The Astonishing Hypothesis is that “You” your joys and your sorrows, and memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phased it;: “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be astonishing
Many educated people, especially in the Western world, also share the belief that the soul is a metaphor and that there is no personal life either before conception or after death. They may call themselves atheists, agnostics, humanists, or just lapsed believers, but they all deny the major claims of the traditional religions. Yet this does not mean that they normally think of themselves in a radically different way. The old habits of thought die hard. A man may, in religious terms, be an unbeliever but psychologically he may continue to think of himself in much the same way as a believer does, at least for every-day matters.
We need, therefore, to state the idea in stronger terms. The scientific belief is that our minds – the behavior of our brains – can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them. This is to most people a really surprising concept. It does not come easily to believe that I am the detailed behavior of a set of nerve cells, however many there may be and however intricate the interactions. Try for a moment to imagine this point of view. …
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3 comments
Dinesh said:
Many educated people, especially in the Western world, also share the belief that the soul is a metaphor and that there is no personal life either before conception or after death. They may call themselves atheists, agnostics, humanists, or just lapsed believers, but they all deny the major claims of the traditional religions. Yet this does not mean that they normally think of themselves in a radically different way. The old habits of thought die hard. A man may, in religious terms, be an unbeliever but psychologically he may continue to think of himself in much the same way as a believer does, at least for every-day matters.
We need, therefore, to state the idea in stronger terms. The scientific belief is that our minds – the behavior of our brains – can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them. This is to most people a really surprising concept. It does not come easily to believe that I am the detailed behavior of a set of nerve cells, however many there may be and however intricate the interactions. Try for a moment to imagine this point of view. …
Dinesh said:
J.Garcia said: