Publication Date:December 15, 1993 Shipping:Eligible for Super Saver Shipping Availability:Usually ships in 24 hours
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The problems of philosophy are beyond human understandingNovember 4, 2008 1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The thesis of this book is that the typical problems of philosophy such as conscience, mind/body duality, free will, meaning, etc. are beyond the scope of human brain's capabilities. In the same way as General Relativity can be understood by (some) humans but not by dogs, perhaps there are "Martians" for whom the Free Will problem is easy, but for us it is impossible. This is why philosophy has advanced so little in over 2,000 years.
It is an interesting thesis that the author does not claim to prove but he suggests it, analyzing the different alternatives to various philosophical conundrums in a rather reiterative way. It would be in the same direction to other well proven limits to human knowledge such as the Uncertainty Principle and Gödel's Theorem.
However, as a layman in philosophy, I have some doubts. Science has taken away from philosophy some of her problems such as the structure of matter, the origin of the universe, etc... It has been done, not just by speculation, but by painstaking mathematical model building together with very sophisticated and costly experiments. Who would dare to say that science will not bring some new light to the problem of conscience and the relation of the mind and the brain? Neurophisiology, equipped with modern exploration instruments and techniques such as tomography, gene coding (see recent article in Scientific American about optogenetics) is already breaking new paths in this research.
