Re: Religion center in the brain

K: 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?



GS: No. And Darwin did not argue that his view was a reaction to
Christianity.

K: On historical pendulums, Wundt investigated covert psychological
activity and psychophysics before radical behaviorism
insouciantly ignored all cognition as irrelevant to behavior.



GS: Radical behaviorism holds that "covert psychological activity" is
important, and is a proper subject matter of psychology, even though it can
only be known by inference. After being in psychology as a student and
instructor for more than 20 years, I still don't know what counts as a
cognition. You imply that it has critically to do with what can be
introspected, but most of what cognitivists talk about is not observed - the
product is allegedly observed, but the processes themselves are not so in
general. BTW, I don't normally associate Wundt with psychophysics, but I'm
not an expert on the history o psychology. Certainly structuralism was one
of the most spectacular failures of all time.



K: The humanists then came along to point out that human beings
have goals that pigeons and rats do not have,[]



GS: The term "goal" is not terribly useful, but to the extent that it is
simply a sloppy way to refer to reinforcement, nobody would deny that the
reinforcers for humans are often different from those of rats and pigeons.



K: and Wertheimer,
after having discovered the magic trick to a stereoscope
declared that Tischener's atomism was "sterile and beside the
point".



GS: I don't get the point of this. Are you somehow comparing behaviorism
with the structuralism of Titchner?



K: Chomsky told Skinner that his precis on language
development was woefully inadequate,[]



GS: Unfortunately, Chomsky's review had almost nothing to do with Skinner's
position, and Chomsky never read Verbal Behavior. Anyone who has read both
his review and Skinner's book already knew that, and Chomsky admitted that
he never read the book to Searle. You were saying?







K: []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.



GS: The discovery of Broca's and Wenicke's areas do not show anything more
than that behavioral function is mediated by physiology. No behaviorist that
I know of objects to neuroscience, but plenty object to the silly
conceptualization that has been foisted upon it by cognitive "science."

K: 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.



GS: And nobody objects to the hypothetico-deductive method when it is
applied at the right time and within a context of conceptual clarity. This
hardly describes mainstream psychology.



K: 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.



GS: I didn't misquote you. Saying that "perception is physiology" is
basically the same as saying that "seeing is in the brain." I paraphrased
you, not misquoted you. There is no need. What you say is stupid all on its
own. There is no denying that it, however, the majority position.



K: And of course if all else fails, Al Bundyism would dictate that
one metaphorically whip out his manhood and wave it around,
Daddio.



GS: I didn't mention my manhood. I am your intellectual superior and I have
no desire to literally subject you to the power of my manhood.



Still Your Daddy,

Glen



"Kali" <kali@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:MPG.1f70d733ed3817669896c0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
In <4506f7b5$0$14688$ed362ca5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Glen M.


.

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