The Undiscovered Mind

Description

My obsession with sciences limits culminated in "The End of Science", which was published in 1996. In it I examined major fields of pure science, including particle physics, cosmology, and evolutionary biology. These disciplines, I argued, were becoming victims of their own phenomenal success. Physicists would never transcend the powerful theories of quantum mechanics and relativity, which together describe all the forces and particles of nature; cosmologists would never achieve anything as profound as the unifying narrative ofthe big bang theory; biologists could not hope to top Darwin's theory of evolution and DNA-mediated genetics. But in the chapters titled "The End of Social Science" and "The End of Neuroscience," I presented a somewhat different argument: that scientists attempting to explain the human mind might be overwhelmed by its sheer complexity. [...] I decided to write another book, one that would examine mind-related science in much greater detail than "The End of Science" did. The book would address not only scientists' efforts to explain the properties of the mind, including consciousness; it would also examine attempts to medicate or otherwise treat minds afflicted with mental illness and to replicate the mind's properties in machines. [excerpted from author's Introduction]

Description

"John Horgan focuses on the single most important scientific enterprise of all - the effort to understand the human mind - and exposes a world of minor and doubtful achievement.". "Horgan takes us inside laboratories, hospitals, and universities to meet neuroscientists. Freudian analysts, electroshock therapists, behavioral geneticists, evolutionary psychologists, artificial intelligence engineers, and philosophers of consciousness. He looks into the persistent explanatory gap between mind and body that Socrates pondered and shows that it has not been bridged. He investigates what he calls the Humpty Dumpty dilemma, the fact that neuroscientists can break the brain and mind into pieces but cannot put the pieces back together again. He presents evidence that the placebo effect is the primary ingredient of psychotherapy, Prozac, and other treatments for mental disorders. As Horgan shows, the mystery of human consciousness, of why and how we think, remains so impregnable that to expect the attempts of scientific method and technology to penetrate it anytime soon is absurd."--BOOK JACKET.

First Sentence

In Phaedo Plato described the last hours of Socrates, who had been imprisoned and sentenced to death by Athenian authorities.

Subjects

Other Editions

• The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and ExplanationHardcoverFree Press1999-09-14
• The Undiscovered MindPaperbackOrion Publishing Group, Limited2000-11-02
• The Undiscovered MindPaperbackFree Press2000-11-14