Thanks for sending me your email. Here is a copy of a
"private" exchange I had with nicole:
_________________________________________________
Nicole-

Thanks for contacting me. I have been busy lately
learning about the actions of estrogen in the brain,
but I generally enjoy a chance to "get philosophical".

About medical school: My advice is to identify the
aspect of medicine that you are most interested in and
become very intimate with it. Seek out people who
share your special interest(s).

"an intrinsic biologically hard-wired process that
allows epistemological rules to exist"

I wonder if you have ever read any of the work of
Gerald Edelman? He has made a serious effort to
formulate a theory of how conventional biological
proceses can account for our abilty to understand the
world we live in.

I have also been heavily influenced by Dan Dennett. He
has done some masterful work that aims to slip a
scientific foundation under some of the crumbly
castles of philosophy. Dennett comes at this task from
the direction of philosophy, Edelman has come from the
direction of science, but they both have done good
work to bring some fundamental philosophical questions
into alignment with modern science.

I have no objection to making an analytic-synthetic
division. It leads to some interesting questions about
rules, reasoning and logic and their relationship to
human knowledge in general. A serious problem for
philosophy is that it has tried to deal with these
issues while being cut off from two important sources
of information:

1) the details of how our biological brains function
to store memories, make learning possible, and provide
us with a "virtual reality" model of the world we live
in.

2) an understanding of how it would be possible to
make a non-biological machine that could understand
and talk about the world in much the same way that
people do.

I suspect that it will be possible for humans to both
understand in detail how a brain makes a mind and how
to make machines with minds. When we have figured
these things out, many of the great philosophical
questions will have been answered.

I'm not saying that this will be easy. In fact, I
think that we are going to have to make heavy use of
mechanical "thinking aids" in order to make sense of
the complexities of the brain. I also think we are
going to have to make heavy use of what we can learn
about brain memory mechanisms in order to make
increasingly useful and "intelligent" machines.

When we get done, I suspect that traditional
philosophical ideas about epistemology will seem as
quaint as ideas like a crystaline sphere with stars
attached to it.

I wanted to mention that I do think Kant was correct
about us having certain kinds of knowledge
"hard-wired" into us....correct in the sense that the
general structure of the human brain is genetically
determined and that structure predisposes us to think
in certain ways. Our ability to combine several simple
analytic relationships and in so doing produce more
complex synthetic conceptual understandings is one of
those "hard-wired" predispositions. I think the theory
provided by Edelman provides a good outline of how the
human brain can climb from the analytic to the
synthetic, but neurobiologists are still working out
the details.

-John Schmidt

--- nicole johnson <reverendlovejoy75@...>
wrote:

> hola schmidt:
>
> introductions: i've been recently conversing with
> parr about wittgenstein via email and he suggested i
> write you due to your extensive knowledge in biology
> [a semi-familiar subject to me] and philosophy. i
> have a vested interest in understanding biology
> since i plan on attending medical school but my
> pursuit of philosophy, though haphazard and wayward,
> is a kindling of an intellectual flame. if you have
> a spare moment and feel compelled to answer i have a
> question for you. i hope this email isn't too
> intrusive.
>
> talk against the logical positivist: if quine has
> suggested that there really is no distinction in the
> analytic-synthetic divide in language would you
> agree or disagree with this idea? if you do agree
> that the analytic-synthetic divide does not exist
> then is there an intrinsic biologically hard-wired
> process that allows epistemological rules to exist
> on the basic level of appearance? ugghh. rather
> complicated but i hope this was clear.
>
> anyway, it's a start and maybe you'll express some
> other points that you have in mind concerning this
> question. i hope you will be able to offer some
> advice.
>
> thanks,
> johnson
>
> p.s. got any tips on getting into medical school?

__________________________________________________
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