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The humanities and sciences have often been at odds, sometimes at war, in modern times. Philosophers and poets have seen scientists as hopeless reductionists, and scientists sometimes assume that in the humanities “anything goes,” since there is no requirement for grounding in reality, since “reality” is, for the humanist, a relative proposition. While I can’t speak for all scientists, my personal view is that both approaches have more to gain than to lose by interacting in an open-minded way.
As a scientist, I have tried to cross the great divide between the sciences and humanities in my books, especially in Synaptic Self and most recently in Anxious. Traveling in the other direction, Jason Tougaw’s The Elusive Brain is exemplary in treating science and the humanities as complementary endeavors. Both enable us to extract meaning about our inner selves and the physical and social contexts in which we exist.
Our ability to explore how the brain works is only as good as our understanding of what we are trying to learn about the brain. We can pinpoint exactly what it is we are measuring when we study how an external stimulus, say an apple, is processed by the brain. The apple has certain features (shape, color), the processing of which can be understood in fairly precise terms. We can also explore how features like shape and color come together to give rise to a visual representation of the object. These processes are now well understood.
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