so say the neurology folk started, more or less unquestioningly, with freud. i predict they'd find the id region; maybe they have. if they started with demon possession they'd find the demon regions etc. what you're detecting is only as good as the theory you bring to bear. say it's the dsm...
now, it's not that they're not seeing anything. and i actually think that at the more careful or open-minded levels they are starting to realize what i believe certainly to be the case: the systems are far far more connected than they might have thought. so, for example, i don't think that reason and emotion are separate functions or states or activities. now if you start with the presumption that they are - that is, you sort of start with some greek philosophy or something, on a superficial read - no doubt you'll find centers of animal irrationallity and centers of higher cognitive functions etc. oops that is a mistake: you started with a theory or a cultural nostrum or a star-trek spock v bones conceptual structure. but that's not to say that you couldn't learn something else if you really loooked without treating the distinction as a full-fledged unquestioned dogma. 'higher cognitive functions': in that phrase lurks an entire bourgeois value system or the part of the culture where the kids have to go to college, or something; or maybe it's just the pride of the ph.d. doing the research.
if you think there can be linguistic processing units in the human head that aren't at the same time rage processors or desire processors or visual and auditory procesors, i say you're tripping. not that there's a wire running between them: they just are not distinct. and if you just think of this whole thing as software running on hardware, i say you'll be working with an entirely different metaphor after awhile, like descartes thought of the whole thing in terms of hydraulic lifts, or when they figured it had to be a clockwork, or was a lot like a big industrial facility. i think - i want to say i know - that we are far more coherent and interconnected than that, and with the outside world, and that if there are modules we will find them not, you know, recapitulating descartes or an ethics where reason makes you good and animal instinct makes you bad and so forth. if it were science, you would not know what you were looking for, and you would not find what you expect. to study the human brain, you're going to have to think like an alien who hasn't absorbed, say, the presuppositions of western culture or latest fad in psychiatry. you're going to have to think like someone who never went to grad school...
