decent books on how the mind works

synapticat

synapticat

Mynd
The point of the quote as i see it is that psychology begins when we start to understand the cognitive, neurological network. Weather that be understood in 3rd person scientific or phenomenological terms - thoughts, feeling etc.

I dont think Dennett would have have dropped a bullshitty phrase in order to comes across as a 'snappy' kinda guy.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
synapticat said:
The point of the quote as i see it is that psychology begins when we start to understand the cognitive, neurological network. Weather that be understood in 3rd person scientific or phenomenological terms - thoughts, feeling etc.

I dont think Dennett would have have dropped a bullshitty phrase in order to comes across as a 'snappy' kinda guy.
Click to expand...

You could think of it like hardware and software (yes I know...). Neurologists or neuroscientists study the "hardware" of the brain, its neurons, its internal structures, while psychologists study its "emergent" properties, sort of like software, where inputs from outside create outputs...these properties are not only brain-related phenomena anyway--psychological phenomena rely on worlds, not just brains. A brain has sense organs in a body which has sense organs out there in the world.

If you think about it, Dennett's quote there is extremely reductionist. He's saying psychology is just the product of neuronal interaction and has nothing to do with environment.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
I would say it like this "the study of one neuron is neurology, the study of the mind is cognitive science, the study of one person's mind is psychology, the study of two people or more is sociology, the study of groups in their environment is evolutionary biology..."

you could go on for a long time with that. not very snappy though.
 
synapticat

synapticat

Mynd
Dennett was actually trying to undo the distinctions between, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology etc buy doing exactly what you are saying he doesnt do. That is emphasize the relationality of the environment to neurological 'hardware'. When he says "two neurons", he is talking about the processing of inputs or information.

He is not saying that psychology must only concern its self with multiple neurons. But that psychology (if understood as embodied) begins here.


As for your taxonomy of academic disciplines, they seem fluid and interchangeable. Which after all, is one of Dennett's best lessons.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Well, ok. Dennett's mostly known for being an adaptationist, and for a relatively reductionist cognitive model that would eliminate things like "qualia" from the scientific vocabulary. Out of context, that quote you've cited seems to line up quite well with what I've read of and by him. I suppose I'd have to hear it in context to know exactly what he meant by it...

He's also a famous athiest whose journalistic writing I've admired here and there, although I don't always agree with it.
 
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Q

Q-point

New member
Dennett is quite a good read, at least from what I've encountered. I guess it does depend upon your stance on reductionism. He makes some of the best arguments for it I've seen, though. He's quite scathingly dismissive of non-reductionists, which can be amusingly insightful or irritating depending on which way you lean.

Apart from that, I'd beware of most books that try to propose relationships between quantum mechanics and the brain, particularly vague association between quantum undecidability and free will. I've come across some of this stuff before and it's mostly on the quack side of speculative.
 
N

Numbers

Well-known member
If you want theory, you'd probably like Maturana & Varela's "Tree of Knowledge". It's quite accessible as well.
 
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Room with a view

Banned
met this guy, chatted bout some stuff and he gave me a book. A good read it was too. Simple, factual and written for the layman.


Going inside - John McCrone

Going Inside tells the story of a single instant of consciousness, showing how the brain pulls together a state of subjective experience in about a third of a second. There have been many heavy-duty books on mind science to chose from over the past few years, but this covers very different terrain to most. It gets more deeply into the actual neuroanatomy of brains and the personalities that shape the field. It also reveals the struggle to break away from old computational and reductionist ways of thinking about the mind-brain connection, looking at what it means to take a holistic or complex systems approach to neuroscience.

http://www.dichotomistic.com/about_intro.html
 
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