Mindless Scientist

I recently read a quote by Stephen Barr in Jon Levenson's book "Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel". The quote addresses the inadequacy of a purely materialistic approach to science and the human body, particularily the human mind, and - frankly - it is somewhat jargon filled and slightly daunting to read, yet the last sentence in this brief paragraph nicely ties everything together, and I thought it was humourous and poignant enough to quote here.

The concept "neuron" itself, in fact, is on this account nothing other than a certian pattern of neurons firing in the brain. Is there not something here to makes us vaguely uneasy? Is not the snake of scientific theory eating its own tail - or rather its own head? Traditionally, we explained the physical world, including the brain, using concepts. Now we are to explain the concepts themselves as being mere physical events in brains. In fact, this whole theory according to which the mind and all conceptual understanding are nothing but electro-chemical discharges of nerve cells is itself, by its own account, nothing but a discharge of nerve cells. This makes it, as far as I can see, no more significant or interesting than a toothache. We should listen to great scientific minds because they are great scientific minds. However, when they begin to tell us that they really have no minds at all, we are entitled to ignore them. [p.13 - italics original, bold mine.]

In case you missed it, what's at stake here is the whole concept of "concepts" in the first place. "concepts" don't really exist because our brains are nothing more then inanimate matter. Yet the phrase "great scientific minds" is a "concept" that means that so-and-so is brilliant. But when the so-called "great scientific minds" tell us that concepts such as have a "great mind" don't really exist, well then what that amounts to is these "great scientific minds" telling us that they really have no minds at all.

Derek