Publisher's Synopsis
What is the relation between Descartes Discourse, Plato's cave, Gödel's theorems, the Big Bang, artificial intelligence, and an electron? The most simple answer would be the human brain that has been thinking these concepts. Brain Centric digs at step further to find out precisely a common characteristic in our mental space that could lead us either to absurdities or to new perspectives. On the way brain-centric proposes new answers to very old questions.This book is about how we build "realities." Scientists see the world under the "External Reality Paradigm " (ERP), which is often called "realism." ERP asserts that our mental representations are what "is" out there. Brain-centrism, on the contrary, asserts that our mental representations are not what "is" out there, what we perceive is only our reactions to the external world. Contrary to ERP, brain-centrism clearly distinguish between what is "out there" and how our personal mental spaces describe it. It asserts that our scientific "third party" descriptions are only "third party" in their form. In their essence, they are but human first-party descriptions with error corrections. Brain-centric is divided into three parts: The Mental Space, Knowing and Being, and Beyond Knowledge.The first part is dedicated to a description of the mental space and particularly to those properties of our mammalian brain critical to our representation system. In part two, we will consider the human knowledge, its origins, its acquisition methods, first and third party knowledges, and how our quest for truth has developed historically. A particular emphasis will be given to the development of mathematics and their increasing role in scientific knowledge since the enlightenment.The third part of this essay will examine limitations imposed to knowledge and truth by the mental space itself and examine how these limitations appear in third party descriptions such as physics, mathematics, and philosophy.
