[MD] Pirsig and Jaynes in Bo's Meta-blender

[Krimel]

Krimel said:
I think Marshall McLuhan may have also weighed in on 
the topic when talked about the way text changed the 
way people think and see the world. ... The brain is not a 
muscle but it acts like one. If you use it a particular way, 
you get better at it and change the way it functions.

Matt:
Absolutely.  The whole set of Marshall McLuhan, Harold 
Innis and Eric Havelock (the classicist) were all at Toronto 
during the formative period for their ideas about orality 
and literacy.  I think understanding "language" as a set of 
sentential attitudes, as dispositions towards thinking X 
when Y happens, is a following out on the metaphor of 
muscle for thought, a furthering of the pragmatist "beliefs 
are habits of action."

[Krimel]
If this idea, of specific practices or different ways of thinking producing
different kinds of brains, works then perhaps Jaynes' ideas are not as weird
as they sound a first blush. After all this would lead us to suspect similar
structural differences in the brains of musicians, mathematicians, athletes
and well you get the picture. Habits of action produce changes in the brain
and visa versa.

[Matt]
Why do ditto-heads act the way they do?  Because their 
thought-muscles are trained to.

[Krimel]
All I know is that whatever triggers the ditto response in some produces a
gag reflex in me.