Learning is a biological process. As is thinking.
Whenever you learn something, there has been a change to your brain — the organ of learning and thought. Psychologists have described the fundamental element as a change to a neuron’s threshold for firing (more likely group of neurons). But there is more to it than that.
Inject the right chemicals into a person’s brain and he/she will be incapable of forming new memories, of learning anything new. A stroke that damages particular areas of the brain will accomplish the same.
Want to alter a person’s thought processes? Mess up the biology of their brain.
More and more research is confirming the conclusion that “mind” and “body” (which includes the fleshy, wrinkled organ in the skull) are not two separate things.
One recent example went by this title: Experience Shapes the Brain’s Circuitry Throughout Adulthood
My initial response was Well . . . yah. Of course. Still, the study provides yet more information about how animal brains work. In this case, mouse brains.
[N]eurons responsible for receiving input from a mouse’s whiskers shift their relationships with one another after single whiskers are removed. The experiments explain how the circuitry of a region of the mouse brain called the somatosensory cortex, which processes input from the various systems in the body that respond to the sense of touch, can change.
It seems to me that to assume mind and body are two separate and separable things is akin to assuming that what happens to/in a computer’s circuitry and what happens on the screen are simply parallel phenomena.
Your thinking — it’s physical.
July 1st, 2010 at 10:46 am
Whenever I learn something there has been a change to my brain?
As opposed to what? What things do I do or think where there are no changes to my brain?
The weakness of this reductionist program is that no objects can be identified by it. It is only through the concept of learning that learning changes to the brain, even the brain itself, can be constructed arbitrarily out of matter.
July 1st, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Yes, John, whenever you learn something there has been a change to your brain. As opposed to the notion that “thought” and “mind” are phenomena divorced from the physical.
And there you go in that last paragraph . . . simultaneously saying a lot while saying nothing relevant here on planet Earth.
While your blathering may make a whole lot of sense to you, it strikes me as tangential and inconsequential.
Something like this: “John, because you use letters in your argument, and letters are mere symbols, what you are saying has no inherent meaning. Therefore, point for me.”
July 1st, 2010 at 7:19 pm
The brain is changing all the time. How do we know when a brain-change is specifically about learning? Not from the brain, but from a description of a learning.
That is why, if everything is physical (reductionism), then no brain-objects can be identified.