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From: pbrennan@world.std.com (Patrick M Brennan)
Subject: Re: The Human Brain.
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Date: Wed, 22 Mar 1995 20:36:43 GMT
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Jon Bazemore wrote:
:         How much is currently known about the human brain?
:     To clarify, I mean, if fully understanding how the brain
:     and therefore mind work was 100 percent, where are we
:     at now?
:  
:         20 percent?

This question, sadly, is so broad and so vague as to be completely
meaningless.  Suppose, for the sake of argument, someone said "25%".
What does that tell you?  What is the meaning of "100%"?  How does one
quantify knowledge?  The questioner has a very poor concept of how
scientific knowledge, indeed knowledge of any kind, is assessed.  Not
all things are suitable for crisp quantization.

As for the state of knowledge on the brain, and on mind, I would like
to point out, as many other commentators have, that we could know
everything about the physic/chemistry and internal state of a brain, a
la Laplace's Demon, and still know nothing about the mind 'within'.
Mind is a complicated region where physics and chemistry mix it up 
with sense data and culture, and the result is even less susceptible
to "25%" answers than just the narrow biochemical question.  So don't
assume that anything capable of explaining "brain" is automatically
going to explain "mind".  To use a brittle analogy, you can't explain
how Windows works by explaining how digital electronics works.  (You
can't explain how Windows works _at all_, but you know what I mean :-)

Jon, your question is too big.  It's too broad.  Nobody is working on
a comprehensive theory of how the whole mind works, or implementing
software and hardware, because we're still too far away from a glimmer
of the big picture.  We need to construct the building blocks before
we assemble them into a GUT ofbrain, and of mind.  Galileo and Newton
didn't start looking for the Top Quark.  People have been working on
physics for 2000 years, or 350 if you only count from Newton.  Serious
work on mind and brain has only begun in this century.  It's much more
productive to focus on questions like "what is the mechanism of
memory?" and "how can people learn ill-defined tasks so easily?", which,
although they are still huge, indeed life-consuming questions, are
potentially much more tractable.

Patrick

