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Old May 9th, 2006, 12:29 PM
Fred H. Fred H. is offline
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Default Cognitive Mechanisms, Ugly Babies, Wind & Winning

Back in 12/2000 I came across this forum and a 2/99 JimB post entitled, “Cognitive Mechanisms and the Bucket of Mush,” wherein Jim suggested, among other things that, “… cognitive therapy [CT] is simple minded stuff that reproduces because it works independently of context and it is fed by trends in modern health care.” Liking what I read, I made my first post here regarding my view (based on my understanding of LeDoux, Damasio, etc.) regarding the separateness of emotion and cognition, and how Cognitive Therapy (CT) generally fails to make this necessary distinction, starting with these paragraphs:
Quote:
Emotion and cognition are separate phenomena from separate neural systems. This is similar to the separateness of physical pain and cognition. CT fails to make this necessary and critical distinction.

Emotions (moods/feelings) are generated by evolutionarily old subcortical emotional systems. Cognition is a product of evolutionarily new cortical systems. A result of evolution is that emotion influences cognition to a far greater extent than cognition influences emotion. CT also fails to make this critical distinction….
JimB began his reply to my initial comment, regarding the separateness of emotion and cognition, with, and I quote: “NOPE! NOPE! NOPE!” It went downhill from there, JimB expanding on what he suggested were fundamental flaws in my various arguments. Then Todd, and a “Heather,” more or less piled on (although Todd, of course, tended to be his typical gentle self).

Essentially I was being told that my baby was ugly . . . and I was elated, having found a “psychology” forum where the participants didn’t feel a need to blow wind up each other’s ass, as many are often wont to do in these kinds of forums/discussions. (Although, as it turned out in my case, it does seem that my initial assertions/arguments were more or less correct after all, something my critics may still be disinclined to acknowledge.)

Anyhoo, as I see it, this forum isn’t about “winning” arguments, or any of this “win-win” feel-good nonsense—rather it’s more a place where you have an opportunity to provide snapshots of your issue, enabling others to then evaluate and explain what they see as defects in your, more than likely, bastardised offspring; and for those that really want to know, maybe they experience a bit of evolution.
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Old May 12th, 2006, 07:34 PM
James Brody James Brody is offline
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Default Re: Cognitive Mechanisms, Ugly Babies, Wind & Winning

Fred,

I get embarrassed whenever you remember what I wrote. (but thanks!) And, my own toy-collection has done a "Rudy Raff" number: duplicate, compartmentalize, vary, and launch new developmental, weakly-linked cascades. (See Russian posting)

Anyhew...

Would you buy the idea that thoughts reflect competiting "modules" and that CBT works by switching the underlying modules?

Indignation, fear of separation, hierarchy, and entrapment: these are the biggies that escort folks to my office....

Jim
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Old May 13th, 2006, 02:22 PM
Fred H. Fred H. is offline
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Default Re: Cognitive Mechanisms, Ugly Babies, Wind & Winning

Quote:
JimB: Would you buy the idea that thoughts reflect competing "modules" and that CBT works by switching the underlying modules?

Indignation, fear of separation, hierarchy, and entrapment: these are the biggies that escort folks to my office....

[from Rusian post]: . . nature works in modules whether quarks, macromolecules, clumps of DNA, or human instinct. Like any child with a set of Legos, we achieve vast combinatorial power when we rearrange our blocks. Nature realized this trick first.
It seems to me that there exists an inescapable duality in our world—in computers we see hardware and software; and in humans we see matter and coding, some of which requires more than just algorithmic processes (since human understanding, unlike computer computation, isn’t constrained by Godel’s incompleteness theorem).

Your “modules” don’t seem to make a distinction between matter and coding. As computer hardware requires software to function, human matter requires coding to function, and to “understand.” And as computers can have hardware or software problems, humans can have biochemical or mentality problems—and as adding memory (hardware), or upgrading the software, may help a computer function better, taking an SSRI (matter), or doing CBT (upgrading the coding), may help a human function better.

OTOH, as things become more complex, I suppose the distinctions between hardware and software, biochemistry and coding, become less apparent. And really, maybe it all boils down to Max Planck’s POV: “There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”

So anyhoo, setting aside my inclination to make distinctions between matter and mentality, and if by “modules” you mean modules consisting of matter and coding, then yeah, I can see where thoughts reflect competing "modules" and that CBT works by altering the underlying modules.

And I might add that it is with our cognition in CBT that we humans are choosing, perhaps with the help of a therapist, to alter underlying modules—or we may choose to alter those underlying modules with drugs instead.
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