I guess it always gets back to the cause of the first cause: What gets the mind to physically change the brain.
I would prefer to put is this way: "Why do we ask 'What causes the mind to physically change the brain?'", whereas persons in some other culture might ask 'How do we molify the spirits?'", or whatever.
Peoply simply cannot get cancer in a society that has not constructed a taxonomy of illness something like ours. The people in such a culture might find their bodies inhabited by angry spirits, but they don't get cancer.
Or let me try this the other way around: How do persons who have not come up with our idea of cancer get the cancers we think they get -- FROM THEIR POINT OF VIEW? Even in our own society, as recently as 100 years ago, we keep saying that people died of breast cancer or some other cancer but they didn't know it. Well, they did think *something*, and *that something* was important in their lives as they lived those lives.
But let's get closer to home: Persons in our society tend to believe that managers and employees exist. Persons tend to treat this difference as seriously as differences from the mathematical sciences of objective nature. If persons didn't think this way, people like Marx and Foucault might have had to find different ares of research (e.g., Freud's first love: worms).
So what? At lesat part of teh "so what" is for persons to appreciate that they are shapers of their world and not just instances in it. I admit that my childrearing makes me especially sensitive to this, since the reality of my parents and tor-mentors was, for me, miasmic. I hasve previously written how I "saw a light" when I read in Kuhn's _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, that old sscientific theories die, not because their adherents get converted to the new theory, but because they all DIE without being ablt to recruit members of the next generation to carry on their work. THe thought that the miasmic incubus world(?) of my social milieu of origin would eventually all be dead and gone was indeed, as last, a breath of fresh air -- a small opening in the unrelieved DENSITY of that form of life.
For persons to see themselves as transcendental subjects of experience rather than as objects in the object world, seems appealing to me. I try to offer this vision to others, in the belief they have generally not been childreared and schooled to know about it, and that at least some might find it an *appealing* transfiguration of their experience of life -- sort of like giving Ptolemy Mount Palomar....
"Yours in discourse [which constitutes our experienced world, even if in the existentially self-confuting form of constituting it as something 'not constituted by us']...."
\brad mccormick
-----Original Message----- From: Selma Singer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 7:24 PM To: Brad McCormick, Ed.D. Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Futurework] new book + Book that needs to be written
From what I can gather from the reviews, Schwartz and Begley make a verydifferent argument; they appear to be saying that the mind is an entity of its own that can physically change the brain; from there, it seems they get to the free will issue.
Selma
----- Original Message ----- From: "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Selma Singer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2003 7:11 PM
Subject: Re: [Futurework] new book + Book that needs to be written
Selma Singer wrote:
I have just ordered the book *The Mind and The Brain* by Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley.
Has anyone read this? I found the reviews particularly interesting in that he argues that we can use our minds to change the wiring of our brains. Apparently he has considerable evidence from his work with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
Apparently he brings in all kinds of interesting stuff about free will in regard to this newly discovered information from his studies.
I'm waiting for a book titled:
_The brain in the mind_
which would detail how contemporary schooled Western persons constitute the notion of *brain*, and also manage to *believe* that the mind is in the brain (like Medieval persons used to believe in God, etc.).
\brad mccormick
-- Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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