An alternative to intelligence?

What do you make of the common claim that brain imaging/studies can differentiate disordered or dysfunctional thought?

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What do you make of the common claim that brain imaging/studies can differentiate disordered or dysfunctional thought?

This has already been explained in this thread (not only by myself), if you don't get it yet you either did not read fully or are unable to comprehend fully. In either case, re-explaining it would be pointless.

Well, I see how you could use brain imaging to differentiate between normal and disordered throught if you had a lot of sample data where all the other variables were controlled. So, for example if you imaged 1000 people thinking in an ordered way and 1000 people thinking in a disordered way, there would be correlatations.

Similarly, you could image 1000 birds to see what ordered thought patterns for birds looked like...but you cannot compare the results of humans to the results of birds, because their brains are organized differently...but being organized differently does not mean that they work fundamentally differently.

Fair enough. But the focus of the question, which was linked to my initial assumption in these threads, was on the common claim that brain imaging/studies themselves can differentiate disordered or dysfunctional thought.

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Fair enough. But the focus of the question, which was linked to my initial assumption in these threads, was on the common claim that brain imaging/studies themselves can differentiate disordered or dysfunctional thought.

The electrical response patterns that we can observe may be correlated to thought coherency, but they are not a measure of thought coherency.

However, since they may be correlated to thought coherency, they can be used as a tool to approximately measure thought coherency when other variables remain controlled.

Using the tool to measure thought coherency when the variables are known to be inconsistent with the variables used to make the correlation in the first place is nonsensical.

I told you that ages ago JJ.And faster than that.

To clear up a stray end, and quite a big stray end, we need to state that thought coherency as measured by brain imaging is a social yardstick and not a physical one.