Mindreading and Misperceptions

The woman who cut my hair this morning told me a story. She cut a guy's hair, she said, really short, and everytime she saw him at the bus stop he was wearing a hat. She assumed he hated his haircut and felt really bad for months, until he made another appointment with her. When she asked him about the hat, he shrugged and said simply: "My head gets cold."

Biological Determinism

I often accuse my friend Rob of being a biological determinist, mostly because of his predilection for biological (chemical/neurological/electric/synaptic) explanations of thoughts, feelings, etc. . My arguments are more faith-based, believe it or not. I just find the biological explanations banal, unpoetic, and just not fun, and I simply don't want to believe that everything we are is determined by mechanical processes. TI argue that we can't boil everything down to simple mechanical processes, that there's so much we don't understand and that it's naive to believe that we ever will understand the big mysteries of life. I must confess, though, that I make a bit of a straw man out of him when I do this, as I know he doesn't really believe in such a simplistic model. The funny thing is I just realized he does the same to me. The impasse we've had over the last several years is that I at first unintentionally and then more craftily ascribed these view to Rob, but he has assumed I believe that chemistry, etc., has NO effect, which, of course, is silly. Truth is, we're probably much closer in opinion than either of us likes to believe. I suspect we're both about 60/40 in opposite directions.

All this came up for me just now because of this article in Edge about the neurology of self-awareness, and the fact that I have been talking to some people lately who have great knowledge of evolutionary psychology, etc. I don't know. I don't have the answers, but I love the questions. When it comes down to it, I don't know if this is an either/or or a both. Maybe just different models of explaining the same things.