317 | Nicole Rust on Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders

Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Back when I was writing The Big Picture, the book, one of the motivations there was to provide kind of an apologia for naturalism. An apologia not being you say you're sorry, you apologize, it's it's when you defend a position, okay, uh, mostly coming from theology. ap apologetics in theology is you're trying to defend the existence of God.

So I was doing the opposite, or at least the flip side, defending the absence of God, defending the idea that even though we don't know everything about how the universe works, given what we do know, there's overwhelming reason to believe that when we finally know everything, it will all fit in happily to a naturalistic framework where you don't need supernatural things, you don't need God, anything like that. You don't need a spark of life to make life go, you don't need an immaterial soul to make consciousness go, and so forth. And it's always going to be a tricky thing to make a case like that because you're admitting that you don't know the final answers, so you can't say, here is the final answer. You're making a claim that it is probable, or you should have the most credence, that when the future final answer comes will take a certain form.

And to do that, you have to face up to some of the issues. And of course, the bridge from the brain to the mind is one of the biggest issues that you have to face up to. You can see why there's plenty of people, philosophers and other people, who will want to accept the idea that the mere physical motion of stuff that makes up the brain is not enough to account for consciousness or feelings or whatever it is that you have your focus at uh your attention focused on when you're thinking about the brain. After all, there just seems like a a gap, as they like to say, between a description of, oh, there's this neuron it's firing, versus saying, oh, there is the experience of being in love or something like that.

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