"Reality exists in the human mind and in no other place. Not in the individual mind, that can make mistakes and, in all cases, perishes soon. Just the mind of the Party, that is collective and inmortal, can sense reality. What the Party says its true is effectively true."
-O'Brien
Equiparating subjectivity as the manifestation of desire itself and making an abstract polarization to possibly exemplify better:
Objectivity Subjectivity
Order Chaos
Rationality Irrationality
One example of how rational our society is, can be approached thru a neurological example of brain function:
Left Hemisphere Right Hemisphere
Analytic Holistic
Verbal Prosodic
Logic Intuitive
Exact Calculation Aproximate calculation
Language: Language:
-Grammar -Intonation /accentuation
-Literality -Prosody
-Vocabulary -pragmatic
-Conceptual
Most people in the world (70%-95%) are right handed. It hasnt been determined why of this tendency in humans. There have been geneticistic and cultural attempts at an explanation but unsuccessfully; aswell different species of primates there isn't such polarization.
So, if there cant be a cultural or genetical explanation, maybe its possible for a neurological and ideological explanation. Maybe its not coincidence that so many people are right handed, maybe it's a symptom to how over-idealized are the qualities and ways of thinking due that they were the basic and necessary for survival in our origins. Maybe its putting to much of a fine point on it, but note that the qualities of the left hemisphere correspond to the characteristics of typical rational thought.
But this rationality, this over-idealization of the qualities of the left hemisphere of our brain are a limitation of the human spectre to satisfy all of its needs and desires. Capitalism and the fetichism of money seem to be nowadays the measure of "objectivity" and "truth", and its ok'ed by the groups in power due to, that the search of happiness thru materialism and consumism doesn't question the functionality of society. If a person feels sad, and accepts consumist doctrine thru the mass media, that he can be happy by purchasing a new cell phone that is in fashion and trendy, then he shall buy the cell phone; or maybe when hes sad he can take it as something random, without deep reasons and can take prescription drugs, such as Prozac, Valium or Tylenol. This person could do thousands of solutions that are rational and "objective" (and reductionist in nature) for his sadness, but ¿are they solutions or distractions to the problem?
Another example of our current reality: psycho-tropic substances. Tobacco, alcohol, caffeine and prescription drugs are within the legal limits in an almost global perspective, while cannabis, LSD, cocaine, heroine and opium are outside of that legal limits. Based on what is this difference? Quickly any agent or representative of the law could answer "Because some are addictive and harmful, while the rest aren't", but the reality is that all of them have adverse effects, with addictive potential. Then, if all have adverse effects to health and all have the potential for addiction ¿What criterion in reality is used to assess if they are legal or illegal? Possibly because one can be an addict to nicotine, caffeine, be an alcoholic and being sedated by prescription drugs and continue to be "productive" economically speaking, while on the other drugs one cannot. Hallucinogens can bring persons to altered states of consciousness where holistic and "irrational" thoughts can emerge.
The aspiration to objectivize the collective subjectivity towards money, "productivity", "efficiency", "utility", all being economical concepts to respond to human needs, human needs that don't respond to such criterions. All in the purpose to keep social order, maintenance of status quo as utopia, utopia with rational basis, logical towards an ideal, but absurd towards what is human. An ordered society its not the consecuence of the satisfaction of all the ideals and desires of all persons.
"... in a purely quantitative world everything would be dead, rigid, without movement... Its evident that any being different from us feels other qualities and, therefore, lives in a different world from ours. Qualities are our human idiosincrasyes properly said; to ask that these interpretations and these human values to be general and perhaps productive is one of the most outstanding crazes of the human pride."
(This is a fragment from last trimesters final essay i did... was originally in spanish.)
Can't brain today; I have the dumb. But that looks like it's well worth the read, and I'll tackle it tomorrow when I'm fresh and unimpaired.
I know why tobacco and alcohol is legal in the US and other drugs aren't: Our country was founded on Puritarianism and tobacco. The puritans (not the actual Puritans, just their ideological descendants) tried and succeeded in banning alcohol and as many neurologically active substances as they could - except tobacco (because the only thing bigger than big religion is big business.) Alcohol was too culturally accepted for the law to stick to it though, but the handy psyops fighting the War On (some) Drugs managed to keep the remaining drugs banned through public opinion. New drugs, produced by powerful corporations, get a soft-ban (prescription only) to appease the law while still allowing access to those with deep enough pockets and/or connections to doctors.
Don't think it has much to do with the powers-that-be being afraid that constituents will reach enlightenment if they smoke too much dope, and then not need Society or Government anymore.
Also, your stuff on the left-vs-right hemisphere is suspect. In particular, I'd like to see the body of evidence supporting the idea that the right half of the brain does holistic reasoning, while the left side does analytical.
I thought it was that the white-landowning-therefore-government-honchos were the ones considering they didn't make enough $ on it, so fuckit make it illegal schtick was why marijuana and coke weren't made 100% legal here?
Seriously, I think that had more to do with it than bullshit religious morality. The way I saw it (The Last White Hope documentary is your friend), the Rx companies strarted out YOUNG in this process and convinced their shareholders aka Mr. LawMakerMan that they'd be better off scripting the shit than selling it in their soft drinks and hemp braids.
Public opinion had shit-all to do with it...public opinion was what The Man told them it was...not the other way around.
Sambrano, Jazmín "Programación neurolinguistica para todos", 2000, Alfaomega, México, pp.20-23.
http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/545/Right-Brain-Hemisphere.html
http://frank.mtsu.edu/~studskl/hd/LRBrain.html
These are some sources that might be of interest. Neurolinguistprogramming and neurology speaking.
Have you heard about left handed persons being more creative? Maybe theres something to it?
Culturally speaking, the symbolism of right and left being equated as "correct" and "wrong"... Do you think it was randomly decided at some point, and at that random point it could might as well have been the other way around?
http://www.elementsofhome.com/Ebay/images/SOCRATES.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Eris_(Discordia).jpg
Do you find it something merely of randomness that Socrates is holding his head up with his right fist instead of his left one?
Is it random also that "she" is holding up her left palm making the gesture instead of her right one?
There are plenty and widespread examples if you look for them.
Did you know the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of your body? And that the right hemisphere the left side of your body?
And speaking of the drugs: just because i am writing in english, doesnt mean im talking only about the USA.
I havent read Thomas Leary, but im sure his theories on the 8 circuit model of consciousness arent far off from what im speaking of.
I think a good expository on the drug culture vis a vis Mexico is a good thing to blag about...I am advocating such exposition here...
As far as i know, pre-hispanic culture was involved with some kinds of hallucinogens, more so by the northern arid nomads...
And by the more centric and southern Aztecs it was more of a ritualistic thing that went on among higher ranks such as priests, im not sure what kind of substance do.
Then the catholic spaniards came along to colonize... Catholicism i think is way more ambiguos towards substances than Puritanism, not speaking of stance in books and officially speaking, i mean in practice with the average joe believers, and i would argue for hypocrisy and double standards - they are more worried on sexuality issues id say.
Unfortunately leaving a big gap on history due to my ignorance, ill speak of this century - there havent been any prohibitions on tobacco nor alcohol, but all the stuff such as opium, cannabis, cocaine, heroince, lsd, etc. have been illegal all along... until recently.
But illegal is a term that can just be written in paper and not enforced...
Ive met quite a few of druggies and sort of been one myself, and i tell you, its pretty easy to get your hands on cocaine and pot, and i think heroine isnt that hard either... Peyote and mushrooms is harder in the sense that you have to travel to where the stuff grows naturally, because the highways that lead there and back are patrolled by the military.
Here the legal entrance to bars is 18... even do theres endless crowds of 15 year olds that get in and are blooming alcoholics.
Tobacco? Tons of 15 year olds are into it too. Theres nomad salesmen all over the street that sell candy, gums and cigarrettes by the dose (sell individual cigarretes) to any willing person.
Inside universities even before the law passed, you could use drugs without punishment because they are autonomous and police or military are not allowed entrance.
The recent law that allows anyone to carry small ammounts isnt about being "progressive" such as the Netherlands (which perhaps they actually just did it for the tourism? IDK)... its because this president we have, issued his own personal version of the "War on Drugs" (Tm)... im not sure if i mentioned it in another thread, but theres 5,200 people dead this year because of this "war" (civilians, police, military, small-medium-big traffickers)... and im not sure if its overstating, but this isnt the first year of the "war"... its a war that the government is losing because our drug cartels are so strong, so its a way of separating the kittens from the wolves... It would just be hypothetics if we start to think up scenarios after the war or if there werent strong cartels...
I think my argument still stands that certain drugs are illegal because of their effects on economic productivity. Most of Europe is quite ""progressive"" and i dont see anyone besides the Netherlands making drugs legal.
Not bad.
Quote from: JohNyx on September 19, 2009, 02:54:34 AM(This is a fragment from last trimesters final essay i did... was originally in spanish.)
I could tell, largely because of the word "inmortal" instead of "immortal" :)
Quote from: Jenne on September 20, 2009, 06:36:43 AM
I thought it was that the white-landowning-therefore-government-honchos were the ones considering they didn't make enough $ on it, so fuckit make it illegal schtick was why marijuana and coke weren't made 100% legal here?
It's illegal in most other western countries as well, and that makes me pretty sure it's a cultural religious thing. Just like they tried to ban alcohol.
Also what "fuck it make it illegal shtick"? Cause there's zillions of stuff that the gvt doesnt make money on, and it's not all illegal.
Regardless, I'm happy that coke is illegal because fuck it I hate that shit and the people who are on it.
Quote from: Triple Zero on September 20, 2009, 11:41:29 AM
Quote from: Jenne on September 20, 2009, 06:36:43 AM
I thought it was that the white-landowning-therefore-government-honchos were the ones considering they didn't make enough $ on it, so fuckit make it illegal schtick was why marijuana and coke weren't made 100% legal here?
It's illegal in most other western countries as well, and that makes me pretty sure it's a cultural religious thing. Just like they tried to ban alcohol.
Also what "fuck it make it illegal shtick"? Cause there's zillions of stuff that the gvt doesnt make money on, and it's not all illegal.
Regardless, I'm happy that coke is illegal because fuck it I hate that shit and the people who are on it.
TITCM. I tried it once and I hated myself on it. I just wanted to keep being an asshole to people. :'(
Quote from: JohNyx on September 20, 2009, 07:03:17 AM
I think my argument still stands that certain drugs are illegal because of their effects on economic productivity.
here here. that's definitely a factor
These things are entrenched in very interesting ways.
Like how hemp isn't used the USA
to this day because the settlers of the USA farmed cotton
or how pot originally became illegal because making it contraband was a way they could kick out mexicans.
I think you can explain drug use through a number of lenses, and the economic model makes a lot of sense
Quote from: JohNyx on September 20, 2009, 06:39:20 AM
Sambrano, Jazmín "Programación neurolinguistica para todos", 2000, Alfaomega, México, pp.20-23.
http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/545/Right-Brain-Hemisphere.html
http://frank.mtsu.edu/~studskl/hd/LRBrain.html
These are some sources that might be of interest. Neurolinguistprogramming and neurology speaking.
Have you heard about left handed persons being more creative? Maybe theres something to it?
Culturally speaking, the symbolism of right and left being equated as "correct" and "wrong"... Do you think it was randomly decided at some point, and at that random point it could might as well have been the other way around?
http://www.elementsofhome.com/Ebay/images/SOCRATES.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Eris_(Discordia).jpg
Do you find it something merely of randomness that Socrates is holding his head up with his right fist instead of his left one?
Is it random also that "she" is holding up her left palm making the gesture instead of her right one?
There are plenty and widespread examples if you look for them.
Did you know the left hemisphere of the brain controls the right side of your body? And that the right hemisphere the left side of your body?
And speaking of the drugs: just because i am writing in english, doesnt mean im talking only about the USA.
I havent read Thomas Leary, but im sure his theories on the 8 circuit model of consciousness arent far off from what im speaking of.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you were talking specifically about the USA. I just happen to only know the history of the USA well enough and not that of Mexico (or just about any other country, really) and didn't feel qualified to comment on specifics outside of the US.
On to psychology (in no particular order): Yes, I am aware that the motor cortex on either side of the brain controls the other side of the body (unless something happens to one, and the other side rewires and handles both.) I also know that some brain functions such as spatial reasoning and different parts of the language complex are (usually) lateralized to certain hemispheres of the brain. But I'd like to see the studies where scientists determined that "holistic" reasoning happens on one side and "linear" reasoning happens on the other - I have my doubts on how an experiment like that would be constructed, especially on how "holistic" and "linear" would be defined and measured.
When you say that you think Leary's 8-circuit model might be close to what you're talking about, are you including the part where people develop psychic powers, remember events from past lives, communication with galactic beings, gain universal consciousness, and such?
It's no secret that in the West and Middle East (I don't know about the rest of the world) that the right hand is privileged over the left. The Latin words "dexter" and "sinister" referring to right and left, respectively, also mean (or came to mean) skill and evil, respectively. I suspect this had more to do with the fact that the majority of humans are right handed and the harsh cultural attitudes towards deviance of any sort than with any knowledge of neurology. That alone explains your two photographs. (btw, to embed images in your post you can just put
[img][/img] around the URL of the image.)
I have heard that left handed people are more creative. I've also heard that sleeping in a room with a running electric fan will
kill you dead. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death) The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
I dont have at hand detailed material on the experiments that led to the description of brain lateralization. Some experiments with people that had an injury to certain parts of their brains and testing them at different tasks come to mind. Ive also heard of certain experiments where numbing agents were administered to certain parts of their brain so they couldnt be used, to see how the person acted.
On Leary: nevermind, i shouldnt even had mentioned him if i dont know about him. Im not sure it has much to do with what i speak of and i dont know how fringe and crazy he is.
On the cultural significance of "right" and "left" i think we are on the same page. However i do not think that humans have always been right handed, and that the cultural significance had to emerge from somewhere.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-are-more-people-right
Basicly, we evolved from primates... primates which dont have a preference for left or right hand... my argument is that, in our evolution, we developed more the "rational"(left) side of our brains which thus gives our population today, predomenantly right handedness.
Quote from: JohNyx on September 20, 2009, 07:15:29 PM
I dont have at hand detailed material on the experiments that led to the description of brain lateralization. Some experiments with people that had an injury to certain parts of their brains and testing them at different tasks come to mind. Ive also heard of certain experiments where numbing agents were administered to certain parts of their brain so they couldnt be used, to see how the person acted.
On Leary: nevermind, i shouldnt even had mentioned him if i dont know about him. Im not sure it has much to do with what i speak of and i dont know how fringe and crazy he is.
On the cultural significance of "right" and "left" i think we are on the same page. However i do not think that humans have always been right handed, and that the cultural significance had to emerge from somewhere.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-are-more-people-right
Basicly, we evolved from primates... primates which dont have a preference for left or right hand... my argument is that, in our evolution, we developed more the "rational"(left) side of our brains which thus gives our population today, predomenantly right handedness.
If you're interested in right/left brain lateralization, look up information on people who've had some damage to or completely lack the corpus collosum. Truth is, we've got two brains (or three, if you count the gastro-intestinal one) which are barely connected to each other. People can live without the cc, it's not ideal, but it's not absolutely necessary either.
Thanks for posting this.
Do you think it is likely that alienation (either in the Marxist or social conception) arises from the socially structured repression, or lack out of outlets, for the "right hemisphere" of the brain or the traits associated with it (putting aside the questions of the validity of this model) to express itself through?
I'll likely have some more questions or comments later, but that was the first that came to mind.
Quote from: Kai on September 20, 2009, 08:08:23 PM
Quote from: JohNyx on September 20, 2009, 07:15:29 PM
Some experiments with people that had an injury to certain parts of their brains and testing them at different tasks come to mind. Ive also heard of certain experiments where numbing agents were administered to certain parts of their brain so they couldnt be used, to see how the person acted.
If you're interested in right/left brain lateralization, look up information on people who've had some damage to or completely lack the corpus collosum. Truth is, we've got two brains (or three, if you count the gastro-intestinal one) which are barely connected to each other. People can live without the cc, it's not ideal, but it's not absolutely necessary either.
Yes indeed.
Kai, by any chance could you comment on if that article talking about primates saying they dont have right handed and left handed preferences in general? My perception is that Scientific American is reliable, but thats not my field of expertise.
Quote from: Cain on September 20, 2009, 08:13:03 PM
Do you think it is likely that alienation (either in the Marxist or social conception) arises from the socially structured repression, or lack out of outlets, for the "right hemisphere" of the brain or the traits associated with it (putting aside the questions of the validity of this model) to express itself through?
My idea is that the "right side of our brain" contains "higher and more complex" processes than the "left side of our brain". But mentioning that, the left side of our brain contains the mechanisms that were most needed for survival and development as a species. But its a matter of balance, because human life (according to what i think) shouldnt just be about "survival"; survival is related to efficiency and efficiency is related to economics... perhaps thats why economics is over idealized.
And evolution to a higher more balanced state is in biological terminology a "mutation". Mutations can be either an improvement or abominations, and it seems to me that the average joe's of the world view any sort of mutation/deviation as an abomination because their lack of perspective and intellect.
In other words, fear.
(I have a bus ride to catch, ill chew on these thoughts while im on it)
P.S. Im gonna read the totality of my essay, perhaps theres a lot of holes in my arguments due to it being fragments of the big one...
Leaving aside for the moment whether what you ascribe to the brain hemispheres in terms of different kinds of reasoning actually occurs in specific hemispheres, on what do you base your claim that some kinds of reasoning are "higher and more complex" than others? What makes you say that verbal, logical, and analytical abilities are of a lower order than qualitative interpretation of the quality of speech and sound?
It seems like a kind of dualism to say that there is a low way of thinking and a high way of thinking.
Quote from: JohNyx on September 20, 2009, 08:40:10 PM
Quote from: Cain on September 20, 2009, 08:13:03 PM
Do you think it is likely that alienation (either in the Marxist or social conception) arises from the socially structured repression, or lack out of outlets, for the "right hemisphere" of the brain or the traits associated with it (putting aside the questions of the validity of this model) to express itself through?
My idea is that the "right side of our brain" contains "higher and more complex" processes than the "left side of our brain". But mentioning that, the left side of our brain contains the mechanisms that were most needed for survival and development as a species. But its a matter of balance, because human life (according to what i think) shouldnt just be about "survival"; survival is related to efficiency and efficiency is related to economics... perhaps thats why economics is over idealized.
And evolution to a higher more balanced state is in biological terminology a "mutation". Mutations can be either an improvement or abominations, and it seems to me that the average joe's of the world view any sort of mutation/deviation as an abomination because their lack of perspective and intellect.
In other words, fear.
QuoteIt seems like a kind of dualism to say that there is a low way of thinking and a high way of thinking.
A very valid observation. That is just my personal opinion and lets leave it at that for the moment.
Now here comes the stuff i managed to think up while on my bus ride (This time i chose to think in spanish - Translation in progress...)
I wont get into philosophers, economists, my own nor subcultural notions of alienation, because i think its a very relative term and i would just drown in definitions. Also, because choosing one definition over the rest would be limitating. Although i will try to adress what i think it is you are questioning. I also felt that the question was loaded as to just involve economics, sociology and neurology primarily. I dont say any of this with malice nor with the intention of easing up what ill try to express.
When i speak of the left hemisphere of the brain, i speak basicly on the foundations of rationalism: (this would be a chart shaped in a square, but, just pretend it is)
Neuroanatomically: right hemisphere / basic functions of survival
Philosophi-scientifically: rationalism / objectivism / enlightenment / order
Artistically: Classicism / renaissance / realism / top chart pop / top chart rap
Psychologically: Conscience (Ego) / Superego
By contraposition (imagine another chart):
Neuroanatomically: left hemisphere / complex functions (higher on the evolution scale of the psyche)
Philosophy-scientifically: irrationalism / discordianism / Zen / disorder
Artistically: modernism / romanticism / dada / surrealism / fringe music (lets not get into that)
Psychologically: Unconcious
So dealing with each area independently:
Neuroanatomically: we owe much to "hard science" that uses a lot of precise numbers, engineering, medicine, logic, etc. These are all quantitative based stuff, and thats fine, because its dealing with objects and stuff for our own purpose, even do qualitative methods are pushed to a side, which are essential to the "social sciences".
Philosophy-scientifically: taking objectivism as an example. Its ridiculous, other than with numbers one cannot be objective, unless that by a rare chance you have the same definitions and perspective. Everything else is relative and subjective. The utopias that rationalism/enlightenment influenced people have all failed because they dont take into account human vice/feelings.
Artistically: Surrealism expresses freely what is experienced psychically, in opposition to Realism that expresses what is perceived and is "real". Rennaissance and Classicism are kind of in opposition to Romanticism which speaks of subjective experience. One could say Dada shares much with Surrealism.
Psychologically: So ok, i think that the Freudian abstract separations of the psyche are correct, and that the unconscious does exist. Unconscious/Id is what deals with our dreams and our psychic world, it can be argued that the mayor part of our psyche is unconscious and it can manifest thru "mistakes" such as lapsus, stuttering, tripping, forgetting... it also is the manifestation of our hedonistic desires. The Ego/ Consciousness is the field of battle between our hedonistic desires and that which is our personal moral rules and ideals (superego).
Just the characteristics of the unconscious and the right hemisphere are, what to call it... taboo? But now its not about hunting down those manifestations, its about ignoring those manifestations and hoping it dissolves in the seas of semi-comftable burgeous, ignorant lower class, and pillaging higher class.
I say in brief words i guess: rationalism has led most of the world to think that there are values that are objective by putting efforts into deying there are way more issues that rely on personal taste and denying the inconscious forces that are the basis for those personal tastes.
interesting thesis, to be sure.
reminds of Robert Pirsig's notion of Quality (as described in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence)
when something is of High Quality, it is because it has unified the rational and aesthetic worlds. He thinks that culture is suffering from a war between the rational mind and the aesthetic mind, and this causes all sorts of Low Quality experiences.
Perhaps I wasn't being strong enough. When I say that your system of the human mind seems dualistic, I meant to imply that you took a very complicated system, much of which is fundamentally unknown at this point, drew an arbitrary line down where you place the middle, and declared arbitrarily that one side was better than the other. (You say they should be "balanced," but it's clear that you take "balance" to mean more right-side and less left-side.)
Quote from: JohNyx on September 21, 2009, 05:52:23 AM
So dealing with each area independently:
Neuroanatomically: we owe much to "hard science" that uses a lot of precise numbers, engineering, medicine, logic, etc. These are all quantitative based stuff, and thats fine, because its dealing with objects and stuff for our own purpose, even do qualitative methods are pushed to a side, which are essential to the "social sciences".
Are you saying that thinking with precise numbers is justifiable, but only if it deals with objects to fulfill a human purpose? In other words, that precise thinking is only a tool and not something that can be its own end? If so, why?
Quote from: JohNyx on September 21, 2009, 05:52:23 AM
Philosophy-scientifically: taking objectivism as an example. Its ridiculous, other than with numbers one cannot be objective, unless that by a rare chance you have the same definitions and perspective. Everything else is relative and subjective. The utopias that rationalism/enlightenment influenced people have all failed because they dont take into account human vice/feelings.
I don't see why one can't be objective with definitions (e.g., analytical reasoning.) And when you say that "everything" else is relative and subjective, are you including statements like "This barstool is a solid object" in your "relative and subjective" division?
Quote from: JohNyx on September 21, 2009, 05:52:23 AM
Psychologically: So ok, i think that the Freudian abstract separations of the psyche are correct, and that the unconscious does exist. Unconscious/Id is what deals with our dreams and our psychic world, it can be argued that the mayor part of our psyche is unconscious and it can manifest thru "mistakes" such as lapsus, stuttering, tripping, forgetting... it also is the manifestation of our hedonistic desires. The Ego/ Consciousness is the field of battle between our hedonistic desires and that which is our personal moral rules and ideals (superego).
Do you have any evidence that the unconscious manifests itself through mistakes (the so-called "Freudian Slip") ? I don't deny that there are many things about my own mind of which I am unaware - I often don't realize what my true motivations are, or what precisely causes me to like or dislike something, or just about anything relating to my dreams. But be aware that modern psychology has essentially completely moved away from Sigmund your-son-has-autism-because-you're-a-terrible-mother Freud, and his ideas about just about everything have been completely discredited. I am unaware of any controlled, scientific study which supports the idea that slips of tongue and lapses of speech reflect unconscious desires, as opposed to swapping phonemes or trying to think about two things and once and saying the wrong word out loud.
I won't lie, this is a long (probably interesting thread), that i haven't read yet, but I have a question...
Do you think that maybe, possibly, our predisposition towards right-handedness (left-brained ness) could be due to the fact we are a highly social species and the left side seems to cover the basics of communication?
though i suppose that doesn't explain why other primates have the same phenomenon.
also, to say the left of right-handedness is not genetic is just silly, it could well be a gene expressed in a similar way to height, you are predisposed but nurture can change that, otherwise what would make someone left-handed? if it was purely down to ideological effects on the brain and this worship of rationality is so widespread then everyone would be right-handed, and left-handedness would almost certainly not occur in westernized countries.
if this has been covered or is otherwise irrelevant then apologies and all that.
x
I can't find a higher citation, but I generally trust Pinker on these things:
"...one hand is dominant, owing to the asymmetry of the brain..." (Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, page 278)
Quote from: GA on September 22, 2009, 05:11:04 PM
Perhaps I wasn't being strong enough. When I say that your system of the human mind seems dualistic, I meant to imply that you took a very complicated system, much of which is fundamentally unknown at this point, drew an arbitrary line down where you place the middle, and declared arbitrarily that one side was better than the other. (You say they should be "balanced," but it's clear that you take "balance" to mean more right-side and less left-side.)
Its not an arbitrary division im making, its according to neuro-anatomic findings, and im sure there are a lot of things that we do not know, but there are a lot of things that are indeed known. And let me explain about the right side of the brain, i meant to speak more of its value in terms of it being unusual traits, in the context of this predominantly rational world we live in, that are needed for balance. I hope this makes my stance clearer.
Quote from: GA on September 22, 2009, 05:11:04 PM
Are you saying that thinking with precise numbers is justifiable, but only if it deals with objects to fulfill a human purpose? In other words, that precise thinking is only a tool and not something that can be its own end? If so, why?
Precise thinking as its own end? I do think it is only a "tool", and of course, if we didnt need it for survival or practical needs we could/should do without it. The first wording of the "same" question you made i couldnt quite understand.
Quote from: GA on September 22, 2009, 05:11:04 PM
I don't see why one can't be objective with definitions (e.g., analytical reasoning.) And when you say that "everything" else is relative and subjective, are you including statements like "This barstool is a solid object" in your "relative and subjective" division?
Definitions and perspective... words are just metaphors, and you can come close to expressing what you mean, but never a solid 100%... If i say "cat", do you think of the animal, the shoe brand or the computed axial tomography scan? There is an inmense array of possible "barstools" that come to mind, and how "solid" it is has a very wide range of "solidity".
Quote from: GA on September 22, 2009, 05:11:04 PM
Do you have any evidence that the unconscious manifests itself through mistakes (the so-called "Freudian Slip") ? I don't deny that there are many things about my own mind of which I am unaware - I often don't realize what my true motivations are, or what precisely causes me to like or dislike something, or just about anything relating to my dreams. But be aware that modern psychology has essentially completely moved away from Sigmund your-son-has-autism-because-you're-a-terrible-mother Freud, and his ideas about just about everything have been completely discredited. I am unaware of any controlled, scientific study which supports the idea that slips of tongue and lapses of speech reflect unconscious desires, as opposed to swapping phonemes or trying to think about two things and once and saying the wrong word out loud.
The unconscious doesnt manifest itself "just" thru mistakes, it would be a horrible task to enunciate every single one way it expresses itself. Explaining that it does manifest thru mistakes is much empirical and a "per case" thing to do. Freud still has certainly an ammount of theories and ideas that have been discredited and others that havent, but to say lightly what percentage of each we are at today i would say its an arrogant posture. Ill look around for examples for the lapsus and stuff, i for sure know theres some within "Psychopathology of Everyday Life", but i wonder how solid you think those are.
Quote from: Roaring Biscuit! on September 23, 2009, 12:56:35 AM
Do you think that maybe, possibly, our predisposition towards right-handedness (left-brained ness) could be due to the fact we are a highly social species and the left side seems to cover the basics of communication?
also, to say the left of right-handedness is not genetic is just silly, it could well be a gene expressed in a similar way to height, you are predisposed but nurture can change that, otherwise what would make someone left-handed? if it was purely down to ideological effects on the brain and this worship of rationality is so widespread then everyone would be right-handed, and left-handedness would almost certainly not occur in westernized countries.
Actually, intonation and accentuation seem to be more "basic communication skills", if you couldnt make intonation with a "primitive grunt" which was the basic form of language, then how would you, lacking a language that does rely on vocabulary and grammar?. And by basing your argument on we being "highly social species", then you are saying it might as well could had been the left hand that turned out to be dominant.
coming up with a geneticist reductionism is what i think to be silly. Even do i go along with it as far as to say it might have SOME PART in the causes.
And tell me, how often left handedness does occur? 5-30%, dont you find that to be at least a minority to what could even could be named "rare" occurrance?
Perhaps in the interest of clarity, you could explain what you mean when you say "holistic" as opposed to "rational" ? I think part of what prevents me from understanding your reasoning is that I see no conflict between something being holistic and rational at the same time.
Quote from: JohNyx on September 23, 2009, 10:00:01 PM
Quote from: GA on September 22, 2009, 05:11:04 PM
Perhaps I wasn't being strong enough. When I say that your system of the human mind seems dualistic, I meant to imply that you took a very complicated system, much of which is fundamentally unknown at this point, drew an arbitrary line down where you place the middle, and declared arbitrarily that one side was better than the other. (You say they should be "balanced," but it's clear that you take "balance" to mean more right-side and less left-side.)
Its not an arbitrary division im making, its according to neuro-anatomic findings, and im sure there are a lot of things that we do not know, but there are a lot of things that are indeed known. And let me explain about the right side of the brain, i meant to speak more of its value in terms of it being unusual traits, in the context of this predominantly rational world we live in, that are needed for balance. I hope this makes my stance clearer.
Quote from: GA on September 22, 2009, 05:11:04 PM
Are you saying that thinking with precise numbers is justifiable, but only if it deals with objects to fulfill a human purpose? In other words, that precise thinking is only a tool and not something that can be its own end? If so, why?
Precise thinking as its own end? I do think it is only a "tool", and of course, if we didnt need it for survival or practical needs we could/should do without it. The first wording of the "same" question you made i couldnt quite understand.
That's what I meant by arbitrary division - you cannot claim that neurological research supports your judgment that precise thinking "should" be discarded if it is not needed. I am not sure where you are getting this statement - I personally love precise thinking as a purely intellectual exercise. Perhaps you personally dislike it and are confusing your personal tastes with normative judgments? And I don't see how you can claim that you're seeking "balance" if you believe that precise reasoning should be kept to "as little as necessary." You can say that there should be this much precise thinking and that much other thinking, but by what reasoning are you making the claim that this much is balanced with that much? (By analogy, if I say that killing humans should be kept to a minimum, and that peaceful methods of conflict resolution should be used more than they are, I am not seeking a balance between murder and peace. I'm seeking more peace and less murder.)
And while neurological research does support a some of your claims (location of verbal language as opposed to intonation, etc.) I see no evidence that modes of thinking - if indeed there are distinct modes of thinking - are lateralized. The fact that parts of the brain which are necessary for grammatical language are (usually) located in the left hemisphere does not imply that literal thinking occurs in the left hemisphere and that whatever is the opposite of thinking literally occurs in the right hemisphere. I would like to see evidence for your claim that "holistic" and "rational" modes of thinking can be distinguished, and that each mode of thought occurs principally in one hemisphere or the other.
Quote from: JohNyx on September 23, 2009, 10:00:01 PM
Quote from: GA on September 22, 2009, 05:11:04 PM
I don't see why one can't be objective with definitions (e.g., analytical reasoning.) And when you say that "everything" else is relative and subjective, are you including statements like "This barstool is a solid object" in your "relative and subjective" division?
Definitions and perspective... words are just metaphors, and you can come close to expressing what you mean, but never a solid 100%... If i say "cat", do you think of the animal, the shoe brand or the computed axial tomography scan? There is an inmense array of possible "barstools" that come to mind, and how "solid" it is has a very wide range of "solidity".
Suppose the International Prototype Kilogram (the one stored in France) were moving towards your solar plexus at 10^40 Planck lengths per second (which is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom), relative to the inertial frame of reference of your solar plexus.
Tell me this will not result in a deformation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformation_(mechanics)) of your body.
If you don't buy this, I WILL start copying precise proofs directly from my Abstract Algebra and Number Theory textbooks.
Quote from: JohNyx on September 23, 2009, 10:00:01 PM
Quote from: GA on September 22, 2009, 05:11:04 PM
Do you have any evidence that the unconscious manifests itself through mistakes (the so-called "Freudian Slip") ? I don't deny that there are many things about my own mind of which I am unaware - I often don't realize what my true motivations are, or what precisely causes me to like or dislike something, or just about anything relating to my dreams. But be aware that modern psychology has essentially completely moved away from Sigmund your-son-has-autism-because-you're-a-terrible-mother Freud, and his ideas about just about everything have been completely discredited. I am unaware of any controlled, scientific study which supports the idea that slips of tongue and lapses of speech reflect unconscious desires, as opposed to swapping phonemes or trying to think about two things and once and saying the wrong word out loud.
The unconscious doesnt manifest itself "just" thru mistakes, it would be a horrible task to enunciate every single one way it expresses itself. Explaining that it does manifest thru mistakes is much empirical and a "per case" thing to do. Freud still has certainly an ammount of theories and ideas that have been discredited and others that havent, but to say lightly what percentage of each we are at today i would say its an arrogant posture. Ill look around for examples for the lapsus and stuff, i for sure know theres some within "Psychopathology of Everyday Life", but i wonder how solid you think those are.
I actually agree with you for once - it was an arrogant statement when I said that Freud's ideas about just about everything are discredited. Let me rephrase that in a more humble way: Of all the psychology professors, psychologists, and psychology students I have heard discuss Freud, all of them have made the point that none of Freud's major theories are still accepted by mainstream psychologists. Rather than contributing theory, they say, Freud's real contribution was the popularization of the idea applying psychological principles to therapy, even though Freud's principles were mostly wrong.
I'd appreciate some examples of studies of lapses. I have to warn you that "Psychopathology of Everyday Life" isn't going to convince me, if only because it was, y'know, written by Sigmund Freud. In the scientific method we have a tradition that empirical claims should be independently verifiable; that is, if I do experiment X and get result Y, and you or any scientist also does experiment X, then they should also get result Y. If the only person who can get result Y is me, and everybody else who does the experiment gets Z, then my result of Y is not considered valid; perhaps my equipment is defective and I am not measuring what I think I am measuring, or maybe I have some bias that prevents me from getting the objective result, or perhaps I have simply lied about my results. For Freud's theories to be considered correct, other scientists who conduct controlled studies on lapses should have the same empirical results. The fact that Freud found support for his own theory is not very convincing; what would be convincing would be a rigorous study conducted in, say, the last 20 years or so. (The time restriction is because psychology is a field in which new things are discovered and old assumptions invalidated on a fairly regular basis. A study done 100 years ago would very likely assume things to be true that turned out to be false.)
QuoteActually, intonation and accentuation seem to be more "basic communication skills", if you couldnt make intonation with a "primitive grunt" which was the basic form of language, then how would you, lacking a language that does rely on vocabulary and grammar?
That may be true, and perhaps millions of years ago more humans were left-handed, but in
todays society for the majority of the populations' right brain communication skills are foremost and as we are talking about todays society I think my point is still relevant.
Quotecoming up with a geneticist reductionism is what i think to be silly. Even do i go along with it as far as to say it might have SOME PART in the causes.
And tell me, how often left handedness does occur? 5-30%, dont you find that to be at least a minority to what could even could be named "rare" occurrance?
well if its occurance is between 5-30% then is could simply be a recessive allele, mendels ratios would give 3:1 (right:left) which seems to fit with your rare occurence. I'm not really a fan of genetic determinism normally, but the fact that you completely wrote it off at the beginning is something I found difficult to accept.
also, thanks for taking the time to reply.
x
Quote from: Roaring Biscuit! on September 24, 2009, 02:57:24 AM
QuoteActually, intonation and accentuation seem to be more "basic communication skills", if you couldnt make intonation with a "primitive grunt" which was the basic form of language, then how would you, lacking a language that does rely on vocabulary and grammar?
That may be true, and perhaps millions of years ago more humans were left-handed, but in todays society for the majority of the populations' right brain communication skills are foremost and as we are talking about todays society I think my point is still relevant.
Quotecoming up with a geneticist reductionism is what i think to be silly. Even do i go along with it as far as to say it might have SOME PART in the causes.
And tell me, how often left handedness does occur? 5-30%, dont you find that to be at least a minority to what could even could be named "rare" occurrance?
well if its occurance is between 5-30% then is could simply be a recessive allele, mendels ratios would give 3:1 (right:left) which seems to fit with your rare occurence. I'm not really a fan of genetic determinism normally, but the fact that you completely wrote it off at the beginning is something I found difficult to accept.
also, thanks for taking the time to reply.
x
JohNyx: If you make the claim that handedness is determined by brain development, then saying that handedness is not influenced by genetic factors is also making the claim that brain development is not influenced by genetic factors. The last claim is certainly false; you cannot say with a straight face that all of the differences in brain structure between a gorilla fetus and a human fetus are due to nurture rather than inborn genetic factors.
ETA: Quick question, are you making the claim that left-handed people primarily think with the right sides of their brains (and vice versa) ?
Quote from: GA on September 24, 2009, 01:01:42 AM
Perhaps in the interest of clarity, you could explain what you mean when you say "holistic" as opposed to "rational"
I need to review this.
Quote from: GA on September 24, 2009, 01:01:42 AM
And I don't see how you can claim that you're seeking "balance" if you believe that precise reasoning should be kept to "as little as necessary." You can say that there should be this much precise thinking and that much other thinking, but by what reasoning are you making the claim that this much is balanced with that much?
Seeking balance in the sense that we have so much of a rational thinking process already, that the means to achieve balance is to reduce it or focus more on the other kind. Lets say that you have 100 of "Type A" and you have 50 of "Type B", to reach a more balanced state you either need to double up on Type B or lessen on Type A.
Quote from: GA on September 24, 2009, 01:01:42 AM
And while neurological research does support a some of your claims (location of verbal language as opposed to intonation, etc.) I see no evidence that modes of thinking - if indeed there are distinct modes of thinking - are lateralized.
Im gonna look for information on brain laterallization, and i know you are on the "corrosion" role, but it would be much appreciated if you could look up information too. Previous mentions of what to look for in this thread can be useful.
Quote from: GA on September 24, 2009, 01:01:42 AM
Suppose the International Prototype Kilogram (the one stored in France) were moving towards your solar plexus at 10^40 Planck lengths per second (which is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom), relative to the inertial frame of reference of your solar plexus.
Tell me this will not result in a deformation of your body.
I can still imagine many kinds of "deformations", nothing you say will come thru at 100% what you originally meant. Its not just about the definitions you are using, its about language itself. Did you ever play "broken telephone" during elementary or middle school? Have you ever done translations from one language to another? Jacques Derrida goes into great detail about these issues.
Quote from: GA on September 24, 2009, 01:01:42 AM
I'd appreciate some examples of studies of lapses. I have to warn you that "Psychopathology of Everyday Life" isn't going to convince me, if only because it was, y'know, written by Sigmund Freud. For Freud's theories to be considered correct, other scientists who conduct controlled studies on lapses should have the same empirical results.
I know about the "scientific method", the "hard science approach", the "quantitative methods" (no need to be condescending).... but there are also "qualitative methods"... im gonna look thru my books and see if i find something good for you.
Quote from: Roaring Biscuit! on September 24, 2009, 02:57:24 AM
Do you think that maybe, possibly, our predisposition towards right-handedness (left-brained ness) could be due to the fact we are a highly social species and the left side seems to cover the basics of communication?
QuoteActually, intonation and accentuation seem to be more "basic communication skills", if you couldnt make intonation with a "primitive grunt" which was the basic form of language, then how would you, lacking a language that does rely on vocabulary and grammar?
Quote from: Roaring Biscuit! on September 24, 2009, 02:57:24 AM
That may be true, and perhaps millions of years ago more humans were left-handed, but in todays society for the majority of the populations' right brain communication skills are foremost and as we are talking about todays society I think my point is still relevant.
Well, going full circle, grammar and vocabulary play a big role on our communication nowadays... which are left hemisphere traits... left hemisphere which is more rational... rationality which is the bread and butter of today. 15,000 years ago there was a shift from intonation/accentuation based communications to vocabulary/grammar based communications... which makes sense with the shift of humanity to a more left hemisphere centric thought process...
Quotecoming up with a geneticist reductionism is what i think to be silly. Even do i go along with it as far as to say it might have SOME PART in the causes.And tell me, how often left handedness does occur? 5-30%, dont you find that to be at least a minority to what could even could be named "rare" occurrance?
Quote from: Roaring Biscuit! on September 24, 2009, 02:57:24 AM
well if its occurance is between 5-30% then is could simply be a recessive allele, mendels ratios would give 3:1 (right:left) which seems to fit with your rare occurence. I'm not really a fan of genetic determinism normally, but the fact that you completely wrote it off at the beginning is something I found difficult to accept.
Could be, could be not... im not too hot on genetics, care to fetch up an article?
Just because im arguing that genes arent the only reason behind handedness, doesnt mean im arguing nurture is the full reason behind handedness.
Yes, i claim that left handed people primarily think with their right side of their brain.
Also that right handed people primarily think with their left side of their brain.
But theres issues:
a) Theres few studies about percentage of world population in regards of handedness.
b) I think theres no studies about nurture influence on handedness (i think theres a percentage of people that were originally left handed but were taught to be right handed and turned out to be so or became ambidextrous)
I haven't forgotten about this thread, just trying to come up with an intelligent response.
Language is primarily handled by the left hemisphere in the majority of right-handed people. It's also primarily handled by the left hemisphere in the majority of
left-handed people - it's just not as strong a majority (70% instead of 95%, I believe.) It's the motor cortex that really does physical movements anyway, that's the part (I think) that would determine whether you are right handed or left handed. (I'm oversimplifying this quite a bit; the brain is so cross-linked that it's very hard to say that one task is done by one part.)
At some point in the near future I will look for studies attempting to compare brain usage in right vs. left handed people. but I'm pretty certain that for tasks not involving movement (or thinking about movement) handedness doesn't significantly affect hemisphere usage preference in general.
Quote from: JohNyx on September 26, 2009, 10:03:03 PM
Quote from: GA on September 24, 2009, 01:01:42 AM
Suppose the International Prototype Kilogram (the one stored in France) were moving towards your solar plexus at 10^40 Planck lengths per second (which is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom), relative to the inertial frame of reference of your solar plexus.
Tell me this will not result in a deformation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformation_(mechanics)) of your body.
I can still imagine many kinds of "deformations", nothing you say will come thru at 100% what you originally meant. Its not just about the definitions you are using, its about language itself. Did you ever play "broken telephone" during elementary or middle school? Have you ever done translations from one language to another? Jacques Derrida goes into great detail about these issues.
Of course you can imagine many different kinds of deformations - I intentionally left that vagueish so as long as you could anticipate one or more types of deformation occurring you could make an affirmative answer. Just trying to drag the barstool experiment into this, because it wasn't cluttered enough already. 8)
With regards to the "broken telephone" game (side note: isn't it weird how a game like that could have two nearly identical names on different continents? Ironic, eh?) I always thought of that effect as more due to it being hard to distinguish words when they're whispered and no repeating is allowed. Translations, yes, I've done some, and while I agree that a straight translation won't in general be able to reproduce the same meaning, a properly annotated translation, with lots of footnotes (like *in the original this word has this and that connotations, and is a homonym for this other word) can get you there, although in either case you can't really preserve style.
I agree that in general a single statement is very prone to alternative interpretations, but in a context where the speaker and listener are allowed a back-and-forth to clarify the statements, I hold that agreement in interpretation can occur, although not all the time. So 100% understanding some of the time with some of the people, but not 100% understanding 100% of the time.
Quick question: for the purposes of meaning and clarity, would you consider programming languages to be mathematics? In one sense they are, but in another sense (some of) them are full languages, only with all the verbs being imperatives.
The stuff im expressing here are like an important part of... a system (?) of ideas im coming up with... i dont expect to be done with it anytime soon... and yea, i think the crap we speak of requires longer "pings" because its not just opinions based on nothing...
Im assuming you speak of modern, complex, language - i think also its important to differentiate between what language is being used... modern language might be handled by the left hemisphere... but one can only wonder without the apporpiate information what side handles sign language... also i stand by that primitive language seems to be a right hemisphere deal...
Last trimester in school we just dealt with different notions of the "subject" through history, the different psychological schools and their "thought process" per se... the concept of subjectivity... tons of other crap too... and now were dealing within the family structure with the "fathers role" as well as gender role, etc... My point is that im not too sharp on biology/anatomy/neurology, but in the interest of dealing with something complex in a complex manner, it has led me to these fields.
Well, obviously "broken telephone" here is "telefono descompuesto", but yea, its pretty close - you from the Europes?
Programming languages = mathematics ?... well first of all, i do consider them as languages in the sense that they are symbols trying to convey something between "sender" and "receiver"... now, as mathematics... not in a direct sense... if you boil it down to essentials, its sequences of 0's and 1's, so in that sense it is "mathematic"... but in its functionality... im not too hot on programming either, but more than mathematical they seem to be logical rather.
(shallow response, more later)
Sign language, among those fluent in it, is handled by the same regions that handle spoken language. It's a pretty amazing example of brain plasticity - you'd expect a deaf infant's Broca's and Wernicke's areas to just rot, but if they are able to observe enough sign language during the span where most infants listen to regular speech, their speech centers just convert from dealing with audible language to dealing with visual language. I'm not 100% sure this is true for people who learn signing as a second language, but my guess would be that for a sufficiently fluent signer it would be handled in the same fashion as regular speech.
Quote from: JohNyx on September 30, 2009, 01:26:56 AM
Well, obviously "broken telephone" here is "telefono descompuesto", but yea, its pretty close - you from the Europes?
No, USA. I remember being blown away when I moved from the state of North Carolina to Tennessee (adjacent states, even!) and discovered that the Tennessee schoolchildren called getting in front of someone in a line "skipping in line" as opposed to "cutting in line", which was the right and proper phrase (and the one in use in North Carolina.) Tennessee had an entirely different set of playground rhymes, and most of the playground games were played with slightly different rules and totally different names.
Quote from: JohNyx on September 30, 2009, 01:26:56 AM
Programming languages = mathematics ?... well first of all, i do consider them as languages in the sense that they are symbols trying to convey something between "sender" and "receiver"... now, as mathematics... not in a direct sense... if you boil it down to essentials, its sequences of 0's and 1's, so in that sense it is "mathematic"... but in its functionality... im not too hot on programming either, but more than mathematical they seem to be logical rather.
In terms of boiling things down things to numbers, remember that just about anything can be boiled down to numbers - our posts are right now, for instance, as they're transmitted through the internet and stored on a server - but I wouldn't call our conversation "mathematical" by any stretch of the term.
I just asked because computer science started out as a branch of mathematics, so I wasn't sure if you would consider computer science mathematics or not. Anyway, the reason I brought it up is because computer languages are highly standardized - I can tell any x86 compliant computer processor to "copy the number in your first register to your second register" in the x86 language and it will
understand me do what I tell it too. Similarly, if you got a dozen programmers who knew x86 - one who speaks a Romance language, another Germanic, another a Dravidian or East Asian or what have you - and showed them a statement written in x86, all of them would agree 100% on what that statement means, since what it means is what it would an x86 processor would do when it encounters the statement.
From part of an article, ive found that "Roger Sperry at the California Institute of Technology" did research in the 50's and 60's by severing parts of the brain to control seizures...
http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/545/Right-Brain-Hemisphere.html (http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/545/Right-Brain-Hemisphere.html) (mid 2nd paragraph)...
Im hunting down specific studies.
***********
Michael S. Gazzaniga worked with Sperry and his sort of his succesor...
*************
http://www.rogersperry.info/ (http://www.rogersperry.info/)
Its a bit of a monster-sized bibliography of Sperry....
**********
http://people.uncw.edu/puente/sperry/sperrypapers/80s-90s/230-1983.pdf
The numerated bibliography link for #230 "Hemispheric Specialization in Nonverbal Communication"
(there doesnt seem to be any text of importance after 230, its mostly about the cognitive revolution and ethics, and behaviourist id say are kind of retarded on those issues)
#224 "Some effects of disconecting the cerebral hemispheres"
Review papers are nice (like the first one) are nice in that they summarize and condense a lot of information; if they didn't exist no scientist could keep up with his own field. That one though... there's no citations. The author just makes claims without evidence. Citations to specific studies and experiments are important, because scientists are no less slaves to their own biases than we are (at least, in general.) For instance, one guy involved in this field, Robert Ornstein, made blatant overgeneralizations in his work. One example: he observed strong alpha waves in the left hemispheres of subjects that arranged forms in space, and concluded that "painting, sculpting, and dancing are right hemisphere activities."* Obviously, the latter statement does not follow from the first. But when a review simply says things like "studies have found that painting is a right hemisphere activity" the reader doesn't know if the author is referring to a quality study, or bull like Ornstein's.
(*This was apparently published in Ornstiens 1977 book, "The Psychology of Consciousness," but I can't find it online for free.)
I found this review article to be helpful - do you have access to JSTOR? If not I can send it to you.
The Hemispherality Wagon Leaves Laterality Station at 12:45 for Art Superiority Land
Michael S. Youngblood
Studies in Art Education, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1979), pp. 44-49
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1319503?seq=1
Perry's paper - yes, there is lateralization for functions like facial recognition, and pattern recognition in general tends to be considered a "holistic" task. This doesn't show that the left isn't holistic, just that it doesn't perform a certain function that is believed to be holistic. Also note the subject who had damage to one hemisphere early in life, and was able to perform well on tasks normally localized to that hemisphere - the brain is highly plastic, especially during early stages of development. The undamaged hemisphere simply learned the functions that were previously handled by the other hemisphere. But more importantly, note that his subjects had hemispherical dominance either because they were split-brained (and input was only presented to one hemisphere) or had gross trauma to a hemisphere - it wasn't due to something like handedness. (And I am not sure that neurotypical persons even have a dominant hemisphere in general, as opposed to merely lateralization of various faculties.)
Okay, on to linear though and holistic thought. I am not convinced that humans naturally think in a linear fashion. To illustrate, let me explain how simple word problems are solved in physics. (This is essentially a universal method on any logical system, just using physics to keep this as concrete as possible lest we end up sailing away in our metaphors.)
- There are a (very large!) number of relations between different quantities. (e.g., F = ma relates the net force on an object to its mass and acceleration)
- These can be used as transformations on the information that is known to produce "new" information. (e.g., if there is a 10 N net force on a 2 kg object, F = ma transforms this knowledge into the knowledge that the object is accelerating at 5 m/s/s.)
- Eventually, a new piece of information is the answer to the problem
At first glance, this looks like a linear problem - you apply one transformation after the other until you arrive at the knowledge which is the solution. Some AI programs attempt to do this in a linear fashion - but the way they do it is very different from the way a human (or at least an expert human) solves the same problem. The trick here is knowing which logical transformation to apply - if you apply all of them, one at a time, there is a decent chance that the universe will suffer a heat death before you finish. The
real task is determining
which transformations in which order to apply in order to arrive at an answer - and I submit that humans naturally do this holistically. (That is, they could force themselves to do it in a linear fashion by an act of will, but even then many would have difficulty not drifting into associative tangents.)
So, suppose I were to ask you for the acceleration of a 2 kg object which is being acted upon by a 10 N net force. Newton's Second Law, which relates force, mass, and acceleration together, solves this problem in a single step. (Two, if you count basic algebra.) Imagine you were solving this problem linearly. You would think of each possible transformation in turn and ask yourself if it solves the question. "Does e = mc^2 do it? No... Work = Force times Distance? No... Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation? No... The Pythagorean Theorem? Quadratic Formula? Kepler's Third Law? Binomial Theorem? Euclid's Fifth Postulate? Hume's Fork? ... " and so forth. It could take you quite some time to find the answer! The holistic method would be to use the associative powers of the human brain to pick a transformation .... somehow. Someone experienced with this type of physics problem never even considers any law besides F = ma. They don't need to check that e=mc^2 will not help them solve the problem. This is where my powers of introspection begin to fail, but I am certain that some sort of holistic thinking is occurring when I solve these problems.
Compare to playing board games - you can play Tic-Tac-Toe with linear thinking and never lose, but if you try that with Go you'll lose by hundreds of points - thinking 2 moves ahead requires contemplating roughly 130 000 board states if you do it linearly. Pros think
way more than 2 moves ahead.
I apologize if this post started losing coherence at some point - it's 2:30 am in my timezone and I have a take-home test on the Modernists due
tommorrow today and if I ever get a time machine the I swear to god the first thing I'm doing is punching Descartes in the face. Abandoning preconceptions my ass.
I have nothing to say other than this is kind of a spectacular thread in terms of content, and I hope it is neither abandoned or overlooked.
Quote from: GA on September 30, 2009, 01:58:18 AM
Sign language, among those fluent in it, is handled by the same regions that handle spoken language. It's a pretty amazing example of brain plasticity - you'd expect a deaf infant's Broca's and Wernicke's areas to just rot, but if they are able to observe enough sign language during the span where most infants listen to regular speech, their speech centers just convert from dealing with audible language to dealing with visual language. I'm not 100% sure this is true for people who learn signing as a second language, but my guess would be that for a sufficiently fluent signer it would be handled in the same fashion as regular speech.
Which shows that language is just a communication transference signal, and that the brain has to decode the message into it's own format no matter what the signal type, and that it can, no matter what the signal type (as long as the code has its counterpart decoder). Morse code, sign language, it doesn't matter, all handled by the same region.
Quote from: GA on September 22, 2009, 05:11:04 PM
I am unaware of any controlled, scientific study which supports the idea that slips of tongue and lapses of speech reflect unconscious desires, as opposed to swapping phonemes or trying to think about two things and once and saying the wrong word out loud.
Broaching this subject again... more than evidence, it would be an explanation:
there is no "randomness" within the psyche, its all deterministic, but in a very complicated manner. If there was enough time, commitment and interest, you could say any "random" 5 word sentence and it could be determined a big part of your "personality". Can be done with numbers, but its WAY harder.
your proposition about phonemes is partly true, in the sense that its the path of least resistance to have something surface.
mmmm, let me pick this retarded example: if i really dislike some person that its name is "Zack" and im speaking about say, his research work, the most likely insult-slip that is gonna come thru would be "Suck". Having a lapsus saying "asshole" is too far off, and even in the worst case of lack of concentration it wouldnt happen.
Theres also different kinds of "slips"... anticipations, perseverations, deletions, shifts and haplologies.
Do you think that random association doesnt express your unconscious either?
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And i swear by the 4th circle of hell, im gonna have to raid a neurology library. (I dont have JSTOR)
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The mathematics example you are using does seem coherent... but i can argue that perhaps a lot of activities and tasks requiere both kinds of thinking, but theres different degrees of involvement of each kind of thinking...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research
That article is just speaking in general while i find some stuff on my notes and etc
Within the social sciences, theres basicly two main theorical perspectives... positivism (Comte / Durkheim) and phenomenological (Berger / Husserl / Schuts etc)...
One assumes that theres facts (?) and causes and that there are no subjective states... while the other engages the "actor's perspective" along with its internal ideas, feelings and motivations...
From what ive seen, sociology tends to take on positivist approaches, while psychology and anthropology tend to be ambiguous on which approach (mostly varies depending on its mmmm branch(?))
The paper in question:
(http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/8909/youngblood197901.th.gif) (http://img39.imageshack.us/i/youngblood197901.gif/) (http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/146/youngblood197902.th.gif) (http://img96.imageshack.us/i/youngblood197902.gif/)(http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/5827/youngblood197903.th.gif) (http://img36.imageshack.us/i/youngblood197903.gif/)
(http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/7753/youngblood197904.th.gif) (http://img5.imageshack.us/i/youngblood197904.gif/) (http://img30.imageshack.us/img30/6879/youngblood197905.th.gif) (http://img30.imageshack.us/i/youngblood197905.gif/)(http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/8166/youngblood197906.th.gif) (http://img36.imageshack.us/i/youngblood197906.gif/)
Quote from: JohNyx on October 07, 2009, 04:41:01 AM
The mathematics example you are using does seem coherent... but i can argue that perhaps a lot of activities and tasks requiere both kinds of thinking, but theres different degrees of involvement of each kind of thinking...
Actually, I'd agree with that (somewhat) - just about every normal task (i.e., not those artificially constructed such that they can only be done in one way or the other) I can think of seem to require a degree of both "modes" of thinking.
I think one of my issues was your earlier assertions that humans nowadays think "too rationally." It seems, from observing the way I think that I think and generalizing to the thought processes of others (whom I've never met), that the human mind first does holistic processing on the input sensations and associations with and of already known things, and comes up with a response, the so-called "gut reaction." From there, the person can later walk through a linear or perhaps branched chain of reasoning, perhaps until a conclusion is reached, or perhaps until an intermediate conclusion is reached that fills a missing node in the associative web of knowledge which allows the conclusion to be generated holistically.
If anything, it seems to me that people think holistically more often than not; and given that holistic reasoning tends to produce conclusions in a shorter amount of time with less effort and energy expended, this shouldn't be all that surprising. My evidence isn't limited to my own biased attempts to catch myself in the act of thinking - consider advertising. Modern advertising is predicated on the consumer responding in an associative, holistic way. Nobody watches a commercial for shoes and thinks, "Ah, I see that there is a causal relationship between wearing these shoes and being chased by a dozen beautiful women. I will weigh this against the economic cost the shoes and my valuation of beautiful women in my shopping decisions." and the advertisers don't expect them too. All they want to see is an association formed in the consumer's mind between their brand of shoes and beautiful women, so that when the consumer later sees the shoes in the store, he thinks of beautiful women, and the positive attitude towards the idea of the beautiful women gets transferred to a positive attitude towards shoes.
Quote from: JohNyx on October 07, 2009, 04:41:01 AM
there is no "randomness" within the psyche, its all deterministic, but in a very complicated manner.
Quick definition/clarification of terms - "Deterministic" has two main definitions that could apply in the same context, which are subtly but significantly different:
The first definition is the more familiar philosophical one - if one state fully determines the next state, the system is said to be deterministic. That is, if I knew exactly the state of the system at one moment, I could compute the exact state of the system at the next moment.
The second definition is the one used in math, biology, the physical sciences, and chaos theory. Here, deterministic means "not sensitive to initial conditions." This means just means that arbitrarily small changes in the initial state do not significantly affect the final state. In math terms, f(x) is said to be deterministic if, as the uncertainty in x approaches zero, the uncertainty in f(x) approaches zero. Equivalently, if f is deterministic, we can find f(x) to any arbitrary precision by simply by finding x to a high enough precision.
Where the second definition differs from the first is that the second does not assume that a state can be perfectly known; a system can be deterministic by the first definition but non-deterministic by the second. For an example, the function f
{ x + 1 if x > 0
f(x) = { 0 if x = 0
{ x - 1 if x < 0
is deterministic by the philosophical definition. It is non-deterministic by the mathematical definition - consider f(x) very close to x = 0. If x is equal to zero, give or take an arbitrarily small amount, f(x) is either 1, in the case that x is just above 0, or -1, in the case that x is just below zero. No matter how precisely we know x, the uncertainty in f(x) is always 2 - there is no way to get the uncertainty in f(x) below two just by making your measurement of x more precise.
Which sense of determinism are you using?
ETA: I have a response to the Zack thing, will post tomorrow.
GA, I don't always agree with you, but your thoroughness and citations bring a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat. Can I just be a cheerleader for this thread? It's so beautiful.
Quote from: Nigel on October 07, 2009, 07:10:42 AM
GA, I don't always agree with you, but your thoroughness and citations bring a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat. Can I just be a cheerleader for this thread? It's so beautiful.
Unless I'm miscounting, I only have one actual citation, plus a wikipedia reference for Korean Fan Deaths.
Also this thread has at least one other major author?
In the first sense. By using the oh-so-frequent-cheesy-phrase that "if you could freeze time and count all variables you could determine the next ocurrence/effect....".
This in a certain manner has relation to Zen koans, in the sense that it has the appearance to be random BS just to look special, but has some ultimate correlation... (well not exactly, but this came into mind, probably on an non specific related thing... ill work on this later)
You are representing the "hard science" Dragon (in a non pejorative way), and that is always needed and useful for the one trying to make a point or support a theory.
Quote from: GA on October 07, 2009, 05:08:34 PM
Quote from: Nigel on October 07, 2009, 07:10:42 AM
GA, I don't always agree with you, but your thoroughness and citations bring a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat. Can I just be a cheerleader for this thread? It's so beautiful.
Unless I'm miscounting, I only have one actual citation, plus a wikipedia reference for Korean Fan Deaths.
Also this thread has at least one other major author?
I think I was drunk, forget about it.
Quote from: JohNyx on October 07, 2009, 04:41:01 AM
Quote from: GA on September 22, 2009, 05:11:04 PM
I am unaware of any controlled, scientific study which supports the idea that slips of tongue and lapses of speech reflect unconscious desires, as opposed to swapping phonemes or trying to think about two things and once and saying the wrong word out loud.
Broaching this subject again... more than evidence, it would be an explanation:
Before you go explaining something, make sure the effect actually exists - otherwise, you'll find yourself explaining why women have one less rib then men and why women who watch beheading while pregnant run the risk of giving birth to a headless child.
Quote from: JohNyx on October 07, 2009, 04:41:01 AM
there is no "randomness" within the psyche, its all deterministic, but in a very complicated manner. If there was enough time, commitment and interest, you could say any "random" 5 word sentence and it could be determined a big part of your "personality". Can be done with numbers, but its WAY harder.
your proposition about phonemes is partly true, in the sense that its the path of least resistance to have something surface.
mmmm, let me pick this retarded example: if i really dislike some person that its name is "Zack" and im speaking about say, his research work, the most likely insult-slip that is gonna come thru would be "Suck". Having a lapsus saying "asshole" is too far off, and even in the worst case of lack of concentration it wouldnt happen.
Theres also different kinds of "slips"... anticipations, perseverations, deletions, shifts and haplologies.
Do you think that random association doesnt express your unconscious either?
I have to admit, I was kind of excited when you posted this (only now got around to answering) because one of my roommates' names is Zach, and I used to mess up his name
all the time. In my case though, I think it was more related to having met so many people at once in my first year of college. There was another student about two dorms down, named Thomas, who I played chess with a lot (and also a strategy video game, although that was in a larger group.) So in my second year at college, we all got split up into different buildings, but the three of us still met to play board games and watch television fairly regularly. On these occasions, I would often call Thomas Zach and Zach Thomas. This wasn't a case of not knowing their names; I'd known Thomas for a full year and Zach for longer (we went to the same high school.) But for whatever reason, when I was speaking without thinking I'd sometimes mix their names up. My theory is that since (during my second year) I rarely saw one without the other, they became associated in my brain and the attempt to retrieve one name in the excitement of an intense board game sometimes pulled out the other name instead. I never mixed up their last names, and I was much less likely to exchange their names when I was only with one (or neither) of them (or when I wasn't trying to talk very fast.) In terms of purely phonetic lapses I think I might have called him Sach instead of Zach once, dropping the voicing on the leading consonant.
And I am going to have to disagree with you on the determination of personality by having the subject say five "random" words. I agree that people are pretty much incapable of saying a random word or making up a random number - but except in extreme circumstances, I don't think that that would tell you much about the person. Current mental state, sure - if I were to try to think of five random words right now they would probably relate to psychology or the PD.com forum. If I had a fixation on some thing, and it was never far from my mind, then my words might relate to that thing. The words themselves will probably be related to each other in the subject's mind, but aside from that I don't really see how you can determine personality based on five words - there just isn't enough information. The amount of information in a human brain is enormous - 100,000,000,000 neurons, each of which can have different activation thresholds, 1,000,000,000,000 synapses, each of which can have different strengths and neurotransmitters, and on top of that different concentrations of bazillions of hormones and other signalling chemicals, which may not be uniform across the brain. You can't meaningfully extrapolate to that level of complexity from a mere five words. I dunno, it just seems kind of like figuring out a person's personality bases on the numerology of their name or something.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "expressing your unconscious." There are obviously many things about my own mind which I do not know, and I think we'd agree that by carefully observing your own thoughts and actions you can learn things about your mind. But somehow I get the impression that you mean more by that than merely becoming cognizant of things one was previously not conscious of?
Quote from: JohNyx on October 07, 2009, 07:50:36 PM
In the first sense. By using the oh-so-frequent-cheesy-phrase that "if you could freeze time and count all variables you could determine the next ocurrence/effect...."
But you aren't counting all the variables - just five lonely little words. (I'm probably missing something here.)
Quote from: GA on October 20, 2009, 07:56:45 AM
...when I was speaking without thinking I'd sometimes mix their names up... I never mixed up their last names, and I was much less likely to exchange their names when I was only with one (or neither) of them (or when I wasn't trying to talk very fast.)...
Interesting coincidence that i picked Zack... its what i would call basic association, being the theme "close friends"... last or second names are harder to make slips with because they are less frequently used (unless you are creepy football jock or in the military), and the prescence of the right person for yhour usage of the right name "lends you a hand" in not confusing it due to symbolical and visual association...
Quote from: GA on October 20, 2009, 07:56:45 AM
And I am going to have to disagree with you on the determination of personality by having the subject say five "random" words. If I had a fixation on some thing, and it was never far from my mind, then my words might relate to that thing.
well ok, ill admit i over-run my mouth a bit when im arguing thru written form in a forum (i dont know if its strange, but this is the only forum i have participated in, the few others ive followed ive only lurked... and also ive only started writing down my thoughts or theories for about.... 6 months... i dont count taking notes as "writing"...)
ANYWAYS - ok, my proposition that determining personality thru 5 words was arrogant... usually it does just show your current mental state... although when you get someone to perform free asociation with pictures, tis much more easier (if they dont fall into defensive mode and just say the friggin colors of the image)...
Quote from: GA on October 20, 2009, 07:56:45 AM
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "expressing your unconscious." There are obviously many things about my own mind which I do not know, and I think we'd agree that by carefully observing your own thoughts and actions you can learn things about your mind. But somehow I get the impression that you mean more by that than merely becoming cognizant of things one was previously not conscious of?
This relates again to free association, but if i understood correctly, you do agree that "random" words and numbers arent random (even do, that to decipher what they mean is a hard thing to do)
Sidetracking a little - but in relation to "randomness" and language - if language is in a sense a set of symbols to express something to someone else... anything you wear, that you have chosen, shows a lot of yourself...
Clothings, piercings, hair-do's and cuts, facial hair, accesories, tattoos... i think that profiling with these elements can be very useful.. the easiest example i can think associating something visual with a personality trait would be: anti-social personality with piercings and also shaving parts of your head-hair, while growing the facial ones.
Voice tone can say a lot.
Ive personally experimented anticipating personality traits based on visual appearance, voice tone and hearing a short conversation about whatever. I personally think that you can get a good grip on who is someone within 5 minutes, given that i have a chance to see all these traits. (most of this is in reference to restating more structured my previous statement)
The thing to be careful with when describing personalities based on how the people choose to present themselves is to remember that different cultures have different "languages" of personal presentation - a Buddhist monk shaves his head to indicate something very different than a Neo-Nazi who shaves his head. A priori you can't associate a shaved head with either non-violence or violence at every opportunity; you need to know which culture the person comes from - and whether they're being "truthful" in the language of appearance.
Personal appearances, inasmuch as they are intentional, can also be "faked." Anyone can dress in the manner associated with honesty or virtue without being honest or virtuous themselves, or can pretend to be more rebellious than he really is by wearing the appropriate t-shirt.
The interesting thing, I think, are the appearances that aren't intentional. I used to dress terribly, not as a way of expressing myself, but because I lacked an appreciation for how others viewed me and interpreted my appearance. So that kind of fashion represents ignorance of the inner workings of others, which you can run with in all kinds of ways with psychology / psychotherapy.
I agree that you can get a good surface idea of a person in a good 5 minute conversation - judging other people is one of the things that humans as a species have evolved to do well - with the proviso that deeper personality issues - basic motives and drives, foundational beliefs, worldview - might not necessarily come out in a single typical conversation (although a conversation designed to get that kind of information, like one conducted by a skilled therapist, might.)