The ontological reversal of computation and the brain

Ida Momennejad

Abstract: The Brain Abstracted (2024) critiques treating abstractions in neuroscience as complete explanations of the brain, for their oversimplification and control-orientation. Chirimuuta argues that neuroscience operates on haptic realism, where scientific knowledge arises through control-oriented experimental interaction rather than contemplative understanding of reality. She proposes distinct epistemic aims for philosophy (understanding) and science (control of nature) and suggests a disciplinary separation between the two. I argue that Chirimuuta underestimates the entanglement of philosophy and science in naturalizing abstractions, what I call ontological reversal, where abstractions gradually define the very reality they were meant to simplify. When computational models and metaphors are idealized, treated as more real than lived neural and social processes, they machinify minds and brains. Undoing the reversal of computation and brains, however, requires interdisciplinarity, rather than the book’s separation of philosophy and science. This supports Chirimuuta’s conceptual pluralism: treating neuroscientific abstractions not as singular truths but as evolving microcosms.