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everyday events are subject to perceptual ambiguity and its attendant variety of
interpretations, mystical union is claimed to bring the existence and meaning of
Absolute Reality into direct experience. This kind of knowing is more akin to the
Platonic view of mathematics, that theorems have been everlastingly existent, from
before our physical world, then it is to the here and now, physically based, finite
computations involving the experimental machines of physics.
The philosopher-mathematician father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl,
criticized the physics-want-to-be orientation of the 1860 empirical, objective
measure psychologies of Fechner and Wundt. He understood the best of their
findings as simply correlations between subjective and observable events. Using
mathematical discoveries as examples, Husserl spent his life arguing for the
possibility of abstract truths relevant to mind being more reliable and valid if grasped
via direct experience. Knowing by what the popular mid-twentieth century writer of
science fiction, Robert Heinlein, called grocking it. This is antithetical to the attitudes
of today’s human cognitive and brain sciences which disallow such knowing as
deeply suspect unless accompanied by objectively definable observables such as
changes in electrical or imaging indices of brain activity in one neural region or
other. The modern psycholinguistics of brain mechanics can be _ called
neolocationism. Using modern technology to measure regional blood flow, energy
metabolism and/or electrovoltage or magnetic field activity, stories of function are
spun that closely resemble those imagined more than a century ago by the first
locationists, such as Ramon Cajal. These neuroanatomists spent thousands of
hours looking at cell clusters and their connections in stained slides of human brain
tissue using microscopes and imagined their singular and integrated function.
Today, Lewis Judd, long time chairperson of the Department of Psychiatry at
UCSD in La Jolla, carries a full sized, polymeric, three-dimensional model of the
human brain when teaching his students about human subjective experience and
interpersonal behavior. In his weekly grand rounds, he explains that day’s
psychiatric patient’s problems pointing here and there at regions in this plastic
surrogate for our electrical jellied brain. Few, if any, of the psychiatry students in his
class was inclined to ask the foundational question: how it is that a finger point and
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