Hawking. Einstein. Curie. Darwin. Freud. Aristotle. Da Vinci. Christ. Buddha. Confucius. Gandhi. Mother Theresa. Martin Luther King, Jr. What do these historical greats have in common?
They earned their place in the history books without armies or advertising budgets. Their ideas, their philosophies, inspired their followers and set them apart from the pack. Their concepts changed the world forever.
Ideas, philosophies, and concepts -- all products of the mind.
What is the mind? Why do we care about it?
The mind can make history, but more than that, the mind is the essential difference between a man and an ape. Gorillas, monkeys, and orangutans experience roughly the same emotions as we do: Love. Fear. Happiness. Anger. Pleasure. Jealousy. Hope. Despair.
The mind gives rise to language. It gives rise to structure, to organization, to rules and regulations, to empathy and enmity. The mind conceives of gardens, rockets, guns, towers, tanks, music, sculpture, scripture, treaties, movies -- all of human culture, past and present.
But does that make it worth studying? Does that make the mind worth our time and consideration?
Why is the study of the mind important, here and now?
In the past century, we have peered deeper and deeper into the universe's infinitesimal depths, gaining an increasingly intricate understanding of chemistry, physics, biology, and data. Not only have we accumulated new knowledge, we've also developed new ways to organize, access, and process that knowledge.
Modern computing technology is allowing us to create virtual minds that outperform humans at increasingly complex tasks. These artificial intelligences can now outperform our simian ones at image recognition, board games (first Chess, and now Go), and other tasks. Within ten years, we hope to have cars that drive themselves, freeing up billions of man-hours to apply to other tasks.
Meanwhile, genetics and chemistry are giving us unprecedented insight into the workings of our human brains. We know the molecular structures that give psychoactive substances the ability to alter behavior, and we are using this knowledge every year to conceive, manufacture, and sell "new and improved" variations of these structures, in the form of prescription drugs. New molecules. New mixtures, and old mixtures in different proportions. New delivery systems. We regularly identify and mimic the neurotransmitters that interact with our brain cells, and increasingly, we understand what's happening both inside and outside those brain cells when these chemicals enter our bloodstream. Increasingly, we're able to predict the behavioral outcomes of these chemical changes, and the practice of prescribing pills to fix problems is now a societally-ingrained approach.
As a result of the simultaneous, parallel advances in these different fields of science, we stand at a crux. We have the potential now to understand the mind like never before in history.
Some of the greatest minds of the last century have chosen to concern themselves primarily with the study of the mind itself.
Ray Kurzweil, for example, dubbed by Forbes the "ultimate thinking machine," publishes books with titles like: "The Age of Intelligent Machines", "The Age of Spiritual Machines", "The Singularity is Near", and "How to Create a Mind," all centered around the theme of engineering artificial intelligences by understanding and mimicking human neurobiology (and featuring Kurzweil's predictions about the results of such an undertaking.)
Or take Freud, whose opinions, controversial as they have been, have undoubtedly served as a foundation and a catalyst for much of modern psychology and the medicine of the mind.
Apes have tongues and fingers, the dextrous organs that make possible both sophisticated communication and use of tools. (Even if horses had minds like humans', there would be no "horse technology", for they lack the physical organs which make technological innovation possible.) But in contrast to the primitive ape, the human mind has given rise to music, machine guns, and more. Wars are begun and ended by the products of the mind: Hitler's ideology, Einstein's bomb. Without the mind, we are but fleshy shells, vegetative, unfamiliar. And it is only due to the advanced, sophisticated mind which is unique to us among all primates, that we live as we do today, as part of a vast, contrived civilization, far separate from the order of the natural world.
The mind presents many faces for us to study, many rabbit holes to go down. We are fascinated by it because it is both enigmatic and fundamental. The mind gives rise to the entire human experience. How then could we not investigate it to the utmost?
