(no subject)

I made this comment in challenging_god yesterday and wanted to record it here for posterity, and perhaps discussion.

It regards what I am calling "the Neoplatonist Fallacy."

The Neoplatonists believed that the things in the cosmos are like thoughts in the Mind of God. In their view, Mind is the most real substance; manifest form follows from Ideal (or Mental) form.

This is a fallacy, though, because of the way the human brain processes sensory input. Of course things when examined begin to take on the properties of mind, because that is the way the perceptual faculties in the brain break down sensory input.

For example, we have neural pathways that represent the cardinal numbers; a neuron for "one," an neuron for "two," a neuron for "three," and so on. We have neurons for recognizing circles, squares, triangles, etc. These things therefore seem "eternal" because they precede thought; they are central to our experience of the universe.

So naturally when we examine the universe, things appear to be patterned in intelligent ways. We have NO OTHER WAY of perceiving the universe.

Edit. What makes this so difficult to realize is the fact that sensory data is edited so that things seen or heard which do not fit easily into our pre-developed conceptualization pathways is discarded or ignored. Our mind overlooks a great deal of raw input from the outside world in order to quickly develop a real-time sense of the immediate surrounding. It can take a great deal of effort and conscious concentration to learn how to see outside of the neural censor.

(no subject)

For many years, researchers and educators alike believed that reading problems affect far more boys than girls, with boys suffering problems at rates as high as five to one. About 15 years ago, our research group at Yale decided to investigate the occurrence of reading problems in boys and girls. Using data from our ongoing Connecticut Longitudinal Study (CLS) of learning we, too, found that elementary schools indeed were identifying nearly four times as many boys as girls as having a reading disability. However, when we individually tested each child, we found comparable numbers of boys and girls are affected by reading problems.

School identification of a reading disability is dependent on teacher perceptions. ... According to their teachers, boys are more inattentive, more active and exhibit more behavioral and academic problems. Yet, despite such teacher reports of difficulties in the classroom, we found that boys and girls perform similarly on individual tests of reading and math.

Why are more boys identified by their schools? The answer is behavior. For example, boys who may exhibit normal activity levels for their gender - but excess activity for girls - are perceived as outside the range of normal, and subsequently are referred for testing. Behavior is used as a proxy for a learning disability and here, the normally increased activity level of boys is perceived as pathological.

Why should the norm for girls be held as the standard for boys as well? One explanation is that the teachers holding these perceptions are primarily women who may relate much more to the experience of girls than they do to that of boys. And in the primary grades, nearly 80% of the teachers are female.

from Recognize boys' differences

Edit. Yahoo posts another article that might be worth reading to people for whom this is a subject of interest:
Boys' academic slide calls for accelerated attention