Maggie's Farm

From Alva Noe's How Art Reveals the Limits of Neuroscience:

If you are at all sympathetic to the skepticism about neuroscience that I am advancing, then you will perhaps find it plausible that neuroaesthetics is another instance of neuroscience’s intellectual imperialism, another chapter in its attempt to come up with a brain theory of everything. But neuroscience’s recent preoccupation with art, however, reveals something deeper and more fundamental about the neuroscience project itself.

I am no skeptic about basic neuroscience. I am skeptical about its overeach, its hubris. Aesthetics can never be understood at a neuronal level of organization any more than a living cell can be understood at an atomic level.