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A review by ledge
The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience by Matthew Cobb
4.0
Really fascinating overview of the past, present, and future of our knowledge of the brain, showing how far we have come and how much further we have to go. The author is suitably sceptical on all sorts of areas (fMRI, the chemical imbalance theory of depression, The Human Brain Project...) but ultimately optimistic that we will find the answers, even if it's 100 years or more hence.
The only criticism I have is that, though the book is largely about the science, where it deals with philosophy it is rather unsatisfactory. In particular it deals with the hard problem rather perfunctorily - in order to abandon materialist approaches it says 'we would need [...] inexplicable experimental results that contradict the materialist working hypothesis'. We already have those in the form of our everyday experience, which in its private, subjective, qualitative nature is fundamentally unlike anything science (not just neuroscience but all science) tells us about the public, objective, quantitative material world. Though I don't doubt that the materialist hypothesis will eventually provide us with neurological correlates of consciousness, how matter actually produces, or instantiates, or 'is' mind, is likely to be a mystery for a lot longer.
The only criticism I have is that, though the book is largely about the science, where it deals with philosophy it is rather unsatisfactory. In particular it deals with the hard problem rather perfunctorily - in order to abandon materialist approaches it says 'we would need [...] inexplicable experimental results that contradict the materialist working hypothesis'. We already have those in the form of our everyday experience, which in its private, subjective, qualitative nature is fundamentally unlike anything science (not just neuroscience but all science) tells us about the public, objective, quantitative material world. Though I don't doubt that the materialist hypothesis will eventually provide us with neurological correlates of consciousness, how matter actually produces, or instantiates, or 'is' mind, is likely to be a mystery for a lot longer.