re: #421 Right Brain

Egads, one would have to eject the entire project of evolutionary psychology to accept this silly partition of configuration vs. communication. Yes, nature vs. nurture. Nice new package, same old, same old.

Actually, no. Such psychological predispositions as an avoidance of a visual cliff and a fear of snakes can well be products of long term environmental selection. But most of our ideas -whether true or not - have been communicated to us by others. As has the very language in which we apprehend them.

Here’s one for you, its the sentence that ended the enlightenment, from the Critique of Pure Reason (such as your attempt), said by Immanuel Kant:

“Everything perceived is located in space.”

Meme or configured?

First of all, it’s incomlete; everything perceived is located in spacetime, and unlike Kant’s illegitimate bifurcation of that seamless manifold into ‘space’ and ‘time’ because he was seduced by the predominance of spatiality in vision and the predominance of temporality in audition (even though both of those sensory modalities are spatiotemporal - taction, the most basic sensory modality, contains the aspects in equal measure).

And just because something can be memetically replicated does not render it true - or untrue. But the simpler lie tends to be more readily memetically replicated than the more complex truth. Which is why the belief in creationism tends to be such a vexingly pernicious phenomenon.