FINISHED AND MOVING ON

I managed to read through THE ORIGIN OF MINDS twice before I had to turn it in. Another fundamental argument which La Cerra puts up against Steven Pinker is the idea that the mind is not strictly modular so much as general purpose or undedicated. Here’s her take on the matter:

“We agree that your brain is composed of neural adaptations that resulted from evolution (and the mind, remember, is a product of the activity in the brain). But these adaptations did not take the form of well-defined, inherited information-processing circuits that were designed to generate predetermined adaptive solutions to Stone Age problems. Rather they took the form of components of a system that could construct adaptive information-processing—individualized circuits that generated behavioral solutions that precisely fit the specific environmental conditions, bioenergetic needs, personal experiences, and unique life history of an individual.” (p. 186)

A good deal of nurture is allowed for in La Cerra’s view. She uses the idea of beauty to discuss the modular idea of the mind as compared to her more generalized view of how the brain works. According to most modular views, the brain is modularly constructed to select for standardized ideas of beauty which show health and good childbearing capabilities, etcetera. According to La Cerra, that view is false, or more to the point, uses different mechanisms to make its decisions than her "bioenergetic adaptations" .


GOD LIES OR PAT ROBERTSON LIES OR AINTNOGOD?

Pat Robertson reported that God told him personally that Bush’s victory would be a landslide. Turns out ‘twas no landslide at all. Now, either God lied to this pompous asshole or Pat Robertson lied to the President of the United States. Considering all the lies coming out of the White House about our successes in Iraq, Pat’s lies maybe just got lost in the traffic out of the lie channels exiting the Bush-mouth.


THEY ALWAYS CRUMBLE.
JUST PROMISE THEM MARRIAGE

In USA TODAY, November 8, 2004, p.60, we read: “U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention data show that teens who pledge virginity until marriage wait longer before having sex and have fewer partners. But they also are less likely to use condoms once they have sex, and they contract sexually transmitted diseases at the same rate as teens who don’t take abstinence pledges.”


IT’S OKAY TO BE DEPRESSED

One of the ideas that interested me in La Cerra was her idea that depression is a sign of a healthy, functioning intelligence system. She believes that defeats and loses ought to bring us down so that we can rest and reevaluate what’s going on. According to her bioenergetic theories, serotonin is the chemical that adjusts ‘self worth’ according to the situation you’re in. It may raise or lower your self-esteem depending upon what’s called for and also based on your past experience and familiarity with the situation.

Example: if you feel nervous and hesitant when approaching a novel situation to yourself, then it pays to be cautious and uncertain while you feel your way through it. Also, if you suffer a series of reverses in the business world, of course, your self-esteem lowers and you withdraw, lick your wounds, then come back with new solutions because the old “adaptive representational networks” have proven to be wrong. You need new ones. Depression lets you find this out and causes you not to rely on the old ways so much.

You know one of the reasons I like La Cerra’s work here is that her answers are simple and elegant and take into account so many other fields of knowledge. Consilience seems to reside in her description of the functioning, human chemical system. And isn’t that a sign of a true answer?

CONSILIENCE

Speaking of “consilience”. I just got Wilson’s CONSILIENCE out of the library. That’s my next read.
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"Man is more an ape than many of the apes." —Nietzsche
"Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal." —Tolstoy
"Tolstoy ruined his talent with his endless moralizing!" —aintnogod