Comments on: Bad Quote of the Week

By: Paul Batik

Paul Batik — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 18:46:42 +0000

Deleuze, in his last book Essays: Critical and Clinical, brings up and uses William James’s theory of emotions in the chapter about T.E. Lawrence (The Shame and the Glory). Of course, this does not undermine the great value of James’s theory, Deleuze makes only a small corrective: “James suggests a paradoxical order: … 1. the perception of a situation, 2. the modification of the body, a reenforcement or a weakening, 3. the emotion of consciousness or the mind. James is perhaps wrong to confuse this order with a causality, and to believe that the emotion of the mind is merely the result or effect of corporeal modifications. But the order is correct…”
James remains one of the main inspirations for constructivism today, but Deleuze shows that constructivism can be brought even further.

By: Marsh Gardiner

Marsh Gardiner — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:50:35 +0000

Thought-provoking post, neat to stumble across (via del.icio.us).

“Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real”

I take issue as well! In fact we often forget that there isn’t any “real”, we’re prisoners to our senses. Isn’t everything really a simulation? We’re simulating “real” in our brains during every conscious moment. This ability to simulate as also called intelligence.

Recently I’ve been fascinated by the concept of mirroring. Our ability to mirror others, to feel what they feel creates empathy/compassion, which is an underpinning of society and an extraordinary evolutionary advantage. It also enables us to preprocess/pre-visualize events, mirroring the feelings of a projected future self–preparations that can be life preserving.

But never forget that that everything is simulated!

By: Steven Shaviro

Steven Shaviro — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 02:55:41 +0000

There's a good critique of Kanazawa and Miller, in more detail than I could bring myself to engage in, here.

By: glen

glen — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:35:01 +0000

“SK: In fact, we’re not playing catch up; we’re stuck. For any evolutionary change to take place, the environment has to remain more or less constant for many generations, so that evolution can select the traits that are adaptive and eliminate those that are not. When the environment undergoes rapid change within the space of a generation or two, as it has been for the last couple of millennia, if not more, then evolution can’t happen because nature can’t determine which traits to select and which to eliminate. So they remain at a standstill. Our brain (and the rest of our body) are essentially frozen in time — stuck in the Stone Age.”

This comment also seems like atomistic nonsense. What about the role of ‘co-determination’ in evolution? Isn’t it possible that humans have been evolving by modification to the ‘environment’? Not just the ‘eco’ environment, but the pharmacological, nutritional, cultural, material, etc. ‘environments’. I am pretty sure our bodies are different to even those of 300 years ago, everything from average height and intelligence to different genetic compositions between previously discrete populations.