Neuroscience is King

To study the brain apart from the mind, or to study the mind apart from the brain is a paramount mistake, both academically and personally.  Yet there are people who do this.  The guilty studiers of the brain wonder incredulously at the mind, treating it like it’s beyond the purview science.  The guilty studiers of the mind are perhaps the guiltier party.  They are usually altogether ignorant of the brain, or treat it offhandedly, as some organ that’s workings only correlate with those of the mind; the thing of real importance.
I held a brain in my Behavioral Neuroscience class the other day.  I knew I was studying me.  It knew it was studying it.  I imagined at that moment the neural pattern in my brain that corresponded to my knowledge of my brain.  I made note of the irony.  There was at first an aversive reflex away from that knowledge.  But this hardly stopped me from learning.  I wasn’t going to let some intuition of mine keep me from knowing me.  But I’m convinced that the brain has a secret it doesn’t want itself knowing, and it doesn’t seem like the studiers of the brain have fully grasped exactly what this secret is.
Neuroscience has a burden that no other field of science has right now.  It has to deal directly with this secret.  This secret will force us to redefine ourselves.  Our identity, our soul, whatever we value about our precious egos, neuroscience can manipulate, change, break apart, better, worsen, and destroy.  “Identity recreation,” “perspective alteration,” “mind transplant,” “thought control” will all be a new words used in the way, “mood alteration” is used now.  People either see this as implausible, or too far in the future to attend to.  But neither is true, this technology will arrive in our lifetimes. And humanity doesn’t have the time to brace itself for this blow.  Can we properly engage in neuroscience class without understanding the risk we take in studying this material?  Can we sit naively back studying something we should all be afraid of?  Can we reconcile ourselves?  Can we give up our egos?
Despite these concerns, no one is going to give up knowledge.  Perhaps we do know what we’re up against and are just choosing to ignore it.  I for one won’t preserve the secret.  I’ll do just what every other good neuroscientist will do: learn the brain.  There is no split any more.  Mind/Brain.  There is just our control over it.  Neuroscience could just as easily be defined as the science of controlling ourselves. In 30 years, 50 years, anyone’s free to estimate, it will be the neuroscientist who has more power than anyone.  The dexterous neuroscientist will have a better argument than anyone’s ever had.  Feel free to think of an argument for something.  Make it an argument that convinces everyone.  Make it an argument so logically sound, so intuitively obvious, that someone would have to be crazy to deny it.  The neuroscientist will have the power to make you doubt it; to make you change your mind.  It’s not about right or wrong; it’s about power.