You and Me by Susan Greenfield

Author:Susan Greenfield [Susan Greenfield]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910749296
Publisher: Notting Hill Editions
Published: 2016-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Note that the prerequisites of ‘sameness and continuity’ could be captured in the attitudes of the incipient young drug-taker or the blogger whom we met earlier. However, if that consistency and uniformity nonetheless involves, as we’ve just concluded it must, interaction and participation of the individual with the outside world, then what consistent factor or phenomenon will determine what those responses, real or imagined, might be? Erikson talks of ‘acquired ideals’ and ‘values offered’: so personal ‘values’ must be important to identity. Erikson also mentions ‘available roles’ in relation to, for example, occupation, friendships or sexual encounters. So ‘roles’ will join ‘values’ on our shopping list of additional key factors important for the subjective feel of identity. Let’s look at each in turn.

A value – say, whether something is good or bad – is based on specific beliefs. These beliefs will come from personal experience: witness the famous Jesuit promise, ‘Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.’ Early experience is most likely to leave its mark most powerfully on a young brain that is processing early information unconditionally, without the retaliatory checks and balances of the existing connections and associations that would typically characterise the adult mind. Yet as the young individual starts to ‘understand’, to see one thing in terms of something else, to connect what is happening to them as each moment of consciousness unfolds, that understanding of each individual event will generalise into a wider ‘understanding’. In this way, information is converted into knowledge and knowledge into ‘wisdom’, the monopoly traditionally of those who are older. Implicit in the concept of wisdom, are values that go beyond mere passive understanding – and when values too are generalised, there is a belief. For example, a man might evaluate a particular woman as stupid; if this unfortunate event occurs again and again, he would develop the belief that all women were stupid.

The concept of a belief system still presents a formidable challenge to scientific inquiry. Theology and philosophy provide a conceptual framework for thinking about belief systems, and identifying conceptually fruitful ways of relating the relevant notion of belief to different levels of scientific description. Anthropology identifies general patterns of belief acquisition and maintenance that hold universally, as well as distinguishing features of belief systems that are culture-specific. Psychology offers an array of measurement tools that allow us both to quantify various dimensions of belief and to correlate these with broad personality characteristics (e.g., spirituality) that are likely to echo stable neural properties. The combined results of these disciplines thus prepare the ground for neuroscience to identify the neural correlates of belief systems.

Because the scope of this essay prevents any substantial excursions into these different disciplines, we shall need to restrict ourselves to a definition of beliefs based on the agenda of a scientist such as myself, bred on empirical refutation or validation. While, by definition, no belief can be proven, we can nonetheless think of a highly variable and hypothetical potential provability in each case.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.