There's been a resurgence of discomfort with science, bubbling up from both conservative religious quarters and New Age movements. From the times of Galileo through the 1960s or so, the philosophical debate mostly involved God. Something has changed. We've entered a more selfish era, and with it has come a new challenge. The concern with God has been joined by anxiety over the nature of personhood.
In the mid-20th century, scientists like John von Neumann and Alan Turing presented the world with a new framework for explanation. Suddenly, the mind could be interpreted with a technological metaphor: the computer. The phantasmagorical ideas of Freud have since been replaced by crisper notions supported by personal experiences with a ubiquitous gadget. People are simulated in video games, so it's not too hard to imagine real people as components of a higher-resolution video game. One hears a bit of goading in the way some scientists and technologists, including Steven Pinker, Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, and others, have tried to challenge the notion that individuals are too special to be understood like any other phenomena.
Humility is valuable in science. Even when a scientific idea is true, it can be misused through grandiosity. Your body has a gravitational field, but that doesn't mean that studying physiology can teach you about black holes. It should be uncontroversial to state that the human brain is only partially understood. Certain mental phenomena might be explained and modeled with computers; the most fashionable candidates at the moment envision thoughts competing in the brain like organisms in the wild. But entirely new dynamics may well be needed to explain what brains can do.
