But some say that, sure, the scientific method is fine for things like chemistry, but not for others. The human brain (or some aspect of it: consciousness, the mind, love, belief, or whatever) is the most popular exception. Science just won't work on it, we're told. It's too complex.
Maybe, but I find this view rather blinkered. It relies on taking our current state of knowledge as an eternal truth.
To see humanity as a mystery surrounded by a world of unmysterious things is a very new idea. It would have seemed bizarre just 300 years ago. Back then, nature was pretty much inscrutable. At best human life was no more mysterious. In many ways, less so. There were no end of philosophical, psychological and religious theories, many of them so plausible that they're still around today.
The notion that humans are complex and hard, while nature is easy, is an illusion created (ironically) by the successes of reductionist science. Some of the biggest questions facing mankind for eons have answered so well, that we don't even see them as questions. Why do people get sick? Bacteria and viruses. Why does the sun shine? Nuclear fusion. Easy.
But only easy now. Think of the billions of people who lived and died before say 1800 - they saw the sun every day and they had no idea why it shone, and they knew no-one else did. You may not understand nuclear fusion, but you know that physicists do, you know it's no mystery. 300 years ago, it would have been very tempting to think that no-one would ever know, that the answers were known only by God.
So, to confidently claim that explaining the human mind will just be too hard is presumptuous. It may or may not be, I don't know. Historically, though, the theory that things are inexplicable has a bad track record.
Then there's the idea that humanity is not so much hard, as different. Philosophers have spent many pages coming up with new ways of phrasing that point. Nature is material, but we're spiritual. Nature is in-itself, but we're for-itself. And so on. If we can understand the mind at all, it certainly won't be through reductionistic, mechanistic, rationalist, objectivist (phew) science, they say.
Again, this seems perfectly plausible... to us, now. But people used to say the same thing about living things in general. That was vitalism, the idea that physics and chemistry were fine for inert matter, but anything alive was radically different.
At a certain point in history, when biology was almost completely seperate from (and primitive compared to) the other sciences, that seemed fine. But it turned out to be wrong. With the benefit of hindsight. Nowadays, no-one sees a radically difference between nature and bacteria, plants or animals... well, except humans.
Maybe the mind will never be understood within the framework of the rest of science. I don't know, but I don't think anyone else does right now, either.
28 comments:
But there's also (presumably) the argument that humans are extremely bad at meta-knowledge.
Or the idea that if the human mind was simple enough to understand, it wouldn't provide us the intelligence to understand it.
Yes, vitalism is dead. But we've not reached the point where there is one kind of science or a single set of scientific laws to explain all of nature except ourselves.
I think (from a position of ignorance other than reading Robin Hanson's blog :-) that it's very plausible that we'll be able to create AIs by whole-brain emulation well before we understand the mind well enough to build something intelligent from scratch. Which has no bearing on your question as to whether we will eventually understand the mind, but is an interesting point.
It should be noted that most philosophers do think the brain can be explained with science (philpapers survey).
That's so cute. Will science ever understand the brain?
Don't you mean: Will human brains ever understand the human brain?
That seems like a Chinese finger puzzle.
@NS
I'm not entirely sure that the human mind can be understood in the same sense as past problems have been. If we deconstruct the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness, it is clear that we understand the question but not the answer, nor even how to conceive of such an answer.
In the analogies that you provide, however, I'm not sure that past human societies even knew which questions to ask. For example, the questions "Why do people get sick?" and "Why does the sun shine?" are analogous to the question of "How is consciousness created?" But I would argue that we are beyond this latter question today. What we really are trying to answer now is "How does brain activity cause conscious experience?" The better analogies for this question would be: "How do viruses and bacteria cause disease?" and "How does nuclear fusion cause the sun to shine?"
The distinction here is that in your examples, it was a lack of knowledge which us from understand how disease spreads or how the sun gives off energy. In the case of consciousness, it is an inability to conceptualize what an answer would even look like.
I’ll admit that there still remains the possibility that we just think we understand the question, but that we still lack the requisite knowledge to fully define it. Nonetheless, I’m in the camp of people who are skeptical about the ability of science to furnish us with an answer.
@Tom
Have you considered that perhaps plausibility should not be evaluated from a position of ignorance?
Anonymous #1: It's a plausible idea, but we don't have to understand the human mind all in one go. We can start by looking at individual pieces of the puzzle and then put them together. Maybe we'll hit a brick wall and find we can't make them fit, but we'll at least have got close to the goal.
Anonymous #2: I disagree. I mean, no, we can't derive all of biology from chemistry - but we never will be able to. As Rutherford said, all science is physics or stamp collecting. Well, there are plenty of stamps to collect e.g. species. To understand a given species you need to know all of its genes, proteins, biochemistry, ecology etc etc etc. which can't be derived from physics. And we haven't done that for any species yet (although I believe we're pretty close with bacteria, and we have done it for viruses, if you count those.)
Pseudonymoniae: Personally, I agree that the hard problem is hard. If I had to name one thing we will never understand, it's that (2nd on my list being "Why is there something rather than nothing").
Certainly I can't see even glimmers of the answer to that question yet, whereas for every other question about the brain/mind, you can at least imagine what the answer would look like, in outline.
However, it may be that we've just framed the question wrong, and that one day we will realize that there's just no question to answer.
Well, isn't there any questions which we, as of now, can say are impossible to ever answer? For example, I would strongly argue that you never can know whether the world you live in is real or merely virtual (think The Matrix). Or if there are invisible, undetectable monsters on the moon. If we can acknowledge that there are questions that cannot ever be answered, then we will also have to argue why, for example, consciousness doesn't belong to this set of questions.
I think we have to come back to Neuroskeptic's original point. So often in the past, the reason we could not explain a certain thing was that we were asking the wrong question, or maybe trying to answer it the wrong way because the method did not fit the problem. How this develops cannot be known beforehand, and that is something every scientist should always keep in mind.
I think there is also a big difference between a question about something we can see the results of (brains producing behaviors and thoughts) versus those without any true outward effects that could be examined (monsters on the moon, the matrix). While the first involve philosophical discussions about real-world ideas, the second are philosophical discussions about philosophical ideas. While the philosophical ideas are important, the difference should not be forgotten.
I think, that now we have brains that was formed by our enviroment (including type of knowledge which help us to explore the nature) - and this type of brains can`t radically change. But new generation maybe will find they own type of thinking and they type of science. Will see...
@Infinidiv: I guess it comes down to how you see the problem at hand. I see the problem of consciousness as something on equal footing with the philosophical problems I listed. So in my view, it isn't a hard problem, it is an impossible problem. I don't see the burden of proof falling solely on my shoulders though. Anybody who wants to categorize consciousness in either of the two slots will have to argue for it. I only see this blogpost as an argument if we at first acknowledge that consciousness is of that non-philosophical nature.
Is it in the business of science to 'understand'? The lack of understanding makes it functional right? Science should remain 'procedural', leave the meaning of life to self-discovery, the why and when to self-autonomy. If science self-reflects, that'll make it no different to religion.
Neuroskeptic asks: "Will science ever understand the brain?"
What does understand mean? I have no idea. If you mean: "Will we ever have models that are predictive of the behavior of the human brain?" then the answer is yes for we already have some.
Questions like this seem nonsensical to me. I could equal well ask: "Will science ever understand light?". Once again, if what you mean is: "Will we ever have models that are predictive of the behavior of light?" then the answer is yes for we already have some models that work well. Many of these models have changed overtime and if history is a good guide those will change again. But then again is history a good guide? I don't like inference.
Neuroskeptic, since you asked the question can you tell us what you mean by "understand"?
@Eid: excellent point...contextually this post reminds me of Dan Dennett's work...including the beautiful notion that people imagine the (currently) "un-understood" requires some monumental skyhook of a solution to be made tractable.
great post neuroskeptic!
I think you leave out the pernicious influence of the Romantic movement. The elevation of emotion above reason, the resistance to explanation, and the xenophilia which are behind the idea that science will never explain consciousness can all be laid at the Romantic door.
I think Antonio Damasio and Thomas Metzinger between them do a pretty good job of explaining many aspects of self-consciousness. And it can only get better!
Maybe the speed of light is not the absolute maximum speed, maybe time is not linear and maybe some things cannot be measured.
Evolution has had millions of years playing with all the physical properties of this universe, including those we do not yet know about, to create us and give us consciousness.
We can only guess at how many dimensions we occupy.
"If we deconstruct the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness, it is clear that we understand the question but not the answer, nor even how to conceive of such an answer."
As Neuro intimates, I think it is rather more likely that the question is just ill-posed.
Just a minor thing regarding being-in-itself and being-for-itself. I think you're mischaracterizing Sartre a bit. The way I understand the distinction is that he's focusing on the idea of consciousness, or the difference between conscious knowledge of your existence and physical existence. Humans exist on a material level (being-in-itself) but the process of consciousness (being-for-itself) exists on top of the physical level. Consciousness is not a physical thing; just because a bunch of "stuff" is there doesn't mean there's any consciousness. Consciousness may arise from material, but consciousness itself is not an object. And so "being [for-itself] is a nothingness." Sartre doesn't give being-for-itself any mystical qualities, and I don't think it's reasonable to describe him as such. I don't think his ideas are at all incompatible with a scientific worldview.
JFF: Well, I'm no Sartre expert and actually I am still in the middle of reading Being & Nothingess. However my reading (thus far) is that he is proposing a radical indeed ontological difference between consciousness and everything else. He cautions against bad faith which seems to mean the process of seeing the for-itself as if it were an in-itself i.e. a being with properties subject to natural laws, in other words in denying this ontological dualism.
It is possible I'm missing the point and that Sartre was a bad example.
Great post. If you want someone to argue against, try this by Raymond Tallis (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1844652726/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=raymontalliso-21&link_code=as3&camp=2506&creative=9298&creativeASIN=1844652726).
"To explain everyday behaviour in Darwinian terms and to identify human consciousness with the activity of the evolved brain denies human uniqueness, and by minimizing the differences between us and our nearest animal kin, misrepresents what we are, offering a grotesquely simplified and degrading account of humanity."
Heh, funny you should say that, this post was actually sparked off by reading Tallis (but the argument isn't specific to him so didn't want to single him out). More Tallis-related stuff is coming soon.
The notion that humans are complex and hard, while nature is easy, is an illusion created (ironically) by the successes of reductionist science
Not true. It's not an illusion. Just purely in information content measured in bits, if we were to try to quantify and describe every single connection in the human brain, it would require more bits than doing so for any other structure we know about.
It's not an illusion that humans are complex. Humans are complex because the human brain is the most complicated structure in the universe (that we know about).
JoeDuncan: It's true that the brain is very complex in that sense, but that doesn't mean it will be hard to understand (which was the sense in which I used "complicated").
For example the internet is very complex. There must be trillions of bits of data being transferred every second. But the internet is not a mystery. We know how it works pretty much. That doesn't mean we know all the details but we know the essential principles which govern it.
In the same way, I doubt we will ever be able to measure brain activity in sufficient detail to be able to analyze and predict the activity of any given neuron, or whatever. But we may be able to discover the underlying principles behind higher brain function, which at present are entirely mysterious.
Has anybody ever tried to grow a CNS of any species on a 3D grid capable of measuring electric potentials?
Neuroskeptic
But will the internet ever be able to "understand" the internet?
Huh. That's a good point.
But I still don't like this idea that this "the human brain" who is doing the understanding has to be the same "the human brain" that is being understood.
For example, I think we understand the retina, the spinal cord, the brainstem and the primary visual cortex very well. Not entirely. But rather well.
Yet they're part of "the brain" (anatomically, although we arbitrary decide not to call the retina and spinal cord part of it).
You might say, fine, those bits are easy but we'll never understand the bit of the brain that does the understanding.
Maybe not (I am open to that possibility) but that seems like that's close to Cartesian theatrics.
I think everyone is looking at this through a filter. You are all assuming that the human mind is the same/housed in the brain. While this may sound odd or ridiculous to people, I believe that the brain is just a conduit, if you will, for the mind. The mind is a separate entity that the brain can use for information gathering and the like. Sure, the brain functions on deep thought, personality, etc., but what about things we cannot explain? Is it really the brain questioning its own existence, or questioning an existence that is beyond itself, yet close to it.
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