For more about the “crystalline spheres”, the particular bit of foolishness I referred to earlier, see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_spheres

..and for where we are today on that topic:

http://www.universetoday.com/

It is tough to know where you are, if you don’t know where you’ve been.

The rules which describe and govern biochemical reactions also operate identically throughout all human individuals.

Wait a minute…. that’s incorrect? That’s what I’ve believed all these years.

Shows how little I know about the brain. I’d better read up.

“Ancient doctors believed that the womb could move about in a woman’s body, putting pressure on other organs and so causing serious illness, and even death… Tells about Egyptian beliefs of 1900 B.C.: a woman who was unwell was said to be “womby”… How could such diseases of the womb be cured?”

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/02/26/1996_02_26_194_TNY_CARDS_000373322#ixzz16GXULmMd

This, from Wikipedia:

“Plato’s dialogue Timaeus tells of the uterus wandering throughout a woman’s body, strangling the victim as it reaches the chest and causing disease. This theory is the source of the name, which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus, hystera (ὑστέρα).”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria

I can see it now: “The top 7 scientific theories (that were later proven false)”

To tie in with Anon#29, science should not be a finger-pointing exercise, it’s to be a test of accuracy, proper analogy, and consistency. Which is (perhaps, maybe) how the brain works, go figure.

We are working to build a set of analogies which do not conflict in anyway with the outside system. It’s important that incorrect theories are made, otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to test and theorize otherwise. Without failure, no progress can be made.

So, stop with the dualist nonsense, it gets us nowhere.

Now, back in the Golden Age of SF just about all the pulp stuff was based on theories that later turned out to be wrong: especially the aether. Here’s a challenge for all you writer types: pick your favourite discredited theory (preferably one that hasn’t already been done to death), create a universe where it’s true, and then see what kind of nifty extrapolations into technology and biology you can build into a story set in that universe.

A good mental exercise would be to take today’s accepted theories and do the same thing. If we see things that fall into the same pattern, maybe there’s something we should investigate further?

To sum up his response: Enlightened thinking and Rationality fail to describe what we now know about human thought and behavior in pretty much every way.

After decades of persevering through the university system, the only thing I can say is that true wisdom is always linked to humility, and the higher up you go in the scientific pyramid (generally) the more humility you find. The number of science undergraduates and graduates who enter the world thinking they have the secrets of the universe all tied up never ceases to depress me. What’s sadder is the number of mid-level academics who have the same arrogance.

In my career I have been lucky enough to collaborate with some at the very pinnacle of the pyramid, Nobel prize winners and those who are real leaders in their fields, and am always so astounded by their humility and sense of awe and wonder before the universe. These are guys who know how to hold ideas lightly, and know just how much we don’t understand. Sadly, for the vast majority of my scientific peers (and I probably have my days, too), most of the time is spent in sound and fury, and arrogance.

My field is geology, and consider this: most of what we now hold to be correct about geology is a result of the acceptance of plate tectonic theory – which happened around *1970*!

Before that, there were countless wild theories about just about every aspect of geology. And what’s great is that geology is a field where artistic depictions of land forms, the earth’s structure, and so on are frequent and necessary for clarity in publications. Some great stuff to be found in old geology books in your local university library.

And in what way is “enlightenment reason” a statement of reality, a scientific proposition capable of experimental proof, such that it is which is capable of being called a “false theory”.

In other words, “enlightenment reason” is NOT, itself, a scientific theory.
IMHO, Prof. Lakoff does not know what he’s talking about.

Actually what was told in the EDGE comment by CHRISTIAN KEYSERS is not that specialised motor and visual brain areas do not exist but that some neurons (labelled as ‘mirror’ neurons) in other areas that those primary cortices were identified as responding similarly when a monkey performed an action and saw an operator perform the same goal-oriented action.

The funny part is that this discovery – which as said in the EDGE comment challenged the theories linking action to perception – proved quite popular and led to a whole lot of enthusiastic extrapolations (mirror neurons as basis for everything from romantic love to financial crisis), on which skepticism would have to be applied now.

Thinking about this and other situations such as when genetic mapping was thought to solve everything, I wonder how much people jumping on a new experimental result or concept to force it into whatever gap lies in their own constructs could create or stabilise wrong beliefs.

By what measurements is it known, or its effects evidenced?

“Enlightenment reason” is not a scientific theory, but a political one, as it has ever been: and Lakoff is not making an argument about science and the validity of its specific theories: but trying to argue politics, on the basis that “science” PROVES his political opinion to be correct.

But I’d like to know what the theory of enlightenment reason predicts, not what it claims: for a scientific theory makes predictions as to the measurable shape of nature.

I don’t think that “enlightenment reason” is itself a “scientific theory”, so as to be falsifiable, or to be even capable of being called “proven” or “dis-proven”.

As a concept, it does not itself bear those qualifiers. It is a method of thought: not a scientific theory of thought.

Per perceiving predilection’s effect,
researchers search precautions
to assure that their constructed theories
won’t be wrecked by accredited critics
who abjure results
from lax experimentation which
funnels too few affecting factors.
Scientists’ psyches lack isolation –
all audiences are also actors.
Objectivity varies
with the minds involved
whose realities rarely budge;
what one expects to see
is what one finds.
One must watch “blind”
to impartially judge –
so data’s distinct
from observations which
bind to belief’s anticipations.

SURVIVAL OF THE WITLESS
— James Ph. Kotsybar

When fire, water, earth and air were thought
to be the elementals that composed
all matter, folks did not become distraught
at what avant-garde chemists then proposed.

Most understand that our world is a sphere
(with only one natural satellite);
no matter where folks sail they do not fear
they’ll reach Earth’s edge and fall into the night.

Most even have embraced that time’s not fixed
and have adopted relativity.
So why should folks’ beliefs remain so mixed
about evolution’s activity?

Abundant evidence supports this view,
yet institutions argue it’s not true.

Later, others make more observations that the theory fails to explain, and somebody has to come up with a new theory. Sometimes they revise or revamp the old one; sometimes they replace it wholesale.

Neither the old theory nor the new one is Right or Wrong. The new one is merely provides a better explanation of the now-expanded observations.