Saturday, January 8, 2011

"Advances" in Brain Hate

Coming up with reasons why the brain is an irrelevant or uninteresting object in the study of humans doesn't seem to be a very productive research program. Here's more of the same-old same-old:

Tallis on Ramachandran: Book Review: The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human - WSJ.com

See also: Burge's Stone piece: "A Real Science of the Mind"

10 comments:

  1. I've read the Burge piece. Pretty stunning. I like the bald assertion: "The third thing wrong with neurobabble is that it has pernicious feedback effects on science itself. Too much immature science has received massive funding, on the assumption that it illuminates psychology." Does he have any data to back up this claim? I'm sure he conducted a very strict analysis of the pieces he read in Discover Magazine to arrive at this conclusion.

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  2. These two articles aren't saying that the brain is irrelevant, they're simply saying that the research on it isn't being conducted correctly. Burge says, "Science of mind is one of the most important intellectual developments in the last half century." He thinks that brain science is important. Please try to understand what authors are saying before you make judgments about them.

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  3. The quote you present is explicitly about "mind". Your sentence immediately following the quote is about Burge's alleged respect for the importance of the *brain*. But since Burge is highly unlikely to endorse the equivalence of mind and brain, the quote doesn't seem to support what you seem to think it does.

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  4. What Burge was saying is that so-called "neurobabble" is a fad in science right now and he feels that neuroscientists don't need to be wasting their time/energy on it. You completely missed the point by saying he thinks the brain is "uninteresting and irrelevant", where in reality that's what he thinks of neurobabble.

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  5. Okay then, you can just ignore the gaping holes in your argument if you want to, I guess.

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  6. It appears that Burge's fight is mostly with the media for what he sees as misplaced emphasis. But that obviously has nothing to do with scientific merit - it's economics. Research funding is another matter, but that hopefully has little if anything to do with neurobabble.

    The brain is familiar - everyone is assumed to have one (massive evidence to the contrary notwithstanding) - and exciting. Perceptual psychology? Not so much (unless you're specifically interested in it, which I have recently become). And the story about "finding love in all the wrong places" was in National Geographic, hardly the go-to source for in depth science reporting.

    So Burge is shocked, shocked to find hype winning in the mass market. Doh.

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  7. It's better than when we entered grad school, when it was considered just quaint to think the brain was relevant. Now the opposite is the case, thank goodness.

    PS Go Patriots beat The Mouth.

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  8. Burge, in reality, is Borges in disguise, writing from the "Beyond" that is surmised in Bryan Magee's "Intimations of mortalit". Primum vivere, deinde filosofari.

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