Jean-Pierre Changeux

From Philosopedia

Changeux, Jean-Pierre (7 April 1936 - )

A French neuroscientist, Changeux was born in Dormont. In the early 1960's, he began working on the brain and wrote a thesis about the concept of allosteric interaction under the direction of two of the fathers of molecular biology, Jacques Monod and Francis Jacob.

He heads the National Advisory Committee on Bioethics in France.

Changeux is author of L’Homme neuronal (1983) and co-editor (with M. Konishi) of The Neural and Molecular Basis of Learning: Report of the Dahlem Workshop on the Neural and Molecular Bases of Learning (1987). In 1994, he wrote Raison et plaisir.

With Alain Connes, a distinguished mathematician, Changeux wrote Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics (1995). The conversation with Connes pointed up differences of opinion on basic matters. Connes chided Changeux for not grasping some points about quantum physics, for example. But Changeux related and questioned the vision of humans as being complex biological systems, the result of millions of years of evolutionary changes. Changeux thinks of mathematics as a human construction, the result of having been shaped by the intricacies of neural wiring and cultural transmission. According to Philip Kitcher, the Presidential Professor of Philosophy at the University of California in San Diego, Changeux includes an overview of the fundamentals of neuroscience that “is a model of lucidity.”

He has been honored with the Balzan Prize, the Linus Pauling Medal, the Max Delbruck Medal, the Louis Jeantet Prize, the Gold Medal of the French CNRS, the Richard Lounsbery Prize, and the Gairdner Foundation International Award.

A non-believer, he signed Humanist Manifesto 2000 and is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism.