Neuroscience in the Sciences of Cognition: A Review of the Literature Arguing for Neuroscience to Becoming Spinozist

This review of the literature aims to present and discuss the place of neuroscience within the sciences of cognition. We present the different paradigms within the cognitive sciences and the diversity of approaches in neuroscience and analyze the different reasons for the development of cognitive neuroscience and neurobiology, in particular technical evolutions. In order to clarify the problem of reductionism and determinism in neuroscience, we present in detail the contribution of the sciences of complexity and in particular emerging phenomena in dynamic systems. Relationships between neuroscience and artificial intelligence, as well as neuroscience and the sciences of the mind are then discussed in more detail. Special attention is paid to deep learning methods that we see as a major breakthrough. The last part of this review is devoted to the neuroscientific turning point in society and the implications and challenges it raises. We review the neuroenthusiasm of some and the neuroscepticism and anti-naturalism of others which leads us to explain the naturalistic program of neuroscience and the consequences for the notions of freedom and responsibility. We then discuss social naturalism and social neuroscience and present the Spinozist current in the social sciences. We present a naturalistic framework for neuroscience: deterministic but where contingency exists, emergentist, i.e. non-reductionist and non-holistic and neither materialistic nor idealistic. We propose that Spinozism is the future of neuroscience in the sense that it allows to think the consequences of discoveries of neuroscience "in advance" if we can say soand in particular the notion of freedom. We hope that this vision of naturalism can be able to reconcile neuroscience with the human and social sciences.