The Future of Cognitive Science and the Problem of Experience

Abstract

Since the early 1990s a respectable interdisciplinary study of cognition and mind called cognitive science underwent a series of radical transformations. Perhaps the most dramatic one is concerned with the growing role of neuroscience with its recently announced large-scale ambitious proposals to map and simulate the activity of the whole human brain. Nevertheless it is not clear what such neuroscientific shift might entail both for the eternal questions about cognition and mind and for the cognitive movement itself. The primary aim of the article is to examine the most radical prediction about the role of neuroscience in the future cognitive studies, according to which it may eventually replace any higher-level “soft” approaches to mind and cognition. It will be shown that this scenario is implausible and unpersuasive, because though psychology needs to be grounded in neuroscientific theories and taxonomies, it is actually in no danger of elimination by those lower-level theories and approaches. Moreover, it will be noted that any reductive strategy toward mind and cognition evidently confronts a far more serious challenge of providing a satisfactory explanation for the old and treacherous puzzle of conscious experience. Finally, we will briefly outline two examples of a contemporary non-reductive informational perspective on consciousness and conclude that so as to provide a successful explanation for the whole range of mental information processing phenomena they will need further refinements and specifications.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s2p74