Neuroscience is making great progress understanding the human brain, and there is no reason to think that it will not continue to do so. However, it will always have to deal with a blind spot that limits its results. What is a neuroscientist studying the brain but a brain studying? Such a study can only understand the functioning of the organ, and those functions vital to the life of the whole person: respiration, heartbeat, etc. Experiments will continue to verify or discard hypotheses concerning memory, language, the acquisition of habits and addictions, accumulating knowledge — there is no end to neuroscience as such. But why a person has become or even should become a neuroscientist is a question this science cannot and will never be able to answer.
An analogous indeterminacy exists with respect to physics, namely, the problem of frames of reference. Albert Einstein explained it thus:
Every general law of nature must be so constituted that it is transformed into a law of exactly the same form when, instead of the space-time variables of the original coordinate system K, we introduce new space-time variables of a co-ordinate system K′. […]
This is a definite mathematical condition that the theory of relativity demands of a natural law, and in virtue of this, the theory becomes a valuable heuristic aid in the search for general laws of…
