The New English Review has a poignant article by Theordore Darlrymple entitled “Do The Impossible: Know Thyself.” With the deluge of editorials, opinion pieces and essays describing how neuroscience is the last vast expanse separating humanity from truly knowing itself. This comes on the heals of Jeffery Rosen’s article in the New York Times Magazine entitled The Brain on the Stand, elucidating the shaky relationship between neuroscience and law in America. Jeffery Rosen was profiled on NPR’s Fresh Air today. I’ve found myself debating the pros and cons of neuroscience, and I have become comfortable in the fact that it probably won’t reveal all of our inner secrets, but it will certainly foster a greater understanding of mankind; or at least of his own self image. Here’s a snippet from Darlrymple’s essay:
Those who say that we are on the verge of a huge increase in self-understanding are claiming that enlightenment will suddenly be reached under the scientific bo tree. The enlightenment will have to be sudden rather than gradual because, if it were gradual, we should already be able to point to an increase in human contentment and self-control brought about by our already increased knowledge. But even the most advanced societies are just as full of angst, or poor impulse control, of existential bewilderment, of adherence to clearly irrational doctrines, as ever they were. There is no sign that, Prozac and neurosurgery notwithstanding, any of this is about to change fundamentally.
In other words, I think that life will continue to bewilder us for as long as we are self-conscious, thinking, feeling beings.
Tags: neuroscience, science, cogsci, cognitive science, philosophy, mind, law
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March 13, 2007 at 1:13 pm
It seems that, while neuroscience may not have opened the floodgates, neither has cognitive psychology. I imagine that any steps we make in cognitive science these days will be primarily baby steps, which is not to say they aren’t significant–they are–but in such a high-level science, in which there is not much consensus, it is unrealistic to expect breakthroughs similar to those in physics or biology. The mapping of newfound theories onto the reality is almost never one-to-one, although it may be the closest at the neural level.