The brain as a hermeneutic device
pp. 183-198
in: Olga Kiss (ed), Hermeneutics and science, Berlin, Springer, 1999Abstract
One way of eliminating, at least partially, the mystery of the brain has been the application of metaphors (as suggested by Arbib's (1989) book entitled The Metaphorical Brain). First, technical devices, like telegraph circuits, holograms and of course computers, have been offered as metaphors and/or models of the brain. Second and third, theoretical notions of physics and of information theory (understood in a rather broad sense) served as analogies for characterizing neural functioning. Though the technical brain, the physical brain and the computational brain (Churchland and Sejnowski 1992) were powerful concepts, still they could not add much to the age-old philosophical questions of the brainmind problem. The philosophical brain has been approached by a variety of theories, each finally labeled as either monist or dualist, but none of them proved capable of meeting the strict criteria which the neurosciences seem to offer.