Mississippi State Univesity.
University of Mississippi Medical Center.
Top Cogn Sci. 2020 Oct;12(4):1241-1256. doi: 10.1111/tops.12452. Epub 2019 Sep 6.
Optogenetics and DREADDs (Designer Receptors Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs) are important research tools in recent neurobiology. These tools allow unprecedented control over activity in specifically targeted neurons in behaving animals. Two approaches in philosophy of neuroscience, mechanism and ruthless reductionism, provide explicit accounts of experiments and results using tools like these, but each offers a different picture about how levels of mechanisms relate. I argue here that the ruthless reductionist's direct mind-to-cellular/molecular activities linkages "in a single bound" better fits with both the experimental designs using these tools and some of the scientists' own judgments about their results than does the mechanist's "nested hierarchies of mechanisms-within-mechanisms." So at least some important work in current neuroscience appears to be ruthlessly reductive. Mechanism may not correctly characterize all current work in neuroscience, despite its recent popularity.
光遗传学和 DREADDs（受特定药物激活的设计受体）是神经生物学领域的重要研究工具。这些工具使我们能够以前所未有的方式控制行为动物中特定靶向神经元的活动。神经科学哲学中的两种方法，即机制论和无情简化论，为使用这些工具的实验和结果提供了明确的解释，但它们提供了关于机制层次之间关系的不同观点。我在这里认为，无情简化论者的直接思维与细胞/分子活动之间的联系“一劳永逸”，与使用这些工具的实验设计以及一些科学家对自己实验结果的判断更为吻合，而不是机制论者的“嵌套机制内部机制层次结构”。因此，至少在当前神经科学的某些重要工作中，无情简化论是有效的。尽管机制论最近很受欢迎，但它可能无法正确描述当前神经科学的所有工作。
