Francis Harry Compton Crick
FRANCIS HARRY COMPTON CRICK   Macroknow Library
   

   
The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul.

"As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased it: 'You're nothing but a pack of neurons.'"1a TIPLER

" . . . [W]e really have no clear idea how we see anything."1b SCHRODINGER

"What you see is not what is really there; it is what your brain believes is there."1c

"Nonlinear behavior is common in real life, especially in love and war. As the song says: 'Kissing her once ain't half as nice as kissing her twice'"1d WATSON

"A brain does not look even a little bit like a general-purpose computer."1e VON NEUMAN

"There is no clear distinction in the brain between hardware and software . . ."1f

"The brain's operating system is probably not cleanly located in one special place."1g

"Not only do the beliefs of most popular religions contradict each other but, by scientific standards, they are based on evidence so flimsy that only an act of blind faith can make them acceptable. If the members of a church really believe in a life after death, why do they not conduct sound experiments to establish it? They may not succeed but at least they could try. . . If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are unusually wrong."1h GNOSTICS RUSSELL DAWKINS TIPLER

"The aim of science is to explain all aspects of the behavior of our brains, including those of musicians, mystics, and mathematicians"1i  ARISTOTLE BOOLE PLANCK EINSTEIN WIGNER BROMLEY WATSON

"A few physicists and other scientists who worry about quantum indeterminacy sometimes wonder whether the uncertainty principle lies at the bottom of Free Will."1j SCHRODINGER VON NEUMAN


 
   
  
Interesting Link
  • Francis Harry Compton Crick, James Dewey Watson, and Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1962, "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1962/
  

* Italics in the original.

1 Francis H.C. Crick. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. The Francis H.C. Crick and Odile Crick Revocable Trust, 1994. New York, NY: Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, 1995.
a 
1 Introduction, at 3.
b 3 Seeing, at 24.
c 
Ibid., at 31.
d
 13 Neural Networks, at 178.
e 
Ibid., at 179.
f
 Ibid., at 180.
g 
14 Visual Awareness, at 205.
h
 18 Dr. Crick's Sunday Morning Service, at 258.
i 
Ibid., at 259.
j A Postscript on Free Will
, at 265.

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