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.
But the flip side of that is that we don't know that it is there either until we've actually hit the barrier, and it makes no sense at all to assume when going into a new avenue of study that it's impossible to carry to a successful conclusion. Such an assumption would be a show-stopper. If the limit is there, we'll find it. The hard way.
Now, IANAD, but your medical examples seem rather poorly chosen. We can slow down Alzheimers. We can't stop it yet, but there are credible research programs that are trying to figure out how to do that. We do understand many of the proximate causes, and several of the ultimate causes underpinning the disease. Same with bipolar disorder. I don't understand 'belief' either, but I have a couple of more or less credible guesses, as have the people who are actually researching it. I don't know where you're getting with the dog, though?
The salient point, however, is that you can always find a subject that's on the frontier of science, because, to paraphrase a famous populariser of science (whose name escapes me at the moment) 'as the island of our knowledge expands, so do the shores of our ignorance.' Pointing out that science can't explain everything (yet) is nothing more than an exercise in perpetually moving goalposts.
And it is a fundamental misconception that the instruments we use to measure brains have 'a mind of their own.' I am not involved in that kind of research, but my understanding is that we use (mainly) 3d-NMR imaging, ultrasound Doppler and image contrasting to measure and interpret blood flow in different regions of the brain. I see a lot of electrical circuits, a couple of piezo-electric crystals, a RF emitter and some big-ass magnets in those experimental setups. Don't see no minds, though.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Don't see no minds, though. Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. -Charu Saxena.
It is even more uncertain: how do we know that a barrier is a barrier? How do we know that we NEVER EVER get to know the other side? All we can surely know is the possibilities that we experienced!
I am rather optimistic about mind research. As we try to build robots, we may conclude that most key qualities (including bias in strength of earlier of first experiences, say) are kind of necessary to a cybernetic system of certain complexity level.
On the other hand, will the knowledge of human mind would necessarily be spread without reservations and just as openly as the knowledge in fundamental physics? Couldn't that knowledge be "worth" more restricted?! We even have commercialization of "standard" scientific research under way.
The NLP (Neuro-lingquistic programming) development is interesting. The NLP guys do not want themselves to register their discipline as science by official institutions. Either they do not wish to bother with merely academic status (and perhaps "open source" standards), or prefer to make money - it depends how cynically you want to see them. Their approach is pragmatical foremost, but they possibly have much interesting knowledge and experience, and there is a vague philosophy behind. If someone would wish, some interesting science could be made of that, I think.
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.
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.
