How do you react to neuroscience moving towards explaining the mind?

[Into It]

The thought of understanding the brain is very cool in my opinion, the scary part is when we use the knowledge to try and control or change it to what we "think" we want.

+5

 

[stellar renegade]

Well... it'd technically be more accurate to say attempting to figure out behaviour or the mind. Considering the forum we're on, most of us are probably rather fond of theories within psychology about how we behave, how we think, how we feel and everything else that comes with this field.

There is an old documentary called "Brain Story" about a neuroscientist explaining functions. But more disturbingly, the idea that even the most intense and surreal emotions can be explained away by combinations within the brain. While the mind-body problem has always existed within philosophy, this evidence does sort of point towards one direction surely?

Back the to original question. How do you react to the whole thing? Discoveries about how we operate being reduced to atoms moving about.
Regardless in a practical daily life sense, it doesn't really seem to matter much but perhaps contemplation of the matter has an influence on your life.

I personally think it can help us understand things with fewer misconceptions about what's going on by actually observing instead of just guessing.

But this is quite odd, yet somehow refreshing: an ISFJ talking about psychology/science and their implications for life? My ISFJ friend would never do that in a million years. hah.

 

[Mole]

One step closer from eradicating this "soul" junk from the public's psyche. Which is one step closer to people really living in the world they really live in.

Soul is one of our most powerful metaphors.

And the only way to kill a metaphor is with another metaphor.

Fortunately you present no metaphor compelling enough or powerful enough to replace the soul.

And even if you succeeded you would not have reached the "world people really live in", you would still be in the world of metaphor.

Of course they have tried to replace the metaphor of soul with the metaphor of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but failed miserably, taking the lives of 100 million of their own people in the process.

They hate the soul so much that when they find they can't destroy a metaphor, they start destroying people. But 100 million later they found even that didn't work.

Really, why do you hate the metaphor of the soul so much?

It seems demonic to me.