The Autistic Nature of Secular-Humanist Philosophy
This item is by Wilf Gaunt. In Lone Frank's book 'Mindfield ,' she describes how, in conversation with the (superstar) neuroeconomists Colin Camerer and George Loewenstein, they reformulated Plato's old metaphore: comparing the human mind to a chariot drawn by two horses, one representing reason, the other emotion. This is true enough they said, with the important difference that reason should be represented by a pony, and emotion by an elephant. The book then goes on to point out that reason cannot be put into practice without the involvement of emotion: emotion being the primary driving force of our system, inherited through evolutionary time, and reason being a more recent, subordinate application. Autism can be defined as a malfunction of the connection between the reasoning part of the brain and the origins of our emotions. No matter how high the IQ of an autistic person, their attempts to apply the results of their reasoning fall apart because of the non-invo...