The Undiscovered Mind

How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation

Edición de la obra The Undiscovered Mind

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]