A lengthy response to my argument against the “hidden mind” by this person.
Here’s the gist:
All Vedantam is really saying is that there is such a thing as an Amity/Enmity Complex, that it can manifest itself as racism, and that, if we are to control such socially destructive behavior, it would behoove us to understand what causes it. Fifty years ago, he would have been loudly denounced as a heretic by the High Priests on the left for stating such obvious truisms. Today, we hear barely a whimper from that direction, but, alas, the time for rejoicing has not yet come. It appears that the right has now discovered, in its turn, that evolutionary psychology is really a nefarious plot against mankind.
I cite as exhibit A an article written by Jeff G. at Protein Wisdom. Instead of rejoicing at the return of the Prodigal Son from the left, it seems he has smelled a rat. Mr. Vedantam, it appears, is not really a benign science writer for the Wapo, but a myrmidon of the left, a mere tool in a broader plot to seize control of our minds and reprogram us into latter day versions of Homo Sovieticus.
[…]
[…] the strawmen are really starting to come out of the woodwork. Whoever said that our racial attitudes are “buried deep in our sub-conscious,” beyond our conscious control? Whoever came up with the idea that our conscious and unconscious minds are “divorced” from each other? Whoever suggested that it is impossible for us to become conscious of our own “unconscious racism” because our “unconscious minds” aren’t part of our “We?” Mr. Vedantam certainly makes no such claims in the NPR article, nor does he imply anything of the sort. In fact, these are all fantasies invented by Jeff G. himself. Of course, they are necessary fantasies if we are to give any credence to the central theme of his article, which is that Mr. Vedantam is part of a larger conspiracy to convince us that “we must rely on others to spot our bigotry for us.”
[…] Nowhere does Mr. Vedantam claim that it is even possible to “re-educate our autopilot,” and this must be dismissed as another of Jeff G.’s fantasy strawmen. Far from implying that we have no control over our autopilot, he specifically states exactly the opposite.
[…] far from suggesting that we need to be “re-educated,” because we can’t control our “autopilot” by our own volition, Vedantam is again saying exactly the opposite; that our conscious minds are really in overall control, and that we are quite capable of dealing with asocial manifestations of unconscious behavior such as racism on our own, without the need for any “re-education” by cliques of leftist illuminati. No matter, Jeff G. has already left reality far behind, and can’t be bothered to read what Vedantam is actually saying.
[…]
[…] Nowhere does Vedantam suggest that “you can only ‘take back control’ by changing what culture and society imprint.” Far from claiming that you cannot consciously control your unconscious, he actually explicitly states exactly the opposite. Nowhere does he suggest that its even possible to “correctly” program the unconscious mind by “giving over control to those who will properly teach you.”
Well, I can only offer Mr. Vedantam my sincere sympathy, and express the hope that, in future, those who attack his book will take the trouble to read it first.
The political animals on both the right and the left will always have their ideological axes to grind. Meanwhile, we continue to learn. That which is true will remain true whether it happens to be politically desirable and expedient or not. Let us seek the truth.
Let’s!
And we can begin with this observation: sometimes what people say they are doing is not, in fact, what they are doing at all. Crazy, I realize, but I’ve seen it. No, really!
Then again, maybe I’m just a right-wing fantasist who sees leftists in his breakfast cereal, not a semi-learned man who knows his Julian Jaynes and Daniel Dennett but rather a semi-learned man who doesn’t have the good sense to affect the enlightened sanctimony of a world-weary political moderate caught between the twin pillars of stiff, crass partisan politicos that support the political fringe.
Or maybe it’s that I’m just another wingnut godbotherer frightened by all that scientificy-sounding stuff like “evolutionary psychology” that Satan plants in the minds of Lost Souls like so many scattered dinosaur bones…
Read. Consider. Discuss. I’ll be here to answer questions if you need me.
*****
update: for those interested, some unpacking of the unpacking:
Just so I’m not accused of skirting the arguments, let me dash off something very quickly here. I’ll even try a format favored by some of my critics, for ease of use:
1) “All Vedantam is really saying is that there is such a thing as an Amity/Enmity Complex, that it can manifest itself as racism, and that, if we are to control such socially destructive behavior, it would behoove us to understand what causes it.”
And what is it that causes such behavior? What is it that we are to have understood? Are we to understand that nurture imprints itself on our “autopilot”? If so, what particular instances? All of them? Certain salient moments? What part of the social text do we absorb, and what part do we filter out? Does it not differ for each individual? And if that’s the case, what are we to learn from studies of 3-year olds that we can then embrace, consciously, in order to “understand the causes” of “our” amnity / emnity?
Plus, no he’s not.
2) “Mr. Vedantam, it appears, is not really a benign science writer for the Wapo, but a myrmidon of the left, a mere tool in a broader plot to seize control of our minds and reprogram us into latter day versions of Homo Sovieticus.”
It matters not a whit to me what Mr Vedantam believes himself to be arguing. What matters is what his argument does, what it suggests, how it operates, and what necessary follows from it once it is played out structurally.
3) “Whoever said that our racial attitudes are “buried deep in our sub-conscious,” beyond our conscious control? Whoever came up with the idea that our conscious and unconscious minds are “divorced” from each other? Whoever suggested that it is impossible for us to become conscious of our own “unconscious racism” because our “unconscious minds” aren’t part of our “We?” Mr. Vedantam certainly makes no such claims in the NPR article, nor does he imply anything of the sort. In fact, these are all fantasies invented by Jeff G. himself.”
First, I don’t suggest all of our racial attitudes are buried in the unconscious mind. I’m just interested, for purposes of this piece, in those that operate in “autopilot,” and so those are the attitudes I focus on. It was Vedantam who suggested autopilot is steering what “we” should be steering in certain instances. If autopilot is steering what “we” are not, how can “autopilot” be a part of “we”? I realize later on that he will try to rejoin the two. But his argument relies on this moment where the two are divorced. And of course, becoming cognizant of our unconscious racism after the fact is not the same as being consciously aware of what our autopilot is doing. Otherwise, our “autopilot” wouldn’t be “hidden.” Vedantam can tie this to something like, say, phatic speech (which I note in the comments to my original post), but he seems to be suggesting that there is something more at work here than mere laziness or grooming speech.
That Vedantam “makes no such claims” doesn’t mean that his argument doesn’t, in effect, lead to such necessary assertions. Here, for the “autopilot” to function as “hidden,” it must remain unseen by the conscious mind. It follows, then, that the conscious mind can’t be conscious of the unconscious mind [at any moment unconsciousness is “in control”], else there’d be no reason to talk about an “unconscious mind” in the first place. There’s the “divorce,” which I noted was merely metaphorical.
4) “Nowhere does Mr. Vedantam claim that it is even possible to “re-educate our autopilot,” and this must be dismissed as another of Jeff G.’s fantasy strawmen. Far from implying that we have no control over our autopilot, he specifically states exactly the opposite.”
Just because Vedantam doesn’t make the claim explicitly (or even consciously!) doesn’t mean his argument doesn’t make the claim in effect. If the “autopilot” can’t be re-educated, what difference does it make if we study it? It just is. But that’s not what Vedantam is arguing. Instead, he argues that we must be aware when our “autopilot” is on.
But how in the world can we be “aware” — that is to say, “conscious” — of when we are being “steered” by our “hidden,” unconscious mind? Were we aware, presumably we wouldn’t be steered by said mind, because said mind wouldn’t be “hidden.” And were we capable of such awareness, we presumably wouldn’t even have an “unconscious mind.” Unless, of course, Vedantam is making the more interesting argument that the unconscious mind is itself a learned social fiction adopted to explain what appears to be unthinking behavior. At which point I’d ask him how this works in 3-year-olds.
Of course, that isn’t the argument Vedantam is pursuing, however. And so when he writes, “it may well be that the hidden brain is much more in charge of what we do than our conscious mind’s intentions,” it behooves us to explore that line of thinking. Which brings us back to what the “hidden brain” is, exactly, and how it knows what it knows.
Vedantam suggest the culture and upbringing instruct the hidden brain. I’ve already noted that it is foolish to extrapolate out to every individual as necessarily instructive what are mere generalizations distilled from some statistical analysis of the prevailing cultural dialogic. Therefore, since we can’t know what it is in culture or upbringing that instructs the “hidden brain” and often renders it “more in charge of what we do than our conscious mind’s intentions” (or even if the social text has anything at all to do with an individual’s thinking; after all, if we always and only were taught by the prevailing social text, we wouldn’t theoretically ever be able to create a new and different social text) we are left with one of two choices: 1) admit that studying the social text is hardly dispositive when it comes to determining the imprinting of any individual’s autopilot; or 2) act as if it is dispositive, then prescribe a more careful examination of the social text, presumably — and here’s the unspoken leap — to correct those things within the social text that imprint negative associations on the unconscious mind.
Vedantam may not say that’s what he wishes us to do. In fact, his study may be purely descriptive and presume to carry with it no political weight whatever. And yet the implications of what he is arguing DO carry such political weight. And if we are to believe Vedantam’s fiction about how consciousness in its entirety functions, it follows that the social engineers will use that fiction to get the results they desire.
And, as nearly everyone would agree that racism is bad, why would we not, as a society, take Vedantam’s description and draw from it a blue print to stamp out the kind of racist associations (and I’m using that as only one example in the amity /emnity dichotomy) that find their way into our “hidden” brains?
Now, call me insane — or a political shill — but the only way I can see to do that in advance of it getting there is to massage and finesse the culture, and to structure upbringings in such a way that the emnity is shortcircuited before it becomes a part of the “autopilot” — which, while we may be aware of what our autopilot does, we cannot conceivably control, else it wouldn’t be an “autopilot” — or hidden — to begin with.
okay, I’m kinda behind and just finished reading the post referenced and all I could think was “so, what made my dog racist?”
The workings of the inner mind become manifest.
I mean, she’s only been here a couple weeks and I certainly didn’t teach her to growl at black men.
Amity/Enmity Complex. Is that what drives certain bloggers?
To quote your critic …
“Vedantam is again saying exactly the opposite; that our conscious minds are really in overall control, and that we are quite capable of dealing with asocial manifestations of unconscious behavior such as racism on our own, without the need for any “re-education” by cliques of leftist illuminati.”
Didn’t he just confirm that Vedantam admitted that we don’t control our unconcious but only “are quite capable of dealing with asocial manifestations of unconscious behavior” ? In other words, after the fact. Admitting your are a murderer doesn’t change the fact that you are a murderer. Its quit clear that the “leftist illuminati” want to tell us how to deal with our “unconcious racism”, because in their minds we can’t really control our unconcious.
Maybe it’s just me, but, doesn’t Jeff G. tend to use language and references most of the population understands?
So, when I see statements like the following, “..but a myrmidon of the left, a mere tool in a broader plot to seize control of our minds and reprogram us into latter day versions of Homo Sovieticus.” I have to ask just who the author of said statement is talking to.
I tend to file such things under “putting on intellectual airs.”
Could someone explain what evo psych is?
Is it just me or are there a significant number of people who are positively Andre the Giant drunk with the wonders of evolutionary processes? Does the reading of “The Origin of the Species” impart some kind of self mutating “high” that causes the person to mewl and then see involuntary evolutionary processes in, well, everything?
Much of this is beyond me but there seems to be an ongoing effort to downplay the individual and make him or her a slave … to culture or psychology or upbringing or Legos.
If I’m being prancingly simplistic I will accept the beat down.
Amity/Enmity ComplexIs that what drives certain bloggers?
I thought that’s what they named the fenced-in compound where Dorothy and the gang lived after she returned from The Emerald City.
In fact I can still hear old Amnity Emnity yelling “Dorothy!”
Having re-read the NPR blurb and the excerpt from Vedantam’s book (which, amazingly, manages to be graphically violent and tediously boring simultaneously), I still can’t see anything that supports the idea of people being in charge of their “hidden minds.”
To the contrary, the tedious and violent excerpt describes a bridge full of people who allow a woman to be killed before their very eyes, without lifting a finger to help. The author himself says, “The more I learned, the more I came to see that [bystanders] Mayberry, Sandford, McGore, Jones, and Alexander did not really have insight into their own behavior.” Unless I’m badly misreading something, that sounds like the author excusing the inaction of the bystanders, and using his “hidden mind” hypothesis as the basis for such an excuse.
Now, if my hidden mind won’t let me react against a man violently assaulting somebody in broad daylight, what chance do I have against the racism that’s infected me since I was in pre-school?
“Amity Em! Amity Em!”
“Shut up, Dorothy, and feed the pigs!”
Amity Enmity is the Queen of Bartertown, you fools.
TWO BLOGGERS ENTER! ONE BLOGGER LEAVES!
“No Amnity Emnity, it was real. And you were there, and Toto, and Hunk and you were there too! And there was a good witch and a bad witch and a bunch of really short people and they were all white. Is that wrong?”
I have a pretty good evolutionary-psychological explanation for certain people’s peculiarly frequent use as rhetorical dummies through which things they’ve never said are “repeated.”
It’s not very interesting.
Claiming the authority of the discipline it inspired is what does that. And it’s more The Descent of Man than Origin. But they don’t know that, really. So it’s “science” or “truth”—or, disturbingly, the “future”—they’re on the side of, not page 38 line 14.
Also, evolutonary-psychology types are peculiarly frequently used as rhetorical dummies through which things they’ve never said are “repeated,” so their defensiveness is understandable.
It’s not very interesting.
Y’all are just letting your inner racist, or your hidden racist, out to play. Shame.
Isn’t that a contradictory statement? First sentence states it’s not possible to re-educate our autopilot, then immediately turns around to state we have the opposite of no control over our autopilot. Which is it?
Maybe that’s an evolutionary paragraph.
Pavlov? And that bell?
” Oh, Dorothy, dear, it’s just your hidden brain unconsciously manifesting some deep seated fantastical bigotries against both people of color and the height challenged. Since I’m not responsible for your cultural programing please bend over the kitchen chair so that I might beat you with a feeding trough.”
I’m not sure that you’re wrong.
When will people learn that all of the five dollar words simply look like they’re trying to pull something over on most folks?
From the (as yet) only comment over there:
Fine work. But unpacking that guy’s logic is bound to unleash his sycophants. Good luck with them…most of them have only a tribal outlook
“Tribal outlook” …. That sounds kind of racist to me. Not to mention the bestial “Unleashing of the sycophants”.
Tribal sycophants? How fucking racist can you be?!
Well JD it’s simply impossible to be a racist if you are a progressive in good standing. They like do define who is and who isn’t and they aren’t going to include themselves in the racist side.
Obviously. [Doesn’t make it true, however.]
They like TO define….
Astigmatism.
I guess what these two goof balls are saying is; we have a conscience brain, and a hidden brain, and it may well be that the hidden brain is much more in charge of what we do than our conscious mind’s intentions. But by realizing we have a hidden brain with our conscience brain, and that we have no way to control what influences it, we can control the hidden brains influences, to the sum affect of becoming much less certain about ourselves, and more humble.
Or something.
I guess I’d have to read the book to get the full experience of uncertainty and humbleness…
When they refer to subconscious and unconscious, is there any discerable difference?
My head hurts.
Screw sycophantism.
I, sir, am a myrmidon.
ANTI-TRANSPARENTISTS!!!
DENOUNCED! DENOUNCED AND CONDEMNED!
No, I don’t know why – just for the hell of it.
Carry on.
Fast thread.
Heh. She said “myrmidon.” She must be smart.
And thanks a lot for starting a fascinating thread when I have a whole slew of meetings this morning. I guess I’ll have to watch this one from the bench, later on.
Oh well.
We are not amused. But we may not be the we, we think we are, or perhaps there’s just a mouse in my pocket.
I want to be a myrmidon. And I want minions, and tribal sycophants. And, thick-cut applewood and black pepper bacon. That is all.
300 lbs. can’t be far off the way you’ve been talking JD.
a myrmidon of the
leftbaconBy virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatus Committeeatum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon all you morons the honorary title of Myrmidon.
220 and falling, al. I am going for svelte.
I am a myrmidon! Thanks, Lazarus !!!
The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the remaining sides.
You’re there JD. Now it’s on to Heroin Chic.
Careful, summing all teh skwarez.
Just so I’m not accused of skirting the arguments, let me dash something off very quickly here. I’ll even use a format favored by some of my critics, for ease of use:
1) “All Vedantam is really saying is that there is such a thing as an Amity/Enmity Complex, that it can manifest itself as racism, and that, if we are to control such socially destructive behavior, it would behoove us to understand what causes it.”
And what is it that causes such behavior? What is it that we are to have understood? Are we to understand that nurture imprints itself on our “autopilot”? If so, what particular instances? All of them? Certain salient moments? What part of the social text do we absorb, and what part do we filter out? Does it not differ for each individual? And if that’s the case, what are we to learn from studies of 3-year olds that we can then embrace, consciously, in order to “understand the causes” of “our” amnity / emnity?
2) “Mr. Vedantam, it appears, is not really a benign science writer for the Wapo, but a myrmidon of the left, a mere tool in a broader plot to seize control of our minds and reprogram us into latter day versions of Homo Sovieticus.”
It matters not a whit to me what Mr Vedantam believes himself to be arguing. What matters is what his argument does, what it suggests, how it operates, and what necessary follows from it once it is played out structurally.
3) “Whoever said that our racial attitudes are “buried deep in our sub-conscious,” beyond our conscious control? Whoever came up with the idea that our conscious and unconscious minds are “divorced” from each other? Whoever suggested that it is impossible for us to become conscious of our own “unconscious racism” because our “unconscious minds” aren’t part of our “We?” Mr. Vedantam certainly makes no such claims in the NPR article, nor does he imply anything of the sort. In fact, these are all fantasies invented by Jeff G. himself.”
First, I don’t suggest all of our racial attitudes are buried in the unconscious mind. I’m just interested, for purposes of this piece, in those that operate in “autopilot,” and so those are the attitudes I focus on. It was Vedantam who suggested autopilot is steering what “we” should be steering in certain instances. If autopilot is steering what “we” are not, how can “autopilot” be a part of “we”? I realize later on that he will try to rejoin the two. But his argument relies on this moment where the two are divorced. And of course, becoming cognizant of our unconscious racism after the fact is not the same as being consciously aware of what our autopilot is doing. Otherwise, our “autopilot” wouldn’t be “hidden.” Vedantam can tie this to something like, say, phatic speech (which I note in the comments to my original post), but he seems to be suggesting that there is something more at work here than mere laziness or grooming speech.
That Vedantam “makes no such claims” doesn’t mean that his argument doesn’t, in effect, lead to such necessary assertions. Here, for the “autopilot” to function as “hidden,” it must remain unseen by the conscious mind. It follows, then, that the conscious mind can’t be conscious of the unconscious mind, else there’d be no reason to talk about an “unconscious mind” in the first place. There’s the “divorce,” which I noted was merely metaphorical.
4) “Nowhere does Mr. Vedantam claim that it is even possible to “re-educate our autopilot,” and this must be dismissed as another of Jeff G.’s fantasy strawmen. Far from implying that we have no control over our autopilot, he specifically states exactly the opposite.”
Just because Vedantam doesn’t make the claim explicitly (or even consciously!) doesn’t mean his argument doesn’t make the claim in effect. If the “autopilot” can’t be re-educated, what difference does it make if we study it? It just is. But that’s not what Vedantam is arguing. Instead, he argues that we must be aware when our “autopilot” is on.
But how in the world can we be “aware” — that is to say, “conscious” — of when we are being “steered” by our “hidden,” unconscious mind? Were we aware, presumably we wouldn’t be steered by said mind, because said mind wouldn’t be “hidden.” And were we capable of such awareness, we presumably wouldn’t even have an “unconscious mind.” Unless, of course, Vedantam is making the more interesting argument that the unconscious mind is itself a learned social fiction adopted to explain what appears to be unthinking behavior. At which point I’d ask him how this works in 3-year-olds.
Of course, that isn’t the argument Vedantam is pursuing, however. And so when he writes, “it may well be that the hidden brain is much more in charge of what we do than our conscious mind’s intentions,” it behooves us to explore that line of thinking. Which brings us back to what the “hidden brain” is, exactly, and how it knows what it knows.
Vedantam suggest the culture and upbringing instruct the hidden brain. I’ve already noted that it is foolish to extrapolate out to every individual as necessarily instructive what are mere generalizations distilled from some statistical analysis of the prevailing cultural dialogic. Therefore, since we can’t know what it is in culture or upbringing that instructs the “hidden brain” and often renders it “more in charge of what we do than our conscious mind’s intentions” (or even if the social text has anything at all to do with an individual’s thinking; after all, if we always and only were taught by the prevailing social text, we wouldn’t theoretically ever be able to create a new and different social text) we are left with one of two choices: 1) admit that studying the social text is hardly dispositive when it comes to determining the imprinting of any individual’s autopilot; or 2) act as if it is dispositive, then prescribe a more careful examination of the social text, presumably — and here’s the unspoken leap — to correct those things within the social text that imprint negative associations on the unconscious mind.
Vedantam may not say that’s what he wishes us to do. In fact, his study may be purely descriptive and presume to carry with it no political weight whatever. And yet the implications of what he is arguing DO carry such political weight. And if we are to believe Vedantam’s fiction about how consciousness in its entirety functions, it follows that the social engineers will use that fiction to get the results they desire.
And, as nearly everyone would agree that racism is bad, why would we not, as a society, take Vedantam’s description and draw from it a blue print to stamp out the kind of racist associations (and I’m using that as only one example in the amity /emnity dichotomy) that find their way into our “hidden” brains?
Now, call me insane — or a political shill — but the only way I can see to do that in advance of it getting there is to massage and finesse the culture, and to structure upbringings in such a way that the emnity is shortcircuited before it becomes a part of the “autopilot” — which, while we may be aware of what our autopilot does, we cannot conceivably control, else it wouldn’t be an “autopilot” — or hidden — to begin with.
See, this is why the sarcasm mark people thought they had a market. Because I think I might just detect a hint of sarcasm there. Just a tad. A sarcasm mark would clearly explain it.
Where is my hat, again?
BJ it wasn’t so much Origins that caused the problems as Descent of Man. Origins was loaded with observational data in support of some reasonable conclusions, Descent was pretty much the opposite, a tangled mass of conjecture with little evidentiary basis.
Perhaps he is correct, perhaps that is what Vedantam was attempting to say. How he knows this, I cannot tell. Vedantam’s own use of the words always and raceleads me to an opposite conclusion. Always being a much more concrete word than can, it leads me to conclude that Vedantam sees the concept of race as a form of a priori knowledge. One that he grants can be overcome by conscious effort, efforts requiring the guide of an outside agency.
How did Dorothy learn to hate green people?
Jeff G.
Considering school systems have been used as laboratories for the social experiment de jour, and those experiments usually spring from academic tripe such as you’ve discussed, I see the inherent danger.
ThomasD @44: Indeed. And I was careful to note that very same thing in my original post. At least, I thought I was:
Vedantam has taken something value neutral and redescribed it in terms that carry political freight.
That’s a leap HE makes — and one our thoughtful moderate who Believes In Science doesn’t really take up.
Really, Jeff, you should aquaint yourself with some basic understanding of neurological architecture and the collective functioning of these structures which produces consciousness. To that end, I’ve provided a video lecture by of all persons, John Cleese, which should make an accessible primer for anyone interested.
http://tiny.cc/ekwfD
The necessary conclusion will of course be, that I know what you are thinking and how to fix it, and make you do what I want.
Which is, after all, the purpose of science.
Actually, Vedantam said this:
OK, OK, he’s right. It isn’t about “teaching”, it’s about “helping to shape”.
Toootally different, you alarmist you.
LBascom
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who thought that made no sense.
It’s not inherently contradictory if you also posit that ‘autopilot’ is something akin to read-only-memory. That is, in this formulation, what is to be educated (or re-educated) is the conscious manifestations of self.
Another metaphor, ThomasD, but a better one.
The contradiction comes from believing that your read-only-memory can be overwritten by virtue of your knowing it exists.
It can’t. It would have to be replaced by a different read-only-memory. The question is, who should be charged with writing that new code — and what are its influences?
Cleese has to be run through a Lutwidge/Dodgson design translation device and then becomes as transparent as O!
To continue with the metaphor. What some appear to be arguing is that RAM can overrule ROM, but only when we engage conscious pilot (yeah, I know, and I’m sticking with it.)
Speaking personally I reject the belief that racism is in any way a priori knowledge. I am willing to entertain arguments that some sort of ‘fear of other’ is hard wired, and that one means of identifying other is in visual comparison to self and close relations. But short of running from a charging rhino the vast majority of these manifestations are decidedly learned behavior.
And, most tellingly, as we have previously noted, these are often esoteric distinctions since they are all merely manifestations of self. I really cannot stress enough that cognitive behavioral science has no business trying to make the leap into sociology, particularly anything of a moral nature.
Thomas: Even if we are dealing with hard-wiring (this isn’t the argument Vedantam makes, but let’s go with it just the same), the mechanism “fear of other” would be an inveterate category-type distinction: this differs from us. Which means that it makes no sense to single out “race” — because “race” is a learned category.
It is Vedantam and, in his attempt to rehabilitate Vedantam, the writer of the piece we are reacting to here, who are responsible for politicizing what amounts to one manifestation of what may (or may not be) a hard-wired reaction.
Question: Is it the children themselves who are putting race on the table, unpacking the associations they are “unconsciously” attaching to it, and then shaping those associations in more effective ways? Or will someone else be in charge of directing that approach?
If so, who? And to what end?
— is my point.
These two, other and same, make all our little world. Slippery bastards.
What some appear to be arguing is that RAM can overrule ROM, but only when we engage conscious pilot (yeah, I know, and I’m sticking with it.)
EPROM (Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) seems to be what Vedantam is driving at. (Old Mac-heads and others should recognize that.) Comes set from the factory in the CPU but can be rewritten by specialized applications to control how the system functions.
If we are consciously writing things to our autopilot, does it not then make sense that we would try to “adjust” what gets written there in the first place? And if so, how do we do that “effectively” in a way that “properly” shapes how children learn?
Can we re-write to make these filthy men stop leering at the dames? Can we re-write that mothers will always ignore the kiddies or actively usher the kiddies into serious danger? Can we re-write to make light sing tunes in our heads? Or tunes heard to cause lightshows in the world? Can we re-write to eliminate a language already known, erase English or French selectively, say?
The Left; Your auto-pilot is racist, you hick.
The Right: Understand your Auto-pilot, know where it tends to lead you, and deviate from the pre-programmed course when the auto-pilot is clearly wrong.
The Left: Just reprogram the damn thing.
The Right: How, exactly?
The Left: Uh.
The Right: That’s what I though.
The Left: Racist.
Take the straight and narrow path
And if you start to slide
Give a little whistle! Give a little whistle!
And
alwaysnever let yourconscienceautopilot be your guideSdferr @ 60-
yes
umm……the basic disconnect is that you stubbornly and intransigently remain a first culture intellectual in an increasingly third culture society, Jeff.
perhaps you could read some Jonah Lerner or Tomasello or perhaps some SBR?
There is a biological basis for behavior, and the scientific community is proving it.
The times they are a changing, dude.
And nuggie trots out another nuggie-centric meme: You’re the wrong flavor, Jeff.
sdferr,
@60..in my misspent youth, such reprogramming was called “LSD.”
And there’s a biological basis for shirking responsibility for behavior, circling around to the point against such relativist nonsense.
I have no conscience, and I need no guide.
Nishit is a genocidal idiot. That is all.
But the times they are a changing, dude.
Dude.
Any specific critiques of my arguments, nishi?
And really, who is denying a biological basis for behavior? I’m denying this particular description of that biological basis — which happens to be based on a confused notion of how behavior is learned. Said notion, I point out, is itself based not on anything scientific, but rather on a cultural materialist’s view of how “we” are imprinted by the social milieu in which we live. It is pure sociological fantasy.
Stop name dropping and commence with the counter arguments. Or admit you can’t, and that you drop names in lieu of being able to make arguments.
If you are a determinist / fatalist, say so.
I think you can reprogram the autopilot in children if we can get them into a preschool that starts the morning singing that Barack Obama hmmm hmm hmm song instead of that nonsense pledge of allegiance.
The parents will need to do some homework of course; the Maoist re-education model seems to have shown results out in China where drone worker bees obey the central government well enough…
nuggie, is there a biological basis for philosophy? A scientific proof of mind?
Aside from star-calling, I mean. Or aside from an involuntary and unfortunate synaptic firing to engage stodgy old faiths and other antiquities inconvenient to the great hopey postmodern cleansing. One spiritualist’s psilocybin is another’s phenylalanine.
First culture, second culture, third culture, n + 1 culture ….
Where do these ordinations end? Or begin, for that matter?
Mine too and it does work, the control part is/was/has been the problem. Selectively personal and very touchy about original unknown and unknowable conditions.
74. Where do they begin? In the heads of those who think that they are better than everyone else, and they owe it to society to see that ALL people benefit from their glorious thoughts.
Man, that’s nauseating.
I’m familiar with acid well enough, but beside being apparently temporarily effective at the sight-sound/sound-sight crosswiring, it wears off (yes?) and other than having the control to take the pill or not take the pill, offers little if any actual control over the crosswiring process itself. One may have or may not have these apparent sight-sound/sound-sight crosswired events during a tripping experience; they are not uniform, coming and going variously in various people, due to causes unknown and uncontrolled by them, least so far as I could tell.
But the point of 60, as a rhetorical, was to dig into re-writing as an intentional and fully conscious act, i.e., one undertaken aside from [pill] chemically induced alterations of the brain, but rather as a matter of an ordinary thinking course.
I did not understand LBascom’s link so well, at least in the context of the rhetorical.
I’m more and more convinced that the Nugget grew up in a toxic waste dump. Think about it: not only does this hypothesis explain its mental and psychological abberation, it also explains its preoccupation with biological/chemical explanations for behavior.
Until I see evidence that contravenes this hypothesis, I’m sticking with it.
What I want to know is how does nishi’s premise rehabilitate Vedantam’s argument?
If only she’d stay on point, maybe we could have a discussion. But instead, it’s all oblique references and glancing innuendo.
Full of sound and fury, and yet…
nishi has an agenda that has been fairly consistent, lo these many months, having nothing to do with any ongoing discussion at any particular time. I was just reading in an old thread looking for something blowhard had written and came upon nishi comments and comments (like this one I’m writing) on nishi comments that were remarkably like to this comment she has left today and these subsequent comments on it today. There are many other instances of the same thing in other threads. It is pretty damned boring though, if one isn’t nishi.
But back to the subject (sort of), the [political] history of these sciences (sociobiology and evolutionary psychology) hinted at in helian-whoever’s “return of the prodigal son from the left” is an interesting subject in itself, though somewhat off the topic of the shape and manner of consciousness studies. But I do not wish to divert, merely to note.
As far as I can recall, the times have always been a changing; or is this something new?
circling back even more, sdferr, I point you to nishi, progressivism, and eugenics — as a political offshoot of sociobiology and evolutionary psych at various points in historical time.
A great big circle we are spinning in!
My fault, missed your rhetorical, sorry.
I was merely addressing the question of whether mind control was possible, in the context of that seems to be where Vedantam and his desire to shape young minds could conceivably lead…although maybe only in his hidden brain.
His conscience brain would never entertain the idea of course, but as we have learned, it may well be that the hidden brain is much more in charge of what we do than our conscious mind’s intentions.
“…although maybe only in his hidden brain.”
Ha! Good one, LB
sigh.
Tomasello in The Cultural Origins of Cognition describes the onset of the concept of Other in young children, ie, cognizance of extratribal actors.
The concept of Other can of course be triggered by other signalling than skin color.
Your blinkered focus on denying that white christian conservatism is essentially……well……. white is sortof crippling your argment.
Why not just admit that nearly all conservatives are are racists, either overt or covert?
Yeah, Montreal is just jam-fucking-packed with conservatives.
“white christian conservatism is essentially……well……. white”
This hidden brain seems to want to overstate the obvious
Sigh.
Cognizance and consciousness are not the same thing. Does Tomasello tell you that? And as I noted up thread, why is Otherness — as a mechanism — trained here on “race” and not on, say, eye color; or eating habits; etc.? That is, why is one neutral category — pigmentation — given political weight, while others under sway of the same behavioral hard-wiring are not being overdetermined for the purposes of corrective behavior modification? For that matter, what is the political capital involved in describing the mechanism itself as an examination of “Otherness” as opposed to, say, differentiation? (Hint: for the same reason those who rail against racism cannot stand to hear arguments about race being a bankrupt category.)
I’ve answered why I think that is. Why do you think so? And yes, you may use Tomasello or whomever you wish to come up with your hypothesis.
The point being, you pretend that you are explaining behavior using science. You aren’t. You are creating a narrative out of certain observations and calling that narrative science, when in fact it is but sociology with footnotes and equations.
As for my “blinkered focus on denying that white christian conservatism is essentially…well…white,” I’m not sure where you see that — especially as I am not Christian, not religious, and am more classical liberal than Christian conservative.
Why try to force me into an absurd admission when you can just find the “conservative gene” and smother those predisposed to wearing it as a dominant trait right in the crib?
Voila! An end to racism and the onset of UTOPIA! OH BRAVE NEW WORLD!
Really, nishi. This griefer shit is so played, as you kids might say. When you aren’t singing Broadway show tunes, or doing your devilish “twist” dance like the coloreds, I mean.
Why not just admit you’re a bore and a griefer?
Even with a pair of fallacious outs nuggie can’t close. Always know the move before you make it, nuggie.
Mine is overt and covert, and done for fun and profit.
“white christian conservatism is essentially”
What happened to the death of essentialism again? It died and rose from the grave? Ooooh, spooky.
Squid’s hypothesis remains intact.
I found this at VDH’s private papers, and thought it interesting. While not really on topic, it does mention evolutionary psychology, and is sure to cause the griefer some grief, so I thought I’d share.
A Review of The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions by David Berlinski
Berlinski is one wacky outlier, least from what I can recall of one of his earlier go-rounds on the subject of Darwinism. Not to say bad, mind you, just very outliery.
Is it still gonna be OK to tell your children not to talk to strangers?
And what if the stranger is black? Are we supposed to teach exceptions to the stranger rule?
Is it racist to teach a child that an unknown black person is a “stranger”, or do we need to find another word so that the black stranger isn’t offended within his/her hidden mind by being “strange”?
What about the possibility that little unknown white kids are out there being told not to speak to people like him/her? How traumatic that must feel…
Your blinkered focus on denying that alternative white gratuity otherness is essentially, well, built upon appearances-centric pop contrariness for its own mere sake is preventing the argument that should stand in for it.
Great piece at the link, LBascom…
While u r at it, plz stop beating your wives kthxbye.
From the linked piece LBascom gave us:
This approximates what I was getting at when I wrote that “[…] if we always and only were taught by the prevailing social text, we wouldn’t theoretically ever be able to create a new and different social text.” No slippage. Simply stagnation.
Unless (as one astute commenter here noted) the “slippage” is the product of living too close to a chemical dump, or beneath a pernicious carbon blanket — and is sort of an evolutionary mutation that can only happen by way of biological accident. Which would mean Erin Brockovich should be hanged for crimes against evolutionary psychology, and Al Gore for wanting to roll back thought to a less evolutionarily developed state. The psychical Luddite.
It’s the same argument I make when dealing with those people who claim that convention governs meaning. Were this so, how would we develop new conventions, given that no one can communicate their meaning outside of the set of conventions they are operating under? And how did they ever communicate for the first time, before a convention could be logically formed?
If the answer is “accident” or “mutation,” than this is really just another metaphor for “breaking convention,” or “individuality” acting to change the pool for selection.
But hey: at least now you can take advantage of the cool symbols you can type on modern day word processing software!
I have a thought that this is just the biggest and most easily wielded club at hand. Once racism has been soundly thrashed from those evil conservatives, their sight will fall next upon anything that differentiates from their narrative of social control. As long as they can “prove” that it’s an unconscious urge they can declare any solution they want. Those sheep of the guilty conscience hand-wringer club will quickly fall in line. The rest will be marginalized and cut from society like the horrific wife-beating, reich-wing, bible-clingers they are.
It’s what they deserve, after all.
?????? !!eleventy!!11!
I should add, I’m not even arguing that someone like Pinker is wrong. After all, he says everything we do is tied to what we’re made up of — then he goes on to say that “nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives.” Which means that he himself views the biological determinism as only deterministic in a way that our individual chemistry makes us act — and inasmuch as it is unclear what factors influence, either actively or latently, the chemical makeup of us, we are right back where we started: “we” are a combination of our genetics and those environmental factors that impact our brain chemistry in some way.
If, for instance, laughter floods the body with good stuff, then presumably laughing changes our body chemistry in some important way. Is our sense of humor biologically determined? By what? Can that “what” be altered by some other environmental “what”? And so on.
So you see, what Nishi, et al, rely upon is merely the same narrative we all rely on, with her “faith” placed in the decidedly material.
Which is fine, so long as people like her realize that they are no more acting from some settled “Truth” than are, for instance, Christian fundamentalists.
Which is quite close to the point(s) Sellars and Quine were separately though in parallel on about, I think. We are theory laded creatures all the way down.
dammit, laden, not laded…
Jeff, if Nishi were that self aware she wouldn’t be saying the nonsense she does.
And I don’t have a problem with her babbling… except for the fact that she’s allowed to vote, and so can elect someone with power over me who will send someone around with that pillow… or a tank equipped with flammable gasses. What A Cook Out.
What I find so funny, is the way that some people seem to not quite get protein wisdom.
The insults never land close to the target because, out of ignorance, they’re always shooting in the wrong direction.
Sadly, this row has already been hoed extensively, yet with the recent upsurge in people looking to utilize a little science as a cudgel in pursuit of conformity it appears we are destined to repeat the efforts.
‘[T]he sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’ — need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present — until next year — that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James
Regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, or political affiliation.
I truly am an equal-opportunity enigma.
The remarkable thing, Jeff, is that you remain an enigma… after publicly writing tens of thousands of words over the years on your thoughts.
I’d say people intentionally misread you but who knows? Maybe they just don’t switch off the autopilot.
RIDDLE-WRAPPED-IN-A-MYSTERY-INSIDE-AN-ENIGMA-IST!!!!!
If only someone was available to shape the way these poor children read pw…
QUICK. SOMEBODY WRITE ME A GRANT!
do you have to pay extra for enigma on the new pw?
also can there be an open thread for the state of confusion address?
Sure thing
what about enigmas do we pay extra
No. Enigmas come with the entree.
Heh.
By which I mean, I had not read that William James quote about free will before writing the post linked in my previous comment.
Jeff:
Apparently, even if you provide a couple hundred pages of ample footnotage and a two-year head start, some things will always be an enigma to the Left.
Or not. I’m pretty sure they know damn well what’s being said but it BURNSSSSSS THEM!
Reminds me of RAW. He referred to nishis as “fundamentalist materialists” – an appellation I imagine to be paticularly gauling for them.
Or galling even. Sigh.
“No. Enigmas come with the entree.”
Sweet! What’s for dessert?
ThomasD, the Prophet put it best: “There is nothing new under the sun; all is vanity.”
Well…there isn’t a “conservative” gene….the current thesis is that there is some gene complex that is linked to strong partisanship. Lower IQ strata do tend to be conservative, fear of change, fear of experimentation, rejection of scientific data that contradicts the world view…also expressed as correlation of lower IQ with high “religiousity”.
It is just depressing to me to see you waste your considerable talents….thousands of words on why conservatives aren’t really racist…
Of course you are racist….conservatism has devolved to white christian conservatism. The social cohesion paradigm that has failed was Carlson’s White Patriarchy….the paradigm that stigmatized divorce and illegitimate children, and favored white male heads-of-family in the workplace. Cultural and demographic evolution have destroyed it.
The new social cohesion paradigm that is evolving is social democracy.
Like europe.
And I’m not an atheist. I’m a Sufi. Currently there is a lot of interest in the new domain of Social Brain Research convolved with the Eastern religious concepts of universalism, buddhist prana, islamic wahdat al wujud….I guess what white christians would describe as pantheism.
The interaction of nature and social humanity.
Our argument, Jeff, goes all the way down to free will.
I believe in free will because the metaverse is random.
But the interesting place for this discussion is the border of the classical world and the quantum world….not in semiotics and linguistics.
nice to see you again malaclypse.
I see Kate Mengele is still dissembling.
Sweetcheeks, your shit, does indeed, stink.
How utterly circular. Did you bump into your own ass, making that argument? And: you haven’t been listening at all, if you think Jeff is a conservative.
The only real language for that discussion is Ubykh, which unfortunately is dead. So you’re out of luck, there.
You don’t have an argument; what you have is a string of assertions backed by little other than faith.
There is no metaverse, outside of fiction. Furthermore, the degree of randomness of your fictive metaverse has nothing to do with free will. Systems can have no random inputs, yet still behave unpredictably.
Whereas I believe in free will because there is no rational alternative way to order my decisionmaking to accommodate a world in which free will does not exist. A deterministic universe demands the existence of an external omniscient intelligence that isn’t sharing its knowledge with those of us inside it — so what good would it do for us to know that the universe is deterministic, if it is?
Especially since, if the universe were deterministic, we wouldn’t even know that.
Choosing between free will and determinism is a matter of faith either way. After a fashion it’s a different form of Pascal’s wager because if we make decisions on the assumption that the outcome is pre-determined, and it isn’t, where does that leave us?
Meh. Best to live one’s life as if it really does matter what we do. It just might.
You are racist because Nishit has declared it to be so. That is all. Well, that and she is an idiot.
Nishi also appears to conflate two manifestly distinct meanings of “discriminate”. Hopefully unintentionally, but I’m sure that’s just an accidental side-effect of that she doesn’t really understand English all that well.
Actually the preacher. Solomon.
Sweet! What’s for dessert?
Pie. Dur.
The new social cohesion paradigm that is evolving is social democracy.
Like europe.
Baha haa ha haa … yea, I wonder how that’s gonna turn out.
…only bettr cuz AMERICANZ r in charge!!! But not u icky caveman americanz.
LBascom, Solomon was a prophet under Islam. See also: Sulayman.
The genocidal Sufi is teh suck.
Yes James had a pretty good appreciation of free will. Not coincidentally he is also famous for propagating the ‘you don’t run from a bear because you are afraid of it; you are afraid of the bear because you run from it’ aphorism.
You only have to run faster than the person standing next to you.
If you say so. Seems an odd place to put an Israeli king under though…
Islam borrowed lots of Biblical figures. No telling when they’re giving them back, though.
Though I have no dog in the preacher/prophet intention hunt, I nonetheless wonder whether your instinct isn’t to repair to the original language and text in such a case, fearing one translation, another translation or both (or all, for that matter) have slipped some parts of the meaning of the term translated (to English, or German or French or whathaveyou)?
I’d love to hear this explained. Hold forth, nishi, hold forth.
Serious question: how many people who exhibit these “conservative” traits vote Democrat? I bet the number is remarkably high. Just another way for our betters to purge the real enlightened progressives from the useful idiots, I’m guessing.
This makes little sense. First, there are racist conservatives, just as their are racist progressives, racist moderates, racist libertarians, etc. But there are significantly more non-racists in each of those groups. To say that conservatism is “racist” makes as much sense as saying that chess is totalitarian.
To borrow from the Great Bill Paxton, “maybe you haven’t been keeping up with current events, but [the new social cohesion paradigm] just got [its] asses kicked!”
Which part? The one we’ve been propping up for the last 70 years?
So you’re a religious whackjob who wants to force her religion onto everyone else. KEEP YOUR DIRTY SUFI PANTHEISTIC PAWS OFF MY UTERUS!
“Social humanity?” Is there some other kind?
And yet you keep preaching a worldview that paints itself as necessarily deterministic. Meanwhile, you leave yourself an escape hatch — and mock those that others employ for similar reasons, but that differ in vocabulary.
Yes. Because it’s not like our epistemology is influenced at all by language.
How silly of me to believe that to be the case!
What really puts the grief in griefer for me is the way nishi takes something beautiful, science, and then speaks on its behalf in the sloppiest ways possible.
If you want to school us, nishi, up your game and make a case. You’re a mismash of contradictions, lazy reasoning and incomplete thoughts. Which is boring.
Mostly I was concerned with calling a spade a spade.
Solomon is most famous for his wisdom, and while the bible is full of prophets, Solomon wasn’t described as one, and the books attributed to him (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon) weren’t prophetic, they were about imparting wisdom. Thus, he was a preacher (teacher), not a prophet.
Thanks for the theoretical theological discussion LBascom. Still, is there a text worth the having?
Apparently not, if you believe the text. “There is nothing new under the sun, all is vanity and chasing after wind”. ;-)
Heh, guess I don’t.
I agree with you, LBascom. Islam doesn’t, but I do.
And after having read through the various bits of the Qu’ran that mention Solomon, I conclude that the Prophet Muhammed (PBUH) was afflicted with some serious attention deficit disorder. They guy couldn’t tell a story that hangs together to save his life. One second he’s talking about Solomon, the next about Lot.
It’s nearly as if someone ran the Old Testament through a shredder, then tried to piece it back together while stoned on hash.
Now we know why the nishtoon embraced it.
“One second he’s talking about Solomon, the next about Lot.”
Slart,
I think that’s because the Koran is not written chronologically. The verses are arranged by their length – shortest to longest.
Oh. That makes just about as much sense as reordering Biblical verses according to checksum.
For nishi.
SCIENCE IN THE AGE OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, or The “Islamization” of Science
Watch for the New Revised New Re-Revised Intergalactic Version any day now.
So you’re a religious whackjob who wants to force her religion onto everyone else
Sufis, like Jews, do not proselytize. Not everyone that wants to become a Sufi or a Jew qualifies.
We maintain exclusive clubs.
Yours is better for you, mine is better for me.
And yet you keep preaching a worldview that paints itself as necessarily deterministic.
Science is the search for truth. It is neutral on determinism.
The border between the classical and the quantum worlds is where physics meets metaphysics.
We could find scientific evidence of metaphysics, if such evidence exists.
I believe in free will because otherwise there would have been one commandment stating simply “You are my bitches”.
KEEP YOUR DIRTY SUFI PANTHEISTIC PAWS OFF MY UTERUS!
That was funnie though.
Reminds me of the menacing attack-penises of yore.
Abject idiocy, it worships at the altar of perception, faux science, and text lurv.
It’s an Internet Gobbledegook Generator.
It’s also known as the place where physics meets… more physics.
So, we’re all Aristotelians now.
Oh wait, we always have been, we just didn’t know it.
Crap, there’s a freaky-deeky unconscious mind again, damn it all.
You can read Chaos and Dancing Wu Li Masters and A Brief History of Time and The Tao of Physics without really gathering much understanding of what science is, apparently.
The Tao of Pooh is too tough for her.
That is some good shit right there. Had me looking around for a roach clip wondering where the RA was for a second
Is one of the requirements for getting into the Sufi club consistent Christian bashing?
It may be. The way you wield it is not.
But then, that’s because you are to science what Gene Simmons is to the Ellen Jamesians.
Ohhh…snap-turn into TWATG.
Hopefully not indicative of a premature and painfully jaw-clamping moment.
Well played, sir.
It took me until just now to get the joke. I knew it was in there somewhere.
But maybe not. Wouldn’t it have worked better the other way around?
Humor. I’m not so good at it, sometimes.
Nishi (internet crank) is to science (non-crankish) as Gene Simmons (plays a misogynist) is to the Ellen Jamesians (radical feminists). Works for me, slart.
Nobody should ever talk about someone inserting a crank into nishi, ever.
Philosophy can be a search for truth. Science is the search for a narrowed knowledge.
Science is a little old lady who lives in Manchester. I made up the other stuff in my book because it sounded smarter.
Jeff, it seems Helian Unbound has engaged you over at that site.
timb is creepy
consistent Christian bashing?
Oh, I don’t bash real christians.
I bash WECS.
WEC is a socio-political-racial demographic that only pays lipservice to christianity while seeking to maintain the status quo and retain political primacy for its memetic deme.
See, I was going with the tongue angle, of which Gene Simmons has a-plenty, but which Ellen James has nada.
Which seemed not to quite be appropriate to express that nishi is sadly lacking in the REAL science department.
The World Extreme Cagefighters will bash you back. Hard.
I guess brown Christians that take a vow of disenfranchisement from the political system are A-OK in nishi’s book.
She doesn’t bash Christians…well, at least not those that stay out of her fucking way.
I went over there once. He is free to find his way back here — particularly if he’s now attracting people like timb. I’m perfectly happy to argue ideas. I’m no longer willing to do it in places where the only other commenters are left-wing trolls who hate me personally.
All you need do to get these kinds of folks as readers is disagree with me.
That should tell you something.
Slart — you can switch the terms around if you’d like.
Jeff, can’t blame you.
Seemed pretty thin gruel to me anyway.
Stupid sock puppets…