Will science ever understand the brain?
To start off with, it must be admitted that science has done a pretty good job of explaining pretty much everything else in the universe, so just going on past experience, it probably will.
But some say that, sure, the scientific method is fine for things like chemistry, but not for others. The human brain (or some aspect of it: consciousness, the mind, love, belief, or whatever) is the most popular exception. Science just won't work on it, we're told. It's too complex.
Maybe, but I find this view rather blinkered. It relies on taking our current state of knowledge as an eternal truth.
To see humanity as a mystery surrounded by a world of unmysterious things is a very new idea. It would have seemed bizarre just 300 years ago. Back then, nature was pretty much inscrutable. At best human life was no ...
