10 Contemporary Worldview
Chapter 10: Contemporary Worldview
Intro
The Contemporary mosaic will probably look more familiar to us than its predecessors. It includes, after all, the theories and methods taught at the very universities you’re attending. We have borne the Contemporary mosaic since about the 1920s. It includes accepted theories like neuroscience, quantum mechanics, special and general relativity, and cosmology, which we will consider in more depth below, in addition to the theories of evolutionary biology, genetics, chemistry, psychology, sociology, economics, and history.
It is important to remember that, as with all previous mosaics, the Contemporary mosaic is in a continuous state of flux. In other words, the mosaic of 1920 is not identical to the mosaic of today. Furthermore, as we stressed in chapter 2, our current set of accepted theories and employed methods are in no way absolutely true. We do think that they’re the best available descriptions of their respective objects, but we are also prepared to replace our best descriptions with even better ones. Consider, for instance, the acceptance of the Higgs boson, the mapping of the human genome, or the discovery of new pyramids in Egypt. So, although we sometimes treat our Contemporary worldview as unchangeable and something already crystalized, it is very much modifiable as we learn more about the world.
Let’s start our focused discussion of the Contemporary worldview with the field of cognitive neuroscience and the metaphysical principles implicit in this discipline.
Cognitive Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system and aims to better understand the functions of the brain. Cognitive science is the study of the mind and its processes. Cognitive neuroscience melds these two fields and seeks to understand the processes of the mind as functions of the brain. The central metaphysical question here is whether the mind can exist independently of the brain or anything material, or whether the mind requires the existence of a material substrate to produce it. In the previous historical chapters, we’ve seen that Cartesians and Newtonians alike accepted the metaphysical conception of dualism, which holds that mind and matter are independent substances. Recall, for instance, how Cartesian mechanistic physiologists couldn’t figure out an acceptable way for the mind to interact with matter. This problem grew more acute in the nineteenth century, when the law of conservation of energy became accepted. The law implies that the physical world is causally closed, and that it is therefore impossible for a non-physical mind to influence a physical brain. Given this constraint, and neuroscientific theories accepted within the Contemporary mosaic, substance dualism is no longer regarded as the best available description of the relationship between mind and matter.
Dualism is a response to a question about the number of distinct independent substances that actually exist. It answ