Nothing but Neurons?

The Astonishing Hypothesis: the scientific search for the soul, by Francis Crick.

What is man? asks the psalmist. Dr. Francis Crick, credited with the discovery of DNA, as an experimental scientist proposes in response a hypothesis: the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. This he calls The Astonishing Hypothesis. Should the hypothesis be proven true, should we turn out to be entirely explainable as a great chain of interconnecting neurons, we would be astonished, wouldn't we? Haven't we always throughout history insisted that there must be something more, that we must be something more than the physiological self?

Dr. Crick invites his general public reader to a gentle exposition of the investigations of neuroscience, placing vision, consciousness and memory up front and then moving into a clearly illustrated introduction to neuroanatomy which takes up the bulk of this book. His question seems to shift as the book progresses from asking what is seeing? what is vision? what is understanding? to a discussion of how the organs and processes within the brain operate visual signal reception and memory storage. He stops at the cellular level; the mathematical equations and chemical formulae needed to go smaller are beyond the hypothetical reader's expertise.

The concluding chapter, "Dr. Crick's Sunday Morning Service," lays down a challenge to philosophers, psychologists, believers and scientists alike: Disprove my astonishing hypothesis. Go ahead, lay out your evidence, show me! Do you find it Astonishing that we might be no more than neural networks? Crick finds it downright Astonishing, but astonishing is not a synonym for untrue. He allows that most hypotheses are disproven or at least altered by further investigation and he expects no less in this case, concluding that perhaps neither his own hypothesis nor that of faith against science will prevail but that truth may well lie in a third alternative, in a yet to be elucidated understanding of who we are.