by John Horgan about the future of mind-science, from the Heffter review of psychedelic research :
Mind-scientists have their creeds, just as religious
believers do. Francis Crick spelled out his reductionist
vision at the beginning of his book “The Astonishing
Hypothesis.”
“You: your joys and your sorrows, your memories
and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity
and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior
of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated
molecules.” As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have
phrased it, “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”
In a sense, Crick is right. We are nothing but a
pack of neurons. At the same time, neuroscience has
so far proved to be oddly unsatisfactory. Explaining
the mind in terms of neurons has not yielded much
more insight or benefit than explaining the mind in
terms of quarks and electrons.
There are many alternative reductionisms. We are
nothing but a pack of idiosyncratic genes. We are nothing
but a pack of adaptations sculpted by natural selection.
We are nothing but a pack of computational
devices dedicated to different tasks. We are nothing
but a pack of sexual neuroses. These proclamations,
like Crick’s, are all defensible, and they are all inadequate....
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