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| "The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers Stone" by Joseph Wright (1771_ |
After you' read it, respond to the question Brooks poses: is Mlodinow guilty of getting "caught up in the excitement of this breakthrough and try to use it to explain everything"?
I think that that might be the case for many of the people and situations that Brooks described in his article. I do not however believe that this is the case for Mlodinow. People that read books and articles on neuroscience would naturally believe that it is possible to explain all of the minds tricks, but most of these people are not noted scientists who have conducted themselves or researched many experiments the way Mlodinow has. There is of course room to agree or disagree with the things an ideas presented to us in the book we read, but Mlodinow never claimed to have it all figured out. He simply gave us experiments to go off of that all pointed in one direction. None of the statistics provided showed that anything he was stating was true 100 percent of the time, they just showed that the point he was trying to make with each topic did tend to lean one way more often than not. Of course Mlodinow has passion for this subject because it is something he honestly believes in, but I think that is a harmless passion that does hold value.
ReplyDeleteEmma Rolin
I agree with Emma. Though Mlodinow was passionate about this subject, he never claimed certainty. There were a few subjects, such as animals not having an as developed mind, that that he was more particularly more convincing about, but he left room for people to read his opinion and still form their own. Similar to the question about whether or not to trust 'experts', Mlodinow has given himself space so that it's almost impossible to "blindly follow" what he says, or to say it's all a lie. So no, I don't think he is trying to use this new breakthrough as an explanation of everything, but he does make it clear that he believes it.
ReplyDeleteI feel that Mlodinow might have been somewhat caught up in the idea that the unconscious mind controls everything and while he does present good evidence he puts too much of a damper on the conscious mind and how it works for us. Examples such as when the cough was placed in front of the word eel and how what people heard would change based on the last word in the sentence can just as easily be explained by the conscious mind. If I had been given that test I might well have thought consciously that I didn’t hear the word that well but given the content of the sentence then the word wheel or meal is what makes the most sense so I would have consciously made the decision to tell the researchers that is what I heard. I also don’t put much stock behind him using John Dean example because it is quite possible with the way politics works that he was just lying to try and fry the President. Some of the testing seems to have too many variables which makes it hard to pinpoint what the exact reason for the answers given is and I think that because of this new breakthrough in neuroscience too many people are willing to jump to the unconscious as the conclusion.
ReplyDeleteJeffrey Johnson