Adama Tova -I suppose if he had a word about the soul, the academic community would close ranks against him.... the most important thing is first for the shift from cognitive development to emotional development and right hemisphere development to happen.
The issue of the criteria of the self or what philosophers call "personal identity'' has a long history going all the way back to Plato, who assumes that the immaterial soul is active and self-conscious, which means that the mind is reflexive, it can think about itself, which means that it has a different function or role than our passive sensations. By contrast, Aristotle offers two conflicting paradigms of consciousness. In the De anima he provides the model of a tabula rasa, a blank tablet on which sensations and experiences "writes." But in the Metaphysics, he offers a very different model. He holds that the Unmoved Mover thinks "reflexively," self-consciously and in privileged moments, man is able to enjoy purely abstract thinking, i.e. reason. Basically Christianity assumes, through Plotinus, an immaterial soul because it wishes to protect its immortality. Locke is the first philosopher to worry about the actual criteria of personal identity (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk II, xxvii. Locke invokes Aristotle's principle of the blank tablet. But Locke also inconsistently holds that the mind is reflectively conscious of its self. This is different than reflexive self-consciousness. In Kant, self-consciousness consist of a synthetic a priori relation between the concept of the self and the concept of an object. For different reasons, Freud similarly describes how at first the infant experiences an "oceanic feeling. Next, the child" realizes his difference from an object of desire--the mother's breast. Eventually, he also realizes that the breast belongs or is attached to a self-conscious self. And then the struggle begins for dominance. In 1953, it was already recognized that if a infant or child is left unnurtured, it would regress and even expire. During the First World War in England, many mothers of very young children were institutionalized so that the mother's could work and participate in the war effort. Often with the return of the mother the babes recover would depend on the length of absence of the parent. See Rene Spitz, the film, Grief: A Peril in Infancy.
Anyone who speaks so blithely about the brain and neuroscience is clearly unaware that the "father" of neuroscience is Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan; A. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography). There is another issue and its called the "mind-body problem." And they have never heard of Descartes. How does an immaterial mind "know" physical objects? How can they interact if they share no common property, predicate, or attribute in common? And all the while carelessly referring to loaded terms like "empathy" while confusing it with sympathy. It is Teodor Lipps who first coins it as an aesthetic concept; it means consciousness projecting itself into objects. Husserl picks it up in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. But for both Lipps and Husserl it is unidirectional. The mother may feel "empathic" but the baby's cognitive state cannot certainly be described as "empathic." Let me give you an example of a genuine empathic state: a young couple experience the early death of their child; or a loving older couple learning that one of them has terminal cancer. Empathy is a "two way street." It means sharing the SAME emotion.
In Western philosophy, basically there are three principles/paradigms of the self. The first is steeped in materialism. It begins with Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Lorenzo Valla, and Thomas Hobbes. Materialism hold that all that exists is matter, motion, and empty space. The brain is passive, and electrical receptor that re-acts, re-sponds to the motion of physical atoms. The responses for Hobbes are called "phantasms," i.e. sensations that are appearances, since we do not see or hear atoms. Basically these neo-neuroscientists are behaviorists: the mind is like a computer; it responds to stimuli flooding it from the "outside." It is both a causal and a deterministic model. In the 1930's, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolph Carnap speculated that because of Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty, it was possible to have some freedom in human activity. Epicurus also early on posited a "random swerve" to the atoms as they fell and travelled thru empty space. The problem of course was that the "agent" himself/herself had no idea what was going to happen next--hardly a plausible basis for ethical behavior. Materialism, mechanism, determinism, empiricism, phenomenalism, behaviorism, and the current neurosciences are interconnected. The other fundamental assumption is Darwinian evolution. In effect, human behavior is absolutely predictable, according to Michael Dennett.
![Bruce D. Perry: Social & Emotional Development in Early Childhood [CC]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vkJwFRAwDNE/mqdefault.jpg)
and not a word about the soul........ha
Adama Tova -I suppose if he had a word about the soul, the academic community would close ranks against him.... the most important thing is first for the shift from cognitive development to emotional development and right hemisphere development to happen.
This is Psychology, not Spirituality.
The issue of the criteria of the self or what philosophers call "personal identity'' has a long history going all the way back to Plato, who assumes that the immaterial soul is active and self-conscious, which means that the mind is reflexive, it can think about itself, which means that it has a different function or role than our passive sensations. By contrast, Aristotle offers two conflicting paradigms of consciousness. In the De anima he provides the model of a tabula rasa, a blank tablet on which sensations and experiences "writes." But in the Metaphysics, he offers a very different model. He holds that the Unmoved Mover thinks "reflexively," self-consciously and in privileged moments, man is able to enjoy purely abstract thinking, i.e. reason. Basically Christianity assumes, through Plotinus, an immaterial soul because it wishes to protect its immortality. Locke is the first philosopher to worry about the actual criteria of personal identity (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk II, xxvii. Locke invokes Aristotle's principle of the blank tablet. But Locke also inconsistently holds that the mind is reflectively conscious of its self. This is different than reflexive self-consciousness. In Kant, self-consciousness consist of a synthetic a priori relation between the concept of the self and the concept of an object. For different reasons, Freud similarly describes how at first the infant experiences an "oceanic feeling. Next, the child" realizes his difference from an object of desire--the mother's breast. Eventually, he also realizes that the breast belongs or is attached to a self-conscious self. And then the struggle begins for dominance. In 1953, it was already recognized that if a infant or child is left unnurtured, it would regress and even expire. During the First World War in England, many mothers of very young children were institutionalized so that the mother's could work and participate in the war effort. Often with the return of the mother the babes recover would depend on the length of absence of the parent. See Rene Spitz, the film, Grief: A Peril in Infancy.
Anyone who speaks so blithely about the brain and neuroscience is clearly unaware that the "father" of neuroscience is Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan; A. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography). There is another issue and its called the "mind-body problem." And they have never heard of Descartes. How does an immaterial mind "know" physical objects? How can they interact if they share no common property, predicate, or attribute in common? And all the while carelessly referring to loaded terms like "empathy" while confusing it with sympathy. It is Teodor Lipps who first coins it as an aesthetic concept; it means consciousness projecting itself into objects. Husserl picks it up in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation. But for both Lipps and Husserl it is unidirectional. The mother may feel "empathic" but the baby's cognitive state cannot certainly be described as "empathic." Let me give you an example of a genuine empathic state: a young couple experience the early death of their child; or a loving older couple learning that one of them has terminal cancer. Empathy is a "two way street." It means sharing the SAME emotion.
In Western philosophy, basically there are three principles/paradigms of the self. The first is steeped in materialism. It begins with Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, Lorenzo Valla, and Thomas Hobbes. Materialism hold that all that exists is matter, motion, and empty space. The brain is passive, and electrical receptor that re-acts, re-sponds to the motion of physical atoms. The responses for Hobbes are called "phantasms," i.e. sensations that are appearances, since we do not see or hear atoms. Basically these neo-neuroscientists are behaviorists: the mind is like a computer; it responds to stimuli flooding it from the "outside." It is both a causal and a deterministic model. In the 1930's, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolph Carnap speculated that because of Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty, it was possible to have some freedom in human activity. Epicurus also early on posited a "random swerve" to the atoms as they fell and travelled thru empty space. The problem of course was that the "agent" himself/herself had no idea what was going to happen next--hardly a plausible basis for ethical behavior. Materialism, mechanism, determinism, empiricism, phenomenalism, behaviorism, and the current neurosciences are interconnected. The other fundamental assumption is Darwinian evolution. In effect, human behavior is absolutely predictable, according to Michael Dennett.