Elena Antonova, PhD, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London.
Experimental psychology of behaviourist era was explicitly non-ontological. Cognitive psychology that based its explorations of the ‘black box’ was unconcerned with the question of mind/brain relationship and simply proceeded with understanding the mind as a dynamic of different cognitive processes in functionalist terms. With the advent of neuroimaging techniques, particularly of functional Magnetic Resonance imaging, allowing to peer directly inside the ‘black box’, experimental psychology and neuroscience proceeded from a tentative search of ‘neural correlates’ of this or that cognitive function or this or that affective response or social process to a definitive dominance of the language of ‘neural substrates’ or ‘neural basis’ of cognition and consciousness. Reductive materialism has become an unquestioned ontology of the mainstream neuroscience and thus dawned the era of ‘neuralism’. This talk and subsequent discussion will explore whether contemplative neuroscience has to blindly follow the mainstream or whether it should, could, or even must proceed in an ontology-free way in line with radical interpretation of Varela’s neurophenomenology.
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