muso wrote on Dec 7
th, 2010 at 8:38am:
There are insights from cognitive psychology that derive from brain architecture - but not at the individual thought level . I'll explain what I meant some other time. Meantime, real life calls.
Perhaps, but what "brain architecture" measures is emotion, not cognition.
In neurology, for example, if the imigdula's neurons are active, it indicates fear.
Cognition, however, is how the mind interprets fear. Cognition, of course, can create fear. Often out of nothing.
I think therefore I am - not the other way around.
Soren's thoughts on this matter are entirely apt and show sound judgement, particularly his ideas on Freud, who is much more important in the humanities than psychology.
As a case in point, Soren has a lot of neurones in his brain and spinal cord, which spark up every now and then and create physiological reactions.
This is in stark contrast, however, to his ability to
think, which is merely influenced by his firing neurones - particularly if you happen to mention Allah or any other signifier of the Islamic faith.
Of course, there is nothing about Islamic signifiers in themselves which makes regions like the imigdula light up, they are merely signs. Soren's cognition processes these signs according to his belief system, or thinking. And this is what cognative psychology teaches.
Thought is invisible, but it is predictable, based on a system of signs, or language.
Freud didn't think subjects could be really free as we are based, as he believed, on biological urges, many of them unconscious and working hard to conceal themselves from consciousness. Freud saw this mechanism as a process, not a product, a systemic interface between cognition (consciousness) and unconscious limbic processes of fear and desire. His solution was to shine light on these processes, where possible, through psychoanalysis, who's purpose was to allow:
Where there was id, there shall ego be.
For Nietzsche, however, freedom is possible because the mediator of this process is linguistic: if you can unpick the signs that cause you fear or desire (or your slavery to these), you can be liberated. Of course, very few are, or will ever be. Great people like this only come about once in an age.
On this board, there are few, if any. It_is_the_light, perhaps...
For Freud, signs shift and are altered through fear and desire by unconscious processes: projection, transference, sublimation, condensation, etc, etc, etc. These unconscious processes can only be "read" by an external reader - a trained psychoanalyst, of course, but these processes are not immutable laws. Psychoanalysists, for Freud, are observers of nature, not psychologists with checklists and formulas. Each subject is a work in him/herself.
Psychoanalysis can only be a way, therefore, of
reading. It's not a system or formula in itself. This is why it's so crucial to the humanities and interpretive fields.
Nietzsche only became really influential on the humanities when reflected through other thinkers, particularly Heidegger, Sartre, and then Foucault, through the question of Being; again, a verb - a process - and not a noun, phenomenon or observable thing.
Cognition, therefore, is only detectable through language - not the lighting up of neurones or regions of the brain. In cognative psychology, cognition is the mediator between feeling and behaviour, which are both observable, whereas cognition isn't.
But who knows? Maybe one day it will be.
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