The first school of thought is empiricism empiricism states that A concept if not exhaustively is wholly made by perceptual data So if i see the things around me if i have a concept of yoda It's composed of the sensory information that i have about yoda Yeah, so visuals about yoda sounds yoda makes what it's like to touch smell or taste yoda. Yeah Now if you think about this School of thought a little more you'll see that one possible counter example to this are things like infinity Or negative numbers or zero or numbers These are things i've never touched. I don't know about you guys But i've never had the opportunity to feel or experience infinity perceptually And so the argument against the empiricist would be how do you You know capture the concept of infinity using sensory data. Yeah okay, so So you have two schools of thought one empiricism that says that If these are the boundaries of the concept on the inside you're expected to find Perceptual data about the concept But rationalism says no you we should not have perceptual data when you draw the definition of a concept instead A concept should be just a symbolic mental representation Of the thing in the world just as a word is a symbol that has nothing to do with the thing it represents Does it make sense? So just as chinese people speak chinese The philosopher named jerry fodor said that we can call these words mentalese or words within the mind of the language of thought Yeah, and this is separate from Sensory information about that which it represents now just as So just as a car Has a certain function by virtue of certain constitution certain constituents It has an engine so if you remove the engine it can't perform the function So the question about the constitution of concepts leads into the function or what concepts are used for The empiricist would say that the concept is used to both represent And categorize things in the world So the empiricist would say it is by virtue of owning the concept that I can see And look at this picture and go like oh, that's yoda's picture and look at this picture and go like oh, that's not yoda So the rationalist on the other hand would say no you don't use Concepts to categorize things in the world. You only use them to represent things So if I were to have the thought that yoda lives in india It would be composed of the concepts yoda lives in india and it's just to have these thoughts It's not to categorize things that I see Okay I don't know why I keep asking okay, it's not like you guys are going to respond anyway, so What so now the question is what can we learn about concepts from the neuroscience, right? so If you so the experiment was done where you we scanned people's brains And then we scanned them while they were looking at pictures of faces houses chairs shoes cats dogs Hands all kinds of different things and we got a distributed pattern of activity across the cortex And the same areas of the cortex also light up for when you see these things and classify these things When you use the concept and when you have perceptual experiences So this seems to be Data that might help it embarrassed is to say hey if I were to use the concept of a face or a house The parts of my brain that are active when I'm having a perception are also active So this is probably the case that there is sensory data in within a concept. Yeah So if we look inside the most active areas within the distributed activity We look inside the posterior ventral temporal lobe and that's a candidate for where concepts might be stored object concepts So the neuroscientists believe that it stores representation of object concepts And if you damage this area, you have diseases where you can't recognize objects I will go into that one next and So experiments were done where you can show a person the picture of a bicycle say the word bicycle or read the word bicycle All of which will elicit the same pattern of activity within this part of the brain. Okay So this would mean that Scientists want to say this is where the abstract sort of Meaning is represented in the brain devoid of sensory commitments so nonsense words and pictures do not elicit a strong response at all And semantically related words, but visually different stimuli. What does that mean? So if I have a bicycle and a motorbike there are an overlap of neurons that activate for both So this seems to be a candidate for where concepts are stored in the plane And like I was saying earlier, if you damage this area, you have different sort of diseases that come up One of them is called plosbognosia. It's also called face blindness where Patients with face blindness cannot recognize faces They can't recognize themselves in mirrors and some of them can't read emotions So you could be really angry with one of them and from their facial expression They won't be able to tell they generally use cues like scarfs or the way you Wear your hair or the perfume that you wear or shoes or necklaces to identify people now It might seem that we have data to support empiricism. However Babies discern faces from when they are very very young So from about a week or they're capable of picking out a face within the things that they look look at And they look at faces more than they look at other objects They have the ability to recognize familiar faces. They would look at your mom's face No, they would look at their mom's face More More than their dad's face. No more than a stranger's face And they would probably look at able to discern between expressions as well So they would be happier to cross. Okay. This is a really cool experiment. I want to go into it quickly A baby was put on a raised platform with a glass bridge across the platform And there was a projection of different faces The baby was uncomfortable to cross his glass bridge if it was an upside down face or if it was an angry face But if it was a smiling face of his mom or her mom It would attempt to try and cross the bridge So it has an ability to discern between faces and sometimes babies also look at the mom's face when a stranger enters To assess whether the stranger is a familiar You know a source of danger or it's okay to you know stay calm So the question now is if empiricists say that the function of a concept is to help categorize things in the world Is it by virtue of owning the face concept that the baby is capable of then looking at the face and saying, ah, that's a face But if that's the case Then when did they have the time to acquire that because if a baby is super young and sees faces And is able to already discern faces and expressions and and categorize them as people who they know and don't know Then when do they acquire the perceptual data that is required For defining the face concept? Yeah So this is an argument, uh against empiricism that favors rationalism Just to quickly recap if you were to see Yoda's face, what would the data What would the activity in the inferior temporal lobe then say The rationalist would say this is where the immortal Cognitive symbol of the face is stored and the empiricist would say, oh, that's where all the perceptual data about this concept is stored So in conclusion As we advance in technology and advance in processing power advance in ability to store more data Neuroscience also advances with imaging data And as neuroscience attempts to tackle bigger questions, they start, um knocking on the doors of philosophy So when you ask questions like how we understand How do you understand how we understand then you have to ask philosophers, um To conduct the philosophical method, which is called conception analysis Which is to take a concept and then break it down into its constituents and find out how it's defined So that they can use the neuroscience data or they can conduct experiments to operationalize the definition The word operationalize means if I take a word and then attempt to study it or test it in neuroscientific neuroscientific experiment, right So, um from the neuroscience data, we have a structure and function of the brain and um with philosophical analysis We have questions like what is a concept? How do you define a concept to then test for it? How do you define the functions of a concept to test for it? What is perception where do the borders of these two interactions lie? and the the combination of Neuroscientific data working alongside The philosophical method is called neurophilosophy. So thank you So did thank you for your talk. So now we have five minutes for the questions So if someone would like to ask a question. I also going to repeat questions for everyone to hear it So someone Actually, I have one question So in one of the conferences, they were talking about transferring data between brains And I was wondering what is your take on that like, uh, would it be possible to transfer data between trains brains? So the question is is it possible to transfer data between brains and what your opinion about it from philosophical point of view probably Uh, my philosophical answer It's going to be along the lines of what exactly do you mean by data And what conditions should be satisfied for you to say, okay data has been transferred between two brains because the There was a similar experiment with an at at mit where they transferred, um, the The memory of Such a difficult topic to go about when there's a yellow philosopher with the memory of a fear from From one mouse to another, right? so So the mouse is afraid of a certain color floor and it transferred that memory onto another mouse Which is not afraid but then became afraid you can induce a false memory into it or create a false memory Uh, you could I mean, I guess you could technically Transfer data, but then the question still remains. What is the format of that data? Is it cognitive symbols like fodder and rationalists would say or is it uh, perceptual data? Like the empiricist would say So, yeah I guess I did not answer your question. I made it more confusing They just like to ask a lot of questions, right philosophers like but now you know how difficult that problem is to solve That's my job please If transferring the data between two friends, actually you are transferring data to our friends. Yeah It should be like the method it should not be usual. Otherwise, I can tell you there is a warm Is it is it a question? I just There is like the method which is not like we don't know not by telling or Other than by you Yeah, so I'm guessing he meant along the lines of like a usb card where I plug it in somewhere and like Now I know kung fu If I got it correctly what was the method of transferring this memory between two mouths, she's nice probably shouldn't have brought that up Yeah, stop right here. So it was Modifying synaptic connections and that's as far as I would dare to go but It wasn't using the okay, so someone said yes over there. Yes Neuroscientists, so it would be modifying synaptic connections to then induce a sort of fear memory of Yeah, so we have time for one short question, please Short it is not it's a bit long Go ahead. It's okay. I try to make it short that your philosophy is a mix of Neuroscience, which is more materialized, right, which is more about our brains and how they function and how they are the cells of it and The or like the organ the brain on the on the other hand you have the philosophy which is more cognitive, right? So I I'm not sure what's a question mark Because he was thinking so I need to repeat I need to repeat the question because people will not hear it on the stream. Sorry Okay, okay Come on go on go on So if you're saying if the neuroscience is more materialized it's a and philosophy is more cognitive Do you see any tendency that the people who are studying neuroscience would believe in the school that says yoda should be touch double Should be materialized and the people who study philosophy. They have the tendency to Understand yoda as something mental like a metal language as you say So as far as and this is the question was other people who study neuroscience have more tendency to follow their Rational school of thought to the contrary to philosophers who are more empirical or in our way around so So the thing is every neuroscience experiment that is conducted already has a presupposition of a certain philosophy In order to then Accumulate data to support a hypothesis. So why like this goes back to the philosophy of science question. Why does certain data Support certain hypotheses. Now if you had the hypotheses that concepts have precepts inside them, right? And then the question is how do you test for those things? Then you would fabricate an experiment where and you've presupposed what functions a concept has Yeah, so all experiments in philosophy in neuroscience will have All experiments in neuroscience that attempt to study the mind will have a certain philosophy of mind that they presuppose And part of the job that I have as a neurophilosopher is to then to assess whether or not the conversation between philosophers and and neuroscientists Are actually about the same thing So when neuroscientists say concepts when they talk about these experiments and philosophers say concepts are they the same thing? So coming back to my job, I should say out of time. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you