I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Damn it, Gene! I start reading your article and I get sucked into two others: theofascist Gary North writing on labor unions and Ron Paul's lousy screed on the situation regarding Alfie in the UK (the court's decision was wrong and horrible, but Paul's article is dumb because it introduces a lot of nonsense that is just his fevered imagination).
ReplyDeleteAlso, your post already has the expected libertarian proclaiming taxes are theft, government is a monolithic substance, and so forth.