Krimel said to various MOQers: But this in no way suggests that the basic emotions are anything other than biological patterns. ...But the emotions themselves are autonomic and biological. ...That something as biologically based as emotion could evolve and be encoded genetically says something about fundamental human nature. ...While emotions can be mediated by social patterns they are still purely biological. ...We can attempt to create conditions that draw out or suppress emotions but they remain inherently biological. ...Emotions are a purely biological. ...The seat of the emotions is actually known as the mammalian brain. ...As I tried to suggest above this means that all experience has "Value" or emotional valence. ...In other words Values can be created and expressed by stimulation of the nervous system. ...Emotions ARE pre-intellectual. They ARE pre-verbal. They ARE "the immediately felt quality of the situation." ...Like the emotions, conscious experience arises in the brain and is "felt" throughou t the body.
dmb says: I don't suppose you'd be interested in talking about reductionism, would you? If it's not clear to you what I mean by reductionism, please review the statements above. Your comments depict it exactly. Obviously you do not see this as a problem. Quite the opposite. You take my complaints about it to be the problem. Apparently, you think anti-reductionism is a kind of romanticism, as a kind of anti-scientific stance. This is simply not the case. The anti-reductionist does not oppose science. He simply opposes reductionism. There is a huge difference. The anti-reductionist wants to improve science and knowledge by removing the reductionism. Take, for example, the scientific paper you recently asked me to read and comment upon. You probably recall that it was about the brain states of meditators. And hopefully you remember that I said that was all fine and good because data are data but I also criticized your reductionistic interpretation of that study and suggested that their findings need to be supplemented by the perspective from within the meditative state, the experience as it was had by the meditators themselves rather than JUST what the researchers observed from the outside. See, I was not saying that their findings are invalid or that they should be dismissed but that they are partial. And I mean they are "partial" in both senses of the word, which is to say they are biased and incomplete. That's why they need to be supplemented by other perspectives. And that's what perspectivalism is all about. It says we need to take on board all the various perspectives and sort of add them up. Otherwise you get.... y ou guessed it; reductionism. The most recent assigned reading in my class on the social sciences explains this debate quite nicely. Daniel Pals has written a book called "Eight Theories of Religion" wherein he takes us through the high points pretty much in chronological order with chapters on Frazer, Freud, Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Eliade, Evans-Pritchard and Geertz. In the conclusion he explains how the state of the current debates in religious studies have now moved away from the social sciences. "Clearly", he says, "theories of this kind mark an important shift in emphasis from social to natural science - especially along the paths of genetics and neuroscience" (page 304). Throughout the book he repeated says that guys like Freud, Marx and Durkheim are reductionists but in the conclusion he says, "should we be able to construct it, a theory holding that genes determine all of human behavior would go beyond the kind of reductionist functionalism we see in Freud, Durkheim and Marx. It would, in fact, bio logically reduce not only religion [or meditation] but also those very psychological, social and economic theories of religion to the residue of traits in the the brain conferred by genetic inheritance" (304). "The theories now beginning to form in cognitive science and evolutionary theory obviously bring reductionism back into the field... (310). Yes, obviously. But it seems to be far from obvious to you, Krimel. I don't expect you to give up on your reductionism because of this explanation. But I do hope you'll at least start to see what reductionism is and why so many people might be against it. No? Thanks anyway. dmb _________________________________________________________________ Want to read Hotmail messages in Outlook? The Wordsmiths show you how. http://windowslive.com/connect/post/wedowindowslive.spaces.live.com-Blog-cns!20EE04FBC541789!167.entry?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_hotmail_092008 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
