Abstract
Guided by key insigths of the four great philosophers mentioned in the title, here, in review of and expanding on our earlier work (Burchard, 2005, 2011), we present an exposition of the role played by language, & in the broader sense, λογοζ, the Logos, in how the CNS, the brain, is running the human being. Evolution by neural Darwinism has been forcing the linguistic nature of mind, enabling it to overcome & exploit the cognitive gap between an animal and its world by recognizing environmental structures. Our work was greatly influenced by Heidegger’s lecture notes on metaphysics (Heidegger, 1935). We found agreement with recent progress in neuroscience, but also mathematical foundations of language theory, equating Logos with the mathematical concept of structure. The mystery of perception across the gap is analyzed as radiation and molecules impinging on sensory neurons that carry linguistic information about gross environmental structures, and only remotely about the physical reality of elementary particles. The most important logical brain function is Ego or Self, guiding the workings of the brain as a logos machine. Ego or Self operates from neurons in frontopolar cortex with global receptive fields. The logos machine can function only by availing itself of global context, its internally stored noumenal cosmos NK, and the categorical-conceptual apparatus CCA, updated continually through the neural default mode network (Raichle, 2005). In the Transcendental Deduction, Immanuel Kant discovered that Ego or Self is responsible for conscious control in perception relying on concepts & categories for a fitting percept to be incorporated intoNK. The entire CNS runs as a “movie-in-the-brain” (Parvizi & Damasio, 2001), at peak speed processing simultaneously in a series of cortical centers a stack of up to twelve frames in gamma rhythm of 25 ms intervals. We equate global context, or NK, with our human world, Heidegger’s Dasein being-in-the-world, and are able to demonstrate that the great philosopher in EM parallels neuro-science concerning the human mind.
Highlights
Philosophy Meets ScienceProgress in science adds to philosophy always, the famous case of the Copernican revolution in astronomy serving as the opening chapter of the Modern Era, followed through by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton
We may envision the cognitive gap as a channel of yet unknown formation and nature, but to be fully explored and its Darwinian design revealed in this essay, the subsequent sections, connecting the individual human’s self with the universe, information flowing across the gap to the biological organism, with Ego or Self relying on its own inner world, which we like to refer to as our noumenal cosmos, the private version of our common universe, a model world providing for the global context required in each application of Ego’s conceptualcategorical apparatus when forming judgments about events in the environment
Our human world—as experienced—is a production of the CNS, directed by neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which are distinguished by having global receptive fields, and are responsible to ensure through conscious control of perception, that the jointwork of the noumenal cosmos is preserved in good order
Summary
Progress in science adds to philosophy always, the famous case of the Copernican revolution in astronomy serving as the opening chapter of the Modern Era, followed through by Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Progress in philosophy can be expected and achieved through a more perfect linkage with science, what neuroscience has to say about traditional philosophical themes, constructs and theories Today this appears to be proceeding a-pace, and we are beginning to sense a form of a new universal science, a science of philosophy. They provide us with intellectual access to the global context on which we depend for each of us to build our NK adequately, i.e., in a functional completeness that we require in order to conduct our affairs Their commonality of insight is well illustrated in their four motto quotes placed above the present text and opening this work serving as four pillars in support of the entrance to the temple of philosophy and thereby of the whole edifice of human science. There is much overlap in this present essay and in our related earlier work, showing how much we depend on Heidegger’s insights, esp. from EM
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