Natalia Tomashpolskaia
University of Malaga
There is a problem in contemporary cognitive neuroscience formulated and proposed by Aron K. Barbey, Richard Patterson and Steven A. Sloman in their “change of course memorandum” “Cognitive Neuroscience Meets the Community of Knowledge” published in 2021 in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. They start that there has been no progress in neuroscience in the last 50 years and their hypothesis claims that the reason is because some of the facts we think are true are wrong. Hence, the problem is the basic premise, which throws the development of neuroscience off course. The point is to recognize the problem’s presence and remove it. According to Barbey et al., “Accumulating evidence indicates that memory, reasoning, decision-making and other higher-level functions take place across people.” They came to the conclusion that “Cognition extends into the physical world and the brains of others.” Therefore, the issue is that we should not study brain in isolation. Wittgenstein said in Zettel (§567), “How could human behaviour be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgement, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing mow, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action.” The fallacy of neuroscience was the assumption that human knowledge is represented in the individual brain and transferred between people. Whereas cognition processes occur in socio-cognitive networks of knowledge communities. Barbey et al. acknowledge, “In cognitive neuroscience, the standard approach is essentially to assume that knowledge is represented in the individual brain and transferred between individuals.” The correction of this erroneous fact would be the recognition that only the brain can be individual, and the mind is an exclusively collective phenomenon. Because of this, cognition is simply irreducible to neurobiology. It is distributed in the physical world across many minds (including long-dead people) and countless artifacts. And the task of understanding complex objects, phenomena and ideas, in essence, comes down to its transfer to “outsourcing” — using the experience of other people to make one’s own decisions. The most obvious example is a belief, for instance, a person does not know the whole chemical process how a drug functions, but he or she believes a doctor and takes aspirin or ibuprofen in case of fever. Such a mechanism of belief concerns all human knowledge. Returning to Wittgenstein, he was the first to emphasise that we learn something from out childhood by believing our parents, teachers, tutors, lots of people around, and the doubt comes after a belief. According to Barbey et al., “Without relying on experts in our community, our beliefs would become untethered from the social conventions and scientific evidence that are necessary to support them.” “Cognition is, to a large extent, a group activity, not an individual one.” “People depend on others for their reasoning, judgment and decision-making. Cognitive neuroscience is not able to shed light on this aspect of cognitive processing.” “The challenge for cognitive neuroscience becomes how to capture knowledge that does not reside in the individual brain but is outsourced to the community.” Cognitive neuroscience is unable to shed light on this aspect of cognitive processing. MRI and other brain research tools have been developed to track an individual’s brain activity. They are almost useless for capturing the dynamics of processes occurring in socio-cognitive networks. The task is to learn to record the appearance and presence of knowledge not in the brain of an individual person, but in the course of outsourcing cognition to socio-cognitive networks. In an effort to achieve this, neuroscientists should turn to a transdisciplinary approach — to sciences that are significantly ahead of neuroscience in understanding processes in knowledge communities: social epistemology, socio-philosophical aspects of the representation of knowledge in language, etc. Barbey et al. wrote, “We need to incorporate not only neuroscience evidence, but also evidence from social psychology, social anthropology and other disciplines that are better positioned to study the community of knowledge.” We have to study brain and mind at the group level not at the individual level to understand not only human behaviour and decision making but also human cognition and knowledge in general. Moreover, a revolutionary turn in the understanding that only the brain can be individual, and the mind is an exclusively collective phenomenon, will radically change the trajectory of research into general (strong) artificial intelligence. Its researchers will have to find new, fundamentally different architectures and algorithms, focused not only on neural, but on socio-cognitive hyper-networks. Today’s mainstream view of social networks of intelligent agents, whose cognition is concentrated exclusively in the neural networks of their individual brains, is erroneous.
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SOPhiA 2026 