Talk:Tree of Knowledge System/Expert article by Gregg Henriques

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Once the expert article is finished, it could go here. Tom Michael Mostly Zen (talk) 22:44, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

Initial comments

It is hard to overstate the importance of this article for the Psychology Wiki, providing as it does a guide towards one of our key aims of integrating the field. The key point for me is that it makes clear the category error at the heart of much thinking in psychology. We are not all dealing with the same stuff and a program of straightforward reductionism will fail. Hardware ((Neuroanatomy, biochemistry etc)) will take us so far, but without understanding that software (Meaning, meaning of meaning, language, metaphor, culture etc) need another level of discourse we will not make progress. The challenge is to work out how to negotiate the boundary and the reflexive properties of organic systems (such that hardware modifies software modifies hardware etc.). I think the wiki can go a long way in providing the tools to make these issues clearer by gathering all the references together, gathering the evidence into articles and then drawing these into an overall structure.Dr Joe Kiff - User:Lifeartist (talk) 09:24, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Comments by Keith Henson

I certainly agree that reductionism won't do it with anything based on biology where so many effects such as culture are emergent. I think (like Tooby and Cosmides) that evolution is the key that ties virtually everything based on biology together.

I.e., to answer a high level question about what conditions lead to war, you need to understand the stone age environment in which humans did most of their evolution and what psychological traits were favored by selection. More on this if anyone is interested. Hkhenson 20:14, 23 November 2007 (UTC)