Re: Kurt Godel: Unpublished Philosophical Essays, by F. A. Rodriquez-Consuegra and Kurt Godel

From: Kent Paul Dolan (xanthian_at_well.com)
Date: 05/07/04 

Date: Fri, 7 May 2004 13:44:40 +0000 (UTC)

"David Longley" <David@longley.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> No you woolly headed ape

You've started right off with your usual recourse to sweet
reason when an argument has exceeded your resources, I
notice, with my usual laughter at the shallowness of your
mind, David.

> you are not in the same league as Kandel and even Kandel
> is prone to say some silly things.

All the experts are wrong when they disagree with your
manifest idiocy? Why am I _so_ skeptical (and amused)?

Now people with fewer axes to grind seem to disagree with
you, and in fact to hold Kandel in rather high regard:

    "In the year 2000, the Nobel committee awarded the
    Prize for Physiology or Medicine to three
    neuroscientists, Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard, and
    Eric R. Kandel. Their research revealed basic
    processes at work in animal brains. Carlsson
    identified dopamine as at brain neurotransmitter.
    Greengard revealed the molecular cascade inside
    neurons initiated by the dopamine signal. Kandel
    realized that the molecular basis of learning should
    be studied in simple animal systems as the basis for
    understanding learning in human brains. He spent
    many years studying the nervous system of Aplaysia,
    the Moon Snail. His 1976 text _The Cellular Basis of
    Behavior_ can be considered a classic in the study
    of nervous systems."

http://www.nutramed.com/Philosophy/neuroscience.htm

But of course you are vastly allergic to the idea that
behavior can be tied to the detailed physical mechanisms
that trigger that behavior, being a "black box" psychologist
of the "adamant to the point of lunacy" persuasion, and so
can find it well within your pointless existence's bill of
rights to insult a Nobel laureate rather than demonstrate
the humility appropriate for a pathetic whining
non-contributor to science like you.

> You have no grasp of what is being done or said.

David, you take "no grasp" to heights the rest of us can
only crane our necks to admire.

>> BTW, did you see the latest Sci Am where Kandel is
>> mentioned as one of a who's who of neuroscientists that
>> are looking again at the work of Freud and how well his
>> theories map to what is known factually about brain/mind
>> now? Interesting article.

> No, I don't read popular science magazines!

Being so threatened as you are by any modern works, which
have the disagreeable habit of proving each of your claims
to be arrant nonsense, I'm sure your interest in the
writings of real scientists, popularized or in the original,
stopped cold at a spot some decades in the past, and you
stick to reading the backs of cereal boxes any more, so that
you can avoid those unpleasant encounters with modern
methods and understandings of the function of the human mind
as illuminated by direct physical investigation of the brain
in the process of implementing mind.

> Freud started his work in neurology. Go and read Freud's
> "Project". But before you do so, try to read some of
> Kandel's research first-hand, and try to grasp what he
> actually did and how he did it without treating it as a
> damned ink-blot!.

Wow! Everyone who gives deferrence to a world class expert
in the field (who happens to disagree with the all-knowing
"David Longley") is a mindless zombie True Believer, in your
opinion? Too bad you cannot grasp that the better
description is "well informed participant in an ongoing new
understanding of the workings of 'mind'".

> It is precisely because his "popularism" or "salesmanship"
> encourages idiots like you to infer no end of gibberish
> that Glen and I are so critical of what he (and others
> like him) are doing.

It couldn't have something to do with the fact that he is in
the forefront of science, making new discoveries that prove
you to be a bad imitation of a scientist, that arouses this
ire in you, instead? That he, by doing real science, is
getting all the fame and glory which you think you deserve
even though you contribute nothing of value to science?
A bit of jealousy or envy, in other words, driving your
inability to be happy for his success?

> You have no grasp of this, because you're an ignorant
> self-opinionated twit who doesn't know how to read
> science, and won't be told what's going on by those who
> can!

Certainly, with a proof by thousands of examples to the
contrary, this does not include one "David Longley",
contributor of nothing but mendacity, insult, and hot air.

Semir Zeki seems to have had precisely you and your ilk in
mind, when writing this in A Vision of the Brain:

    It is...fortunate that neurobiologists are not
    philosophers, for they might otherwise find
    themselves immersed, like the philosophers, in an
    endless and ultimately fruitless discussion of the
    meaning of words such as 'unconscious,' or
    'inference' or 'knowledge' and 'information' instead
    of trying to unravel important facts about the
    brain. They would, in brief, end up contributing as
    meagrely to an understanding of the brain and of the
    mind as philosophers have. This last point is not a
    trivial one for ultimately the problems that
    cortical neurobiologists will be concerned with are
    the very ones that have preoccupied the philosophers
    throughout the ages - problems of knowledge,
    experience, consciousness and the mind - all of them
    a consequence of the activities of the brain and
    ultimately only understandable when the brain itself
    is properly understood. The path toward the
    millennial future lies more with neurobiologists and
    some philosophers acknowledge this...It is only
    through a knowledge of neurobiology that
    philosophers of the future can hope to make any
    substantial contribution to understanding the mind.

as quoted in this document arguing in _favor_ of your
muddled viewpoint:

http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/05/53/bbs00000553-00/bbs.gold.html

Sadly, much like one of your epistles, I couldn't finish
that one, the process of setting up strawmen never included
in the writings of the authors whose ideas were being
disputed, against which to battle, was so nakedly obvious as
to be repulsive. Intellectual dishonesty among its
proponents does not lend your position much grace, David.

xanthian. 

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