www.psychspace.com心理学空间网Professor Paul Bloom: We're going to begin the class proper,Introduction to Psychology, with a discussion about the brain. And, inparticular, I want to lead off the class with an idea that the NobelPrize winning biologist, Francis Crick, described as "The AstonishingHypothesis." And The Astonishing Hypothesis is summarized like this. Ashe writes, The Astonishing Hypothesis is that:
You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and yourambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact nomore than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and theirassociated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it,"you're nothing but a pack of neurons."
It is fair to describe this as astonishing. It is an odd andunnatural view and I don't actually expect people to believe it atfirst. It's an open question whether you'll believe it when this classcomes to an end, but I'd be surprised if many of you believe it now.Most people don't. Most people, in fact, hold a different view. Mostpeople are dualists. Now, dualism is a very different doctrine. It's adoctrine that can be found in every religion and in most philosophicalsystems throughout history. It was very explicit in Plato, forinstance.