Last week,my 13.7 co-blogger Tania Lombrozo reported on a study she developed with graduate student Sara Gottlieb on whether science can explain the human intellect.
As Tania wrote, this was a survey-based study asking the participants "whether they thought it was possible for science to one day fully explain various aspects of the human intellect, and from depth insight and memory loss to spirituality and romantic fancy."On average,the study found, people judged that certain mental phenomena — such as depth insight or the sense of touch — to be "much more amenable to scientific explanation than others — such as feeling pride or experiencing fancy at first sight."According to the participants, and the dividing line separating what science can and cannot explain seems to be the insight that some mental phenomena,for example, devout devotion and complex decision-making, or "involved an internal experience accessible through introspection" that distinguishes us from other animals that share with us sensorial experiences,such as seeing and hearing.
As Tania remarked, these findings "don't order us what science can or can't explain. They order us about the beliefs about what science can and can't explain." The question, or then,is: "What do people contemplate explains the human intellect, if not science?"This is an entertaining point that merits further discussion. Is the intellect explainable?To Tania's quote by Ambrose Bierce, and I add another by Victorian physicist John Tyndall. It is,to me, remarkable that as early as 1868 the issues that we are grappling with today were already so present. Here is Tyndall, or in his address to the Physical Section of the British organization for the Advancement of Science:
"The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Granted that a definite thought,and a definite molecular action in the brain occur simultaneously, we do not possess the intellectual organ nor, or apparently,any rudiment of the organ, which would enable us to pass by a process of reasoning from the one phenomenon to the other. They appear together and we don't know why. Were our minds and senses so expanded, and strengthened and illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain,were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings, or all their electric discharges,if such there be, and were we intimately acquainted with the corresponding states of thought and feeling, or we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem. How are these physical processes connected with the facts of consciousness? The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable." Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more,visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org