The Mind Is Not the Brain
Can a machine change your mind?
Jane O’Grady – Open Democracy – 2009 – May 25
This is a fairly good treatment of the philosophical conundrums of psychology, even if it’s a gloss. Because O’Grady’s article doesn’t grind an axe as do the contestants in the academic field, (or, shall I say, ‘out in the field?’) her summary escapes the special quality of much meta-psychology: being spectacularly ironic.
This irony is easy to get at, and I’ll launch it from this paragraph of O’Grady:
Even if a more scientifically sophisticated vocabulary does replace it. it will fuel only the discussion of those for whom such superior terms are germane. The irony is that the lowest level of folk psychology is the one everybody deploys automatically to negotiate the minds–including their own–and all the other ‘objects’ found in their world.
I’ll bet even philosophers of psychology muddle about using half-baked heuristics. (And, like, they should know better!) From this, one area of investigation addresses the query: why is everyday psychological behavior, based as it is in the brain, so unsophisticated?
Read the rest of this entry »
Jane O’Grady – Open Democracy – 2009 – May 25
This is a fairly good treatment of the philosophical conundrums of psychology, even if it’s a gloss. Because O’Grady’s article doesn’t grind an axe as do the contestants in the academic field, (or, shall I say, ‘out in the field?’) her summary escapes the special quality of much meta-psychology: being spectacularly ironic.
This irony is easy to get at, and I’ll launch it from this paragraph of O’Grady:
The most irritating (to us lay people) aspect of philosophical and scientific attempts to reduce the mental to the neural, and to squash down human beings into being on all fours with other physical things, is that their proponents nearly always say that actually they are just putting the truth about consciousness more clearly and taking nothing away from our experience. Like politicians deviously withdrawing privileges, they expect us to be quite happy about this. Some developments of identity theory, however, are more upfront. They force consciousness into equivalence with lightning and water by impugning the ignorance of us ordinary people. The way we talk about sensations, memories and beliefs is, say eliminative materialists, hopelessly antiquated, a form of ‘folk psychology’ as hidebound and superstition-laden as talk about witches, or about epileptics being possessed by devils. ‘Folk psychology’ is a theory about how humans function, they say, that is pathetically inadequate in both describing and predicting. In time, a more scientifically sophisticated vocabulary will replace it.
Even if a more scientifically sophisticated vocabulary does replace it. it will fuel only the discussion of those for whom such superior terms are germane. The irony is that the lowest level of folk psychology is the one everybody deploys automatically to negotiate the minds–including their own–and all the other ‘objects’ found in their world.
I’ll bet even philosophers of psychology muddle about using half-baked heuristics. (And, like, they should know better!) From this, one area of investigation addresses the query: why is everyday psychological behavior, based as it is in the brain, so unsophisticated?
Read the rest of this entry »
