Descartes is credited with starting this error of talking about two things- mind and body. There is only one thing. Even though I tend to call it the Cartesian error, it goes way back to the earliest writings in the Greek and my own Jewish traditions.

I’m always on the lookout for the error when I read neuroscience. The literature, both popular and scientific, if full of statements implying that mind can control brain or that mind is perceiving what is occurring in the brain.

But as John Searle has pointed out most pointedly, retreating to pure materialism and ignoring mind as not existing is to miss the most interesting part of the endeavor of brain science.

At this point, we can pretty confidently point to the brain activity underlying most of what we experience of our brain activity. I’m not sure there will ever be much more of an explanation since the experience is an emergent process from neuronal activity. Explain it at either level, correlate them, but it may be that you can’t turn one into the other.

I think “embodied” is a good start, but I “feel” you are skipping by a lot with the phrase “give meaning to the actions of others”. I have the same objection as before. Meaning for who?

I am impressed by the discoveries of cognitive science, but completely underwhelmed by the short cuts taken in discussing consciousness. Basically, I think the popular authors (and those are the ones I have encountered) actually know a lot less about “consciousness” than they seem to think they do.

“It’s a small conceptual step to suggest that valuation of stock, reading another person’s motivation, and understanding calculus are all brain maps of various types.”

Please, not so fast! Who values, who reads, who understands? And maybe even more importantly, who models the world?

I am curious to know how you fill this in?

Of course with publication bias toward positive studies, so I start reading every clinical report with the jaundiced eye of one who wonders how many negative studies remain unpublished.

I will still stick with my D90 for sometime.

But yeah, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Imagine, perhaps, the complexity of a committed relationship, and why so many fail.

How does one manage the disruptive affects of uncertainty in the complex system of a committed relationship? Perhaps more accurately, how does a couple manage uncertainty in a committed relationship?

Indeed, why do we seem to need some type of committed relationship (there are many)? How does one manage the disruptive affects of uncertainty in the existential questions of only one life? The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Denial or affirmation? Which is generative?

Stay tuned… Another Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious to follow. And I’m delighted by the synchronicity (at least in hindsight) of certain discussions…

I presume it takes a long time to fill up the schema of younger brains with new ideas. Some ideas, like religion, seem recur despite new ideas that seem to compete.

Its a point that you’ve made often about these inflection points that promise to change everything. They seem more to change how we do the same old thing.