Neural Correlate - Conceptual Frameworks Using The Notion

Conceptual Frameworks Using The Notion

The notion of a neural correlate of a mental state is an important concept for materialists, those philosophers and researchers who believe that all mental states are equivalent to brain states. According to strict materialists, all properties credited to the mind, including consciousness, emotion, beliefs, and desires have direct neural correlates. This is also a pragmatic view adopted by a number of scholars. This view frequently depends on considering minds exclusively as sentient knots in nature's causal net.

Instead, other neuroscientists find minds inaugurating causal actions in nature, rather than solely being able of merely continuing previously initiated causal sequences. These neuroscientists thus describe minds as percipient agencies, the mind's very agency or causal aptitude being deemed extraneous to any neural correlate.

Still, some neurobiologists consider reasons to further assume that rememberings are not engraved in brain tissue but retained by the very mind, which thereby transforms itself in a way different from the time changes underwent by non-minds. These later neuroscientists consider that there is no neural correlate for episodal and some other memories, but that the mind moves the brain state (like as it may also inaugurate a finger movement) in such a way as to produce a brain state which the mind then reacts to by fleshing its selected memory again (Husserl's Einfüllung), re-imagining it. This view develops a notion by Aristotle and, again, makes no use of the notion of neural correlate for certain experiences, namely in regard to complex mental contents. It only admits neural correlates for the mind's elementary sensational reactions, which are called "intonations" (following neurobiologist Christfried Jakob, 1866-1956).

The concept of a neural correlate only encompassing the production of intonations occurs in a variety of researchers on different neurobiological traditions, including Scholasticism (see References). Rather, the concept of a neural correlate encompassing the production of every mental content occurs only in a specific conceptual line of theoretical neuroscience, characterized by the following features:

• Minds are sometimes viewed as incapable of positing causal acts upon self-initiated, internal modifications. This posits observers in nature as epiphenomenal, unable to introduce perturbations, even less to absolutely inaugurate causal series.

• Mental contents are considered stand-alone realities, similar to any other physical reality as apples, rocks, or molecules. Such a line of opinion does not admit a difference in level between non-mental things and mental contents, namely that while things as apples and rocks do not belong with any other natural reality and thus are capable of standing alone, mental contents rather belong with a particular mind or, as sometimes called, a particular existentiality: e.g., this red is in Jane's experience whereas that red (which might be sensationally identical to Jane's) is John's experience and not Jane's at all. This distinctive feature of the contents of experience is dismissed (see Szirko's article cited in References), so that the physical condition of mental contents is deemed identical to the stand-alone condition of apples and rocks.

• The relationship of a mind with the body in which it finds itself is platonistically portrayed, so that any a mind might have found itself in any a brain-body system, like as a steerman may find himself in any ship that he chances to steer. Therefore this line of theoretical neuroscience does not admit that every mind and its particular body could intrinsically make a unity besides and apart from their causal interactions, which interactions, inasmuch as the mind is also deemed epiphenomenal, reduce to bodily influences upon the mind's experiences or states.

• As a consequence, the connections of a mind and the body in which it finds itself are deemed to exclusively be of causal-efficient nature, similar to the energy supplied for a domestic appliance to function. This view entails that minds are no more than the mental contents which may be causally generated in them by their respective brains. Sentience (minds' intonability), semovience (minds' capability of inaugurating efficient causal actions on internal forces) and circumstantiation (every mind's finding itself in not another body) are thus viewed as highly problematic and their research is usually relegated.

In the conceptual line characterized by these four features, and in recent years, papers have been published on the neural correlates of awareness, emotions, and decision making. Francis Crick wrote a popular book "The Astonishing Hypothesis" whose thesis is that the neural correlate for consciousness lies in our nerve cells and their associated molecules. Crick and his collaborator Christof Koch have sought to avoid philosophical debates that are associated with the study of consciousness, by emphasizing the search for "correlation" and not "causation".

There is much room for disagreement about the nature of this correlation (e.g., does it require synchronous spikes of neurons in different regions of the brain? Is the co-activation of frontal or parietal areas necessary?). The philosopher David Chalmers maintains that a neural correlate of consciousness, unlike other correlates such as for memory, will fail to offer a satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon.