… at iai News. An excerpt:
The physical sciences have been so extraordinarily successful in their own sphere of late that people tend now to expect them to be applicable everywhere. Enlightenment thinking has built up a general optimism about human capacities which centres at present on what is called `the scientific method’ – a grossly simplified notion about how scientists work, one which almost treats them as omnipotent.
Brain science, in particular, has been greeted with a credulous rapture which is quite out of proportion to any light that it has actually thrown on the rest of life. In fact, at present the sort of wild credulity which used to be associated chiefly with religious movements seems to flow most naturally towards scientific developments.
All this distracts people from older ways of thinking – not just from religious thinking, but from all sorts of instinctive and traditional social approaches by which human life has habitually been guided, and which are probably necessary to it. In this area, isolated experimental results are really not a substitute for the accumulated experience of history.
Many ways of thinking are important, yes. But neuroscience has definitely contributed insights that we didn’t realize before. This is particularly the case for non-humans. While we can directly experience human life from many perspectives, neuroscience is one of the most important ways for us to understand the inner lives of animals.