Early last month, Steven Novella, a materialist neurologist, made a somewhat surprising claim in his Neurologica blog, "A recent open-access study of learning and decision-making in mice shows that the human mind is merely what the human brain does. That's a lot for mice to prove."
In this research, the mice were trained to choose holes where food is placed. The activity of mice's brains was gauged as they learned and decided which holes were best.
Furthermore, the study looked particularly at "quick and intuitive decision-making" against slower decision-making. It also involved an evaluation of the situation.
In this research, it was discovered that analysis-based decisions in the mice encompassed brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain's region in the fissure between the hemispheres.
Link Between Mind and Brain
From the perspective of understanding the link between mind and brain, this research is said to be unremarkable. Undoubtedly, that perception usually engages activity of the brain of some sort.
Meanwhile, dualists, those who think that the mind of a human is using the brain but is not the same as it, and materialists, who think that the mind is simply what the brain is doing, do not have any disagreement here.
In this research is a detailed correlation of activity of the brain in mice may be nice to know. However, Novella is taking his so-called unremarkable study and drawing what Mind Matters News described as an "absurd conclusion."
Such a conclusion specifies that Novella feels obliged to emphasize that research like this totally destroys the idea of 'dualism,' that mental function exists, one way or another, outside of or independent from the brain's biological function.
The 'Neuroscience Hypothesis'
So far, the materialist neurologist explained, the 'neuroscience' hypothesis, "that mental function is brain function is working quite well."
The brain, Novella, continued explaining, is a multifaceted biological computer, and they could discover how it works by investigating it.
He also concluded that even the most sophisticated cognitive processes like analytical decision-making, for one, are evidently occurring in the brain.
Moreover, aside from having zero-evidence for what the study describes as a dualist hypothesis, it is entirely unimportant, which is "a fate in science even worse than being wrong."
Attempt to Sell Materialist Ideology for Over a Decade
Novella has been attempting to sell his materialist ideology in the appearance of neuroscience for over 10 years now.
This study is just the most recent in a series of his unusual claims, which includes his claim in 2008 that the "materialist hypothesis, the brain causes consciousness," has made numerous predictions, and every single forecast has been verified.
That is an ideal example of the Dunning-Kruger effect where individuals overestimate their expertise in an occurrence they do not understand. Specifically, in neuroscience, materialist ideology is the answer, only if one does not understand the question.
Novella's claim that the research of brain activity, particularly in trained mice, totally destroys any idea of dualism is said to be hopelessly nonsense.
As how materialist ideology is described, Novella is getting the answers wrong as he does not understand the questions.
More so, to Roger Scruton, a paraphrase philosopher, the materialist neuroscience of Novella is an extensive collection of answers without memory of the questions.
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