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JONAHS_WHITMAN

                                             January 15, 2012

Lehrer's first chapter is about
Walt Whitman, where Lehrer                                JONAHS_COOKIE
takes Whitman's rejection of
the mind-body dichotomy and            Whitman believed that
asserts that this was a major          the self *is* the body.
disagreement with a popular
pseudo-science of the day:
phrenology.

This seems peculiar, because while
I'm willing to believe that the          Is it possible that Lehrer is
phrenologists of the 1800s had a         conflating two ideas?
rationale based on a separation of
mind and body; it's hard to see          (1) mind vs body & matter vs spirit
why that should be fundamental to        (2) brain vs body: brain is mind
the practice--
                                               Even if (1) is wrong (2)
                                               can still be right...

                                                   Though for (1) to be
                                                   right, (2) must be wrong.


   Some phrenological notions:
                                                 Note: I had to crib
     o  The brain is the organ of the mind.      from wikipedia to
                                                 look up the doctrine
          An exaggeration, but not *that*        of phrenology.
          far off.  E.g. a malady of the
          gut will certainly affect the             Lehrer doesn't actually
          mind, but not as badly as a               say that much about it,
          malady of the brain.                      and that's a real flaw:

     o  Different regions of the brain have         A good intellectual
        different functions.                        history really needs
                                                    to cover the dead
          Not bad, really, though it's              ends, the ideas that
          taken some work to figure out             were once-popular but
          which regions do what, and there          are now abandoned.
          isn't as much specialization as was
          once expected.                                It can be hard work
                                                        to wrap your brain
     o  Well-exercised functions of the brain           around them, but that's
        produce larger regions (sub-organs?)            one reason it's
        associated with them...                         important: you get
                                                        a different perspective.
          Well no, but such regions may show more       How did people see
          "wrinkling" reflecting more neurons and       before we learned to
          neural connections.  Perhaps: "half-wrong".   see the way we do?

     o  These larger sub-organs can be perceived
        through the skull as bumps on the head.

          Now *this* is simply wrong, but it's
          wrong because of an absence of
          empirical evidence for this
          relationship, not on any theoretical        And if phrenology
          objection to the underlying ideas.          worked, that might be
                                                      used as evidence
               The now acknowledged                   *against* the
               fact that phrenology is                mind-body dichotomy,
               a pseudo-science does                  not in favor of it:
               nothing to prove                       personality traits
               Whitman's brilliance.                  would correspond to
                                                      physical ones.

            So, on page 3 of the book,
            we already find Lehrer
            saying some dubious things.



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