Other Titles > Neuropath
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Jorge ---
--- Quote ---I mean musical ability - the level which life-long pianists or violinists achieve - is thought to be one of the most superfluous adaptation.
--- End quote ---
http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant_syndrome/savant_profiles/derek_amato
Apparently a bump on the ol' noggin can replicate the lifelong efforts of your vaunted musicians.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---Certainly, Jorge, and I remain curious about how we can achieve those same abilities without injury or drug. You have to understand, I spend most of my days reading things pertinent to my academic field - not that I don't try and have a pretty good interdisciplinary context. Ideally, I'd like to aspire to and believe that the Renaissance Man is still achievable in our world. For instance, I could probably point out to you most of the other documented cases of this nature. After all, there are probably fewer than a couple hundred documented cases of brain injury that yield to selective loss, especially virtuoso abilities, without complete cognitive degeneration, and those individuals are quickly monopolized by individual institutions, forever, according to strict research methodology.
I'm willing to suggest that, perhaps, your example has relevance. But the quote you've used there was actually a commentary on reductionism and evolutionary psychology. I thought you were suggesting that everything "we" as conscious experiences "do" - of our own volition as it were - is something of an epiphenomenon in relation to the "4F" brain, grinding along, doing what it needs to do.
In that context, I offered the suggestion, in that very quotation, that its theorized in the cognitive sciences - those taking this "I" as it's subject - that learning an instrument, or as jvj so well put it, learning "any ability humans tend to decide to spend a long time getting good at, and that does not seem to enhance said humans genetic fitness in any overt fashion," is not something the "4F" brain would do.
Ripost?
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Callan S. ---I'm inclined to think that if you take an individual who is addicted to heroin but broke the habit - if one were to go back in time and inhibit the concious brain (ie, the brain that kinda detects and thinks about/performs functions in regard to the rest of the brain) in that individual, then they would not break the habit. They'd be utterly locked in, as I imagine most animals would be (can animals break a habit if given some amount of access to what they are addicted to?).
Caveats: Lots of people don't break habits. Also how'd he get addicted to begin with if the concious brain is sooo great?
But other than those caveats, it seems it does have a chance at interupting behaviours.
I dunno if I'm slipping off topic in raising this idea.
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What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Madness ---I think, in fact, you've hit another nail, Callan.
Heroine is an interesting case because of its speed and efficacy. In the near future, the paradigm is set to shift to a framework that suggests all addiction is relatively the same in rudimentary function, different in degree.
While Bakker's metaphor of the Steppe is a better one than he probably realizes, I'll give you a more common one in the literature. Neural networks are like rivers. At first they have to wear a path across the ground, or brain, literally any path, but a path. But there's a threshold that is passed and where once the water wore a path, now the ground dictates its passage, or your words and actions.
So it is with, well, all the imaginable and so far unimaginable human cognitive habits.
People are lazy, Callan, mentally and physically. They look for any excuse not to utilize their agency in the world. Why? Innumerable reasons we could theorize. I prefer to go down fighting.
--- End quote ---
What Came Before:
--- Quote from: Jorge ---
--- Quote from: Madness ---I thought you were suggesting that everything "we" as conscious experiences "do" - of our own volition as it were - is something of an epiphenomenon in relation to the "4F" brain, grinding along, doing what it needs to do.
In that context, I offered the suggestion, in that very quotation, that its theorized in the cognitive sciences - those taking this "I" as it's subject - that learning an instrument, or as jvj so well put it, learning "any ability humans tend to decide to spend a long time getting good at, and that does not seem to enhance said humans genetic fitness in any overt fashion," is not something the "4F" brain would do.
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OK, I kinda get what you're getting at.
Here's my thing... I don't doubt that the stuff our pre-frontal cortex does 'on top' of the four Fs is important. You don't evolve a highly convoluted, energetically demanding, and anatomically impractical organ unless it is important.
What I am saying is that the subjective feeling of "volition" is very likely an epiphenomenon of those higher processes, not just the 4 Fs.
--- End quote ---
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