Can neuroscience dismiss the concept of personhood: competing philosophies of science as a source of neuroethical tensions
Creators: name: Larrivee, Denis
name: Gini, Adriana
Publisher: name: F1000Research
Year: 2015

description: The concept of the human person, originally derived on theological premises, constitutes a pillar grounding jurisprudence, medical care, and social theory. Progress in neuroscience, however, now significantly impacts our understanding of personhood, eroding the definitional integrity on which these disciplines traditionally premised their ethical norms. Interpretations of neuroscientific theory, which undergird such definitions, themselves depend upon the philosophical approach used to analyze data, with differing approaches yielding different conclusions. In this poster we explore the manner in which competing philosophies of science generate conflicting interpretive postures with regard to the human person. Neuroreductionism, the notion that brain operation is driven by the properties of its neuronal elements, constitutes the dominant philosophical approach used by neuroscience. This approach is encapsulated in the neuron doctrine, given prominence through the neuroanatomical work of Ramon de Cajal, its foremost proponent. Colloquially expressed as an example of bottom up causation – understood to mean that  the operation of the system is dictated by the properties of its individual constituents – neuroreductionism is representative of a perspective that has dominated much of scientific thinking throughout the century. Increasingly, however, the notion that large scale systems constrain the operation of their elemental constituents, referred to as top down causation, has gained sway. According to this view, the nervous system as a whole dictates the function of individual neurons and nerve circuits. The respective philosophies of science underwriting each of these approaches has spawned numerous ethical quandaries. Neuroreductionism characterizes human behavior as derivative, the result of activity in circuit assemblies that are themselves composed of discrete subsets of neurons. Human behavior is thus fragmented into numerous features, whose source can be traced to discrete neuronal assemblies. The resulting division raises numerous neuroethical issues including the division of the nature of self, personal identity, and responsibility. By contrast, systems views generally attribute human behavior to the organism, or to its nervous system, nature’s most complex structure. Systems views however, also underpin broader conceptual entities, or supranetworks, that are the focus of ethical models such as roboethics, ethical parity, and extended mind theory. These theories expand notions of self, identity, and responsibility beyond the organism boundary. The opposition between interpretations yielded by these approaches has resulted in conflicting values and neuroethical conclusions. Neuroreductive approaches tend toward loss of self and value neutrality, whereas system views make ambiguous the sense of self and generate distributed ethical responsibility. We propose that conflicts between these approaches may be resolved through recourse to a concept of the human person that is grounded in a form substance approach in which his rational nature is conceived as  an embodied and evolutionarily dictated form.