The importance of false and oxymoronic religious claims

Quite often, our use of language is puzzling, indeed.  For instance, we often walk up to each other asking, “How are you doing?” or “what’s happening?” when we would be annoyed if the person we addressed tried to answer our question.  We spend a lot of time talking about the weather when it really doesn’t affect most of us.  We crave to talk with our friends and co-workers about entertainment such as the performance of professional sports teams, as though our lives and moods should depend upon such things. And we love to gossip.

What is language for?  Most people consider language merely as a means of preserving and communicating ideas.  In “Magic Words: How Language Augments Human Computation,” Andy Clark set forth six additional ways in which we use language, each of these uses serving to “re-shape the computational spaces which confront intelligent agents.”  

Clark discusses Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist of the 1930’s who “pioneered the idea that the use of public language had profound effects on cognitive development.”  Vygotsky focused on the role of private language and scaffolded action in guiding behavior by focusing attention and controlling action.  For instance, he found that children who are working on their own internalize the verbal directions previously given to them by responsible adults in order to guide complex tasks. 

Clark makes a strong case that his “supra-communicative” account of language can transform, re-shape and simplify computational tasks that confront our biological brains in six ways.  According to Clark, we …

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Where is the consistency in Republican positions?

In a past post, Grumpypilgrim asked : “Why do the two parties divide the issues the way they do, and who decided that the issues should be divided the way they are?”

I’ve often wondered that too.   After all, you would think that the “pro life” Republicans would also be against capital punishment.  You might think that a “conservative” Republican would be in favor of conservation, not squandering, of either the treasury or the environment.  You would think that those supporting smaller, weaker starve-the-beast government would resist laws that harass gays.  Asked in another way (regarding Democrats), what do gun control, generous welfare benefits, pro-union and pro-choice positions have in common? 

George Lakoff asked these questions too.  Writing of conservatives, he wondered:

. . . What does being against gun control have to do with being for tort reform?  What makes sense of the linkage?  I could not figure it out.  I said to myself, These are strange people.  Their collection of positions makes no sense.  But then an embarrassing thought occurred to me.  I have exactly the opposite positon on every issue.  What do my positions have to do with one another?

(p. 5) Lakoff proposed a solution to these questions in his bestseller Don’t think of an elephant!: Know your values and frame the debate (2004).  He concluded that our two different ways of understanding the nation come from two different understandings of family. 

The conservatives model government off of a “strict father” model, where the government’s …

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The Brain is not a Computer.

How often do you hear someone say that the brain is a computer?  This statement is not literally true. The brain is certainly not like a desktop computer. Brains don’t look like computers; there’s no CPU in the head.  Neurons aren’t all wired together to an executive control center.  Human brains have a massively parallel architecture. Cognitive scientists who have carefully thought through this issue arrive at this same conclusion:  the brain does not really resemble a computer, certainly not any sort of computer in general use today.

The brain as computer is a seductive metaphor. According to Edwin Hutchins, “The last 30 years of cognitive science can be seen as attempts to remake the person in the image of the computer.” See Cognition in the Wild (1996).

Metaphors are models, however, and models are imperfect versions of the reality they portray.  Metaphors accentuate certain parts of reality while downplaying other parts. 

Unfortunately, many people “reify” the brain-as-computer metaphor: they accept this metaphor as literal truth, leading to various misunderstandings about human cognition.

Here’s another big difference between brains and computers: human cognition is fault-tolerant and robust.  In other words, our minds continue to function even when the information is incomplete (e.g., while we’re driving in the rain) or when our purposes or options are unclear (e.g., navigating a cocktail party).  Computers, on the other hand, are always one line of code away from freezing up. 

In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire:  On the Matter of the Mind (1992) Gerald M. …

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How We Really Think About Religion and Politics: The Power of Metaphors

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

The above is an excerpt from “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a poem on which John Godfrey re-told an ancient Indian fable that serves as an allegory. The lesson is this: the lens through which we view reality accentuates some features while downplaying others.  It must be this way, because we are creatures of limited attentional capacities. 

Metaphors are the lenses through which we view our world.  In abstract fields like religion and politics, the use of metaphors isn’t just fanciful (although it can be fanciful); the use of metaphors is absolutely necessary to understand abstract concepts.  Further, research has shown that the use of conceptual metaphors is systematic, not ad hoc. 

Just as physics students understand the flow of electricity by reference to the flow of water, the rest of us use metaphors to understand our own abstract concepts (e.g., in the fields of religion and politics).  More important, without metaphors, we would have no meaningful understanding of most abstract concepts.  Therefore, whenever we discuss any abstract concept, we are compelled to relentlessly engage in the use of metaphors–there is no other way to talk or write about such things. 

Not convinced? What does this matter? Read on and consider the examples.  This was literally and truly a life-changing idea for me.

In Metaphors We …

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Darwin, the roots of words, etc

I have had the opportunity to exchange email and links with a man named Josh, who I invited to visit this blog.   Josh’s initial comment was: “Thanks for the Invite! But I must say… you and I are in for many future debates!” I could also tell that Josh and I were different by looking at the homepage of his blog, where he writes: “I enjoy apologetics, studying the Bible, and reading various amounts of other important literature. My passion in life is to please Christ.”

Recently, Josh referred me to an article he wrote last year, an article entitled “The Scientific Truth” published on his blog: http://defendtruth.blogspot.com/.   Below is my reaction to his article. 

Josh:

Thank you for bringing my attention to your article:  I’m truly glad we can have this conversation.  We certainly come from different perspectives.  Different perspectives, but not necessarily different backgrounds.  When I was young, I was told to fear God and to read the Bible. I was told that my questions were “just a phase” and that I would learn to simply love God and stop asking impertinent questions.  I was sent to Christian (Catholic) schools for 15 of my years of education.

I don’t pretend to know all the answers.  I am now an agnostic regarding many things.  I believe that the evidence only goes so far and we need to be brave enough to repeatedly say “I don’t know.”  I struggle to find explanations that make the most sense …

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