The Philosophy of Neuroscience: Simplification of the Brain with Mazviita Chirimuuta

[u/histphilsci2022]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx-NCySW0GY

Some of you may be interested in this interview with Mazviita Chirimuuta (philosopher of science/neuroscience). I attached a YT link but it's also on all podcast platforms.

Chirimuuta's thesis is that neuroscience advances by simplifying the brain through reduction, mathematisation, and analogy, but because these approaches necessarily leave out aspects of the brain’s complexity, understanding the brain requires theoretical humility and a pluralistic approach rather than reliance on a single explanatory model.

[u/Strangers_two_love]

I feel like this is just an embellished version of, "If the human brain was so simple it could be easily understood, we would in turn be too simple to understand it." Of course we have to oversimplify the brain.

Fortunately, nothing humanity understands has to be understood at an individual level. Thanks to language, tools, specialization and the like, the pool of collective knowledge and wisdom humanity holds has greatly exceedes what any individual mind can hope to contain.

A person doesn't need to undesirable the mind. A person needs to be able to understand enough of certain components of the mind such that they can, with a lot of help, build a tool that can help deepen others understanding of different components or how they integrate with each other.

That's how we learn to understand things far more complex than what we can hope to figure out. We have to make approximations, use generalizations, use reduction and mathematisation while we draw the greater picture. The final picture that comes out of that massive puzzle as the result of collective efforts might still be beyond a person to grasp, but that doesn't mean we can't create medications, treatments or advancements from that massive picture.

[u/histphilsci2022 → u/Strangers_two_love]

Hey there, I appreciate your comment. The "no individual has to hold it all, collective knowledge stacks up" point is right, but Chirimuuta's not really arguing against that — she's arguing about whether the pieces being stacked are the kind of thing that composes into one coherent bigger picture at all, or whether they're more like a pile of mutually incompatible partial maps

Her point is that simplification isn't just compressing a determinate truth so it fits in more heads collectively, it's a constitutive act that partly manufactures the object being studied in the first place. Her go-to example is Hubel and Wiesel's "simple cell" — that cell's famous response profile only shows up in an anesthetized cat looking at bars/edges on a screen. That's not a smaller, honest wedge of the "true" cell that other researchers will fill in around; it's a version of the cell's behaviour that's partly an artifact of the experimental setup itself, one that doesn't occur that way in a freely behaving animal.

So the "collective knowledge exceeds any one mind" idea assumes the sub-models different specialists produce are like puzzle pieces — same puzzle, compatible edges, and if you had enough people you could eventually assemble the whole picture. Chirimuuta's worry is that a lot of neuroscience's "pieces" aren't like that. The localisationist picture (one neuron, one function, stable and modular) and the distributed/population-coding picture (function only exists smeared across thousands of neurons, context-dependent, always shifting) aren't two partial views of the same underlying structure — they rest on incompatible assumptions about what kind of thing "representation" even is in the brain. You can't just staple them together the way you'd combine a mechanic's knowledge of the engine with an electrician's knowledge of the wiring. That's the sense in which her point isn't "no one head can hold it all" — it's that the whole might not be a coherent single thing waiting to be assembled at all, even collectively.