Cheers, Aum418
If snappy, dismissive one-liners and mindless ad homs are how "adepts" and "initiates" hold discourse, then count me among the "pompous windbags".
@Aum418 said
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@Fnord said
"The whole point of Skinnerian behaviorism is that the mind is a black box in which nothing happens worth talking about, except conditioning."
That is a methodological and not a metaphysical claim, like you seem to be making."
This is semantics. The methodology of explaining everything solely in terms of behavior and environmental influences rests on the metaphysical premise that nothing interesting happens inside the brain. It's not like the behaviorists said, "well we don't know what happens inside the brain, so let's look at behavior instead and see where that gets us." Behaviorist rhetoric, is very explicit that there is no reason to look in the brain, and that nothing will be found there except the mechanisms by which conditioning occurs.
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"You would think it would be obvious to anyone participating in this particular community how hopelessly and profoundly false that is. It is also a scientific model a century old and is about as relevant as geocentrism."
You are the one who is hopelessly and profoundly false. FIrst of all, the Skinnerian model is, if anything, HALF a century old and it is EXTREMELY relevant within psychology and especially medicine. Im sorry you have to hear that but you are just completely wrong that it is outdated and equating it with geocentrism only belies your utter ignorance about its use in modern society."
Behaviorism is a century old and half a century debunked. The fact that behaviorists discovered true and useful things about behavior that are still relevant today does not mean that their metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the mind are relevant today. The fact that geocentrists discovered true and useful things about the motion of the Earth does not vindicate geocentrism as such.
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"Anyway, people do not have "innate temperaments and inclinations hard-wired into their brain"."
Coloquially speaking, yes, yes they do. In fact, some people might give the above quote as a mild definition for 'genes' let alone neural structure.
"What they have is a modular computational architecture that consists of thousands of semi-intelligent, semi-autonomous subsystems dedicated to the solution of particular problems in the ancestral paleolithic environment that shaped the evolution of the brain."
Congratulations, you managed to throw out a lot of big buzz words and really say nothing at all. In fact, I could easily interpret the 'semi-autonomous' nature of those 'subsystems' to be 'inclinations' and 'temperaments.' So really youve done nothing expose yourself as a pompous windbag."
The whole point is that the colloquial way of speaking about the structure of the brain is confused and belies the complexity of the issue. Specifically, "temperaments and inclinations" are things that we attribute to people, or to personalities. A brain is not a person or a personality. The question as to whether folk-psychological attributions can be reduced to functional or structural properties of the brain is a matter of ongoing debate in cognitive science. In fact, this question is often answered in the negative.
The modules that are described at the computational level of brain architecture do not at all correspond to features that we would normally attribute to personality. To give some examples, the types of problems that these modules solve include the recognition of syntactic universals in natural language, recognizing correlations between facial expressions and emotional affect, the development of sophisticated and reliable folk-psychology and folk-physics in very young children, and so on and so forth.
Those features of a human being that we recognize as psychology and personality arise only when this panhuman computational architecture couples with the environment.
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"The idiosyncrasies of human personality arise as a result of a complex feedback loop between this evolved architecture, its developmental trajectory, and the environment in which it is embedded."
A feedback loop between its own structure and its trajectory in the future? You just use large words thinking they impress people, dont you? Its kind of cute, I guess..."
Unfortunately, this is how the system actually works. You have (a) the panhuman computational architecture, you have (b) its developmental trajectory (i.e. the subject matter of developmental psychology), and you have (c) the environment. The state of (a) as it traverses (b) is a function of (c). However, since the modern environment is directly created by human beings at their various stages of development, what you get is a feedback loop.
This is not a horrendously complicated idea, but I can see how it would appear that way if you're used to thinking in terms of gross oversimplifications.
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"This is putting the cart before the horse. We want to adapt the tools we've got to the environment; not adapt the environment to our tools. The game is transcendence, not paralysis."
The tool is the body and the mind... not the environment. You are the one switching cart and horse around."
That is what I said. Considering reading attentively before replying.
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"As far as your idea of society telling us what our true will is, this is a stunningly nightmarish idea. "
It really isnt... it happens all the time today in just about every culture I know baout."
Actually, just about every culture has some kind of outlet whereby an individual can disconnect from his or her social persona and obligations and find his or her identity in the ground of being rather than in arbitrarily defined social roles. The nightmare is when this outlet is pathologized or criminalized, and people who cease to identify the concept of self with the social persona are locked up in wards or prisons. To what extent we are living this nightmare in the developed world is an open question, but obviously it is not as bad as it could be in a Skinnerian dystopia.
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"Without such minds, the collective has no check on it whatsoever."
There is no such thing as 'the collective' except as a name for a lot of individuals. By calling it that you should your own inability to see differences and nuance but rather only black and white - theres US and theres THEM, the collective, who are stupid and unworthy. This kind of temperament, Im afraid, is the nightmarish one."
The collective is not a name for a lot of individuals. A collective has a set of shared values, norms, habits of being. As soon as you are born into a society, you are brainwashed with its arbitrary reality tunnel as a consequence of socialization. This renders you incapable of evaluating the collective reality tunnel in any objective way until you become aware of the brainwashing and are able to work through it. The reason for doing this is not to feel special and liberated and go off and live in the woods, but to be able to bring things into the consciousness of others that are typically kept out by the rigidity of socialized brainwashing. Individuation is a social function.
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"The whole point of individuation/attainment/enlightenment is to produce a mind that can move outside the collective reality tunnels and see them from without."
No its not, its union with God/divine. Unless your 'enlightenment' consists in you thinking yourself so much cooler, smarter, better, and 'controversial' and 'counter-cultural' than everyone else, count me out. It sounds a lot like being a whiny teenager to me and absolutely nothing like adepthood or initiation."
I'm sorry but you just come off as too much of a [censored] to talk about these things with.