Mind

Here: Our fascination with the brain seems to come from a longing to make psychology more like a hard science and hence, we assume, more useful. Physics gave us electricity, skyscrapers, and the Internet. Chemistry gave us medicine and more fresh food. Psychology is still taking baby steps, designing empirical tests of unsurprising observations. It may be too much to expect science to reliably save marriages, but how desperately we need the secret to stopping people from burning others alive. More. Psychology is like looking in a mirror and expecting objectivity. See also: The human mind Follow UD News at Twitter!

To “the Singularity”? Science writer John Horgan interviews Neuroskeptic (Discover) It’s a wonder anyone is asking. Aren’t we still baffled as to what consciousness is? Perceptronium vs. the immateriality and consciousness? We might usefully decide first what we are trying to upload. See also: Why the human mind continue to baffle

From New Scientist: Big money is being spent on initiatives like the European Union’s Human Brain Project. Will people hoping to learn about consciousness be disappointed? Absolutely. From what I hear, some of that project’s neuroscientists are disappointed because it isn’t nearly strong enough in asking cognitive questions. It is asking the basic, materialistic questions – such as which cells connect with what, or which chemicals are diffusing – but these basic questions aren’t the only important ones. More. See also: Why studies of the human mind go nowhere.

Yeah. Here. You wouldn’t even think the concept still existed, if Darwin were right: The fact is that we don’t “make” anything of our compulsions, or use them to “realize the self”. We have no ability to “realize” our self; all we can do is rationalize what we do and re-brand it as “freedom” so people don’t get scared. So Eagleton’s simply engaging in nonsense when he says stuff like this: Freedom is not a question of being released from the forces that shape us, but a matter of what we make of them. The world, however, is now divided down the middle between off-the-wall libertarians who deny the reality of such forces, and full-blooded determinists such as the US Read More ›

The Christian Scientific Society: The Truth, Wherever It Leads Details for the Annual Meeting, April 17-18 in Pittsburgh here: J.P. Moreland, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University “The irrelevance of neuroscience for formulating and addressing the fundamental problems in philosophy/theology of mind.” In the first part of my talk, I will lay out the autonomy and authority theses in philosophy and identify the central questions in the four key areas of the mind/body problem. In the second section, I will show why neuroscience cannot even formulate, much less address these central questions. I will also clarify what it means to say that two or more theories are empirically equivalent and go on to argue that Read More ›

From UT San Diego News We’ve put men on the moon, sequenced the human genome and connected most people on Earth with cellphones. Techno wizards. That’s what we are — except when it comes to deciphering the workings of the brain, an organ that seems to defy comprehension. And that is a surprise, why? See also: the human mind Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Not for lack of trying. From The Guardian: Men and women aren’t authors of themselves, as a character in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus remarks of its proud protagonist, but neither are they slaves of their genes. When Richard Dawkins describes human beings as “survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”, his language is redolent of neoliberal capitalism as well as the scientist’s laboratory. To see people in this demeaning way is simply the flipside of the idealising talk of pure autonomy. If the former captures something of the bleak reality of the marketplace, the latter belongs to the heady rhetoric that helps to legitimate it. Some neuroscientists imagine they have dispatched the idea of freedom Read More ›

That is a classic cultural argument for Darwinism, as here : In trying to make sense of the world around us, our brains have evolved to do some very odd things. The more we learn about our cognitive processes, the more it seems we have inherited a very weird wetware set, filled with bizarre and misleading foibles. While most of the cognitive errors I reference here work against us — especially as investors — today’s example of a cognitive process works strangely in the brain’s favor: Spelling don’t matter. Comprehension remains essentially unchanged, even when all letters of a word are totally mixed up — just so long as the first and last letters are in their proper place. Here Read More ›

Here’s an interesting, longish item in New Atlantis (2014): Together with the popular success of psychoactive medications like Prozac and Xanax, the change in the commitments of psychiatry has created ways of talking about mental illness that would have seemed outrageous or even nonsensical less than a century ago. Many of us now blithely accept that depression results from an imbalance of neurotransmitters. While the neurobiological understanding of mental disorders is still at a rudimentary stage, drugs that alter brain chemistry have definite palliative effects, and we increasingly look for and accept explanations of mental illness in neuroscientific terms. We might still take older explanations drawn from psychoanalysis or social psychiatry to hold some value, but we tend to assume Read More ›

See them before someone decides that their (unrelated) religion decrees their destruction.

The best attested effect in medicine. Here: One common explanation for the efficacy of some alternative medicine is the ‘placebo effect’. If there is a placebo effect, it still has the healing effect. So why not go with that? It doesn’t really matter what’s in the black box: the mechanism of healing isn’t the crucial thing, all that matters is that when you take this particular tablet, it relieves your headache. Yes, a placebo can be very useful, and it may be that some of the effect of conventional medicine is achieved through placebo. But, of course, we know that it’s not just placebo when we’ve done the science. We know that, in fact, these drugs really do have medicinal Read More ›

Over the past day or so, following a News post, the self referential incoherences of evolutionary materialism have been coming under the microscope here at UD. In the course of such, the indefatigable (but often “misunderestimated”) BA77 has again struck gold. As in per famed eccentric and insightful mystic, William Blake, Tiger, tiger, burning bright . . . And, how could we honour BA77 without a vid? So . . [youtube uuiusIIOqY4] (While we are at it, Eye of the Tiger, vid + lyrics.) Well worth headlining: _______________ BA77: >>I like the nuance that Dr. Pearcey draws out. It is not only that, under materialistic premises, our perceptions may be false, it is also that, under materialistic premises, free will, Read More ›

What if it is the other way around? Just wondering, that’s all. Anyway, from New Scientist: “HOW on earth does the brain enable mind?” This line from the preface to Tales from Both Sides of the Brain by neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga serves as the overarching question for his latest book. And it’s also a question that permeates The Future of the Brain, a collection of essays edited by psychologist Gary Marcus and neuroscientist Jeremy Freeman. About Future of the Brain we learn, The technologies will generate lots of data, and neuroscientists will need large-scale simulations and brain models to make sense of it. Editors Marcus and Freeman say that we had better get used to seeing the brain as an Read More ›

Here: ENV is pleased to share the following excerpt from Nancy Pearcey’s new book,Finding Truth: Five Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes. A Fellow of Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, Pearcey is a professor and scholar-in-residence at Houston Baptist University and editor-at-large of The Pearcey Report. She is author of the 2005 ECPA Gold Medallion Award winner Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity and other books. A major way to test a philosophy or worldview is to ask: Is it logically consistent? Internal contradictions are fatal to any worldview because contradictory statements are necessarily false. “This circle is square” is contradictory, so it has to be false. An especially damaging form of contradiction Read More ›

Voytek at Five Books: As a scientist, I really do believe the scientific method is quite powerful for explaining the world but — at least for the foreseeable future — it is not very good at discussing the human condition. So I think the strength of the arts and the humanities is its ways of discussing the human experience and I hoped to pick up on this in my book choices. The Master and Margarita ?isn’t exactly a scientific book. When you’re looking at how people interact, the suffering, the pain, strife, love and all those crazy things, neuroscience doesn’t really have answers about that. That’s what we’re getting at in the introduction to our book. A neuroscience of love, for Read More ›