From: NPR
Can Science Explain The Human Mind?
In The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce describes the mind as “a mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain,” engaged in a futile attempt to understand itself “with nothing but itself to know itself with.”
Questions about the limits of self-understanding have persisted long after Bierce’s 1911 publication. One user on Quora asks: “Is the human brain intelligent enough to fully understand itself?” A satirical headline at The Onion reports that psychology has come to a halt as “weary researchers say the mind cannot possibly study itself.”
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Psychology PhD student Sara Gottlieb and I decided to find out. In a series of studies forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, we asked hundreds of participants to tell us whether they thought it was possible for science to one day fully explain various aspects of the human mind, from depth perception and memory loss to spirituality and romantic love.
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Comments
Science believes in observation and visible aspects.This is like the tips of the iceberg. No method to study the mind, from the questionnaire to the experimentation, is foolproof. Each method has its limitations. Therefore, there is a need improve the methods to study the mind.
As a behavioral neuroscientist, I believe that we will eventually be able to explain many, if not all, aspects of the human mind.
With a touch of hubris, my new book (tentative title, “The Origins of Mind: What I learned from Conversations with a Caterpillar and a Protozoan” — Oxford University Press) “explaining” the mind will be out next year. Spoiler alert: Protozoan have minds — very small ones. It’s all evolution of a basic kind. And yes, this article is discussed.
Surveys will not provide an answer to such a question. The mind is subject to the laws of psychology, the brain is subject to the laws of neurology. All matter is subject to the laws of physiology, and, ultimately, to those of physics. EACH SCIENCE HAS ITS OWN DATUM. The correlation among the laws is 1.0
A coherent biology based theory of mind already exists at mindexamined.com . Yes it was hard to figure out what controls our behavior, but it’s there. Why not take a moment or two to read a paragraph?
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