Lecture+2(耶鲁大学-心理学导论讲稿).pdf

1 Introduction to Psychology Yale University Lecture 2 Professor Paul Bloom: Were going to begin the class proper, Introduction to Psychology, with a discussion about the brain. And, in particular, I want to lead off the class with an idea that the Nobel Prize winning biologist, Francis Crick, described as The Astonishing Hypothesis. And The Astonishing Hypothesis is summarized like this. As he writes, The Astonishing Hypothesis is that: You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carrolls Alice might have phrased it, youre nothing but a pack of neurons. It is fair to describe this as astonishing. It is an odd and unnatural view and I dont actually expect people to believe it at first. Its an open question whether youll believe it when this class comes to an end, but Id be surprised if many of you believe it now. Most people dont. Most people, in fact, hold a different view. Most people are dualists. Now, dualism is a very different doctrine. Its a doctrine that can be found in every religion and in most philosophical systems throughout history. It was very explicit in Plato, for instance. But the most articulate and well-known defender of dualism is the philosopher Rene Descartes, and Rene Descartes explicitly asked a question, Are humans merely physical machines, merely physical things? And he answered, no. He agreed that animals are machines. In fact, he called them beast machines and said animals, nonhuman animals are merely robots, but people are different. Theres a duality of people. Like animals, we possess physical material bodies, but unlike animals, what we are is not physical. We are immaterial souls that possess physical bodies, that have physical bodies, t