The end of psychology? Perhaps not quite yet, but there is a serious message behind The Onion’s fantasy about the American Psychology Association (APA). Over the past decades, psychology has been increasingly overtaken by neuroscience. Two multi-billion euro/dollar initiatives – one European, one American – were launched in 2012 with the avowed objectives of “solving the brain” and, in the EU’s case, incorporating the solution into novel “neuromorphic” computers. Hard-line reductionists speak of “molecular and cellular cognition” and dismiss the mind as an epiphenomenal product of neural processes, a “user illusion,” or, as zoologist Thomas Huxley put it a century and a half ago, merely the whistle to the steam train. Most neuroscientists concur; as Francis Crick put it: “You are nothing but a bunch of neurons.” Neurophilosophers, a world away from Descartes famous Cogito ergo sum speak contemptuously of “folk psychology”, to be replaced as neuroscience progresses by an objective, rigorously defined brain language.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 12:42:49 +0000