Interesting article: http://nautil.us/issue/18/genius/shakes ... s-nonsense

I'm not surprised to see, once again, that one man's ideas about certain mental processes surpasses the current understandings of the involved sciences. Too often in academia the model becomes an idol, and we filter out whatever doesn't agree with it in the natural world.

The idea that language-processing center of the brain can track multiple meanings is painfully obvious to ex-lovers, political upstarts, close friends. Veiled threats, hidden sexual propositions, and concealed messages of all sorts have simply not been studied closely, yet are used in language as early as pre-adolescence. As the article points out with regards to Shakespeare, classic literature is about with examples of multiple messages being delivered simultaneously. A not-so-distant cousin is also discussed: phonological ambiguity.

One could argue the fact that the brain can process multiple meanings at any given time in order to make sense of a sentence at its resolution has been known since the birth of Neuro-Linguistic Programming in the 60's, when it was made explicit in writing. I make the argument that this is a fact that has been known for much longer, as evidenced by the works of Shakespeare, Kafka, Joyce, and many others.

Science needs models. It's simply part of the integral structure that must be in place in order to conserve proper functioning. Bohr, Einstein, Newton, Chomsky and Feynman were no exceptions to this rule, and needed to put in extra work to create new models and structures within which they could fit their new theories and present them. This gives the sciences great inflexibility when tackling new ideas. If it doesn't fit the model, everything needs to be overhauled.

I believe the 'baby brother' of the sciences, the fields which tackle the great questions of the human brain, mind and consciousness, will spend a few decades more baffling us with interesting and amusing facts about the specific neurological processes before they can reach the level of understanding that we naturally develop as we plod along through life. Mr. Booth is not a genius neuroscientist, yet postulated neurological process which neuroscience is just about to have the ability to tackle. He did this by paying attention to his own experiences.

We have known these things. Science says "Very slow, controlled exercise can promote strength and health". How many years have we been practicing Tai-Chi? Breakthrough science: "Meditation has positive effects on mental health, promotes relaxation and focused attention". I'm sure most older cultures, which have been practicing different forms of meditations for a few dozen centuries after seeing these changes take place, are thrilled to hear this. Breaking science: "Brain can track multiple meanings when phrases are ambiguous". Well, hypnotizing hypnotists can be tricky, after all.

While every natural science has evolved far past our rudimentary understandings of their naturally found exponents (who understands a spotted squirrel better than a zoologist?), the cognitive sciences have yet to catch up to common and uncommon sense. As I am not a neuroscientist, however, I can only wait.

My, look at the time. I'm going to go punch my clock.

If you haven't read Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, I think you would find it interesting. If you have read it, then you'll know why I thought of Kuhn when I read this.



Another example of this, in philosophy (there are probably more there), is that George Berkeley's theory of perception (developed in his New Theory of Vision in 1709) got the right answer to the Molyneux problem and I don't think it was just from introspection (he was as much working from puzzles in optics relevant to his time). He doesn't get mentioned in this article, but I can tell you that the results are precisely what he expected: http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/ ... ntPage=all

As to the original article, I'm reminded of Derrida's/deconstruction's emphasis on plurivocality in texts and fondness for wordlplay. This probably counts as a small victory for that camp.

An interesting article, thank you for posting! However, wouldn't it be more accurate to state that Berkeley agreed with William Molyneux and John Locke, whether he read their correspondence or not?

If I'm not being too presumptuous, might I suggest philosopher Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances (a few endorsements, http://www.usca.edu/math/~mathdept/hsg/barfield.html) and physicist Roger Jones, Physics as Metaphor, or if you have more of a spiritual turn, perhaps Sri Aurobindo, The Future Evolution of Man (http://www.mountainman.com.au/auro.html) and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomena of Man (https://archive.org/details/ThePhenomenonOfMan).

Another interesting area is the martial arts,

Well, he certainly agreed with Locke and Molyneux about what the result would be, but Berkeley's reason for his answer was tied to his particular account of the distinction and interaction between visual and tangible sense modalities, which has predictions beyond the direct answer to the Molyneux problem. Those predictions line up with the experiences reported in the article I linked. That was why I was giving Berkeley credit.



I appreciate the recommendations and I will look into them. However, as a grad student I have a lot of reading already lined up!

Sure, I'm an ancient, lifelong reader...Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, though, is only 186 pages. IMHO, it really is a brilliant philosophical discussion of our internal, mental perceptions versus external "reality" (the appearances, which we model or treat as idols in our minds). Of course, some may argue that what we need is a much better physiological analysis of mind...

BTW, if it isn't too personal a question, what are you studying?

Interestingly, they were probably less efficient at learning than toddlers.

While specializing on one subject and taking time to analyze your progress and experiments, toddlers simply interact with their world one object at a time, restlessly going from one to the next, in an extremely systematic way. They immediately perform physical experiments to gather tons of data, more accurate data, and compare their current experience to previous ones. It's evolution in action.

What I like about their behavior is the seamlessness of it. They do not pause, they do not let their mind rest. And they're acutely aware at all times of what's going on around them, to the point of maintaining very low sensory thresholds. And if they feel hungry or tired, they will simply act on it.

In a way they have reached a state of No-Mind, No-Thought. Later, as the world impresses on us a need to reflect upon it in an organized manner, and form metaphors and rely on other systems of thought to organize the information we have gained, striving to develop specific knowledge and skills instead of adhering to a free-form approach, some of us are terribly discomforted trying to attain this level of Zen-like mastery once again.

You will probably be unsurprised to hear that the answer to that question is philosophy.

Ah, indeed. As in so much else, I am just an amateur (from Latin amātor, or as Daniel Boorstin put it: http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/amateur/amateur.html), so I wonder if you could give me some idea of how the working discipline functions today. That is, I'm thinking of the complaints made by Bryan Magee in Confessions of a Philosopher (https://philosophynow.org/issues/19/Con ... hilosopher) concerning logical positivists/linguistic philosophers. If this seems too broad or ignorant a question, I will take no umbrage should you choose to ignore me!

BTW, another nosy question, is your nom de plume in homage to Leibniz?

Since I'm not a Philosophy Now subscriber, I can't see the details of his complaints. That said, the logical positivism and linguistic philosophy have long been out of fashion.

The way the working discipline functions today is hard to characterize in a singular manner. That said, in mainstream Anglophone philosophy journal publications are very important. There is a strong emphasis on being argumentatively careful over being ambitious. Work tends to be quite conservative as a result: many people making small contributions to problems being worked on by large numbers of academics. There has been some concern about this, since it tends to discourage innovation. The American Philosophical Association is putting together a journal whose aim is to emphasize interesting ideas over careful ones, in response to some of these concerns.

There's been a bit of a resurgence of interest in pragmatism and in German idealism in some parts of Anglophone philosophy. On the flipside, the dominant LEMM (Language, Epistemology, Metaphysics and Mind) group tends to be ahistorical in their approach. Many members of that group see themselves as engaging in something like a scientific enterprise (hence emphasizing careful, small contributions by a plurality of 'researchers') and so do not take the history of philosophy to be of much value. Anglophone metaphysics has assumed a kind of pre-Kantian, realist and rationalist approach to metaphysics.

Anglophone philosophy earlier in the century tended to be quite hostile to the so-called Continental tradition of philosophy (think Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, though some people include earlier German idealists like Hegel as well). There has been a lot of headway in being more open to reading and integrating Continental figures though there is still a long way to go on that front. Some Anglophone philosophers have become increasingly interested in more humanistic or existential themes such as love, death, personal values, authenticity and so on. There has also been the development of an approach to philosophy called experimental philosophy which you can read about here. From what I understand it is fairly controversial.

I'm not sure if that helps answer your question! I wasn't quite sure how to approach doing so, especially since I couldn't read the article you linked.



That's right. It was indirectly inspired by Gilles Deleuze though, who mentions Go in his book on Leibniz. That reference got me to pick the game back up a year or two after I was introduced to it.

Hi Monadology,

Thank you for your very informative answer!

I'm not sure if this will work properly at L19, but I saved the review in Word and attached it to this post. I believe that many professional philosophers dissed the book--Magee was a politician, after all--but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it about 10-12 years ago. I confess, however, that I have never got around to reading his books on Schopenhauer or Popper.

The trick is that science try to separate the "we have know these things and it was true" from the "we have know these things and it was false"

How many years have we practised bloodletting ? It must be a good medecine ! Breakthrough science : it's not.


Common sense is something that can be very wrong. If something seems obvious, beware !