Science of the SpiritS


Brain

Is language a module in the brain?

juliana barembuem language brain module
One of the mysteries of language is whether, as Noam Chomsky and many others claim, language is a "module" residing in our brain, or not. This video summarizes the theory behind it, the conditions that would need to be fulfilled for the theory to be valid, and the problems we encounter with the latter. Is Language a module? Maybe! But probably not in the way that is presented.


References:
- (book) Vyvyan Evans, "The Language Myth", Cambridge University Press (2014)
- (paper) Mark D. Hauser, Charles Yang, Robert C. Berwick, Ian Tattersall, Michael J. Ryan, Jeffrey Watumull, Noam Chomsky and Richard C. Lewontin, "The Mystery of language evolution", Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 5, Article 401, (7 May 2014).

Comment: See also: MindMatters: Meaning All the Way Down: The Wonders and Mysteries of Language with Juliana Barembuem


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SOTT Focus: MindMatters: Unmasking Psychopaths and Narcissists in Business and Politics - with Dr. Clive Boddy

clive boddy
Clive Boddy is Associate Professor of Management at Anglia Ruskin University, a leading researcher in the field of corporate psychopathy, and author of the book 'A Climate Of Fear: Stone Cold Psychopaths At Work'. Today on MindMatters, we interview Clive about his research, why psychopaths do not make good leaders (despite claims to the contrary), how they contribute to employee job satisfaction, and how toxic leadership intersects with incompetent leadership. Once a taboo subject, corporate psychopathy has gained widespread acknowledgment in the last decade or so. But another related subject is only now breaking through academia and public consciousness: political psychopathy. Clive discusses his own work in that field as well, with comments on screening politicians for psychopathy. We even talk about Star Wars.


Running Time: 00:54:26

Download: MP3 — 74.8 MB



Blue Pill

'Misinformation' is the vocabulary of a culture that has lost its capacity to discuss 'truth'

Church sign
© Paul Rubley/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.8Second Church of Christ Scientist Chicago
The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information.

In a preliminary injunction issued against the White House and federal agencies on Tuesday in Missouri v. Biden, Judge Terry Doughty eviscerated government actors for colluding with social media companies to censor users' protected speech in the name of eliminating "misinformation."

Doughty, as others have done, compares the government censorship to Orwell's hypothetical "Ministry of Truth." But Orwell's satirical title gives the speech police too much credit: It assumes "truth" is still a functional part of their vocabulary. No, our censors speak in terms of "misinformation."

The perversion of truth is falsehood; misinformation is just the perversion of information. Truth has a moral component; information doesn't. Years of moral relativism have eroded our cultural understanding of "truth" as a knowable, agreed-upon concept — and in our modern world, all we're left with is an infinite supply of information.

Brain

Governors of the mind

Henri de Saint-Simon
© daily reckoning.comHenri de Saint-Simon
The assault on enterprise of the last few years — meaning not the biggest politically connected businesses but smaller ones reflecting vibrant commercial life — has taken very strange forms.

Ever since The New York Times said the way forward was to "go medieval," the elites have been attempting just that. But this medievalism has not come at the expense of Big Data, Pharma, Ag or Media.

It mainly hits products and services that impact our freedom to buy, trade, travel, associate and otherwise manage our own lives. What began in lockdowns mutated into a thousand forms. That continues with daily new outrages. Maybe it's not random.

Arrow Up

Philosopher wins 25-year bet on consciousness

Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues.
Chalmers & Koch
© Jesse Winter for NatureDavid Chalmers (left) and Christof Koch met on 23 June in New York City to settle up their bet.
A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain's neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is still an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a key study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

"It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof," says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn't the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: "There's been a lot of progress in the field."

Eye 1

The white man's Ghost Dance

The Ghost Dance
Howard Terpning, Hope Springs Eternal – The Ghost Dance
In the 19th century a stalemate that had held for hundreds of years between the European powers and the Amerindian nations broke. The newly formed United States of America had liberated itself from the English crown and, with that, from the restraints of treaties that had held back the white man's westward expansion. Wagon trains began to roll west, extending pseudopodia of settlements into Indian country. Soon the wagon trains were replaced by the steam engine, and the trickle of European expansion became a flood.

War was as inevitable as the war's conclusion. The red man fought fiercely and bravely, inflicting savage terror on the interlopers, slaughtering settlers, taking scalps and wives. But every bullet he fired had to be replaced by trade with the very enemy against whom he struggled, while for every one of those enemies he tortured to death, ten more took his place. And for all that he was capable of inhuman brutality, the ice-water that ran in his enemy's indifferent veins was every bit as terrifying. The red man, outnumbered and technologically out-matched, was doomed.

Towards the end, despair began to set in.

Just as the red man was on his knees, hope flooded back into his heart.

Light Saber

Best of the Web: The Truth in Wokeism

stree france urban peasant
Wokeness derives its power from deep truths, as the example of reformist education shows. If we don't recognize this, we risk losing our free will.

It is true: since the Woke Turn, we have all become conservatives.

But words have power; they connect us with concepts of a higher order, and therefore to entire thought clusters. We better know their nature if we are to avoid stumbling around blindly under a compulsion we don't understand, victims of yet another unholy dialectic: the playthings of forces whose very existence we actively deny by invoking an imaginary realm of facts and reason where there are mostly reactions and well-worn mind grooves that propel us in directions we may or may not want to go.

"Conservative," to many of us, connects to a sort of mirror image of Wokeness, its negation. Where those people say "anything goes," we demand discipline; where they say "you should express yourself," we say "just accept outside reality," and where they seek to "break free from how we have lived for centuries," we demand tradition to be honored.

But a merely reactive state like that, where we robotically invert the latest fashionable slogan, by definition is a state with little free will.

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SOTT Focus: MindMatters: The Unbroken Individual Is the True Source of Moral Responsibility

forest passage
This week on MindMatters we take a third and final look at the prescient and resounding thoughts of Ernst Jünger's The Forest Passage and reflect on what it means - in the philosophical and practical sense - to be a forest walker, or forest rebel. For our previous episodes on the book see: How one resists and chooses to respond to totalitarianism is at least as crucial as making the choice itself. But what are some of the many considerations involved? What inner resources does one draw upon and where might one find the light that helps to make the best of all choices? What does one fall back on when many of the institutions that are meant to morally support a society have been effectively gutted, or done away with completely? What is the responsibility of an unbroken and 'concrete individual' to step in and rectify institutional failure to some degree? And where does the power of the spoken or written word fit into this complex equation?


Running Time: 01:18:45

Download: MP3 — 108 MB



Heart - Black

Victim signaling and dark triad personality traits

Here is an interesting interaction involving a group of baboons, reported in a book titled Machiavellianism: The Psychology of Deception:
machiavellians
Humans will also feign victimhood as a strategy to obtain rewards. A 2020 study found people who signal victimhood (and virtue) are more likely to have Dark Triad personality traits.

The Dark Triad comprises narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and duplicity) and psychopathy (callousness and disregard for others). People with Dark Triad traits can be seductive.

Stop

Presentism: Don't judge our ancestors' actions by today's standards

cavehands
© psychologytoday
In today's blog I wanted to focus on a concept that most people fall victim to when writing about the past (history). Presentism, the historical fallacy or problem area, applies when writing about general history or trying to write about our family. Don't try to sugar coat (cover-up) the actions of the ancestors you don't agree with.

Presentism is a historical term meaning judging past actions by today's standards, or uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts. We all too often color history with the lens of our current prejudices. Remember, attitudes and cultural values have changed over time. Try not to make excuses for the past.

In literary and historical analysis, presentism is the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.

Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter. The practice of presentism is regarded by some as a common fallacy in historical writing.