The epistemological problem in neurosciences and its effect on psychiatry

Abstract

Currently a comprehensive discipline, neurobiology is the field of examining the essence of mind in contrast to psychophysiology. It is becoming more and more apparent that this aim cannot be satisfied. Neurobiology is hampered by its deeply rooted paradigm of mechanistic materialism. Thus we learn about yet unsolved "hard problems." In order to recognize them as pseudoproblems, we must avoid unprovable metaphysical assumptions such as e.g., treating matter and mind as components of one organism rather than complementary but logically incommensurable means of description. To our physicalistically oriented university psychiatry, reintroducing the subject is of primary importance. At first glance, this would confront us again with unsolvable problems supposedly avoided by the psychiatric 'brain technicians' preferring object-oriented study (neuromaging, receptors). One such question is the 'fact' adverse to physical law of psychophysical interactions: it does not actually represent an insoluble hard problem but is a typical pseudoproblem resulting from false premises.

Commentary to the articles of M. Stier (Normative preconditions for the assessment of mental disorder) and T. Schramme (On the autonomy of the concept of disease in psychiatry)

“…Among the contemporary exponents of this solution the best known is Habermas (Habermas, 2004) who prefers to speaks of “ Epistemic dualism. ” Another notion of this concept which dispels the myth of the unsolvable mind-brain problem is that of “ Aspektdualismus ” (Ulrich, 1990, 1997, 2006a,b, 2013). …”