Re: Religion center in the brain

Kali wrote:
[...]
Christianity dominated Western thought for thousands of years before Darwin traveled the Galapogos Islands and published his systematic observations. Will you say that Christianity begat Darwinism?

Oh sure, no question. Only a religion that assumed a historically evolving relationship between god and its creatures could lead to the notion that evolution happened. At the centre of the christian salvation story is the idea that god's relationship to its people changes over time, and humankind's understanding of that relationship changes also.

BTW, Darwin wasn't the first to posit evolution. He was the first to posit a viable theory of how it happens.

On historical pendulums, Wundt investigated covert psychological activity and psychophysics before radical behaviorism insouciantly ignored all cognition as irrelevant to behavior.
The humanists then came along to point out that human beings have goals that pigeons and rats do not have, and Wertheimer, after having discovered the magic trick to a stereoscope declared that Tischener's atomism was "sterile and beside the point". Chomsky told Skinner that his precis on language development was woefully inadequate, and why; Chomsky's theory was later supported by the discovery of Broca's and Wernicke's areas in the brain. Now in 2006 on Usenet a handful of behaviorists troll sci.cognitive and object to the neuroscientific approach to the study of human behavior. Such is the history of scientific progress.

Neuroscientific investigation has supported several inference based theories - Ewald's opponent process theory of color vision, for example - and is developing an explanation of what happens in the brain when learning occurs, which includes "memory encoding/levels of processing" theories from cognitive psychology as well as classical and operant conditioning theories from behaviorist psychology, which are actually complimentary theories. All this, despite the naysaying of the choleric Usenet few... some of whom have apparently been reduced to dishonestly misquoting others or taking their statements out of context in an apparent attempt to win a tangential argument. Instead of seeking common ground you and Wolf argue semantics. And of course if all else fails, Al Bundyism would dictate that one metaphorically whip out his manhood and wave it around, Daddio.

Kali

I'm still not sure what you mean by "cognition". You've made no attempt to explain what you mean by that word. So I suppose we're arguing semantics. By which I understand that we are attempting to find out exactly what we refer to by our terminology. You of course may have a different meaning in mind. I'm not privy to your mind.

What neuroscience has shown is that we can (up to a point) observe the neural correlates of behaviour; and can also (up to a point) specify what kinds of interference with those neural processes will cause what kinds of changes in behaviour.

BTW, how do you know humans have goals and pigeons don't?

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