Professor Paul Bloom: We're 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 Carroll's Alice might have phrased it, "you're nothing but a pack of neurons." It is fair to describe this as astonishing.
It is an odd and unnatural view and I don't actually expect people to believe it at first.
It's an open question whether you'll believe it when this class comes to an end, but I'd be surprised if many of you believe it now.
Most people don't.
Most people, in fact, hold a different view.
Most people are dualists.
Now, dualism is a very different doctrine.
