3 philosophical debates from the 20th century that neuroscience is reshaping

Neuroscience isn’t dissolving philosophy’s hardest problems — it’s forcing us to rethink where they live.

Excerpt: "Philosophers and scientists have always kept close company. Look back far enough, and it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Before we had instruments to measure reality, we had to reason our way into it, but that intellectual lineage is what eventually gave us the scientific method. As technology advanced and the scope for observation expanded, specializations splintered off from philosophy to reconstitute as the sciences.

Astronomy cleared the sky of deities and showed us a universe governed by gravity, not gods. Geography mapped a not-so-flat Earth, then geology dated it, stratifying earthly time in isotopes and sedimentary layers. Physics folded time into space, and with it, reimagined us not as beings apart from nature, but as a continuation of its energy and mass.

We are not, as Pink Floyd suggested, “lost souls swimming in a fishbowl.” We are matter, muddling our way through life in relativistic motion.

Now, in the 21st century, science is tracing a map through the other great unknown: the mind."