Responses to "The Philosophising Brain"

Dr Eamonn Walsh, Reader in Neuroscience Education

I read with interest, Prof Zucca's, Prof Turkheimer's and Dr Noam Goldway’s thoughts on philosophising. I trained as a psychologist, so I’d like to offer the following perspective. For most of history, questions about mind, behaviour, knowledge, perception, and emotion were explored mainly by philosophers. Psychology then grew out of philosophy and became a separate scientific discipline only in the late 19th century. Philosophers asked what a person is, how we think, why we act, and what it means to have consciousness. All of these are now psychological questions. These questions were based on even earlier attempts to explain the mind and behaviour through spiritual or religious frameworks. Over time, the explanations have changed, but not the questions. The curiosity about what it means to be human has remained constant across different disciplines and across time.

I was captured by Lorenzo’s interesting thought experiment which was to imagine what life would be like on a distant planet. This reminds me of an experiment by Thomas Ward (1994), a US psychologist, who challenged his student participants to imagine and draw creatures from another planet. He found that even though participants were told to be as creative and unconstrained as possible, most of the alien drawings ended up with very Earth-like animal features. They were bilaterally symmetrical, and typically had sensory organs, and limbs. Ward concluded that human imagination is ‘structured’ and constrained, and that when imagining something totally alien or unfamiliar, people tend to rely on what they already know.

Here’s a thought experiment I’d like to share, which links linguistic creativity with imaginative creativity. If the 26 letters of the English alphabet can be combined in infinite ways to produce new words, limited only by our willingness to extend word length, then, by analogy, it should be possible to imagine life forms whose shapes are not confined to our familiar cognitive categories. Just as letters act as building blocks for language, the features we know (limbs, symmetry, sense organs) are only one small set of “building blocks” among countless possibilities. In principle, these elements could be recombined, altered, or replaced in infinite ways, producing forms of life that go far beyond anything currently imaginable. The fact that we seldom imagine such creatures reflects not the boundaries of our imaginations, but rather the boundaries of our experience.

Reference:

Ward, T. B. (1994). Structured imagination: The role of category structure in exemplar generation. Cognitive psychology, 27(1), 1-40.

Dr Gabriele Salciute Civiliene, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities

In response to Noam and Federico, I would like to expand on some ideas around language and cultural dimensions in philosophising. No doubt, language has grown to be closely and instrumentally associated with philosophy. It shapes and advances our thoughts even though we do not necessarily need words or images to experience thought, which some call unsymbolised thinking. Yet to some extent, language is deterministic in a phenomenological sense, as reflected in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s idea that we are in the world by being in the language. It opens but also closes the doors to our thinking.

There is this wonderful podcast on multilingual philosophy by Jonathan Egid, who delves into different linguistic traditions of philosophical thought. Being born into several languages myself, I’ve always been wondering what it is like to speak a “time-fluid” language like Japanese, which does not make a grammatical difference between the future and the present tenses – one tense for both. Or what is it like to grow surrounded by the sound of a “genderless” language like Estonian that does not formally distinguish between “he” and “she”? Erich Fromm ponders two modes of existence – having and being – where time is perceived as either a commodity or something outside our possession. We live by those values encoded in our linguistic expressions, such as “I have time” or “You wasted my time”. The Amondawa, the Amazonian tribe, would fit the being mode in Fromm’s sense. They do not quantify time, nor do they have time words for months or age or the abstract notion of time in which events would occur. This does not mean that Estonians do not have the concept of biological sex or that the Amondawa people do not have the cognitive capacity to observe the passage of time. These cases rather illustrate how cultures encode their attention to different values through the use of language.

For me, the fascinating part is that both reasoning as a cognitive activity and the use of language can be therapeutic. Ancient thinkers treated philosophy as a wellbeing activity where emotion was integral to reasoning. The etymology of the word “philosophy” speaks to that – it signifies “love of wisdom”. Eudaimonia, the concept found in Aristotle’s work, means “happiness”. Philosophising puts us into a certain condition in which we pause to slow down the time and to zero in on a looming question at hand. It's empowering to be able to seize and be in the moment for as long as we can make it last by the virtue of thought. I wonder if we could trace this extended and continuous thought on the electrophysiological level.

Language, or "languaging", can also be cathartic. Poetry helps us break away from the inauthentic and incapacitating patterns of thinking and speaking, as when Rainer Maria Rilke set out to translate the female poet Louise Labé to overcome his writer’s fatigue. Yet this therapeutic function of philosophising often gets obscured in its overtly institutionalised and disciplined contexts.

Dr Ahmad Al Khleifat, Senior Research Fellow

Modern civilisation has mistaken convenience for permanence. We have confused technological complexity with stability, and digital abundance with durability. This confusion has left us blind to a basic fact: most of what we rely on exists only under exceptionally fragile conditions.

If we strip away our reassuring narratives, the pattern is unmistakable: civilisations collapse, populations endure, and the only knowledge that survives the transition is the kind embedded in culture, not the kind stored in institutions.

This matters more now than at any time in recent memory.
We have built a society that treats knowledge as if it were indefinitely preserved by technological momentum, as if the continuity of servers, grids, supply chains, and specialised institutions were guaranteed. It is not. History gives us no reason to believe these structures are stable.

This exposes a basic truth we systematically avoid:

Knowledge must be lived, not stored.
Embedded in culture, not trapped in servers.
Woven into philosophy, art, story, and daily rhythms.

We assume that scientific and technical expertise will persist simply because we need it. But high-end knowledge production depends on a tiny fraction of the population, supported by complex institutional and economic conditions. When those conditions fail, the expertise evaporates almost immediately. What remains is whatever has been internalised by the broader population.

Human intelligence is widely distributed; specialised knowledge is not.
That asymmetry shapes what survives.

What we dismiss as “soft”, myth, story, ritual, the humanities, outlasts what we call “advanced” because it does not rely on infrastructure. These domains encode patterns of reasoning, moral frameworks, cosmologies, models of causality. They do not preserve technical detail, but they preserve the cognitive scaffolding through which it becomes possible to recover detail later.

Humanities are how civilisations remember themselves.
Science is how civilisations understand the world.
Only together do civilisations survive.

Ancient societies recognised the fragility of external memory. Instead of relying solely on texts or monuments, they embedded knowledge directly into behaviour and identity. What we call myth is often a compressed survival algorithm; what we call ritual is a method of transmission robust to illiteracy and collapse.

Before we had stone tablets, knowledge lived in behaviour.
Before we had artificial intelligence, it lived in stories.
Before we had digital storage, it lived in identity.

Different civilisations converged on this structure not by coincidence but by necessity.
Culture acts as a distributed system of encoded information, partly noise, partly signal, partly fossilised insight, preserved even when its original justification is forgotten.

This is where the contemporary moment reveals its own blind spot. Our dependence on digital storage and complex machines creates the illusion of permanence precisely where fragility is greatest. A society that externalises all memory prepares itself, unintentionally, for forgetting.

A civilisation lasting 10,000 years cannot depend on GPUs, grids, rare metals, or global supply chains.
AI, in its current form, cannot survive deep time.
The underlying concepts, learning, abstraction, pattern-recognition, can, but only if they become cultural rather than mechanical.

The lesson is not nostalgic. It is structural:

Knowledge that lasts must be stronger than the systems that hold it.
It must live in materials, in stories, and in people.

If we fail to embed essential knowledge in the population itself, not only in institutions, we will follow the same historical cycle we claim to have transcended: invention, flourishing, collapse, forgetting, and reconstruction.

And the most revealing part is this: the danger is not collapse itself.
The real danger is our current confidence that collapse cannot happen,
a confidence that has never been justified by history.