Can we understand understanding?

The Undiscovered Mind
How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation
John Horgan
The Free Press, $25, 325 pp.

Ten years ago the U.S. Congress designated the 1990s as the Decade of the Brain. Neuroscience and other branches of cognitive science, it seemed to many experts at the time, were well on the way toward unraveling the secrets of human consciousness. Now that the Decade of the Brain has ended, the mystery of mind remains. In fact, John Horgan, a former writer for Scientific American and author of the controversial The End of Science, argues in this provocative book that the human mind will forever remain a mystery.

In 1991 philosopher Daniel Dennett's grandiose treatise, Consciousness Explained (which, by the way, does not explain consciousness), declared war on all "mysterians." People who continue to believe that the mind is an impenetrable mystery are only frustrating the progress of science, he said. Apparently Dennett had not read G. E. Pugh's remark to the effect that if the brain were simple enough for us to understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. Last year, however, even so rationalist a thinker as Colin McGinn grimly concluded, in The Mysterious Flame, that the mind and brain will always remain inherently unknowable, out of bounds to scientific elucidation. "I maintain," he wrote, "that we need a qualitative leap in our understanding of mind and brain, but I also hold that this is not a leap our intellectual legs can take."

In The Undiscovered Mind, Horgan's own investigation of the various "mind sciences" leads him to the same mysterianism that McGinn reluctantly embraces and that Dennett deplores. For Horgan, as for McGinn, this confession of the limits of science is no reason to celebrate. The lacuna in our understanding of mind is not a victory for the soul or an implicit sanctioning of religious anthropology. Rather it is just a sad and sober fact. We simply do not, and indeed cannot, understand very much about the mind.

Nor do we really know how to heal it. From psychoanalysis to Prozac, Horgan contends, efforts to heal the psyche have scarcely worked any better than placebos. Citing psychiatrist Arthur Shapiro, he seems to agree that the placebo effect may be the primary ingredient in psychotherapy. Interestingly, at a time when Frederick Crews and others have attempted to discredit Freud as a consummate fraud, Horgan is rather soft in his critique of psychoanalysis, since in his view nothing else seems to work much better. At the suggestion of Jerome Frank and Howard Gardner, Horgan advises professional practitioners of the "talking cure" to situate their discipline not in science, but in the field of rhetoric, the art of persuasion. In this setting they will not have to defend their practice against the usual charge of being unscientific.

Horgan's breezy but gripping book is destined to irritate many neuroscientists now working feverishly to understand the brain, as well as the cognitive scientists attempting to comprehend the "mystery" of mind. Moreover, it will be shocking to the many patients who will testify that psychiatry or psychotherapy has restored them to life. Horgan steers clear of interviewing actual patients, however, content to generalize from sheets of statistics and interviews with experts that the entire spectrum of therapies lives on overblown claims of effectiveness.

In spite of its author's insistence that he is not trying to depress his readers, The Undiscovered Mind hardly sparkles with optimism. Its general mood is melancholic rather than hopeful. The same tragic resignation that came through in The End of Science (a book that sought to douse the notion that the horizon of scientific research extends endlessly ahead) takes over here once again.

For Horgan the glass is always half-empty. Instead of highlighting the obvious medical improvements that have occurred in the care of the mentally ill, he seems content to focus almost exclusively on the failures of therapy to live up to its hype. The information he provides is not without value, but the reader is forewarned that, for Horgan, the universe is not a place of promise, and he wants to make sure that we realize it.

If he is pessimistic about the results of therapy, Horgan is no more excited about the prospects of cognitive science. Here, however, his sobriety seems more justifiable. In the field of artificial intelligence, for example, even Marvin Minsky and other pioneers are now confessing that earlier dreams about thinking machines were too enthusiastic. If we can never really understand the mind, how can we hope to build one artificially?

Especially significant are Horgan's discussion and evaluation of the new field of evolutionary psychology, an offshoot of E. O. Wilson's sociobiology. Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain all of the features and functions of the mind as results of natural selection for reproductive fitness that culminated in hunters and gatherers. Its devotees seem inordinately confident that Darwin provides the deepest and most fundamental explanation of our mental characteristics. Appropriately, Horgan questions just how rich Darwinian accounts of our mental habits can legitimately claim to be. Evolutionary psychology turns out to be "a strangely inconsequential exercise." It can take almost any kind of social or psychological datum and explain it in Darwinian terms, but it cannot experimentally show that this explanation is better than any others. "Like neuroscientists, researchers in evolutionary psychology and artificial intelligence are both bumping up against the Humpty Dumpty dilemma. They can break the mind into pieces, but they have no idea how to put it together again."

Just how mysterious, then, is the mind? There are, after all, both strong and weak versions of mysterianism. An example of the strong variety is that of Saint Augustine, for whom the mind's elusiveness to intellectual mastery is indicative of our deeply spiritual nature. Horgan's implicitly materialist instincts, however, render his own mysterianism rather weak by comparison. The fact that mind evades complete objectification is not a signal of its irreducibility to mechanics. Our mental freedom is probably illusory, for there must be unspecifiable physical factors that quietly "cause" all of our decisions. For Horgan, "the undiscovered mind" is not an exhilarating doorway to infinite mystery, as it has been for the truly great philosophers of the past. Rather it is just one more dead end, perhaps even a final defeat, for human inquiry.

John F. Haught is professor of theology at Georgetown University. His most recent book is God after Darwin (Westview).