Philica — The journal of everything
While searching for OA journals I found a new journal Philica. If it works then it looks like it could be an affordable PLoSOne for the Humanities.
I want to be positive about the journal, I really do. Philica appears to take everything, and I like that. Even if it means a ridiculous paper on Intelligent Design in the Philosophy section. They also have open reviews, and I like that too. To an extent. The problem is that the reviews come after publication and when they arrive the publication is fixed. Some of the articles would have been so much better if they’d been reviewed before being published. The reviews come from bona-fide professional researchers, who are also often authors. So often the credibility of the reviews can be associated with the credibility of the reviewer’s own research. It’s a good idea. Or at least it will be if it can attract credible reviewers.
You can decide for yourself how likely this is by reading some of the articles and reviews.
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Oh, I like this article about Qi Men Dun Jia. So looking at the architecture of Beijing tells one something about a murder in California. That would trump the defense lawyers’ arguments that evidence was planted after the fact. It’s almost like being able to go back in time and watch the murder unfold, only instead of unfolding in the past, it unfolds in present-day Beijing, untouched by human hands. Now all you need is a court and 12 people on a jury who will go for that.
Of course it’s not real. I’m unapologetically ethnocentric enough to be sure of that, even if I am mystical in other ways that I trust. But it’s not that aspect of this that interest me most. What I find most interesting about this is how much this says about the power of symbolism and analogy in our brain.
It’s easy to understand the symbolism involved in our languages, but it can be hard to get a handle on how symbolic we are about everything, verbal and nonverbal. What symbols are involved in every part of our life, from what constitutes comfort food for us to which politicians we elect to what people we like to any choice we make about anything. I suppose some things I do on any given day are purely rational, but I’d bet the vast majority are influenced by some irrational symbolism just as bizarre as Qi Men Dun Jia.
What can one do with neuroimaging to study this? Unfortunately I’m too old and the research I once did on electrophysiology wasn’t good enough for me to have earned access to a functional MRI machine, so it’s pointless for me to speculate, except that I can convince myself that someday, hopefully in this century, it will be possible to say why anyone’s brain would accept trial by architecture as revealing something real. What is the evolutionary psychology of our accepting analogies as being real? We do that for both verbal and nonverbal analogies, as this topic points out. Do we just have to learn that our intuition always has to be tested?
Maybe that last one is correct. So how does one teach that to a population where everyone is trusting their intuition for something everyday?
It’s umm… special isn’t it? To be fair to the Philica system, it is marked at 78.8 for quality — which is below the average of 100.0
The question “What is the evolutionary psychology of our accepting analogies as being real?” is interesting. My quick response unsupported by any evidence here would be that often a quick answer is superior to a correct answer. Particularly if the question is something like “Is this situation likely to be fatal?” So the ability to build a quick rulebook may be useful in a hazardous environment. It wouldn’t have to be right, just right enough.
Yes, Alun, as respectful as I am toward replicated, double-blind, controlled trials, I’d much rather have my intuition than no insight at all.
For any topic in evolutionary psychology, what excites me about it is that we will soon know all 25,000 human genes, so eventually evolutionary psychology should be something perfectly concrete instead of being a matter of conjecture as so much of social science has been to this point. What genes contribute to intuition? It’s hard for me to imagine. We need genes to build our sensation, perception and cognition. I can imagine the proteins involved in that. Then does it take additional genes to go from perception to imagination or is imagination automatic once you have perception? If you have a system that maps the world outside me and inside me multiple times into my brain, do those maps automatically create hypothetical alternatives to reality or are specific genes necessary for us to be imaginative. People we perceive as imaginative might not have specific genes related to that. All of their thinking might be quicker or involve greater leaps in their associations from memory. Or maybe there are specific genes that only help imagination or only that subset of imagination fueled by symbolism and analogy.
There must be something different about those whose capacity for abstraction give them higher verbal IQ’s than mine. It doesn’t seem learned to me, though it’s hard to say. The way children learn language so easily, there should be some genes beyond basic perception, and the symbolism those genes allow may be just as nonverbal as verbal. It’s presumably genetic that cerebral hemispheres are very often lateralized with verbal abilities to the left.
Aside from exploring in a vague way like that, the best I can do today is to say I’ve recognized the power of analogy in my own life, as recently as substituting “trial by architecture” for a more complete description of Qi Men Dun Jia, but to say where such an analogy comes from, how one could facilitate it or suppress it, when it works well, and when it’s misleading is completely beyond my training in neuroscience, except to say that the concept of “garbage in, garbage out” is part of where intuition goes wrong. Yet symbolism is a very powerful ingredient in why people say what they say and do what they do. I think it would be powerful to understand it better.
So this century, I think, one will be able to at least say if we have genes that make our brain light up with an “aha” when we identify an analogy or if it is simply something we learn to do because it often works (given the story of language, I’d bet on the former, but what do I know?). Then we overdo it to where the symbolism doesn’t work any more, except by chance, like trial by architecture, but what is there to tell us it doesn’t work? I suppose culture steps in to compensate for biology’s deficiencies here as it does for other deficiencies.
Knowing genes will let us know where biology stops and culture starts. Until then I can imagine all sorts of things, but I can’t know if biology makes me imagine that or my culture. As I mentioned before, it could even be spiritual, something beyond culture. Maybe I was supposed to read about trial by architecture today. No, I don’t think so, but I wish I had something more than my intuition on that one.