Reddit mentions of Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought

OP, I think you might be interested in this book. It was a course text in one of my undergrad courses.

Lakoff & Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought

>But simply because rationality is very difficult for people does not make it a bad goal. Caring about people in some other country is difficult for almost everybody, as a consequence of human nature -- but wouldn't it be nice if more people gave a damn about, say, poor sanitation in rural India?

I hope you don't think that I'm taking a subjectivist point of view. I'm not, but neither am I taking a rationalist point of view. I'm trying to understand from a different perspective that takes into account what humans actually do what humans arerather
than what various schools think humans ought to do.

>It's telling that the more civilized areas tend to have less harmful superstitions. There are many things wrong with dousing and astrology, but I don't think either of them have said that you can gain magical power by cutting off and eating someone's labia. That's a real superstition from northeast Congo.

I suppose it depends a bit on what you mean by harmful. I suspect that this Congo superstition's harm is fairly local in effect (not that this is a comfort to those who loose their labia). But consider a "more civilized superstition: "Sustainable growth is possible." I doubt even if most readers at reddit would even recognize this as a superstition, but then I doubt if the Congo man recognizes eating his daughters labia as a superstition either.

The pursuit of sustainable growth in the developed world seems to increase welfare locally, but only because we more civilized people export the harm of development
to more remote (from us) regions of the planet.

Perhaps a more easily understood superstition
of the west is "diamonds are forever" in connection with love and marriage. This seemingly to us innocuous idea ships a good deal of harm
into the 3rd world.

>Reason is the only really reliable prophylactic against superstition. Find me one person who has really embraced reason and is also superstitious, and I'll show you someone who will immediately disappear in a puff of logic.

Sir Issac Newton

Thank you. I read your first article and thought you might like this book:

Philosophy in the Flesh

This may sound like word salad, but I can expand anything if you're interested. I'm someone who is trying to explain philosophy itself. One thing I conjecture is that evolutionary mechanisms operating on thermodynamically-driven self-organizing structures will eventually "carry up" the fundamental logical properties inherent in the Universe to the neurological level - where they can then manifest in our awareness as logic and math as we know them. That is, as structure evolves through biological complexity - some fundamental logic of the Universe must be there somehow. Our neurological architecture then allows extrapolation from these fundamentally embodied aspects to the symbolically represented and conceptualized "ideals" we have like perfect circles and real numbers and so on, which are entities that don't really exist as upsetting as this idea is to most mathematicians.

The book I linked makes a very cool, but hard to convey point, but once you realize the implications it's pretty amazing. Our thinking is based on the senses we have. We basically have models of the world in our heads that are the same as the way we experience the world - the neurology of experience is the same as thinking, essentially (e.g. you can get better at piano by practicing in your mind because you can "re-experience" it).

Language, then, is a metaphorical way of expressing our sense-based models of the world, which is why language is filled with metaphors of time, spacial orientation/relationships, sequences, and so on. I really can't do justice to the idea quickly, but it's a quite profound realization to have in your toolbox.

> wouldn't pure logic be the goal of rational thought?

What do you mean by "pure logic"?

It's not true that brain function consists of two distinct parts, one that is based on emotion and the other that is based on pure logic. On the one hand, emotion plays a larger role in thought that is usually recognised. Descarte's Error, by
Antonio Damasio talks about this.

On the other hand, the "non-emotional" aspects of brain function are hardly operating by "pure logic". For one thing, so much of our reasoning is subconscious (See Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson), and even when we explicitly reason through some argument, that's still sitting on top of a lot of subconsicous evaluation of the correctness of the points, using processing that isn't based on logic. A lot of reasoning seems to be pattern matching, making analogies, manipulating mental models, etc.

That a person can learn to avoid so-called logical fallacies (or cognitive biases) does not mean that the (fallacy-free) reasoning they are performing is a matter of "pure logic".

.

> By "more complex", I'm inferring that from the programmers perspective, logic may seem an easier puzzle to solve than decision making based on modifiers like superstition, hatred and passion and that you could infer that it is a more evolved form of problem solving.

There's never any reason to assume that anything that was in fact more complex would be better at a stated goal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff

(just adding some books some may find interesting)

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741/

http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011/

see: philosophy in the flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

Also, mind the gap by Kievet et al -- one of the best papers I've ever seen to tackle the problem of how to test the so-called "reduction problem" - specifically identity and supervenience theories - by using structural equation modeling.

edit: yes, this guy is certainly "obscenely silly"...

As someone who's gotten a BA in philosophy and is now on track for a PhD in neuroscience, I'd like to suggest to some of you the Lakoff/Johnson book linked above; it blows the western philosophy tradition out of the water completely. Supervenience theory is the only worthwhile thing to come out of philosophical works in a long time, IMO...