Why the brain should be studied as a whole

Why the brain should be studied as a whole

Thus, the calculation process is not as formalized as it was formerly believed by many. Even in mathematical theory geniuses recognized calculations as not completely reducible and not working equally in all areas. There are a lot of mistakes, errors, contradictions, and dead ends here, and this is really important: not everything can be reduced to numbers and manipulations with them, especially such "objects" as the brain, the mind, and consciousness.

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The philosopher Jan Christian Smuts coined the term holism a hundred years ago. Today, the holistic approach is seen as synonymous to systemic approach, and holism itself determines the principle citing that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," which many contemporary scientists adhere to.

A reductionist worldview held dominance in the Western thought in the XVII century and onwards. Reductionism is the principle that implies that complex phenomena can be fully explained using the laws inherent in much simpler phenomena. The dominance of reductionism resulted in an emergence of a large amount of loose data. Consequently, reductionism failed even in such conventional fields as mathematics, as we see in the example of a great mind like Hilbert’s.

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This means that no scientific theory can be considered an absolute truth. And this also means that dividing sciences in a way prescribed by reductionism can hardly be considered the only right approach to their division, especially in regards to aspects like studying the brain/ the mind/consciousness/thinking, and even more so, largely, in view of an absence of research results.

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Even Rene Descartes believed that all sciences were connected in such a way that it was much more efficient to study them together rather than by isolating them from each other. Today, it is difficult to agree that all sciences are interconnected. On the contrary, most are studied in isolation from one another.

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Another great mathematician, Henri Poincaré, believed that intuition lay at the basis of mathematical processes, and science itself did not allow for complete analytical justification. He was convinced that logic was necessary only when, and only insofar as, without strict logical justification, intuitively obtained statements could not be considered credible from the outside.

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Poincaré was also one of the first to talk about that which would later be called "conventionalism." Today this is the name of the philosophical concept that implies that scientific concepts and theories are products of agreement between scientists. They must be consistent internally and consistent with the perceptual data, but do not necessarily reflect the actual construction of the world.

For the brain as a subject of research, the concept of holism is all the more relevant: the study of its individual aspects at the level of biology, physics, chemistry, psychology, cognitive science, etc. means losing the very essence of what is being studied. And reductionism further complicates the current state of things, requiring even greater fragmentation of scientific disciplines and the isolation of some finite and accurate truths that do not confirm or explain the functioning of the whole.

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Such a body of data is impossible to comprehend and explain. It was precisely the general reductionism that "created" it, and combining them "back" into a coherent theory simply does not, and will not, work. The reductionism of science does not and will not allow us to understand the structure of such a "whole" as the brain, or at least its "part" which is the thinking process. There is no general theory that unifies all of this information.

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Many of today’s publications dedicated to studying the brain ignore a large amount of information available on the subject of the brain, its operational processes, its structure and evolution, which must be taken into account in an adequate fundamental theory of the brain. An enormous amount of information on the subject has been published, i.e., 30 million articles; at least 1000 articles are published daily.

That is why, a different approach is required; in all actuality, it must be a whole new science, if you will. Moreover, this "science" should study not the cells/connections/processes of the brain or not them exclusively, but the manifestations of brain function, like, for example, thinking and psyche, and not only by using reductionist scientific methods, but by way of returning to the method of observing the "whole," the "unified": by creating models of the brain’s work via searching and explaining the manifestations of its work.

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