Re: Kurt Godel: Unpublished Philosophical Essays, by F. A. Rodriquez-Consuegra and Kurt Godel

From: Kent Paul Dolan (xanthian_at_well.com)
Date: 05/08/04 

Date: Sat, 8 May 2004 17:05:27 +0000 (UTC)

"Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@yahoo.com> wrote:

Ah, the second, sycophantic member of the Bobsy Twins of
Behavioralism chimes in to join the crossposted chorus of
abject stupidity trashing out newsgroups profoundly not
interested in the discussion, and particularly not in the
rantings of behavioralists on the Essays of Goedel. Why
am I not surprised.

> KD: 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.

Someday, with your infinite mental prowess, Glen, you might
learn how to format a Usenet reply, just as a proof in
concept that the material between your ears has any purpose
but to keep them from crashing together with a loud, brass
*clang* that would unduly startle the starlings. Among the
more firm guidelines for posting formatting is _not_ to
include 163 lines of material to which you were not
replying, you bandwidth wasting vandal. I believe you have
received instruction from me on this matter in the past,
proving you to be untrainable as well. Does this mean you
are still swaddled in diapers, too, or is your incontinence
restricted to the verbal variety?

> GS: Wrong, as usual, Commander Serotonin.

Do you even know what seratonin _is_, flatliner? Its lack in
your nervous system would go far toward explaining your
equal lack of demonstrated rational thought.

> Longley doesn't have any problem with the notion that
> physiology mediates behavioral function

How sad that he failed to make any such claims himself. Does
he depend upon you to assure that his idiocy follows the
proper party line, when he has no idea what that line is?

> (and neither do I for that matter). Nor did Skinner. What
> we both argue is that "mental" terms like beliefs,
> desires, goals etc. etc. etc. can't be used to build a
> successful science of behavior*,

How sad for you that behaviors _do_ follow in many cases
from intensions, then, and that intensions are so far
reasonably immune to unambiguous verification. How much
sadder for you that the progress of science is rapidly
approaching making the latter weakness untrue.

> and they certainly can't be used to tie physiology to
> behavior.

Mental lapses like that make it worth asking from just which
cereal box you were granted your PhD. If intensions are
encoded in the material brain, like any other mental
constructs are, (and I'd be _delighted_ to hear from you any
opposite hypotheses as to where they find existence) then it
follows as dawn and dusk in cycle that the chain physiology
=> intensions => behavior is a causal one. Your inability to
measure it is merely an argument from ignorance when used to
claim that it therefore does not exist.

> It would be inappropriate NOT to defer to Kandel on
> certain issues, just as it is inappropriate TO defer to
> him on certain others.

In particular the ones where you and your Luddite
compatriots attempting to stop all progress in the
understanding of mind find his science threatening to your
psuedoscience, I expect. I suggest you make the attempt to
extend your humility considerably farther, you are nowhere
close to having achieved a suffiency of humility yet.

> His work has almost nothing to do with the fanciful
> metaphors of storage and retrieval, and the proof is that
> if he simply referred to the changes in Aplysia AS
> changes, nothing would change, and the significance of his
> work would remain.

Strange that he chose to do otherwise, and was heralded
world-wide as a scientist of the first caliber as a result,
while you, chosing an opposite tack, are reduced to shouting
"me too" to the sad attempts of David Longley to redeem a
failed career and life, then, isn't it. Pathos has become
bathos with hardly a ripple to remark the change.

> Understanding this is not, speaking
> colloquially, beyond your "intellect;" you're simply not
> intellectually honest enough to accurately represent his
> position.

Never, to this point, having read a single word written by
Kandel, I may perhaps be forgiven for a failure to
"represent his position". Unlike your common habit, I make
every attempt _not_ to conduct arguments from ignorance as
if my ignorance of some fact settled the issue of its
existence.

> *I can't speak for Longley here,

Oh, really? You had no reluctance at all mere
virtual-moments ago to blather on as if your seat of
Longly-sycophancy were within his very skull, in just these
words:

.> Longley doesn't have any problem with the notion that
.> physiology mediates behavioral function

> but I would say mental terms were once frank references to
> behavior (eg, "intend" and "attitude" etymologically
> suggest something about the postures of those with,
> hehehe, certain inclinations), and there is a sense in
> which they still are.

Sorry to say, your little jest completely escaped me. I
suspect I am far better off for having missed it.

> We still apply mental terms on the basis of behavioral
> observations but, when asked about it, we have a
> repertoire foisted upon us by academic philosophy.

How sad that your thesis fails utterly in face of the
existence of the Jungian school of psychology, which most
assuredly took its notions of intent from study of the
subject matter, not from the instructions of higher
authority.

xanthian.

Try to remember, Glen, you are being torn to intellectual
shreds by a _math major_. Recourse by you to obscure terms
of art will be ridiculed as inability to express yourself
in clear simple English prose, not admired as evidences of
great scholarship. 

-- 
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