An Opening Note on my intellectual position.

That is a really pompous heading, I know.

How would I define my view point now? In short, my perspective on things is – MATERIALISTIC, REDUCTIONIST, DETERMINISTIC,SCIENTIFIC, RATIONAL … and all those other ‘horror’ words we are not supposed to be in my line of work.

Put briefly like that it seems so simple and clear cut. But, of course, it is neither simple nor clear cut. Each one of those requires definition and clarification, and I can defend every single one if I have too.

Materialism:

“The philosophy of materialism holds that the only thing that can be truly proven to exist is matter, and is considered a form of physicalism. Fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena (including consciousness) are the result of material interactions; therefore, matter is the only substance. As a theory, materialism belongs to the class of monistontology. As such, it is different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism. For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism would be in contrast to idealism.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

Reductionism:

“Reductionism can either mean (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings. Reductionism is strongly related to a certain perspective on causality. In a reductionist framework, phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of other, more fundamental phenomena, are called epiphenomena. Often there is an implication that the epiphenomenon exerts no causal agency on the fundamental phenomena that explain it. Reductionism does not preclude emergent phenomena but it does imply the ability to understand the emergent in terms of the phenomena from and process(es) by which it emerges.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

Determinism:

“Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and behaviour, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism

Scientific:

“Science is the effort to discover and increase human understanding of how reality works. Knowledge in science is gained through research. Using controlled methods, scientists collect observable evidence of natural phenomena, record measurable data relating to the observations, and analyze this information to construct theoretical explanations of how things work. The methods of scientific research include the generation of hypotheses about how phenomena work, and experimentation that tests these hypotheses under controlled conditions. The results of this process enable better understanding of past events, and better ability to predict future events of the same kind as those that have been tested.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific

Rational:

“Rationality as a term is related to the idea of reason, a word which following Webster's may be derived as much from older terms referring to thinking itself as from giving an account or an explanation. This lends the term a dual aspect. One aspect associates it with comprehension, intelligence, or inference, particularly when an inference is drawn in ordered ways (thus a syllogism is a rational argument in this sense). The other part associates rationality with explanation, understanding or justification, particularly if it provides a ground or a motive. 'Irrational', therefore, is defined as that which is not endowed with reason or understanding.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality

I do not apologise for using Wikipedia – they give as good a definition as any. They are, however, a little too simple as they stand, but they give the general idea I think and sets the background framework for my thinking today.

This, as I said, is the broad framework, foundation if you like, of my thinking. Specifically I would describe my position as  Neuro-Cognitive Evolutionary Psychology with a touch of existentialism …. more on the existentialism later.

And there I just named the idea ‘Evolution’. Evolution is a foundational organising principle for the way I think now.