One of my favourite quotes concerning the human sciences comes from the Godfather author Mario Puzo - something like:
"If our minds were simpler, we'd be too stupid to understand them."
A nice self-referential twist - maybe there are limits to our understanding of ourselves - as we get cleverer we develop a more complex brain, but then we can't understand it, so we need to get cleverer in order to understand it, but for that to happen the brain needs to get more complex still, so we can't understand it...
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Comments
2 comments:
One psychologist whose name I forgot jokingly said that brain is positioned at an inconvinient place to be studied. Yes it it is very difficult for us to imagine the mind uderstanding the mind. A similar argument runs about the limts of logic. When a mathematical equation becomes so complex and begin to refer to itself we fail to prove the truth of some statements in that system. Though I don't fully understand what this means, it has a methematical proof and logic was able to establish the limits of logic. I don't know if this is the case with the study of the human mind. The study of the brain itself is in its infant stage.
I'm still trying to figure out what to say.... beside the fact that i find that quote very amusing...
Post a Comment