Changeux think today perform this promise

Jean-Michel Besnier is Professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. He is particularly interested in the philosophy of science and has published, on the threshold, "The crossroads of science". Among the topics covered, it is on the debate between centuries those who continue to distinguish the spirit of the brain and those who argue that they are one, that is, the spirit is matter. This last line, by advances in molecular biology and imaging has the wind in its sails. Jean-Pierre Changeux, author of "The man" neuronal in 1983, Professor at the Pasteur Institute and College of France, is the flagship.

When there is interest in the brain, the question of the relationship between the body and the mind arises with particular acuity. Have we, today, another choice than to follow Jean-Pierre Changeux in his enthusiastic invitation to "put an end to the spirit"

The temptation is strong, as Jean-Pierre Changeux seems to inherit virtually inexhaustible philosophical traditions. "Organic" design the spirit which is the latest incarnation today delivers a power of the development of genetics and brain imaging. But this current is rooted in the enlightenment. From the first half of the 18th century, the philosopher and physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie said not that "the soul is a principle of motion or sensitive material part of the brain" Subsequently, a materialist euphoria captures the encyclopédistes. In the 19th century, this line continues with Franz Joseph Gall, whose "Phrenology", discipline that he founded, locates in the brain 27 "moral and intellectual faculties. Freud himself was first thought to identify the biological basis of neuroses. Changeux think today perform this promise.

This philosophical current consensus

Of course not. It sparked resistance among many philosophers including Henri Bergson, which, in the early 20th century, attempts to stem the rise of scientism. "Consciousness is undeniably clinging to a brain, he wrote, but it is not there (...)". that awareness is a function of the brain. "For him, the brain prepares the mental act, does the product not but the experience of consciousness shows how much the mental spirit more than the brain.

Today, who are the heirs of Bergson

They are called "dualist". Include among them the Nobel Prize for medicine John Eccles, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield or Dominique Laplane Neuropsychologist. They have in common to consider the relationship between the mental and neuronal in terms of emergence. For them, thinking "emerges" a mechanical organization that does not contain. But the positions of the dualists are precarious philosophically because they demonstrate nothing. Only, perhaps, our great ignorance in neurobiology preserves yet.

Is it not paradoxical at a time that exalts the individualism and freedom, to support that thought and matter are the same thing, which is the height of determinism

It may be that we don't like freedom and that it, and that individualism we problem. To our malaise, any science highlights of historic for example, that exercise our genes or the State of our neurons on our behavior seems reassuring. It satisfies our need for certainty: we are all facts of the same cloth and nothing is inexplicable in us. Reducing the indeterminacy, science is otherwise Dodge any freedom, understood as opening random things and relations to others. The reduction of thought to the chemistry of the brain is perhaps emblematic of this intolerance of the science of freedom. This is obviously not a reason to oppose them, but an invitation to look closely at the extent of their explanatory claims.

In addition, if thought and material blend, then nothing we separating most animals, except a slight degree of extra sophistication. That what is prohibited while treated us as laboratory animals

It is indeed the risk posed by the theses that suppress the spirit or, at least, the reduce biological infrastructure. In "naturalising" human, him losing the privilege which was attached to the humanism. In fact, it helps dispel the boundaries between man, animal and the machine. The ethical problems posed by the development of contemporary science and technology are precisely in the temptation to regard human as something to satisfy the fantasies of those who would we manipulating, transforming us and "improving our performance", let us escape to the human condition. Ideologies that develop nanotechnology counterpoint bear witness to this pernicious trend.