Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind Book

5 The Methodological Problem
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Over the past sixty years, behaviorism has been the single most influential school of psychology in the English-speaking world.
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According to behaviorism, the first and most important obligation of the science of psychology is to explain the observable behavior of whatever creature it addresses, humans included. By " behavior", the behaviorists mean the publicly observable, measurable, recordable activity of the subjects at issue: bodily movements, noises emitted, temperature changes, chemicals released, interactions with the environment, and so forth.....
Of comparable importance to most behaviorists, however, was the way in which behavior was to be properly explained. Common-sense explanations that make appeal to ' mental states '
are regarded as seriously defective in various ways. Such explanations appeal to a body of folklore that has no proper scientific basis, and that may consist largely of superstition and confusion,
as with so many of our past conceptions.
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Instead of appealing to mental states, behaviorists proposed to explain any organism ' s behavior in terms of its peculiar environmental circumstances. Or, in terms of the environment plus
certain observable features of the organism. Or, failing that, also in terms of certain unobservable features of the organism ' dispositions, and innate and conditioned reflexes ' where those
features must meet a very strict condition: they must be such that their presence or absence could always be decisively determined by a behavioral test, as the solubility of a sugar cube is
revealed by its actually dissolving (=   the behavior) when placed in water (=   the environmental circumstance).
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Methodological Materialism
It is this methodology that guides the several disciplines collected under the term neuroscience, ... This approach to intelligent behavior has a very long history. The ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates, was aware that brain degeneration destroyed sanity. And the Roman physician Galen had already discovered the existence of, and the difference between, the somatosensory nervous system (the set of axonal fibers that conduct ' touch 'information to the brain) and the motor nervous system (the set of axonal fibers that radiate from the brain and spinal cord so as to control the body ' s muscles).

The neuronal architecture revealed by these methods is breathtaking in its intricacy. The functional ' atoms 'of the brain are tiny impulse-processing cells called neurons, and there are almost 10 11 (a one followed by 11 zeroes: 100 billion) neurons in a single human brain. To gain a usable conception of this number, imagine a smallish two-story house filled from cellar to rafters with coarse sand. There are as many neurons in your brain as there are grains of sand in that house. More intriguing
still, the average neuron enjoys, by way of tiny fibers extending from it called axons and dendrites, about 3,000 connections with other neurons, so the interconnectivity of the overall system is
truly extraordinary: about 10 14, or 100 trillion, connections.

Such complexity defeats any ready understanding, and we have only just begun to unravel it.

The guiding conviction of methodological materialism is that if we set about to understand the physical, chemical, electrical, and developmental behavior of neurons, and especially of
systems of neurons, and the ways in which they exert control over one another and over behavior, then we will be on our way toward understanding everything there is to know about natural
intelligence."

8 Expanding Our Perspective
"Energy Flow and the Evolution of Order
Basically, intelligence requires a system of physical elements (such as atoms) capable of many different combinations, and a flow of energy (such as sunlight) through the system of elements.

The flow or flux of energy, into the system and then out again, is absolutely crucial. In a system that is closed to the entry and exit of external energy, the energy-rich atomic combinations
within the system will gradually break up and redistribute their energy among the energy-poor combinations until the level of energy is everywhere the same throughout the system '
this is the equilibrium state.
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A system has intelligence just in case it exploits the information it already contains, and the energy flux through it (this includes the energy flux through its sense organs), in such a way as to increase the information it contains. Such a system can learn from its ongoing interactions with the environment, and that seems to be a central element of intelligence.
This improved characterization does capture something deeply important about the things we commonly count as intelligent.
And I hope the reader is already struck by the close parallels between this definition of intelligence, and our earlier definition of life as the exploitation of contained order, and energy flux, to get more order. These parallels are important for the following reason. If the possession of information can be understood as the possession of some form of internal order that bears some systematic relation to the environment, then the operations of intelligence, abstractly conceived, turn to be just
a high-grade instance of the operations characteristic of life, operations that are even more intricately coupled to the creature ' s environment.
...human brain constitutes only 2 percent of the body ' s mass, it consumes, when highly active, over 20 percent of the resting body ' s energy budget. The brain, too, is a semiclosed system, a
curiously high-intensity one, whose ever-changing microscopic order reflects the objective structure of the world in impressive detail. Here again, intelligence represents no discontinuity.
Intelligent life is just life, with a high thermodynamic intensity and an especially close coupling between internal order and external circumstance. .."