317 | Nicole Rust on Why Neuroscience Hasn't Solved Brain Disorders

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Back when I was writing The Big Picture, the book, one of the motivations there was to provide kind of an apologia for naturalism. An apologia not being you say you're sorry, you apologize. It's it's when you defend a position. Okay? Mostly coming from theology. Apologetics in theology is you're trying to defend the existence of God. So I was doing the opposite, or at least the flip side, defending the absence of God, defending the idea that even though we don't know everything about how the universe works, given what we do know, there's overwhelming reason to believe that when we finally know everything, it will all fit in happily to a naturalistic framework where you don't need supernatural things, you don't need God, anything like that. You don't need a spark of life to make life go. You don't need an immaterial soul to make consciousness go and so forth. And it's always going to be a tricky thing to make a case like that because you're admitting that you don't know the final answers, so you can't say here is the final answer. You're making a claim that it is probable or you should have the most credence that when the future final answer comes will take a certain form. And to do that, you have to face up to some of the issues. And of course, the bridge from the brain to the mind is one of the biggest issues that you have to face up to. You can see why there's plenty of people, philosophers and other people who will want to accept the idea that the mere physical motion of stuff that makes up the brain is not enough to account for consciousness or feelings or whatever it is that you have your focus at your attention focused on when you're thinking about the brain. After all, there just seems like a gap, as they like to say, between a description of, oh, there's this neuron, it's firing versus saying, oh, there is the experience of being in love or something like that. So the naturalist has to say, sure, we don't understand it yet, but trust us, we will get there. And it is fair for the non naturalist to say, you know, show me the money, show me some advances in how we have understood things. And it is also fair for the naturalist to provide that. There's plenty of ways in which we see things going on in the brain, in the biochemistry that show up in the higher level version of the mind that we like to talk about in our thinking, in our consciousness, and so forth. We've talked about this a few times down the years and consciousness, and so forth. We've talked about this a few times down the years and even, very recently with people like Christophe Koch. So, nevertheless, when you …