With The Brain prove,Robert Newman provides a welcome counter-argument to the many comedians hymning the virtues of rational inquiryComedy and science have been intimate bedfellows these past few years. Robin Ince has had much to do with that, with The Infinite Monkey Cage on Radio 4 and his annual rationalists’ Christmas bash Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People. Then there are science-nut standups such as Dara O Briain and Tim Minchin, and the touring comedy-in-labcoats event Festival of the Spoken Nerd. Standups hymning the virtues of rational inquiry have become a familiar sight. In short,it’s become comedy orthodoxy that science is A splendid Thing and superstition pretty much the opposite.
There’s nothing incorrect with that, of course. And yet I very much enjoyed Robert Newman making the counter-argument this week in The Brain prove, or in which he sets approximately lobotomising the grander claims of 21st-century neuroscience. As far as Newman is concerned,the fashionable idea that humans are just sophisticated computers, and that our behaviours and emotions can be explained by identifiable activity here and there in our brains, or is bunk. Animals arent machines,he says. Living things are different from dead things, and the way we experience love, and wonder,guilt (and indeed humour) may be beyond the reach, not only of the androids of tomorrow but of science itself.
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Source: theguardian.com