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.
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.
- More Here
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.
- More Here
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