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Because Ramachandran thinks so?
by LPTS 18y ago
Because Ramachandran thinks so?
- xlnt 18y agoAn appeal to authority? That's not very persuasive.
- jacobolus 18y agoIt’s persuasive if you fill in the unstated extra bit, which goes something like “… and can explain why in great detail, if you take the trouble to read his writing about it. But such detail is excessive for this comment thread.”
- xlnt 18y agoWell I was just reading some of his writing, but so far I am not persuaded. Further, I have noticed some critical flaws in his writing caused by his lack of understanding of epistemology.
- LPTS 18y agoYeah, you noticed flaws in Ramachandran's thinking. That'd be like me going up to Buckminster Fuller and saying "I don't think those dome things will work because I played with legos as a kid and don't see building it out of legos." Or going up to Einstein and saying "I don't think your special relativity is good because I threw rocks at each other and then away from each other, and I didn't notice it happen." You're a bit out of your league here, is what I mean to say. The point of Ramachandran's writing is to persuade people who know neurology, not to teach it to laypeople who don't have the intellectual integrity to admit they are out of their league.
- xlnt 18y agoYou don't know what my league is, or what my areas of expertise are. I do know that your arguments from authority are invalid.
- LPTS 18y agoI know what Ramachandran's league is. What areas of expertise do you have to such a degree that your intuitions upon a cursory glance at one or two of his papers carry more weight then his decades of study and work at the cutting edge of this field? Appeals to legitimate authority are valid. (disclaimer: Ramachandran is one of my biggest intellectual heros)
- xlnt 18y agoFor example, I know a lot about epistemology, and I am already familiar with the common phenomenon where psychiatrists and neuroscientists accidentally stray into philosophical areas they know little about and make epistemic blunders. I emailed you two passages from Ramachandran's essay. Could you confirm that they are representative of his view, and not out of date?
- LPTS 18y agoI did not get the message. Maybe the internets have a clog.
- xlnt 18y agoI wrote: I'm sorry, I can't talk to you, my mail client says you're a spammer. Do you think this is an accurate statement about mirror neurons? http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p2.html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_p2... Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds." And this from the next page? Denying [one's own] paralysis is odd enough but why would a patient deny another patient's paralysis? We suggest that this bizarre observation is best understood in terms of damage to Rizzolatti's mirror neurons. It's as if anytime you want to make a judgement about someone else's movements you have to run a VR (virtual reality) simulation of the corresponding movements in your own brain and without mirror neurons you cannot do this.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- Tichy 18y agoWell actually it seems to say in the paper "the same neurons fire when you poke someone with a needle as when you watch someone being poked". So how can they be "mirror neurons"? Seems to me they could hardly be both, "mirror" and "direct" neurons, or at least the term "mirror neuron" does not make much sense if the neuron also acts directly. Therefore the "software" theory seems much more plausible. Simply, the brain models it's environment. That is all there is to it. A flower is a flower is a flower.