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Post by brandt on Jan 27, 2012 0:35:53 GMT 10
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 27, 2012 19:19:06 GMT 10
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Post by Smithee on Jan 27, 2012 20:36:38 GMT 10
A better understanding of the brain is certain to lead man to a richer comprehension both of himself, of his fellow man, and of society, and in fact of the whole world with its problems
I can state with complete assurance that for each of us our brains form the material basis of our experiences and memories, our imaginations, our dreams
Now before discussing brain function in detail I will at the beginning give an account of my philosophical position on the so-called brain-mind problem so that you will be able to relate the experimental evidence to this philosophical position. I have written at length on this philosophy in my book 'Facing Reality'… You will be able to see that I fully accept the recent philosophical achievements of Sir Karl Popper with his concept of three worlds. I was a dualist, now I am a trialist! Cart- esian dualism has become unfashionable with many people. They embrace monism in order to escape the enigma of brain-mind interaction with its perplexing problems. But Sir Karl Popper and I are interactionists, and what is more, trialist interactionists!
World 1 is the world of physical objects and states. It comprises the whole cosmos of matter and energy, all of biology including human brains, and all artifacts that man has made for coding information, as for example, the paper and ink of books or the material base of works of art. World 1 is the total world of the materialists. They recognize nothing else. All else is fantasy
World 2 is the world of states of consciousness and subjective knowledge of all kinds. The totality of our perceptions comes in this world. But there are several levels. In agreement with Polten, I tend to recognize three kinds of levels of World 2…, but it may be more correct to think of it as a spectrum. The first level (outer sense) would be the ordinary perceptions provided by all our sense organs, hearing and touch and sight and smell and pain… In addition there is a level of inner sense, which is the world of more subtle perceptions. It is the world of your emotions, of your feelings of joy and sadness and fear and anger and so on. It includes all your memory, and all your imaginings and planning into the future… Finally, at the core of World 2 there is the self or pure ego, which is the basis of our unity as an experiencing being throughout our whole lifetime
And what is World 3?... it is the whole world of culture. It is the world that was created by man and that reciprocally made man. This is my message in which I follow Popper unreservedly. The whole of language is here. All our means of communication, all our intellectual efforts coded in books, coded in the artistic and technological treasures in the museums, coded in every artifact left by man from primitive times — this is World 3 right up to the present time. It is the world of civilization and culture. Education is the means whereby each human being is brought into relation with World 3. In this manner he becomes immersed in it throughout life, participating in the heritage of mankind and so becoming fully human. World 3 is the world that uniquely relates to man. It is the world which is completely unknown to animals. They are blind to all of World 3
The last thing that man will understand in nature is the performance of his brainSir John C. Eccles, FRSAustralian neurophysiologist and Nobel laureate (Born this day 1903) I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reduct- ionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition... We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world… Promissory materialism is simply a religious belief held by dogmatic materialists…who often confuse their religion with their science
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 28, 2012 15:39:31 GMT 10
Evolutionary Psychology...is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it.
In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Machines!?
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 28, 2012 15:41:31 GMT 10
How does EP differ from Sociobiology?
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Post by brandt on Jan 28, 2012 16:12:18 GMT 10
In general, evolutionary psychology (as an approach) does not fall for the false dichotomy of nature vs. nuture but takes into account the dynamic interaction of the two.
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Post by Smithee on Jan 28, 2012 20:19:29 GMT 10
Designed!? Solve!? The word design is found a lot in the article. There is no designer and no design, just the roll of the genetic dice and the survival of the survivers. As Richard Dawkins said. "The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it.” He also said.
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Post by Smithee on Jan 28, 2012 20:20:42 GMT 10
takes into account the dynamic interaction of the two. How does it do that?
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Post by brandt on Jan 29, 2012 2:07:33 GMT 10
Our acquisition of language, for example, is both experience expectant and experience dependent. We come out of the box hard-wired for language. We, at one time, were able to make and hear every sound that could be made by the human vocal apparatus. Then we get our language, we lose the ability to hear and sometimes make the sounds not used in our language.
There are a few developmental psychologists in China that are on some interesting work that I have been trying to follow. There work is in face preference that has produced some interesting results so far. I will see if I can dig up a couple of their papers.
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Post by Tamrin on Jan 29, 2012 8:28:39 GMT 10
Our acquisition of language, for example, is both experience expectant and experience dependent. We come out of the box hard-wired for language. We, at one time, were able to make and hear every sound that could be made by the human vocal apparatus. Then we get our language, we lose the ability to hear and sometimes make the sounds not used in our language. Bearing-in-mind the consensus that particular languages are memetically acquired, down another track there may well be some benefit from comparing and contrasting different schools of the Philosophy of Language (e.g., Chomsky, Wittgenstein and Russell). We may consider the possibility that the perception of the "hard-wiring" of language arises from the limitations and ambiguities of our languages when expressed using our anatomical structures (e.g., larynx, tongue, lips and nose). On the one hand, technology has enabled us to memetically exceed our anatomical parameters (smoke signals, drums, radio, etc.), using memetically different "languages" (binary codes, symbols, frequencies, etc.). On the other hand, we have apes like Kanzi, who while anatomically unable to utter human speech, can communicate in words with gestures and symbols, showing this ability is not exclusive to humans. Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creationNoam Chomsky
I have long found this subject fascinating, however in the context of Evolutionary Psychology, the main controversy is not so much that of features (at least partly anatomical) shared in common by all humanity, as that of the presumption of innate (genetic) psychological differences between groups (gender, race, etc.). Can you give an example of such differences? If you claim to have a theory that deduces unexpected consequences from nontrivial principles, let's see it
Noam Chomsky
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