Naturalizing Normativity in Neuroscience: A Musicological Bridge from Computational Methods

Computational neuroscience has yielded powerful tools for analyzing brain structure and function, yet its foundational commitments to information theory and algorithmic modeling leave a critical philosophical gap: the question of how value, meaning, and purpose relate to neural activity. This paper approaches that gap historically and philosophically, by tracing three paradigms in the study of neurodynamics: oscillatory decomposition, nonlinear dynamical systems, and emerging vitalist-teleological perspectives. Electrophysiology serves as a recurring case study: from Hans Berger's initial recordings, through Walter Freeman's application of chaos theory to olfactory dynamics, to contemporary evidence that subcortical arousal signals shape the global geometry of brain activity. Through this history, successive generations of researchers have been drawn toward holistic and normative interpretations of brain signals, even as their analytic methods have resisted such readings. To overcome this gap, the interpretive lenses of the humanities are explored as conceptual resources for bridging the normative and dynamical dimensions that the history of neuroscience has kept apart. This prospect is specifically considered through musicology, particularly the philosophies of Langer, and Tomlinson, as a domain where form, temporality, and significance are theorized without recourse to encoding and decoding. Instead, a musical lens reframes neurodynamics as global, emotive forms sculpted by the recursive play of anticipation and fulfillment, nested within the vital metabolism of living organisms. This reframing does not abandon the mathematical tools of dynamical systems science but situates them within a richer conceptual ecology, one that may open new avenues for addressing normativity at the intersection of neuroscience and the humanities.