Two Dogmas of Reductionism: On the Irreducibility of Self-Consciousness and the Impossibility of Neurophilosophy
Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts July 15, 2021 Joseph Thompson
Physicalism and neuroscience cannot provide a complete explanation of consciousness because they only address structure, function, and mechanism, not subjective first-person experience. Self-consciousness is embodied and embedded in contexts beyond brain activity. Contemporary antireductionist philosophers like Nagel and Chalmers, when pushed to their logical conclusions, arrive at positions that resemble the ontology and phenomenology of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. The reductionist neuroscientific agenda is incapable of completion for systematic reasons, and neurophilosophy cannot justify itself on its own terms.