This two-day multidisciplinary symposium explored the conceptual and social

effects of mechanistic images of mind and reflected on alternative and

more penetrating languages for human self-understanding.

Videos of the presentations appear below.

Schedule: Friday, February 21

9:00–10:00

“‘The Explanation You Have Been Looking For’: Neurobiology, Determinism, and Freedom” (48:05)

Joseph Davis, Sociology, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture

NOTE: Though the audio in most of this video is clear, the 18-minute segment starting at 07:10 and ending at 25:25 is not. We recommend using the enhanced closed captioning available for that segment.

10:00–11:00

“Not Me: Addiction, Relapse, and Release in Uganda” (37:14)

China Scherz, Anthropology, University of Virginia

Respondent: Ira Bashkow, Anthropology, University of Virginia

11:00–11:15 Break

11:15–12:15

“Politics of Plasticity: The Implications of the New Science of the Developing Brain for Education” (39:28)

Suparna Choudhury, Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University

NOTE: The paper was read by Leann Davis Alspaugh, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

Respondent: Matt Crawford, Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture

12:15–1:15 Lunch

1:15–2:15

“Framing Human Action in Physics: Valid Reconstruction, Invalid Reduction” (50:59)

Shabnam Mousavi, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin

Justin Mutter, Medicine, University of Virginia, and Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture

2:15–3:15

“Life as an Intelligence Test” (36:14)

Paul Scherz, Theology, Catholic University of America, and Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture

Respondent: Howard Kaye, Sociology, Franklin & Marshall College (Kaye’s comments are not included in the video)

3:15–3:30 Break

3:30–4:30

“The Psychology of Happiness and the Phenomenology of Value” (01:09:00)

William Hasselberger, Institute for Political Studies, the Catholic University of Portugal, and Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture

Respondent: Jonathan Buttaci, Philosophy, the Catholic University of America

Schedule: Saturday, February 22

9:00–10:15

“Art at the Limits of Neuroscience” (48:46)

Alva Noë, Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley

Respondent: Talbot Brewer, Philosophy, University of Virginia, and Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture

10:15–10:30 Break

10:30–11:45

“Porosity and Boundedness: How the Way We Think about Thinking Changes Our Sensory Experience of Gods and Spirits” (45:10)

Tanya Luhrmann, Anthropology, Stanford University

Respondent: Eve Danziger, Anthropology, University of Virginia

12:00–1:00 Lunch

Presentation Abstracts and Speaker Bios

Suparna Choudhury

“Politics of Plasticity: The Implications of the New Science of the Developing Brain for Education”

This paper presents critical neuroscience, an interdisciplinary framework which reflexively analyses the social, cultural, and political contexts of neuroscience while staying engaged with experimental brain research. Examining methodologies and theoretical assumptions and simultaneously, sources of funding, policy implications, and processes of subjectification, it aims to unsettle the taken-for-granted objective status of “brain facts” while imagining new modes of experimentation and interpretation that incorporate phenomenological and social dimensions of experience. Using the case example of neuroplasticity in adolescence, the talk emphasizes the importance of a critical approach to studying the model of the adolescent brain and the social contexts of its applications with a focus on education, to show how in trying to fix or repair social and psychological “problems,” neuroscience may also classify and reify vulnerable populations. It draws on findings from a qualitative study with teachers, policy makers, and researchers working in the field of “neuroeducation,” and analyses the interpretations and appeal of developmental plasticity for pedagogical strategies. In so doing, neuroscience opens up particular modes of interpretation and intervention while foreclosing others. Careful attention to the links between neuroscience/the brain and society allows us both to approach neuroscience as a cultural phenomenon and the brain as a cultural organ.

Suparna Choudhury is Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Culture, Mind & Brain Program at the Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, where she works on the adolescent brain at the intersection of anthropology and cognitive neuroscience. Trained originally as a neuroscientist, Suparna has worked as a researcher in London, Paris, Berlin, and Montreal developing interdisciplinary skills to examine the implications of the new brain sciences for health and society. Her doctoral research in cognitive neuroscience at University College London investigated the development of the social brain during adolescence. Her current work in Montreal investigates how the dissemination of cognitive neuroscience may shape the ways in which researchers, clinicians, patients and laypeople understand themselves, their mental health and their illness experiences.

Joseph E. Davis

“‘The Explanation You Have Been Looking For’: Neurobiology and the Quest for Self-Mastery”

Surveys of lay mental health beliefs show a consistent trend over the past few decades toward an ever-stronger endorsement of biological causes for disorder. These data, together with representations in the popular media, suggest that a “chemical imbalance” explanation, at least with respect to depression etiology, may be our “dominant cultural story.” Drawing primarily on interview data, I explore where people encounter neurobiological ideas like chemical imbalance and how they take up such ideas in their effort to account for their painful struggles. While biological explanation is seemingly deterministic, what I found, paradoxically, is that people incorporate it into their projects of self-determination. What makes this resolution possible is the way in which freedom as a kind of self-detachment is conceived. I conclude with some reflections on what this means for self-understanding.

Joseph E. Davis is a cultural sociologist and moderator of the Picturing the Human Colloquy at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. His Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press (March 2020). His research explores accounts of suffering, and most recently, implicit models of mind in the lay imagining of psychoactive medications and their effects.

William Hasselberger

“The Psychology of Happiness and the Phenomenology of Value”

The dominant picture of happiness/well-being in positive psychology encourages us to view happiness as both an "internal" sensory state of human beings, considered as individuals, and at the same time as the highest end of human striving. I want to analyze the internal contradictions and phenomenological distortions of this picture, philosophically speaking. But, more than this, I want to analyze the way this self-conception transforms (deforms) our attitudes toward our own activities and normative commitments (as individuals and as members of families, communities, groups). My hunch is that this perspective encourages a distorted form of quasi-managerial detachment toward your own life activities that is ultimately "unlivable," in the sense that it is inconsistent with truly deep enjoyment, evaluative insight, and growth. I also want to discuss, in a more political vein, the ways that individualized and "psychologized" pictures of happiness from positive psych enable manipulative managerial techniques—under the guise of institutional "wellness" initiatives—that deflect us from, and close off, possibilities of substantive critique of contemporary work practices and patterns of leisure and consumption. We are thrown back upon ourselves, as individuals—ultimately, as brains—instead of looking outward at what might be preventing us from engaging in more meaningful, enjoyable, creative forms of activity—whether at work or in our "leisure" time.

William Hasselberger is a philosopher at the Institute for Political Studies, the Catholic University of Portugal, and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is currently researching the nature of the ethical virtues, especially the relation of virtue to tacit practical knowledge, and how new forms of scientism, reductive accounts of human personhood, and excessively rationalistic accounts of moral and political thinking distort our understanding of human life, ethics, and community.

Tanya Luhrmann

“Porosity and Boundedness: How the Way We Think about Thinking Changes Our Sensory Experience of Gods and Spirits”

This talk makes the argument that the way people think about their minds shapes the way they come to know God. I do this by looking at the kinds of people who have more vivid spiritual experiences (they are more likely to get absorbed in their inner worlds), the way prayers train attention to inner experience, and above all at the way that different cultures invite people to think differently about inner life. I see a paradox: The more a culture imagines an inner world as separate from an outer world, the less vividly they experience gods and spirits.

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. Her work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural, and the world of psychosis. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. When God Talks Back was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year. Her next book, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others, will be published by Princeton University Press in 2020.

Shabnam Mousavi

“Framing Human Action in Physics: Valid Reconstruction, Invalid Reduction”

The human mind operates with a neurobiological brain in the physical world. Its sphere of existence comprises many layers that interact in reality yet are considered discrete in theory. Over a century of “scientifizing” economics by engineers and mathematicians has generated a sophisticated reverse-engineering framework for a mechanical analysis of human behavior. Along the way, behavioral economics has been shaped by attempts to augment this rigorous framework with insights from psychology and other disciplines in order to acquire explanatory power for anomalous behavior. The main challenge to expanding this theory is how to surpass the mechanics of formalization, as integrating the reality of humans comes at the cost of messier mathematics. When it comes to policy recommendations and other societal matters involving economists’ counsel, maintaining ease of analyses is not implication-free. The problem is not this inherent tradeoff, but instead a naïve optimism toward its consequences.

Shabnam Mousavi is a fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, a network member of the University of Chicago Wisdom Project, the current president of the Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics, and editor-in-chief for Mind and Society. She has received a Think Forward Initiative grant from the ING Bank, and the “Original—isn’t it?” award from the Volkswagen Foundation. Currently, she is writing a book entitled Fast and Frugal Decision Making on the implications of cognitive science for policymaking and the study of individual behavior and organizations.

Alva Noë

“Art at the Limits of Neuroscience”

I try to explain how attempts to use neuroscience to study art (so-called “neuroaesthetics”) end up requiring us to neglect art’s interesting challenges and demand.

Alva Noë is a philosopher and cognitive scientist: Department of Philosophy and member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Among other books, he is author of Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature and Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Hill and Wang, 2010). According to the publisher, “Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us.”

China Scherz, and George Mpanga and Sarah Namirembe

“Not Me: Addiction, Relapse, and Release in Uganda”

In recent years, alcohol abuse and dependence have become topics of increasing concern in Uganda, but the chronic relapsing brain disease model of addiction remains only one of many ways of understanding and addressing alcohol related problems there. For many Ugandan Pentecostals and spirit mediums be addicted is to be under the control of a being that comes from outside the self. Where these two groups differ, and here they differ strongly, is in regard to the moral valence of these external spirits and what ought to be done about them. While some scholars might quietly scoff at these sorts of accounts, in this paper we explore the affordances of these ways of viewing and experiencing addiction and recovery for Ugandans attempting to leave alcohol behind. While the idioms of bondage, dedication, and possession are at times severe, we argue that they contain within them concepts and practices that point away from models of addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease and toward the possibility of release. Anthropologists like Angela Garcia have described the devastating stakes of disease models that seem only to replicate the melancholic chronicity of endless loss in places where life has been shaped by acts of dispossession for generations (Garcia, 2010). Through our work in Uganda, we hope to have a found a way to build upon her call to seriously consider potentials contained within other modes of living in relation to time by watching addictions, and their afters, unfold in a world that has not yet been completely colonized by the chronic disease model.

China Scherz is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Having People, Having Heart: Charity, Sustainable Development, and Problems of Dependence in Uganda (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and has published articles on the anthropology of ethics, addiction, religion, and traditional medicine in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Africa, Anthropological Theory, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Coauthors George Mpanga and Sarah Namirembe are independent researchers living in Kampala, Uganda. The three authors are currently working on a book titled Higher Powers: Alcohol and After in Uganda's Capital City.

Paul Scherz

“Life as an Intelligence Test”

Research on the genetics of intelligence has exploded in the last five years. Taking advantage of the large datasets available with new biobank projects, researchers are developing tools to help predict individual intelligence based on genetics. Despite technological developments, this behavioral genetics is continuous with previous attempts to match personal characteristics to heredity, such as sociobiology and eugenics. From them, it inherits an understanding of intelligence shaped by mechanistic and computational metaphors as well as a view of society organized around competition. These models misdescribe fundamental aspects of human engagement with the world, which in turn creates problems for the ‘precision education’ that researchers hope to construct using this genetic knowledge.

Paul Scherz is an Associate Professor of Moral Theology and Ethics at the Catholic University of America and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He holds doctorates in both genetics (Harvard) and moral theology (University of Notre Dame). His book, Science and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, 2019), investigates contemporary moral formation in science.

Respondent Bios

Ira Bashkow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. His award-winning book The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World (University of Chicago Press, 2006) explores the entanglement of ideas of race with development and modernity in Papua New Guinea. His essays on the history of anthropology have been published in American Anthropologist, Histories of Anthropology Annual, History of Anthropology Newsletter, and TLS: The Times Literary Supplement. He is currently writing a book tentatively titled The Corporate Form: History, Culture, Capital.

Talbot Brewer is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He specializes in ethics and political philosophy, with particular attention to moral psychology and Aristotelian ethics. He has been a visiting professor in the Harvard University Philosophy Department and has authored two books, the most recent of which is The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford University Press, 2009). He is currently at work on two books, one on Aristotelian action theory and its intersection with ethics, and another on a phenomenon that he calls “tragedies of the cultural commons.”

Jonathan Buttaci is an Assistant Professor in the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He arrived there in 2016 after completing his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh under James Lennox and John McDowell. His research focuses on Aristotle's theory of knowledge, of learning, and of the human mind.

Matthew Crawford is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He is the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin, 2009), which was translated into seven languages. His The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which brought together cognitive science, phenomenology, and moral philosophy, was published in 2015. His new book on Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road is forthcoming from William Morrow.

Eve Danziger is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. She draws on long-term fieldwork-based research into the language and culture of the Mopan (Mayan) people of Eastern Central America, to investigate the role of language in the construction of indigenous knowledge. She is particularly interested in cultural variation in understandings of intersubjectivity and the mind. At the broadest intellectual level, she asks how the categories of individual thought are shaped by those of socially shared but culturally particular convention and culture. She is the author of Relatively Speaking: Language, Thought and Kinship among the Mopan Maya (Oxford University Press) and numerous articles and book chapters.

Howard L. Kaye is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Franklin & Marshall College. In addition to many papers and reviews, he is the author of The Social Meaning of Modern Biology (Yale University Press, 1986) and Freud as a Social and Cultural Theorist: On Human Nature and the Civilizing Process (Routledge, 2019).

Justin Mutter is an Assistant Professor of Family Medicine and Geriatric Medicine at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. He also serves as core faculty for the School of Medicine’s Center for Health Humanities and Ethics. His clinical, teaching, and research interests lie at the intersection of person-centered care, health policy for older adults, and the modern history of American medicine and public health.

For further information, please contact tom.shull@advancedstudiesinculture.org.