The Existential Synapse: Reductionism, Heidegger and Neurophysiology

Abstract

One interpretation of recent discoveries in the microphysiology of our nervous and hormonal systems is that they give ever stronger and more detailed support for reductionist explanations of psychological functioning - that is, that they have progressively filled out and substantiated the picture that human functioning is rooted in the straightforwardly causal processes of molecular chemistry and physics. But it can be argued that an alternative interpretation fits the facts better - that the functioning of molecules in our nervous and endocrine systems only makes sense when taken in the context of the existential, language-culture-meaning-rooted framework within which we live: as Heidegger put it, that ‘everything we call our bodiliness, down to the last muscle fibre and down to the most hidden molecule of hormones, belongs essentially to existing’. Recent work on the laying down of long-term memory invites a critical comparison of these diametrically (and philosophically) opposed interpretations.