this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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Philosophy
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I feel like research neuropsychology is a better option personally. Understanding human decisionmaking is the crux of making sense of the world, and the physical structures of the brain are where that originates. Trying to make sense of its outputs without diving into the nuts and bolts (or neurons and axons I suppose) of the machine itself is always going to be very challenging. It's still a very young field, so there's not always that much there yet, but that just means a lot of work is available to be done.
Not that philosophy doesn't have its own merits in other ways.
I think you're just getting into the mind body problem. The main problem with just focusing on the mind, is that it's makeup and thus its outputs are very dependent on the body and the environment the body inhabits.
The way we tend to delineate the mind from the body is mainly the byproduct of "science" that has fallen by the way side. The more we discover about the mind, the more we discover that there is no natural delineation from the body.
For example a lot of physical reactions happen solely between the peripheral and the spine, never including the brain. We have neurons and axons separate from the cns located through the body that can interact with microbes. We've known for quite a while that if you sustain a mobility affecting injury, that the physical structure of your brain will eventually change in response.
Unfortunately a lot of how we study the brain independently from the body was influenced by people like frued, who set up a whole education system that tries to delineate mind from body.
Yeah, that's a good point. You certainly cannot limit your study of the nervous system to exclusively the brain.