¿Todo es reducible a la ciencia? Ciencia y paz / cerebro y cultura

Roberto Mercadillo Caballero

Resumen


Is everything reductible to science? Science and peace / brain and culture.

To think about if everything can be scientifically reducible involves a viewpoint on reality that simultaneously encompasses the notion of what “everything” means and the role of “reducibility” of one phenomenon for explanatory purposes. Both aspects are diffuse and discussed within the neuroscientific current research. The discussion concerns the experimental design that has been applied in neurosciences over the past three decades, as well as the scientific interpretations of the cognitive processes under a materialistic perspective. This controversy is patent in some current proposals aimed at the development of the so-called “Culture of Peace”, because it involves the acceptance of a violent reality encoded in biological and neurocognitive human systems, along with cultural variables that make up the history and transmission of such codes. In addition to the nature-culture discussions involving violence in the scientific field, the cultivation of peace is proposed as a structural change for the human society based on difficult operational accessible concepts within the experimental neuroscience, for example: solidarity or compassion. Although such proposals have been developed in the scientific field, their effect is projected in a political and cultural reality. From a neurocognitive perspective, this essay proposes the cultivation of peace as a model for thinking about how science reduces a phenomenon (peace) to influence a whole reality (the political and cultural structure), trough conceptual and methodological interactions provided by different scientific disciplines apparently distant.

Key words. Brain, cognition, compassion, complexity, culture, reality, peace, science, violence, war.

 


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