Beyond Human Neuroscience to Post-Human Neuroscience
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract

Is neuroscience really so promising that, as Thomas Insel said, “[t]he Holy Grail of neuroscience has been to understand how and where information is encoded in the brain”? This promising view on neurology can be contrasted with the sober one by Francis Collin, who cautiously observed that “neuroscience can take us in understanding the…complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us…?” (BQ 2018)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), human neuroscience (in relation to orthodoxy and heterodoxy—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no orthodoxy without heterodoxy (and vice versa), to be explained by the “convention-novelty principle,” the “absoluteness-relativeness principle,” the “regression-progression principle,” and other ones in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

Needless to say, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that human neuroscience, as a field of study, is worthless, or that those diverse fields (related to human neuroscience)—such as biology, psychology, physics, mathematics, chemistry, pharmacology, medicine, computing, anthropology, sociology, political science, religion, economics, communications theory, history, philosophy, linguistics, education, ethics, law, and so on—should be ignored. (WK 2017) Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of human neuroscience (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between orthodoxy and heterodoxy (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the orthodox-heterodox theory of neuroscience) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about human neuroscience (in relation to the dialectic relationship between orthodoxy and heterodoxy—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.