Your statistical summation regarding who have been helped and who have been harmed by an effort to apply Freudian principles doesn't sound like it came from a survey. Furthermore attributing the model to the therapy is like blaming those who dies from leeching on Harvey. The abuses of Freudian approaches are entirely independent of the question of the mind, its nature, and its structure; and lumping them together is simply illogical.

I would like to add that the rationale of taking physical methods of proof and applying them to all phenomena as a sole criteria, and then rejecting phenomena and explanations that rest on the premise that there may be vectors or functions involved that operate outside those ranges because they do not meet that criteria, is perhaps the most circular piece of Byzantine reasoning I have seen. Reminds me of a foo bird.

Furthermore, I was not speaking to the subject of "Mind", as you put it, in the first instance. I don't believe that the major point I have been speaking from has sunk in yet. Nor do I expect that it will.

Your somewhat veiled implication that I am "positing the unprovable" sounds, certainly, like a resounding condemnation of a flawed logical process. But "contradiction is a necessary part of life" as a principle sounds like another, more flawed one, once marketed to the world labeled as dialectic materialism, a key element of the philosophical architecture which informed Marxism.(1)

Regardless, what you are saying -- that one should not call on unprovable or extraordinary elements to account for phenomena if simpler or more demonstrable explanations can be used to account for them -- is sound pragmatic thinking indeed. As soon as you come up with a provable example of a group of wires and switches having an intention, a realization, an actual perception or understanding, I will be delighted to agree with your didactic and supercilious instruction on good scientific reasoning. I will refrain from offering similarly wiser advice about teaching grandmothers to suck eggs. It is as great a flaw to ignore evidence in defense of an old paradigm, as it is to ignore evidence in promoting a new one.

Ask Harvey(2) and Ignaz Semmelweiss about the cost of seeking better models and better results. Semmelweiss -- who dramatically reduced maternity ward childbed mortality by making doctors wash their hands when they came in from other wards -- was eventually run out of town (Vienna) despite saving lives in significant numbers. Harvey flew in the face of ancient established wisdom dating back to the era of Galen the Greek about the tides and humours of the blood and ductless glands. He suggested circulation, valves and pumps. He was almost laughed out of the Academy, except that he came from highly priveleged family, but one of the resounding quotes from a pompous Academy member has survived: "I would rather err with Galen than to be found right with Harvey."

Where do you suppose these cognitive filters in highly qualified, trained, keen-minded intellects comes from? How does this come about? Any ideas? Can you spell "turf"? Or is that too uncharitable an interpretation?

Regards,

A

(1)http://www.uta.edu/english/cgb/marx/dmaterialism.html
(2)http://www.lucknow.com/horus/etexts/hallexpt.html