The Astonishing Hypothesis is a classic book in the world of neuroscience. The book was written by Dr. Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA, who went on to research the visual system and consciousness. The book was published in 1994 and is dedicated to fellow researcher Dr. Christof Koch, who recently wrote Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist. This post features some quotes from the book.
“Tomorrow I may see (or be persuaded of) errors in my present thinking, but today I have to do the best I can.”
“The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
“The scientific belief is that our minds – the behavior of our brains – can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them.”
“Reductionism is not the rigid process of explaining one fixed set of ideas in terms of another fixed set of ideas at a lower level, but a dynamic interactive process that modifies the concepts at both levels as knowledge develops.”
“Can we find a neural correlate of events we consider to show the free exercise of our Will? And could it not be that our Will only appears to be free?”
“The brain at birth, we now know, is not a tabula rasa but an elaborate structure with many of its parts already in place. Experience then tunes this rough-and-ready apparatus until it can do a precision job.”
“Psychologists have frequently shown that our common-sense ideas about the workings of the mind can be misleading.”
“There is one fact about the brain that is so obvious it is seldom mentioned: It is attached to the rest of the body and communicates with it.”
“In our society, you can volunteer for the armed forces and run the risk of being wounded or killed, but you may not volunteer to undergo dangerous experiments merely to obtain scientific knowledge.”
“Experience has shown that several quite distinct models may produce the same behavior.”
“The brain is not a general-purpose machine, like most modern computers. Each part, when fully developed, does a somewhat different and specific job, but, in almost any response, many parts interact together. This general picture is supported by studies of humans whose brains have been damaged and by modern methods of scanning the human brain from outside the head.”
“Other hypotheses about man’s nature, especially those based on religious beliefs, are based on evidence that is even more flimsy but this is not in itself a decisive argument against them. Only scientific certainty (with all its limitations) can in the long run rid us of the superstitions of our ancestors.”
“You cannot successfully pursue a difficult program of scientific research without some preconceived ideas to guide you. Thus, loosely speaking, you ‘believe’ in such ideas. But to a scientist these are only provisional beliefs. He does not have a blind faith in them. On the contrary, he knows that he may, on occasion, make real progress by disproving one of his cherished ideas. That scientists have a preconceived bias toward scientific explanations I would not deny. This is justified, not just because it bolsters their morale but mainly because science in the past few centuries has been so spectacularly successful.”
“Philosophers have had such a poor record over the last two thousand years that they would do better to show a certain modesty rather than the lofty superiority that they usually display.”
“The record of religious beliefs in explaining scientific phenomena has been so poor in the past that there is little reason to believe that the conventional religions will do much better in the future.”
“Not only do the beliefs of most popular religions contradict each other but, by scientific standards, they are based on evidence so flimsy that only an act of blind faith can make them acceptable. If the members of a church really believe in life after death, why do they not conduct sound experiments to establish it? They may not succeed but at least they could try. History has shown that mysteries which the churches thought only they could explain (e.g., the age of the earth) have yielded to a concerted scientific attack. Moreover, the true answers are usually far from those of conventional religions. If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.”
“The aim of science is to explain all aspects of the behavior of our brains, including those of musicians, mystics, and mathematicians.”
“It is unlikely that the Astonishing Hypothesis, if it turns out to be true, will be universally accepted unless it can be presented in such a way that appeals to people’s imagination and satisfies their need for a coherent view of the world and themselves in terms they can easily understand. It is ironic that while science aims at exactly such a unified view, many people find much of our present scientific knowledge too inhuman and too difficult to understand.”
“It would be comforting to believe that most people would be so convinced by the experimental evidence that they would immediately change their views. Unfortunately, history suggests otherwise.”
“General ideas, especially moral ones, impressed on us at an early age often become deeply embedded in our brains. It can be very difficult to change them. This may help to explain why religious beliefs persist from generation to generation, but how did such ideas originate in the first place, and why do they so often turn out to be incorrect? One factor is our very basic need for overall explanations of the nature of the world and of ourselves. The various religions provide such explanations in terms the average person finds easy to relate to. It should always be remembered that our brains largely developed during the period when humans were hunter-gatherers. There was strong selective pressure for cooperation within small groups of people and also for hostility to neighboring, competing tribes.”
“Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truths but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendants.”
“The very nature of our brains – evolved to guess the most plausible interpretations of the limited evidence available – makes it almost inevitable that, without the discipline of scientific research, we shall often jump to wrong conclusions, especially about rather abstract matters.”
“The Astonishing Hypothesis may be proved correct. Alternatively, some view closer to the religious one may become more plausible. There is always a third possibility: that the facts support a new, alternative way of looking at the mind-brain problem that is significantly different from the rather crude materialistic view many neuroscientists hold today and also from the religious point of view. Only time, and much further scientific work, will enable us to decide. Whatever the answer, the only sensible way to arrive at it is through detailed scientific research.”
“My first assumption was that part of one’s brain is concerned with making plans for future actions, without necessarily carrying them out. I also assumed that one can be conscious of such plans – that is, that they are subject at least to immediate recall. My second assumption was that one is not conscious of the ‘computations’ done by this part of the brain but only of the ‘decisions’ it makes – that is, its plans. Of course, these computations will depend on the structure of that part of the brain (derived partly epigenetically and partly from past experience) and on its current inputs from other parts of the brain. My third assumption was that the decision to act on one plan or another is also subject to the same limitations. In other words, one has immediate recall of what is decided but not of the computations that went into the decision, even though one may be aware of a plan to move.”
