Sometime in the recent past people have started substituting a reasonable skepticism about what is known and knowable for a kind of blatant dismissal of everything that is not rendered absolutely elementary and deterministic. This is especially true of the cognitive sciences and the double standard becomes especially clear when the field is contrasted with, say, physics, the most sciencey of all sciences. For instance, go ahead and take a quarter out of our your pocket, flip it into the air and see how it lands on the floor. It's pretty easy to predict whether it comes up heads or tails, right? Except no, it isn't, not outside of a cleanroom with a known atmosphere and a robot flipping the coin.
In my experience it's usually the people who know the least about psychology or cognitive science claiming that the least can be known about psychology and cognitive science. The people who know the most about psychology and cognitive science will also tell you how little we currently know, but the context is very different, sort of like when you're at a party and get cornered by a Shakespeare scholar who for the next three hours tells you in explicit detail how little is known about Shakespeare.
Of course the brain is complicated, and of course we're a long way from understanding it, and yet I could look at a scan that showed hypometablism in your anterior temporal lobes and be able to tell you with great specificity about the symptoms I would expect you to manifest, a diagnosis which would be drawn from a mountain of data that is often, admittedly, observational; and yet using a confluence of imaging methods and single cell recordings and anatomical studies and animal homologies, which collectively have given rise to theoretical models, the predictions are as scientific as those that arise in any other kinds of science. Doesn't mean they're always right, but there's rigorous and principled methodology at work, results shift belief in the explanatory power of this model or that, and the field moves forward.
So yeah, there are bad practitioners and bad papers and overbroad explanations, but that doesn't mean that nobody knows anything.
> In my experience it's usually the people who know the least about psychology or cognitive science claiming that the least can be known about psychology and cognitive science.
Perhaps, but in this specific example, the people who know the most about the topic agree that we don't know anything, and that a new approach is required. As one example, the director of the NIMH recently ruled that the DSM can no longer be used as the basis for scientific research proposals, for the simple reason that it has no scientific content.
Quote: "... each edition [of the DSM] has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
> Of course the brain is complicated, and of course we're a long way from understanding it, and yet I could look at a scan that showed hypometablism in your anterior temporal lobes and be able to tell you with great specificity about the symptoms I would expect you to manifest ...
This is exactly the problem that the NIMH's new ruling is meant to address -- a focus on symptoms rather than causes. Until we can explain these symptoms, until we can move beyond simple description, mental research will remain a subjective dead end.
> So yeah, there are bad practitioners and bad papers and overbroad explanations, but that doesn't mean that nobody knows anything.
As long as vestal virgins can claim to have been raped and destroy their families without anyone asking some obvious questions, yes, no one knows anything: http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology
> For instance, go ahead and take a quarter out of our your pocket, flip it into the air and see how it lands on the floor. It's pretty easy to predict whether it comes up heads or tails, right? Except no, it isn't ...
Of course it is, the outcome is perfectly reliable if the coin is fair -- the probably is 1/2 that the result will be heads. No clean room or robot are required. I mention this to emphasize the difference between observation and theory -- the theory is perfectly reliable.
There are 100 000 000 000 neurons in brain, we can not even count number of connections. We are very very far from understanding it.