>
>You and I still share a lot, Kelley, but, I repeat, one cannot
>hold an intellectual conversation with someone who uses
>psychosis and neurosis as medical terms and believes that
>he/she is saying something true or even harmlessly trivial.
>
>Carrol
Oh come on Carrol, you said this same thing about me probably fifteen times over the past nearly two years. Also, I think we can have a disagreement here without worrying that whatever positions we do share will be irrevocably damaged. I should hope fucking not since that's exactly the kind of crap a solidaristic left doesn't need.
Ken's not using them as medical terms. I do actually know a bit about neuroscience, though certainly no expert. My mother-in-law, too, had multi-infarct dimentia and I had to fight like hell to actually get a doctor to believe she had a problem b/c, as you might now, they don't exhibit the same symptoms as Alzheimer's patients: they pass the test with flying colors and the docs think they're quite sane. And, as you know, they have tiny strokes that appear sometimes like they're just sleeping, slumped over or something. You get them to the doctor's the next day once you realize something's wrong and, for the most part, the problems go away be/c it manifests itself as a stepwise regression: the trauma of the stroke impairs their capacities [like they think they have to pee every 15 minutes which was a real blast to deal with during my second yr in grad school. thank god i was up all night every night anyway. got to take pee breaks every 15 mintues. kept me awake!], but in the next day or two the problem has righted itself.
Anyhoo, i had to hit the stacks and do the research about this disease on my own in order to get the fuckwads to help her/us. Even then, as a dimentia, at that time nursing homes weren't accepting people with mental diseases b/c they only dealt with physical impairments. The neurosci lit was helpful in that regard.
What neuroscience can't explain by itself was edith's manifestation of her disease. Or, why all of a sudden she hated all her children and thought i was the goddess of the planet [she always hated her children's spouses, especially the women] before that. Couldn't explain why she masturbated at night and seemed to be having sex with the late hubbie in her fantasy -- fully aware it appeared that her son and others were in the room with her. Couldn't explain why she saw elves popping out of the sofa or why she had a little friend to whom she kindly fed all her food. Or why she would randomly throw glasses of water at my son thinking he was a cat; she'd always despised cats.
My gram remarried a few years ago. turned out my new grandpa had same dang disease. NS couldn't tell us why his manifestation of the disease was to tell the same stories over and over and over again. Before we knew he had it, we'd finish the effin stories for him. He'd nod and agree with the account we provided but then go on to tell us again anyway. [learned a lot about flyboys stationed in the UK during WW11]. Couldn't explain why he'd get out of bed at 2 a.m to prepare for trip to doctors. Or why he do a little <ahem> poking around when gram bent over to get something out from under the sink or put the dishes away in the dishwasher, not his habit before! [according to my gram at any rate!]
I spent two months conversing with that wanker doyle who you seem to think so highly of. He doesn't know much of anything because doyle hasn't read much of anything and cited, endlessly, some damn text book. In fact, one of the books he references as important to him was i book I told him to read!
NS is not just hell bent on explaining brain functions in terms of physical processes. it's a reductivist endeavor and that's aproblem: it's monological in its logic despite its attempt to claim that it's not. it seeks reductionism via an effort to reduce all human behavior, ultimately, to the brain process. [see hempel on what reductionism means here. yes, there's other fields of study involved, but the goal is to be able to construct an ultimate with the physics of the brain as the last word, reducing them to basic covering laws expressed thru neurosci discoveries] Again, ask Yoshie why reductionism is so problematic for Bhaskar.
One of the most important insights in neuroscience is that the brain develops in the context of our existence as supremely social beings. And, in order to establish a connection [recall doyle's ref to "connectionism?] between brain development/deterioration, cognitive functioning, the social dynamics of socialization in families, peer groups, schools it has to reach out toward other psychologies and it actually has done this in tandem with the Freudian tradition or variations thereof. NS and those working on the relationship between brain functioning and social life are intensely interested in our we come to imagine ourselves as having a sense of self seperate from others, how we represent that self to our selves and to others. And, in turn, they want to know how those processes break down and appear to fail or are absent in the contexts within which the brain is damaged somehow. In other words, they're interested in the 'ego' and consciousness which is, for them, something that is related to physical brain processes but *develops* in terms of the social world within which people live and interact. Their argument is, basically, that all the things that freudian psychology posit--the development of an ego, a regulative function in the superego, etc etc are and can be explained *also*[not only] in terms of a physical foundation of brain processes. In other words, they are often in accord with freudian insights but seek to locate and ground these in the physical processes of the brain. Not all NS are keen to psychoanalysis, but it isn't necessarily in a relation of opposition as you suppose. There are plenty of folks who thought Freud was on to some basic insights, even though he expressed so much of it terms of metaphors and myths that you reject.
finally, carrol, one of the symptoms of alzheimer's is an impairment of our ability to behave according to norms of behavior. people with alzheimer's do things they shouldn't do, iow. why is that? how can the brain possibly have a function that says this is what we should and shouldn't do? how can you look around you and even begin to imagine that norms are anything but filled by the social, even though we may actually have a brain process that encourages the development of norms? Tto suggest that the brain regulates this is ridiculous. sure it might regulate the core processes involved but the specifics of what a society or subculture or whathaveyou consider normatively right and wrong is NOT a function of the brain's physical processes alone. Neuroscience can tell us that there's place in the brain that, when damaged, destroys the ability to adhere to normative expectations of everyday behavior but it can't tell us why those norms have the content they do and how that "social" content is incorporated by the brain. And worse, it can't tell us why people breach norms in the absence of brain damage or deformities! kelley