I wonder if I'm alone in finding this presentation of a fascinating topic to be a touch condescending, as well as unconvincing on at least a couple of points. First, regarding the bit about facial...
I wonder if I'm alone in finding this presentation of a fascinating topic to be a touch condescending, as well as unconvincing on at least a couple of points.
First, regarding the bit about facial expressions being socially constructed to have certain meanings. Isn't there a body of research establishing those associations as innate and unlearned? One of the commenters on the video mentions them as an ancient function of the limbic brain, and that tallies with things I've read in the past.
Also to distinguish between the brain constructing a model of the body, as opposed to a model of the world, maybe I'm just not following. Surely the brain evolved specifically to support interactively modeling the world, not the body in some kind of isolation; such a model is crude and imperfect to be sure, and much entangled with metaphoric and subjective content, but it's a model of the world nonetheless, or some part of the world in relation to and including the body; that's why it is useful for finding food and mates, avoinding predators and so on. So I don't know if I'm misconstruing the point here, or missing something.
I think her point may have been a bit more towards the beginning of the video. She mentions the debate of "Do we experience the stark truth of reality?" According to the rest of it she doesn't...
I think her point may have been a bit more towards the beginning of the video. She mentions the debate of "Do we experience the stark truth of reality?" According to the rest of it she doesn't seem to agree that we do, as all we have is inference from our senses and past experience, so we have a model of what reality is, but we can't know for certain if it's the correct model.
I wonder if I'm alone in finding this presentation of a fascinating topic to be a touch condescending, as well as unconvincing on at least a couple of points.
First, regarding the bit about facial expressions being socially constructed to have certain meanings. Isn't there a body of research establishing those associations as innate and unlearned? One of the commenters on the video mentions them as an ancient function of the limbic brain, and that tallies with things I've read in the past.
Also to distinguish between the brain constructing a model of the body, as opposed to a model of the world, maybe I'm just not following. Surely the brain evolved specifically to support interactively modeling the world, not the body in some kind of isolation; such a model is crude and imperfect to be sure, and much entangled with metaphoric and subjective content, but it's a model of the world nonetheless, or some part of the world in relation to and including the body; that's why it is useful for finding food and mates, avoinding predators and so on. So I don't know if I'm misconstruing the point here, or missing something.
I think her point may have been a bit more towards the beginning of the video. She mentions the debate of "Do we experience the stark truth of reality?" According to the rest of it she doesn't seem to agree that we do, as all we have is inference from our senses and past experience, so we have a model of what reality is, but we can't know for certain if it's the correct model.