Can you ever really understand the brain?

[IQ]

I read in a book- Terminal Man, i think- that it is impossible for an organism to truly be able to analize itself, so a person could never be able to truly understand the intrinsic interworkings of the human brain, no matter how much anatomical and psychological research they did. Is this really the case?

[Cop]

IQ baba yavash yavash in hame topic dari yavash yavash roo kon ke be hamash dorost bahs beshe injoor bazi topica alaki misooze

[IQ]

ey be chashb. bodoeen sari bahs konid.

[IQ]

the human mind evolved as a result of sexual selection, essentially the equivalent of the peacock’s tail, except that in our case, much of the choice works both ways: males choosing females as well as females choosing males. Miller gets wonderful intellectual mileage out of this notion, pointing out, for example, that the brain itself, as an energetically expensive organ as well as one that is highly vulnerable to mutational damage, serves as an ideal fitness indicator. Similarly with the brain’s products, and not just obviously useful behavior of the sort that contributes to survival selection, but also those uniquely human characteristics that have so bedeviled sociobiological explanation: art, music, poetry, creativity, all of which seem unlikely to contribute to fitness.

But “Human language,” Miller points out,

evolved to be much more elaborate than necessary for basic survival functions. From a pragmatic biological viewpoint, art and music seem like pointless wastes of energy. Human morality and humor seem irrelevant to the business of finding food and avoiding predators. Moreover, if human intelligence and creativity were so useful, it is puzzling that other apes did not evolve them (pg. 2).

The point of The Mating Mind is that such traits probably aren’t fitness-enhancing, so long as we restrict our intellectual horizon to survival-related traits. Widen the perspective, however, to include sexual selection, and a whole new world opens up, in which much of the human mind is a sexual ornament: “the Darwinian revolution could capture the citadel of human nature only by becoming more of a sexual revolution - by giving more credit to sexual choice as a driving force in the mind’s evolution. Evolutionary psychology,” Miller urges, “must become less Puritan and more Dionysian.” His project has therefore been to think less about the “survival problems our ancestors faced during the day,” and more about “the courtship problems they faced at night.” Or, more poetically, “whether the mind evolved by moonlight” (pg. 7).

In Miller’s subtle approach, the mind’s moonlight reveals unexpected patterns; e.g. “before language evolved, our ancestors could not easily perceive one another’s thoughts, but once language had arrived, thought itself became subject to sexual selection” (pg. 10). This “doesn’t reduce psychology to biology, but sees psychology as a driving force in biological evolution. It portrays our ancestors’ minds as both products and consumers evolving in the free market of sexual choice” (pg. 16). Nonetheless, his critique of much cognitive psychology is cogent, and perhaps even devastating:

most experimental psychology vies the human mind exclusively as a computer that learns to solve problems, not as an entertainment system that evolved to attract sexual partners. Also, psychology experiments usually test people’s efficiency and consistency when interacting with a computer, not their wit and warmth when interacting with a potential spouse. … But evolution does not care about information processing as such: it cares about fitness (pg. 29-30).

It is indeed delightful to encounter someone trained as a cognitive psychologist who is so conversant, comfortable, and creative when it comes to such biological bailiwicks as the “lek paradox” and consequence debate over the heritability of fitness-related traits.