[JC] No, I'm not interested in a bio-reductionist view. I am interested in basic duality of human perspective.
[Arlo] Huh? A bioreductionist view is just that, John. It argues (as you are) that 'human perspective' or cognition is determined by neurology. You're specifically stating that whether a person operates in the "classical mode" or the "romantic mode" is determined by their left or right "brainedness". But let's set that misunderstanding aside. As I've said now several times, current understandings of neurology DO NOT SUPPORT your belief. The article specifically says this. It starts by repeating your exact argument: Maybe you're "right-brained": creative, artistic, an open-minded thinker who perceives things in subjective terms.Or perhaps you're more of a "left-brained" person, where you're analytical, good at tasks that require attention to detail, and more logically minded. That, right there, is what you are arguing. That left-brained people are classical, and right-brained people are romantic. Then the articles states: It turns out, though, that this idea of "brained-ness" might be more of a figure of speech than anything, as researchers have found that these personality traits may not have anything to do with which side of the brain you use more. I'm going to repeat this next section from the empirical study because you apparently skipped over it. "In popular reports, “left-brained” and “right-brained” have become terms associated with both personality traits and cognitive strategies, with a “left-brained” individual or cognitive style typically associated with a logical, methodical approach and “right-brained” with a more creative, fluid, and intuitive approach. Based on the brain regions we identified as hubs in the broader left-dominant and right-dominant connectivity networks, a more consistent schema might include left-dominant connections associated with language and perception of internal stimuli, and right-dominant connections associated with attention to external stimuli. Yet our analyses suggest that an individual brain is not “left-brained” or “right-brained” as a global property, but that asymmetric lateralization is a property of individual nodes or local subnetworks, and that different aspects of the left-dominant network and right-dominant network may show relatively greater or lesser lateralization within an individual." So what they found was that there are UNIVERSAL HUMAN differences in where different types of activity appear localized. You, me, Ant, Dan, everyone... we ALL seem to have our language activity localized towards left-lateralization. BUT, the authors themselves suggest even this is not an argument for bioreductionism, that they are not arguing that the left-hemisphere of the brain causes language. AND, as I mentioned, studies on neuroplasticity demonstrate that injuries to the left-hemisphere can be overcome by relocating the neural hub, even across hemispheres. NONE of this supports your argument that (1) the left-hemisphere is analytic and the right is creative, let alone that (2) these two 'biologically-determined' divisions create two different types of people mapped to Pirsig's 'classical' and 'romantic' ways of thinking. [JC] But however you wanna map it, there are two distinct ways in which we humans process information and I think the labels "romantic" and "classic" work well to describe these two different ways. [Arlo] And this, again, was the PROBLEM addressed by ZMM. These categories ARE NOT 'NATURAL', they are artificially-coerced ways of thinking resulting from a problematic subject-object metaphysical view. To use the language from the article (also above), "these personality traits may not have anything to do with which side of the brain you use more" but they arise as people are acclimated to life within a SOM-dominant culture. And, seriously, I think I've flogged this horse enough. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
