Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience

by Gregg D. Caruso (Editor), Owen J. Flanagan (Editor)

Existentialisms arise when the foundations of being, such as meaning, morals, and purpose come under assault. In the first-wave of existentialism, writings typified by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche concerned the increasingly apparent inability of religion, and religious tradition, to support a foundation of being. Second-wave existentialism, personified philosophically by Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir, developed in response to similar realizations about the overly optimistic Enlightenment vision of reason and the common good.

The third-wave of existentialism, a new existentialism, developed in response to advances in the neurosciences that threaten the last vestiges of an immaterial soul or self. Given the increasing explanatory and therapeutic power of neuroscience, the mind no longer stands apart from the world to serve as a foundation of meaning. This produces foundational anxiety.

In Neuroexistentialism , a group of contributors that includes some of the world's leading philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and legal scholars, explores the anxiety caused by third-wave existentialism and possible responses to it. Together, these essays tackle our neuroexistentialist predicament, and explore what the mind sciences can tell us about morality, love, emotion, autonomy, consciousness, selfhood, free will, moral responsibility, law, the nature of criminal punishment, meaning in life, and purpose.

Genres: Philosophy, Neuroscience, Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Biology

388 pages, Hardcover

Published March 8, 2018

Reviews

[Erno Berezvay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating overall insight into the topic with greatly written chapters. Obviously chapter quality fluctuate as each is written by different author(s). It was interesting to read contrasting views on the same topic; seeing both sides of the coin.

I can only recommend this book to everyone who is genuinely interested in human behavior/ social related sciences.

[Roo Phillips · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compilation of research papers, not a textbook, but not a typical non-fiction book either. I will quote from the book directly on the definition:

"Neuroexistentialism is twenty-first-century anxiety over the way contemporary neuroscience helps secure in a particularly vivid way the message of Darwin from 150 years ago, that humans are animals—not half animal, not some percentage animal, not just above the animals, but 100 percent animal"

What I like about this collection of papers is that they span the spectrum of views regarding deterministic consciousness. That is, even though we are animals, there is much disagreement over what agency and consciousness means within that paradigm. The two factors that the researchers touch on the most are moral and legal implications. Questions that are considered include ones like:
Are we responsible for our actions if we don't have free will?
What is free will? Are there different levels of free will within in a deterministic world?
How should we deal with people who break the law?

The book was fascinating. Some papers were too dense but some were very readable and thought provoking. If you are interested in the latest debates regarding morality, law, free will, or consciousness, and in particular as they relate to neuroscience, then you might enjoy this book.

[GG · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice aggregation of chapters on the link between neuroscience and existential philosophy written by different authors—I think it's more worthwhile to get a deeper look into what each says by looking at the sources as there are a lot of smaller details in them that weren't included in this book. I'll definitely have to reread some of the more philosophy-heavy chapters with the book mainly reading like a philosophy book while incorporating some neuroscience studies.

[Daniel Solomon · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book provides a sense of the latest naturalist and analytic philosophy thinking about the interactions between cognitive/neuro science and how we conceive free will, the validity of moral rules and the meaning of life. It's a collection of research papers, which means it's lacking a clear underlying thesis or philosophy unfortunately. And some papers were better than others.

Essentially the role of neuroscience is not that different from naturalism in general: There's a sense that everything ultimately has a natural/physical explanation, which causes some people to get 'existential' anxiety about their ability to have free choices, to define authentic life choices (define authentic self when most of your thinking is unconscious and bound to be influenced by society, and everything else is determined by innate human nature/genes). I guess I had a hard time connecting to some of the articles, because (like many others as pointed out in one of the papers here) I'm light on theoretical commitments regarding the meaning of free will/choice. I don't see what's wrong with identifying your mind with your brain (plus embodied nervous system) and thinking of free will as the ability of your brain to choose among several options conditional on the external situation surrounding it. Of course, there's a sense in which those choices are predetermined relative to the structure of your brain/mind (despite some attempts by some writers in this volume to get around this via e.g quantum indeterminacy, and a riposte by a physicist in this volume that quantum indeterminacy is basically orthgonal to the question of free will of the mind/brain). I guess, I'm a compatibilist in the lingo of this volume, and I don't see any problem with accepting as my choices whatever my brain chooses given the external environment. There were also interesting discussions about ethics and punishment in light of neuroscience. As several authors pointed out, there's enough reasons to maintan a justice system with punishment as deterrent or confinement of socially dangerous individuals to allow us to drop any idea of inherent guilt or badness deserving punishment at a fundamental level (beyond just that being part of culture/social codes).

There was also some good analysis of how morality evolves from both evolution (similar to Dawkins Selfish gene thesis and the related kin selection theory) and from social learning combined with human brain wiring favouring social belonging and social imitation. So accepting neural naturalism does not destroy morality and does not invalidate the desirability of a justice system with penal codes (though strongly favouring more humane punishments and avoidance of punishment for its own sake).

Overall, a decent exposure to state of the art debates on human agency, sense of meaning in life and morality in light of neuroscience research. But some chapters were less relevant and easy to skip.

[Michael]

I'm glad I read this and it has a lot of interesting stuff, but will not use again. I used it for a class called, Neuroexistentialism, along with Iain McGilchrist. There are a couple really good chapters in this volume, the one by Jesse Prinz and the one by Caruso comes to mind. But it needed more existentialism and less neuro.

[Bart McIlduff · Rating 3 out of 5]

A jumping off point to an ongoing and bottomless field.

[Hannah Spadafora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well thought out and comprehensive, though also dense and a decent portion of included essays (though not all) not immune to to philosophers dry writing. Also, for all the rich, detailed position debates within, the last essay kinda just negates everything asserted elsewhere (interesting note to end on, after all that...) Somewhere between 4 and 5 stars. Literally so thick to slog through, I started this at the end of 2018 and have just been reading a few chapters every year since then. Definitely one of the more slog-through books I've intentionally picked up since graduating from Philosophy years ago-- not because it's not good or fascinating (it's both), but because not torturing myself with unfriendly works has been a nice reprieve from some of the program's curriculum (even though sometimes I do miss the challenge, and thus find myself here, feeling a bit accomplished to finally have set aside time to kill the last of this book) (but also like now I might switch over to a nice novel that doesn't require any mental gymnastics).