tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058072377999486184.post604566692492015587..comments2023-12-29T18:13:21.495-06:00Comments on pink scare: Once more on "evolutionary" psychologyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058072377999486184.post-53770415846070873032013-05-23T21:36:10.765-05:002013-05-23T21:36:10.765-05:00http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
t is a ...http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism<br /><br />t is a modern day LysenkoAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058072377999486184.post-38856478436744082572011-02-04T22:03:20.628-06:002011-02-04T22:03:20.628-06:00Let's take the following claim that you mentio...Let's take the following claim that you mention: "What are thoughts but electrical impulses among brain cells? What are ideas but novel firings of those cells?"<br /><br />Perhaps this is true, but it is far from obvious that this isn't just a category mistake (a category mistake is philosophical jargon...an example of such a mistake would be to ask "what color is three?").<br /><br />Now, everybody agrees that thoughts require brain cells, electrical impulses, and all the rest of it. But what's not obvious is that thoughts are simply reducible to, and nothing but, electrical impulses, etc.<br /><br />For instance, I may require certain physical materials to produce a painting (e.g. oil paints, a canvas, brushes, etc.) but it's not obvious that the meaning of the painting is well-explained by an analysis of the materials required to produce it. Simply because one thing is necessary to produce something else, it hardly follows that this necessary component exhausts and throughly explains this something else. <br /><br />Also, it is not clear that we are actually explaining consciousness itself when we reduce it to talk about brain cells, neurons, etc. To be sure, the talk about brain cells, neurons, etc. is important and indeed such things are conditions of the possibility of being conscious at all (i.e. no brain, no consciousness). But it's not clear that consciousness itself is captured by such analyses. Some have wanted to say that there's a qualitative "what it's like" character to being a conscious agent that isn't captured by analysis of the physical (or, if you like, chemical/biological) composition of our brains, though it is enabled by it. The example is the qualitative first-person, felt experience of being a bat. The claim is that we could learn everything there is to learn about the neural structure of bat's brains, and this is important... but such facts do not capture what it's actually like to be a bat. That's something else, and the study of it requires different concepts than those required for the study of the physical composition of the brain.<br /><br />There's plenty more to say here, and I hope I haven't given the impression that philosophers all agree here (some are naturalists and are sympathetic to what Tyson is saying, though I think they are making serious errors in doing so).thttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05268192967377248928noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6058072377999486184.post-38988194107756362452011-02-04T15:47:40.953-06:002011-02-04T15:47:40.953-06:00http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/how-does-the-bra...http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/how-does-the-brain-work.html<br /><br />Stuff like this geeks me out, but will likely "cause us to doubt and revise the vast majority of what it is we think that we're doing when we act."<br /><br />My favorite part was when experimenters used magnetic pulses to "turn down" a specific part of the brain and found that they could temporarily alter people's moral appraisal of others' actions. Since I'm a proponent of honest debate, I will say it is possible that their manipulations could simply divorce a person's beliefs with the physical movement of pressing a button, but there are easy controls for that kind of thing, and its likely they did them.<br /><br />A few take-away quotes from Neil DeGrasse Tyson's concluding statements: <br />"We need the tools and methods of science to shield us from bias, blunder, and delusion... What are thoughts but electrical impulses among brain cells? What are ideas but novel firings of those cells?"<br /><br />If the way we view and interpret our world with its stimuli, ideas, and beliefs is through our brain, which is simply an electrical circuit subject to physical laws, why is it so hard to believe that perhaps our conceptions of the world around us is also governed by physical laws?-sfhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16012410602872677911noreply@blogger.com