<borg at swirve.com> wrote in message
news:1152919117.732847.101180 at h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>> konstantin kouzovnikov wrote:
>> I am sure Adrian is sitting down there and thinks: well, boy, I simply
>> asked
>> these guys a question where to get bloody information, but look... this
>> is
>> what happened! See. Adrian, it's good that you have heard it all. One day
>> it's going to work for yah.
>>>> hahaha yep, I was just looking for a good online reference to load
> onto my notebook for quick searches while studying, and suddenly I'm in
> the middle of a debate with comments about Stalin and gulags, Chomsky
> and Skinner.
>> Regarding the competing philosophical viewpoints, I can't understand
> how anyone at this time in the 21st century would even seriously
> attempt to understand and explain the behavioral properties of
> something as complex as the human brain without investigating its
> structural and biophysical aspects and emergent / dynamic properties.
GS: But no one is arguing this, certainly not me. What I argued is that
cognitive "science" impedes this, much the same way that "looking for the
soul" in the nervous system did. This was abandoned early on in biology, but
it is de rigueur in psychology. Like most of those of your ilk, however,
you are not interested in what is actually argued, you are interested only
in your sophomoric misrepresentations.
> Focusing exclusively on external behavior seems too much like
> philisophical masterbation, but I guess there was no real alternative
> until the last several decades, so people did the best they could given
> the primitive technologies of the time.
GS: Behavior can be treated as a subject matter in its own right, just as
classical thermodynamics was. The proof of this is the experimental analysis
of behavior. The behavioral facts obtained by that science are presumably
mediated by physiology. This is a different, and a legitimate, science. But
without the experimental analysis of behavior, we don't know what it is we
need to explain, and we are stuck with the animism of folk-psychology. When
we open up the brain, we do not see the explanatory fictions of
folk-psychology.
