Brain Structures

Doyle Saylor djsaylor at ix.netcom.com
Wed Aug 12 19:16:35 PDT 1998


Hello everyone,

Carrol Cox asks about information on Brain structures. Rosenfield whom Carrol quotes refers to for instance Gerald Edelman whose series of books for the popular market go on at great length about the evolutionary direction of selection in producing a conscious mind. See "Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, on the Matter of the Mind", Basic Books, 1992. A better book in my opinion is by Francis Crick of Nobel fame, "The Astonishing Hypothesis, The Scientific Search for the Soul". For a better discussion of the implications of connectionism for the general audience, see Paul M. Churchland, "The engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul", a Bradford Book, The MIT Press, 1995.

This week I picked up "Goodbye Descartes, The End of Logic and The Search For a New Cosmology of the Mind", by Keith Devlin, John Wiley and Sons, 1997. This book goes into the intersection of Cartesianism with mathematical logic, and the presumptions which have colored understanding the mind, and which are being challenged these days. An historical text which covers the influence of logic in U.S. culture from WWII is; "The Closed World, Computers and the politics of Discourse in cold War America", by Paul N. Edwards, The MIT Press, 1996.

Doug's posting on Gates patenting music is more to the point about the economic interests in brain structures. Certain ideas in the brain such as connectionism are compatable with the historic case made by behaviorism, and are likely where science could make progress in understanding consciousness. But we need to better understand what the corporations are doing with these "logical" structures. I mean an economic analysis. We also need to quit shying away from the brain, I mean start getting better at our education concerning "consciousness". It helps to study brain anatomy. Not that hard really. regards, Doyle Saylor



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