Steven Pinker Post

1. The text from Pinker’s article I selected is as follows: “all of our experiences, thoughts, feelings, yearnings, and emotions consist of physiological activity in the tissue of the brain.”


I selected this because above all else in the world I believe in the brain. Before I believe in love or joy, anger or evil, rationality or violence as concepts, I believe that the human brain is the source and arbiter of them as a physiologic process. We may judge and name them a certain way, but each word I listed exists without a label in our cortex and did before language.

2. This underlies a rather important distinction I will try to present.


Why is okay to call someone a “bodybuilder” and not acceptable to call someone a “schizophrenic”?

The answer lies in pathology. A body builder has made an informed decision about a reversible lifestyle choice and is able to attenuate the degree to which it permeates and controls their life. A person with schizophrenia does not control their condition, as such they should not receive a social label. If a person’s brain produces emotions such as depression, recognizing that depression stems from a chemical source can allow a diagnosis to be dissected away from a person’s conscious and purposeful choices. With enough work, mental health issues could fall away from defining a person much in the same way that people do not think to call someone a hypertensive when their bp is too high by folding them into the group of conditions we consider “normal.” I do recognize the danger in this path, as pointed out in the link between condition and economics section of the keyword document. It seems to be a very fine line between distributing off label non-FDA approved homeopathics that harm patients and profiting from people who have been pushed onto the ferris wheel of conditions you can pay to treat.

3. I am acting out the science wars by accepting a narrow biological view of “being.” I have taken “I think therefore I am” and made it into “I am my brain and my brain is me.” What is fascinating to me is that the blank slate ideology fails when one considers the genetic component of health, but it is fully in effect when one considers the “nurture” effects of the environment. As everyone knows, the answer lies in between. I believe this extends elsewhere; the noble savage and leviathan concepts appear to be similar in how they must applied to the correct situation. Laws serving to deter people from crime may be a form of nurture, however no law can correct for a condition such as psychopathy. The answer of leviathan or noble savage must lie in the middle of the two.