I'm not sure what you're getting at here? Because science does not (yet) understand the brain, science never can understand the brain? I'll freely grant you that the brain might be the limit of scientific knowledge. Every new line of research might be the limit of science. It's always possible - in a strict philosophical sense of 'possible.' We don't know that the barrier isn't there, because we haven't tried to go beyond it yet.
I'll freely grant you that the brain might be the limit of scientific knowledge. Every new line of research might be the limit of science. It's always possible - in a strict philosophical sense of 'possible.' We don't know that the barrier isn't there, because we haven't tried to go beyond it yet.
It's possible that the mind is an emergent property of the brain and thereby has to be explained and understood in its own terms. This can be to a greater or lesser degree. A lesser degree might be pictured as the emergence of waves in water, and the greater degree as the emergence of matter from quantum interactions (at this point someone and migeru may flame me for getting my physics so crude and wrong).
We have had a couple of runs at a purely 'positivistic' understanding of the brain/mind/human psychology (cue B.F. Skinner) and these have not been very fruitful. This is not to say that the angle should thereby be closed, but if you are a government that has to decide which research programmes to fund, you might more successfully go for some mix of qualitative and quantitative research (and if you're a research department applying for funds you should always use the over-abused 'interdisciplinary' buzzword).
You can either base this on a pragmatic estimation that the science to go quantitative all the way is not there yet, or on a philosophical hunch that the mind is an emergent phenomenon.
A lesser degree might be pictured as the emergence of waves in water, and the greater degree as the emergence of matter from quantum interactions (at this point someone and migeru may flame me for getting my physics so crude and wrong).
Wikipedia: Quasiparticle
In physics, a quasiparticle refers to a particle-like entity arising in certain systems of interacting particles. It can be thought of as a single particle moving through the system, surrounded by a cloud of other particles that are being pushed out of the way or dragged along by its motion, so that the entire entity moves along somewhat like a free particle. The quasiparticle concept is one of the most important in condensed matter physics, because it is one of the few known ways of simplifying the quantum mechanical many-body problem, and is applicable to an extremely wide range of many-body systems.
There are two main theories of the FQHE. Fractionally-charged quasiparticles: this theory, proposed by Laughlin, hides the interactions by constructing a set of quasiparticles with charge , where the fraction is as above. Composite Fermions: this theory was proposed by Jain, and Halperin, Lee and Read. In order to hide the interactions, it attaches two (or, in general, an even number) flux quanta to each electron, forming integer-charged quasiparticles called composite fermions. The fractional states are mapped to the integer QHE. This makes electrons at a filling factor 1/3, for example, behave in the same way as at filing factor 1. A remarkable result is that filling factor 1/2 corresponds to zero magnetic field. Experiments support this.
There are two main theories of the FQHE.
