I fully subscribe to methodological naturalism but I agree with you that we are far from explaining how mind emerges from neural stuff. So I don't find Crick's suggestion of neural networks as a good argument. In fact, neural networks have led to nothing of substance with respect to understanding the mind. Moreover, beyond the molecular level, a lot of science is mostly descriptive and not very explanatory. The exception is physics. Having said, I find terms like materialism pretty useless and vacuous since we don't have a definite conception of matter as physics/science is not finished. As Fiona Roxburgh writes:Quotidian wrote:Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Francis Crick:this speculative study argues that our minds can be explained, without recourse to religious concepts of a soul, in terms of the interactions of a vast assembly of nerve cells and associated molecules. Crick delves into the nature of consciousness by focusing on visual awareness, an active, constructive process in which the brain selectively combines discrete elements into meaningful images. Early chapters include numerous interactive illustrations to demonstrate the brain's shortcuts, tricks and habits of visual perception. In later chapters Crick discusses neural networks--electronic pathways that can "remember" patterns or produce spoken language--and outlines research strategies designed to pinpoint the brain's "awareness neurons" that enable us to see.
Revised Kantian Naturalism: Cognition and the Limits of InquiryWe may, therefore, start out in the study of mind just as other sciences started out: by identifying abstract concepts, prior to any knowledge of the particular mechanical or biological realisations of these abstractions. Consequently, the positing of abstract architecture, or of concepts of cognitive science and linguistics, is perfectly legitimate: 'When we speak of the mind, we are speaking at some level of abstraction of yet-unknown physical mechanisms of the brain, much as those who spoke of the valence of oxygen or the benzene ring were speaking at some level of abstraction about physical mechanisms, then unknown.' ...
Returning to the dissolution of the mind-body distinction, any persistent use of some supposedly well established or clear notion of “solid matter” constitutes a refusal to respect the development of scientific terms. In a similar way, assumptions to the effect that we have already completed or exhausted the full set of physical scientific explanations also stand in direct contradiction with the allowance for scientific terms (and indeed theories) to progress.
https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/33046/1/20 ... hFCPhD.pdf