Why scientists need pomo

Following my earlier irritated postings, I came across this (via) " It is easy to get a computer to take a picture, much harder to get it to “know” what is in the picture.
How does a hornet with virtually no brain do it?
Today the language and modes of thought of computing dominate the biological sciences. One speaks of behavior as being genetically “programmed” or “hard-wired,” and of a brain’s “processing power,” of “integrating” information in “real time.” We are perhaps not always aware that we do this. When you think in terms of a particular scheme, you can begin seeing it where it isn’t, begin projecting it onto the world.
When I think of how the control of a hornet’s legs must work (except of course that it doesn’t have to work the way I believe it must), I think in terms of sensors of angle and force, of procedures to calculate this and that. Do hornets do it this way? Maybe not. Scientists as much as other people struggle to escape their preconceptions or, more usually, don’t struggle. Many don’t seem to know that they have preconceptions."
Just so, the lessons of perspectivalism need to be learnt.
And the comment from the blog that led me to Fred's musings adds this: "Brains are sites for thinking in those animals that have them. It doesn't follow that they are necessary for thinking. I am reminded of the claim that alligators cannot feel because they do not have a mammalian brain, and the response of a man who worked with alligators for years:".
And that reminds me of the work of Antonio Damasio, whom I have been referring to from time to time, whose collection of evidence seems to indicate that thinking is more emotional and more body-distributed than we tend to think. Thinking humanly requires an embodied brain. The brain in a vat would not produce human thought except, presumably if it was on cable like humans in the matrix.

What does this mean for incarnation? that's what's occupying my speculative theological thinking from time to time nowadays. It has implications too for the concept of God without parts and passions and what humanity might mean for God. It also impinges on the matter of suffering.

Fred On Everything: