The Undiscovered Mind

de John Horgan

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]