An Odyssey Through The Brain

Link here.

This is a great article and great work by Carl Schoonover.  Unfortunately the article is damaged by the concluding remarks - “People assumed for thousands of years that there must be something else,” the scientist Jonah Lehrer writes in the introduction. “And yet, there is nothing else: this is all we are.”

No one is able to make that statement as one of  incontrovertible truth.  The human mind is the most complex, fascinating and least understood entity in the known universe.  We have no idea what it is, why it is or what it is truly capable of.     

The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality.  This is an ability about which formal traditional scientific method has nothing to say. It’s long past time to take a closer look at this qualitative preselection of facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by those who make so much of these facts after they are "observed." I think that it will be found that a formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in the scientific process doesn’t destroy the empirical vision at all. It expands it, strengthens it and brings it far closer to actual scientific practice.

As Robert Pirsig points out in the quote above, it’s really a qualitative world.  The person making the ideological remark that there is nothing else doesn’t seem to understand that fact. 

Good science is to understand the limits of our knowledge and explore the unknown with an intent to learn.   Good science clearly knows its limitations of knowledge as it relates to the  physical study of the brain and the completely unknown metaphysical aspects of the human mind.  Ideology, on the other hand, often portrayed as science, is to conclude incontrovertible fact when it is  clearly not possible.  This is in fact junk science.   Unfortunately, much of science is religious ideology perpetuated by high priests or experts and keepers of the status quo.   That is, until someone comes along and smashes their special club of overly large egos as Albert Einstein did.  The status quo never moved society or humanity forward.  Ever.  They are keepers of more ideology than truth.

One thing I am completely confident of, and that we have remarked of on here numerous times, is the world is not as it seems.  Whether that applies to the economic world or the human mind is irrelevant.  Our knowledge of both is limited to our sensory interpretations of the world around us.  ie, Most people think with their eyes.