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13 - Source and Limits of Human Intellect

from Part Two - Thought and Consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2014

Leon N. Cooper
Leon N. Cooper
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
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Summary

The brain is believed to be the physical source of thought. But can the human brain understand itself? Are there limits to human intellect? If so, what are they and how will we know when we have reached them?

This essay is based on an article originally published in the journal Daedalus, 109(2), in the spring of 1980.

1

Not so long ago the eye was thought to be a somewhat miraculous organ functioning in a more prosaic body. We smile indulgently at the naïveté of our intellectual grandparents. Today, though we regard our eyes with great respect, few attribute magical properties to them. The same might be said for kidneys, the heart, and other organs. We appreciate their importance, we may understand how they work, we may not be able to build them as efficiently as nature does, yet we hardly regard them as mysterious.

The same calm does not seem to prevail when we consider the brain. Although the brain could be regarded in the same way we regard the heart, the eye, or a muscle, the functions associated with the physical entity “brain” such as thought, consciousness, and awareness of self – those most precious human characteristics – are not as easily attributed to the earthy material in which they may or may not originate, as the function of pumping might be attributed to the heart.

Type
Chapter
Information
Science and Human Experience
Values, Culture, and the Mind
 , pp. 87 - 108
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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References

In Cooper, L. N (1976). How Possible Becomes Actual in the Quantum Theory, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 120(1), 37–45, I have argued that this is not necessary.Google Scholar
Weisskopf, V. F. (1975). The Frontiers and Limits of Science, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28(6), 15–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, J. A. (1970). Two Models for Memory Organization Using Interacting Traces, Mathematical Biosciences, 8, 137–160;CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, L. N (1974). A Possible Organization of Animal Memory and Learning, Proceedings of the Nobel Symposium on Collective Properties of Physical Systems, B., Lundquist and S., Lundquist (eds.), New York: Academic PressGoogle Scholar
Kohonen, T. (1972). Correlation Matrix Memories, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Transactions on Computers, C-21, 353–359; Longuet-Higgins, H. C. (1965).Google Scholar
Holographic Model of Temporal Recall, Nature, 217(104); Pribram, K., Nuwcr, M., and Baron, R. (1974). The Holographic Hypothesis of Memory Structure in Brain Function and Perception, in Contemporary Developments in Mathematical Psychology, vol. 2, D. H., Krantz, R. C., Atkinson, R. D., Luce, and P., Suppes (eds.), San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, pp. 416–457Google Scholar
Willshaw, D. J., Buneman, O. P., and Longuet-Higgins, H. C. (1969). Non-Holographic Associative Memory, Nature, 222, 960–982.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
A more detailed discussion of some of these ideas is given in two articles: Anderson
J. A. and Cooper, L. N (1978). Biological Organization of Memory, in Pluriscience, Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, pp. 168–175Google Scholar

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