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Mind & Self


Francis Crick’s Deliberately Provocative Reductionism


Paul Austin Murphy repudiates a blasé reduction of mind to matter by one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA.


In Francis Crick’s 1994 book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, he wrote the following oft-quoted passage:




“‘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.”




It’s easy to believe that here Crick was being willfully provocative and rhetorical. I want to consider to what degree he may also have been telling the truth, if at all.


In terms of the rhetoric and provocation, it’s true that Crick’s critical attitude towards religion was one motivation for his writing this. Crick certainly believed that religions are often wrong about scientific issues (as do many religious people).


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