Thursday, 9 August 2007

Description of Luana Model in failed submission to Plastic.com

I wrote out a thing this morning that, as silly as it sounds, is trying to be a unified theory. I would like to present it to Plastic, which is the only place I've ever been able to turn for honest analysis of current issues.
I don't have any credentials, so I'm sorry if that's a deterrent for some of you. I graduated a few weeks ago from Harvard with a degree in Psychology and a 3.5 GPA; I wasn't an outstanding student at all. I just took introductory courses in pretty much every subject I could: psychology, computer science, philosophy of identity and self, Confucianism, behavioral neuroscience, mechanics and relativity, music theory, linear algebra, ethics, and history. I also worked briefly in the memory laboratory of Daniel Schacter, doing fMRI of emotional and non-emotional memory processing. While my grades weren't great, I had the great opportunity to take classes or participate in conversations with some of the most respected scholars in the world: Steven Pinker, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Gilbert, Paul Davies, Louis Menand, Tu Weiming, Howard Gardner, Daniel Schacter, Hans Tutschku, David Hubel, Christof Koch, Ned Block, and other people who I've forgotten about. I hope that this didn't sound pretentious, but my only real credential is that I've heard all these people speak in person.
There are lots of troubles at the top of academia today. In science, there's the problem of the unified theory of everything in physics and the problem of consciousness in psychology. In all the humanities, there are tons of conflicts arising from analysis and theories. The Harvard Literature and English departments have deep rifts, the former emphasizing Literary Theory and the latter emphasizing close reading. The only person really making progress is Louis Menand, who puts it all together in his teaching and his writing, which integrates history, literature, and cultural studies. Taking a class with him allowed me to understand the importance of integration.
Now to my model. I'm traveling in Europe with my brother and sister right now, so I've had lots of time to observe and think, and very little time to write. Now as always, I'm paying for my internet connection. So it's all hastily done but, I think, on the right track.
The big problems in psychology are consciousness, memory, and language. They are supposed to be things that distinguish us from monkeys. I propose that (1) since there is no universal acceptable definition for consciousness, it must be a nonsense word, (2) language is the natural product of a big brain and highly refined speech control in our mouths, and (3) that all of the connections we make ARE memory. This is why it's impossible to "find" memories in the brain. I think that we learn everything, including language, simply by the process of Hebbian conditioning, and thus, that the Behaviorist psychologists were right all along. Learning a language is just making connections between sounds and things, and keeping those connections by repeating words. Learning a grammar is learning a way of reasoning or parsing the world, and we pick up grammar with pattern detection, which is what humans are really good at. My thought is that all languages (or at least the ones that spread) really do have a universal grammar, and that's Boolean logic, plus concepts for spacetime. We know that spacetime is one thing, but the fact that we use time and space words and treat them as coordinate systems makes us really believe in the past and the future and in a here/there distinction. All the great thinkers (I think) were able to really overcome the illusions of time, space, free will, and the self vs. other problem. If there is a unified theory in physics, my guess is that it's simple: it's impossible to distinguish any one thing from another, since the only thing that does the distinguishing is language. We give names to help parse the world, but everything is connected and interdependent. The great Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna, and to a lesser extent, the English philosopher Derek Parfit, understood this. Parfit anticipated huge repercussions for the whole self-interest theory of economics as a result, and that's exactly what's happening as economics merges with behavioral psychology and game theory. Wittgenstein also understood this, and he took the interesting position of advocating the use of "it" instead of "I" to avoid the self-other distinction.

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