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The last link wasn't a refutation or response to Hare's research, it was a different METHODOLOGY of doing research. I wanted to contrast the _methodology_.

And no, people are NOT born with mental disorders due to environmental factors, they are born with NEUROLOGICAL disorders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurological_disorders

The two musn't be confused.




And no, people are NOT born with mental disorders due to environmental factors, they are born with NEUROLOGICAL disorders

What is the difference? At some level, all "mental" (i.e, psychological) disorders are neurological.


That's my point of view, and why I think we should look at interesting _neuroscience_ research (which I consider the true science).

As it stands now, they are considered to be fundamentally different (thanks to Descartes and dualism), which is why you have psychiatrists\diagnostic-psychologists as a completely separate field from neurology.


which I consider the true science

That there is a dangerous, dogmatic attitude that I suggest you lose. And I say this as a neuroscience buff myself.


You wouldn't agree there that some fields are more scientific than others? Is physics not more of a science than mechanical engineering? Is linguistics not more of a science than english? Is logic\mathematical analysis not more of a science than philosophy?

Abstracted fields are useful because they can be practical and an application of knowledge. That doesn't make them natural science. I say this not as a "buff" but as someone whose primary in university was cognitive science and has done their fair share of hooking people up to EEGs.


No, a surprising number of psychologists (dating back to B.F. Skinner, who you might like) reject the idea of the mind and view psychology as some kind of black-box experimental science focusing on animal behavior.


B.F. Skinner still holds on to a dualist framework. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AepqpTtKbwo (3:00m)

In this video you can see him still using internal and external seperate. Behaviorism to him means the direction of causality is external to internal and it contrasts it to the notion of free-will, where the direction is internal to external. He doesn't completely reject the notion of the metaphysical, just the importance of it, otherwise there would be no black box in his black-box experimental science. Behaviorism gets pretty boring when you can't study thoughts or ideas.

Non-dualism posits that what we associate with the mind does exist, and it exists in the same manner or plane of existence as everything else. Basically, a thought or idea or emotion physically exists in the same sense that a rock, river, or black hole does. Studying the brain and neurons is the study of thoughts and ideas. Evidence in neuroscience heavily supports non-dualism, and there is a lot of awesome information you can read. I submitted a John Searle video from the IBM Cognitive Computing lecture series, it didn't get picked up but a link is here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3295448672203577230...


There are actually two forms of non-dualism: materalism and idealism. One is that everything lives in the material world and the other is that everything lives within the world of thought. For various reasons, materialism is the only non-dualism scientists give credence to.

Skinner's a materialist, too. He may reject emotions, thoughts, and free will as fiction, but that's because there was, at his time, no scientific evidence for them. Neurology may have changed that, and so in fact may have continued behavioral research. (I suspect there are behavioral studies which would have shown a consistent "internal state" factor to animal behavior, for instance.)


Curious. My psychopathology course always emphasized a diathesis-stress model. Their position was that "mental disorders" are functionally defined behaviors involving biological, emotional, and social factors in varying degrees.




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