It seems to me like we know more about something far like celestial bodies than we do of our own mind. Why is that?
In: Biology
But we don’t; we’re simply more satisfied with the info we have about celestial bodies far away because we don’t really care that much because they don’t affect us in our daily lives.
But for example, we can barely guess the mass of an exoplanet orbiting a relatively nearby star and we don’t really have any confirmation about how accurate that guess is, while we can measure to the exact gram how much our brain weighs.
That’s a complex question to answer. The answer I’ll provide is far from complete but it’ll highlight a few reasons.
Science has developed a rigorous methodology by which it measures and observes everything that can be perceived. This, alongside math, has catapulted things like technology and medicine forward because we limit our observations to what we can observe with tools and what can be verified by 3rd parties.
The mind isn’t so easy. Things like thoughts and ideas can’t be measured or observed but we see their effects all around us.
We’ve only recently began to understand the mind, and by that I’m assuming you chose to say “mind” instead of “brain” to imply the object that thinks and feels rather than produces chemicals and is more an organ. For many decades science has struggled to define the brain versus the mind. Philosophy and religion have both played a part in trying to define it and both, at times, have suggested a center point where the spirit, the self, the soul, resides.
Philosophy eventually broke through that thought process and now we know it doesn’t make too much sense to say there is a central place in us where everything is merged and experienced. Religion disagrees. Philosophy now claims “the mind” is spread out all over our bodies and consciousness is experienced by every part of our bodies, not just the brain.
Science can’t measure those concepts and when it comes to the mind, it relies on neuroscience to find answers. Neuroscience is also a relatively new field that has only come this far with the development of new technologies that help us in seeing the smallest parts of the brain.
Grounded in science, meaning in observing and measuring, neuroscience is by and large materialist and physicalist when it comes to “the mind”. They believe once they understand all the smaller parts, they’ll understand the mind.
Recently we were able to completely map a 1cm cube of brain matter. It took years of works and a ton of man hours, funding, and the latest tech to just map that much. That’s how many neurons are in the brain and each neuron has connectors and so forth.
In a different approach, psychology understands a lot about the mind from an external point of view and from an almost statistical view. Through the years and based strictly on the testimonies of patients, psychologists have pieced together various parts of the mind.
Psychiatry has also researched the mind and discovered chemicals can alter the brain in ways the psychologist can measure. Symptoms of mental ailments can be curbed.
And, again, recently, we’ve been able to take images of the brain of subjects that psychology has categorized. We can see ptsd, we can see depression, we can see schizophrenia and so forth.
The gap between abstract concepts and measurable objects is shortening.
So to summarize, to even understand the brain you need to be semi proficient in various fields that don’t always agree with one another. Biology, chemistry, psychology to name a few. You also need to avoid the various societal and linguistic traps that exist that confuse us like soul, self, mind because if you and the scientist next to you can’t even agree on what you’re studying you won’t get anywhere.
Two astronomers can study a star and measure it. They both know what a star is and isn’t and how to observe it.
Two individuals studying the mind have a high chance of disagreeing on the fundemenfal terminology of the subject matter, they lack the tools to properly measure the mind, they have to rely on what the individual reports and that can’t be verified by a third party, and we can’t throw math at it like astronomers do at the sky to guess at some things.
All the calculus in the world used to predict orbiting patterns of two stellar bodies can’t help us predict or understand the formation of ideas and how they are influenced by lesser organs.
It also doesn’t help science has kind of split itself between hard and soft sciences. Soft sciences is where psychology is and, as you can guess, because it’s not a hard science it’s not taken as seriously as medicine and neuroscience so it’s underfunded and not as enticing to students.
Because we can’t learn much about it without taking it apart, and then it stops working. We learn more as we develop new ways to watch it without destroying it.
And of course, we can’t just ask it, because it is a lying liar that lies. A considerable amount of what we think we perceive is a lazyass workaround because it can’t be assed to process the truth.
The very short version is that it is very complicated and that it is difficult for us to analyse ourself. Analysing the brain is really only getting started. It consists of unimaginable amounts of neurons (basically the cells that send and receive signals in the brain) and fully understanding it like that is very difficult and time consuming.
Analysing our mind (so your thoughts, feelings, emotions, instincts) is difficult too. Anything analysing itself is difficult. Because it becomes very hard to know where you’re just misunderstanding something. Your own biases might make it so you don’t see the bias. To analyse your thoughts, you have to think about them, it’s difficult to recognize where your thinking is “flawed” or not logical, because that makes your analysis also “flawed” and illogical.
It can be tricky to wrap your head around. And it’s difficult to explain.
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