Why Decode Brains?

The question is worth considering. Carefully.

I’m currently reading a book that has compelled again a line of thinking that makes me feel like a sheep among wolves. I can’t reveal to others so loosely in a casual thought exchange among my peers—that is unless I’m prepared to be torn apart by them.

We are always one google search away from finding out how talented humans are in their life missions, and the great lengths they go to in order to accomplish such missions: engineering prosthetics, simulating neurons, designing models to predict recoveries from stroke. This work is testable, measurable, practical and inspiring. Yet behind every line of code and every electrode placed lies a question we rarely name aloud: why bother decoding the brain at all?

Is it because better therapeutic procedures with a clinical psychologist ought to follow? Because human suffering ought to be reduced? That much is obvious—what’s the whole story, though?

The brain, in my limited view, is not just another system to optimize. It is the seat of every judgment, every desire, every conception of purpose. To pry into it is to pry into the very condition of meaning itself. And once you know that, the question shifts: what does it mean to live a life in light of this knowledge?

Students of life, at some point, are taught that no statement about what is can ever tell us what we ought to do.

However, consider what that separation requires to ignore. It means overlooking the fact that every ethical intuition, every act of reasoning, every grand pronouncement about how we should live, emerges from a physical brain shaped by millions of years of evolution. To claim that “oughts” float free from “is’s” is to suggest that morality is untethered from the very organ that generates the experience of value in the first place.

The Thinker: Mind Over Might

The tension first struck, not in the work of Hume, but in a comic book. The Thinker was a villain who built a “Thinking Cap” to magnify his intelligence, only to be consumed by it. 'Let me remind you'—The Thinker says—'the weapon you are handling is capable of destroying entire cities if handeled correctly.' This villan is only a caricature, yes—but also a symbol. When we put on our own “Thinking Cap,” whether through science, engineering, or philosophy, what do we seek? Better gadgets, sharper tools, clever weapons? Or are we watching, however clumsily, for the very nature of mind?

Facts arm. Values aim.

Think of all the “oughts” we discard in the name of the living human organism once was David Hume: that we ought to reduce suffering, that we ought to foster well-being, that we ought to create the conditions under which minds can flourish. Each of these can be traced to how minds, embodied in brains, actually experience the world. Strip the biology away and what remains? Abstract reasoning hovering in the void, as if language itself could legislate values independent of the human organism speaking it.

This too is an illusion. The ability even to make the judgment—”is cannot imply ought”—required a nervous system capable of abstraction, a cortex refined enough to handle logic, language, and contradiction. In other words, biology produced the very faculty that insists biology is irrelevant. To separate psychology from ethics, or consciousness from conscience, is like a brain with signs of dementia—a system that has lost coherence, memory, and meaning, unable to fulfill any purpouse. Yet these are the very brains we hope to understand and cure in the name of neuroscience. This idea—that of strict separation—is, in my view, somewhat antiquated today.

Inside Donald Duck's mind.

If memory serves, I once suggested this line of thought before to an entire class of biopsychologists-in-training only to be shut down with glares of hungry wolves. “A description is not a prescription” is the old tenet. But, consider for a moment the oughts that lead us to the is's in the first place. If a person claimed with full sincerity that 2 + 2 = 5, and was planning to engage in scientific research with this claim, at what point would we begin to wonder if there was something wrong in his head? If we were charitable, what logic would we use to explain the value of logic? What oughts would suddenly compel us to impose the is's? What would you do, then, if he wanted to join a dedicated group of scientists resolved to decode the brain where, according to his better judgement, we could not apply any mathematics beyond the math depicted in Donald in Mathmagic Land? Notice what happens here: what oughts come to the rescue? Should we ought to care that the sum of two and two comes out the same way each time?

Why Decode Brains, Then?

Decoding the brain may yield practical gains: restored movement, better memory, new treatments for suffering. But beneath all that, it forces us to confront the fact that the line between is and ought may not be as scientifically or philosophically air tight as we were once taught. Because if nothing in this observable universe—not even the very organ that makes value possible—could tell us how we ought to live, then what exactly could?