Doyle-- I've been reading tons of this neuroscience stuff that you've been posting and I still don't really know what you're talking about. I have some concerns about this neuroscience project. Now, I seem to recall that you are trying to use neuroscience as a basis for organizing political groups. I think that's odd, but I'll return to that in a moment.
On Sat, 21 Nov 1998, Doyle Saylor wrote:
> Doyle
> The problem I see with this is that you discover this by a logical
> extraction of felt values you perceive in my remarks.
Doyle, this doesn't make sense to me--what is a "logical extraction of felt values?"
What that says to me
> is your view is rule-bound. Here is why this is so. You say something is
> precisely so and symmetrical and invariant. I add the words symmetrical and
> invariant because they are scientific tools for tracing similarities that
> have a great deal of power. You, SnitgirrRl, might have an intuition that
> something in what I wrote and what Jim wrote is like that, but what is the
> material basis for describing such and such precise and material
> similarities?
I don't want to speak for SnitgrrRl, but I don't see why you need to use "intuition" to describe what she's doing--I read her argument and thought she was suggesting that your argument is logically inconsistent. That doesn't have to do with intuition. Nothing that you've written below makes any sense to me. She isn't talking brains, she's talking arguments. I don't see that color has anything to do with argument. I don't know why you're talking about "imagination," either.
I will give an example I am familiar with in vision, color is
> constant under varying lighting conditions. Neural networks provide a means
> to compute such constancy. You suggest that there is a constancy between my
> value judgement or "irruptive motivational affect" and Jim's opposite
> meaning statements from my own. Please show to me how the brain does this.
> Otherwise while your intuition sounds plausible, it seems somehow spurious
> too. It in fact could be just your imaginative speculation worth taking
> into consideratin out of respect for you, but otherwise on the same plain as
> any other guess might be. How are we to proceed if we are ruled by your
> imagination, and not mine?
>
Once again, you offer an irrelevant challenge. Why does finding "rules in
the brain" prove anything? I've been sort of irked by your post since I
received it, and I finally realized why today. It's grossly reductionist
in the same way that the work of EO Wilson, Dawkins et al is reductionist.
I don't see how it is useful to reduce logic, argumentation, art,
conversation and political organizing to the simple neural network.
I fail to see how it is useful to reduce all intellectual activity to
brain function, and yu haven't made a convincing argument that brain
functions explain anything that would be interesting/relevant to people
engaged in political work.
frances