Modular Brain, Entangled Argument.

Abstract

There are many dichotomies that attend debates on understanding the brain, and it is often hard to keep them clear in one's head to see what is really at stake conceptually. In The Entangled Brain, we get several such dichotomies: reductionism versus emergence, network versus region, heterarchy versus hierarchy, interactivity versus decomposability, and entangled versus modular. Apart from the inherent difficulty of studying and understanding the most complex organ in the body, another reason why one can struggle with these dichotomies is that there is often ideological intent lurking when they are raised. What I mean by ideological here is those ideas that go beyond the local epistemic work they are putatively doing to serve a broader agenda. The late philosopher Jacques Derrida used his deconstructive approach to show that often when binary oppositions are introduced, one of the terms is tacitly assumed to be a priori better or correct [Derrida, J., Of grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967].