Jonathan Miller - Philosophy and neurology (10/48)

To listen to more of Jonathan Miller’s stories, go to the playlist: • Jonathan Miller (Theat...
Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) was a British theatre and opera director whose work includes a West End production of "The Merchant of Venice" which starred Laurence Olivier and a modern, Mafia-themed version of "Rigoletto". [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2008]
TRANSCRIPT: I had begun to develop an interest in the nervous system, interested in voluntary movement and what it was for a movement to be voluntary and how it was executed and how the nervous system implemented these actions and how it implemented perception and so forth, that I had begun to get interested in. And I came under the influence of some rather eminent teachers, people like Horace Barlow, for example, who was a great visual physiologist, and Richard Keynes, who the Professor of Physiology. So that, I think, fairly early on in my time in Cambridge I was beginning to move in the area of natural sciences towards a neurological emphasis in medicine.
But I also did a what was called a half subject in the history and philosophy of science. Now, that may have been under the influence of the books I had seen and partly dipped into from my father's library, and I still have many of them back there, because as I say, my father had studied philosophy at Cambridge, though the philosophy that he had studied in the early 1900s was very different from the philosophy that prevailed after the war. It was very metaphysical and Hegelian and so forth.
But nevertheless I can see from the many additions of (Bertrand) Russell's work, 'The Analysis of Mind' and so forth, that I had come under the influence of… and as he had come under the influence of a more modern type of philosophy, so that by the time I went to Cambridge and was a student of a man called Russ Hanson, an American physicist who was interested in the philosophical principles of science… had written a very influential book called 'Patterns of Discovery', and he introduced me in our supervisions to the ideas of Wittgenstein. And Wittgenstein had died, I think, only two or three years before I came up to Cambridge and I was introduced to the later Wittgenstein, the Wittgenstein of whom Russell disapproved, you know. It was the Wittgenstein after the 'Tractatus' and the philosophical investigations that I began reading, and they seemed to me to be very interesting and obviously have a bearing on what it was for something to be a voluntary action.
I remember there’s this line that he has in the investigations, he says, ‘If I subtract from the sentence I lift my arm, the sentence my arm goes up, what is left over?’ and that preoccupied me, and I was by that time really interested in what it was for something to be a voluntary action, and where did it originate? I knew where it got out of the nervous system in what Sherrington had called the final common path, and there was the last neuron in the spinal cord beyond which there was no way of interfering with the effect on the muscle. But then I was interested, as I suppose Sherrington was, and others, was how did volition in the start, where did it initiate, what decided what was going to happen in order to lift my arm as opposed to discovering, to my surprise, that it had gone up?
And that continues to be a preoccupation of mine and I suppose it’s related in some way to what I do in the theatre. I am studying voluntary actions and the interactions between volitional subjects.

[@sherlockholmeslives.1605]

This is absolutely 'Fantastic'!
I'd love to have over 3 hours of this!!

[@sherlockholmeslives.1605]

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
From 'Philosophical Investigations' ( 1953 )
Ludwig Wittgenstein ( 1889 - 1951 )

[@okzoia]

the book is "Mind Design" not Mind Dictionary.

[@sherlockholmeslives.1605]

Thanks rick!

[@sherlockholmeslives.1605]

I can see a book called 'Mind Dictionary' on the shelf behind him,
and it is lying on top of the lines of books as if he had read it recently.

[@Pro0osh]

Can a neurologist write about philosophical aspects of the brain?