Newsgroup: it.cultura.religioni.cristiani
Titolo: [OT] x chi cerca la coscienza...

Brain research? Pay it no mind
Mystery of consciousness
still outwitting scientists
PHILIP MARCHAND
Scientists who have been trying to understand the brain have recently
tried to measure neural activity of Republicans and Democrats to see
if political affiliations had anything to do with brain chemistry.
The results were inconclusive. (I think the Democrat brains were more
active in the "I feel your pain" part of the limbic system.) 
What really caught my eye about a New York Times Magazine article on
the topic was the following statement:
 "One of the most celebrated insights of the past 20 years of
neuroscience is the discovery _ largely associated with the work of
Antonio Damasio _ that the brain's emotional systems are critical to
logical decision-making. People who suffer from damaged or impaired
emotional systems can score well on logic tests but often display
markedly irrational behaviour in everyday life."
I'm sure Damasio has done good work, rooting around the neocortex. 
But what does it say for neuroscience that one of its "most celebrated
insights" is something we've known for three or four millennia? 
"Imagination does not breed insanity," 
G.K. Chesterton wrote around the beginning of the 20th century.
 "Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. 
Poets do not go mad; but chess players do."
Poets deal with emotions as part of their stock in trade, which is one
of the reasons why it's safer to trust a poet than a mathematician
with looking after your children and pets and even your business
affairs.
Cardinal Newman in the 19th century hated what he called paper logic 
_ the ability to "score well on logic tests." He pointed out that "the
exercise of reason is a living spontaneous energy within us, not an
art," and came up with a great image of the mind as a mountain climber
scaling a rock face. The brain scrambles up with incredible dexterity
- finding a foothold in some obscure memory, reaching out and grasping
a secure handhold by sheer instinct, discovering a ledge provided by
some observed law of human behaviour, and so on. Afterwards, it's
almost impossible to analyze the process by which the climber made it
to the top. But the climber did make it.
"In practical matters, when their minds are really roused, men
commonly are not bad reasoners," Newman pointed out.
 "Men do not mistake when their interest is concerned." 
(He meant women, too, I think.) 
The funny thing is, the person who reasons well may not be able to
argue well. Don't ask that person to give you his reasons for why he
has come to a certain conclusion. He can't. He'll hem and haw and come
up with some reason which sounds stupid and illogical. 
But his conclusion will be right, anyway.
We do know that the "living spontaneous energy" of right reason
depends on many things, including emotional honesty, moral clarity,
paying attention, using your eyes and ears - but the actual operations
of reason, according to Newman, "baffle investigation." 
This, however, hasn't stopped neuroscientists. 
Year after year, they come out with books promising to solve the
mystery. The whole tone of their writing is: 
We've solved the mystery of the spiral nebulae, 
the human brain is next. 
Trust us.
Noted science writer John Horgan wrote a book a few years ago entitled
The Undiscovered Mind, in which he pointed out that the brain
continued to "baffle investigation" despite all the scientific hype.
He started his survey of scientific research with the psychologists,
with their long and instructive history of enriched baloney. We had
the cult of Freud, then the cult of B.F. Skinner, then the cult of the
computer, and now we have the cult of Darwin.
Evolutionary explanations of human behaviour - men don't like to ask
for directions because their genes tell them to beware approaching
strangers - are thick on the ground, and about as enlightening as the
explanations that phrenologists used to give. 
(Some men are womanizers because they have 
a large amative bump on their skulls.)
The bravest of the neuroscientists are trying to tackle the toughest
nut of all, the mystery of consciousness. A scientist named Gerald
Edelman, who won a 1972 Nobel Prize for his work in immunology,
switched to brain studies and has been particularly vocal about his
ambitions. 
"My hope is to disenthrall those who believe that the subject of
consciousness is exclusively metaphysical or necessarily mysterious,"
he has proclaimed. 
This smacks of a philosophical agenda, which does not inspire
confidence - a scientist venturing into the fields of philosophy and
metaphysics is like Tie Domi figure skating.
 It's not a pretty sight.
Edelman has come out with a book titled Wider Than The Sky: 
The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. 
A review of the book in The Guardian tries to summarize his theory,
which is that consciousness is an evolutionary process (of course) in
which brain cells form "fleeting coalitions," subsequently "whittled
down" by certain "lower-brain valuing centres" into a "dynamic core,
the particular network of cells that suffice to do the job of
representing the world meaningfully at a particular instant."
I know I should read the book and not merely quote from this review,
but I don't want to read the book. I'm getting a message from a
fleeting coalition of brain cells right this minute, and it says
Edelman's theory is the equivalent of Tie Domi trying to perform a
triple lutz-triple toehold combination. 
I could be wrong. Horgan's book, however, suggests I'm right. It's
full of interviews with professors who made brave starts in cognitive
science and then hit a brick wall. A professor named Howard Gardner,
for example, whose 1985 book The Mind's New Science helped to
popularize the field of cognitive science, told Horgan that questions
such as consciousness and free will were "particularly resistant" to
the scientific habit of trying to break down a subject into its most
elemental parts, like neural pathways in the brain. Gardner, Horgan
writes, "contended that psychologists may advance by adopting a more
`literary' style of investigation and discourse. After all,
Shakespeare and Dostoevsky can tell us much or more about the self
than psychologists can."
The human brain is so complex it simply defies the same kind of
analysis that scientists devote to subatomic particles or human immune
systems. "Like neuroscientists, researchers in evolutionary psychology
and artificial intelligence are both bumping up against the Humpty
Dumpty dilemma," Horgan writes. "They can break the mind into pieces,
but they have no idea how to put it back together again."
A friend of mine, who teaches physics at the University of Toronto and
has read a shelf-load of books on cognitive science, neuroscience, and
so on, says to me, "You take a problem such as human creativity -
anything I have ever read on that particular topic says to me that
these scientists have absolutely no idea, not even the beginning of an
idea, how we come up with new ideas, whether as artists or scientists.
We just don't know." 
His prognosis is not hopeful: "A lot of general readers have the
impression we've made a lot of progress in this field. There's a whole
plethora of books that promise, `This is the age of neuroscience,
we're finally understanding how the human brain works.' We can't even
understand how a cat's brain works. The fact is, real discoveries are
hard to come by. My own feeling - this is my guess - is that 5,000
years from now, we still will not have made much progress in
understanding our cognitive processes - how we conceptualize things,
how we become conscious."
No one denies that splendid work on the mechanics of the brain has
been done by scientists. The question is why neuroscience has been so
oversold. My friend has a theory on that. 
"I think the reason people want to believe in all of this is that they
have lost religion and the little of religion that remains to them
takes the form of a belief that science will explain things," he
comments. 
"My students get very bothered even by the suggestion that some
problems will not be solved. 
When I talked about this in class, one of my students was almost
crying. 
She actually said I had removed the meaning of her life. 
I thought, get a grip."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
pma...@thestar.ca
by Toronto star

 The results were inconclusive.
we will get the same result with our politician...
It's the "politician" brain that doesn't think..
do they   mention the "catholic" brain...?
Saluti encefalopiatti
Forex