BitterSweetLife

Another Reason Why We Hardly Understand Ourselves



Ka-crack! Thud! Books are falling like bricks, and The Master List is slowly taking shape. Keep your head up or you might get caught off-guard.

Back in the summer, I had voiced an interest in exploring the whole human consciousness conundrum - what makes us cogitate, how our minds form, etc. But it was only a couple weeks ago that I actually began to carry out my admittedly "mental" plan. Step one in my exploration was to crack John Horgan’s The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation. Finishing the book was an enlightening first step in my journey toward understanding the grey matter, although the "enlightening" part is open to debate.

Horgan cites so many genius genetic engineers and award-winning biologists that one loses track of them—and that’s ok. The gist of this book didn’t reside in the specificity of the quotations, theories, and anecdotes, however (which rapidly become marginal, as it would take multiple readings and copious notes to retain them all). The central premise is strikingly obvious. You could say the title gives it away. With pleasing irony, the penetrating quotes and innovative philosophies that Horgan culls from scores of researchers coalesce into a solid verdict: Where the mind is concerned, we don’t know all that much—and may never. Horgan buttresses this conclusion so forcefully that I, at least, found his conclusion undeniable.

While I can’t say I was disappointed with this judgment, I found myself wishing that Horgan had gone still further in his defiance of overly-smug “sciencedom.” On the one hand, I found concepts like the “explanatory gap” (saying that “thoughts originate at the intersection of lobes A and B” hardly explains thoughts; thus the “explanatory gap”) and a pseudo-scientific approach to the mind (ala Dickens or Poe, more literary—and more revealing—than pure biological models) quite helpful. But I found Horgan apparently self-blinded in other areas. For example, in his concluding chapter, Horgan quotes Max Planck.

“Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.”

And Horgan goes on to validate such a mindset, suggesting, “Scientists will never accept that the mind cannot be tamed. Nor should they…” In a half-playful, half-serious way, Horgan suggests that a “mysterian” approach, a kind of unbridled scientific mysticism, may be the only route left in perceiving the mind. However, in light of the nonchalant way that Horgan writes off the possibility of God’s existence, I find his “mysterian” position highly inconsistent.

Unsolvable mysteries are fine, Horgan seems to suggest, as long as they aren’t God. The problem is, when faced with unsolvable mysteries, we don’t get to pick and choose. Admitting that the mind is an awe-inspiring machine that defies our attempts at self-analysis could be a tip of the hat to a genius Creator. Horgan prefers to just embrace to nebulous "mystery" of it. Thus, while The Undiscovered Mind is fascinating and informative, Horgan’s assault on the limits of scientific certainty should have begun a little closer to home.

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