An exploration of the opening of the field of psychological possibilities afforded by the internet

The title of this post gives away the subject matter that I intend to write about, hopefully not entirely. My goal here is to explore a growing body of ideas that I've been entertaining that concern, broadly, the effects of technology on human psychological functioning.

A common theme, at least for those in the non-biological areas of psychology, is the idea that the psychological processes of human beings are shaped by social activity, or other basic forms of activity. Lev Vygotsky and George Herbert Meade are associated with the first idea while Jean Piaget is associated with the second. Both share the core idea that our psychological structure is derived from our activity.

My own thinking has been deeply influenced by these ideas, but I want to suggest a third possible origin of our psychological processes that can account for some of the most basic organizational features that have traditionally emerged in humans and may continue to emerge: The basic features of the world as the setting of human life. This includes both the basic physical properties of the world (space and time), as well as the basic layout of the human body. Alongside the factors of social and basic physical activity, this factor will be referred to as physicality.

Physicality is distinct from the effects of social interaction and other activity in that it affects the overall organization of psychological processes, rather than the specific forms that they take. For example, social influences in our development determine which types of things we are willing to discuss in public and which we keep private, but physicality is the reason for the very possibility of privacy.

Privacy is typical of the kinds of psychological concepts that result from physicality. They are negotiated in certain ways according to certain cultural practices, but they emerge out of the structure of our interaction with the world. Privacy emerges first and foremost out of the fact that only some of the processes that correspond to our subjective mental life are visible to others (without the use of highly invasive technology). While we can choose to communicate our thoughts and feelings with others, we don't necessarily have to do this. As a result, our mental activity is able to go in directions that we don't have to fully disclose, and this is a consequence of the organization of our bodies.

Similarly, throughout our lives, our bodies exist in a specific series of locations in 4D spacetime. At any given point, we may be near or far from other people. This has profound implications for human beings because, as cultural animals, we have meaningful relationships with other people in our environment. Maintaining specific relationships-whether they're with other people or with social institutions-requires specific kinds of self regulation on our part. As anyone knows, this is not necessarily as constraining as it sounds because we're not always around the significant others in our lives. The fact that we have to act a certain way in the office doesn't require us to maintain the same code of conduct while at home, though there are still obvious limits to our freedom.

As I've gone on, some of what I've said has been untrue, or is no longer true. Technological and cognitive advances have steadily altered the effects of physicality by removing some of the constraints of the past, thereby allowing us to transcend the traditional boundaries of the physical world. Many cognitive and later technological developments can be seen in this light, such as the emergence, first of primitive semiotic systems seen in many animals, and later in more advanced form, human language. The development of literacy, and electronic communication have been a recent and profound example of this. Each of these is not an independent effort to transcend the constraints of physicality, but a cumulative process that builds on the achievements of previous efforts. The shining example of this in the present day are social networking sites such as Facebook. Facebook is a continuation of a stream of development that incorporates language, written language, networked computers, and finally the development of a domain of computer mediated activity that incorporates features of the offline social world (person-centered interaction), thereby going beyond the format of the non-agentive Web 1.0.

Each of these developments occurred to extend human perception and action beyond the traditional limits of the physical world. In doing this, what they have also done is freed us from some of the effects of physicality. Of course, the legacy of physicality in terms of its effects on culture are still with us. Concepts like privacy, personality, and so forth continue to exist even as the conditions that gave rise to their emergence are changing. What we're able to do now is to creatively develop these concepts in new ways and with the enhanced freedom provided by technological and cognitive advances. Games allow us to try out and develop different types of personalities, and social networking sites allow us to explicitly develop and control multiple presentations of ourselves--or decide to unify our personality into one single work/personal/family entity.

I would characterize our activity at this point as the beginnings of the realization of creative control over these concepts--though I don't want to speak for everyone, and exciting things may very well be going on that I'm completely unaware of. From what I've seen, we're just beginning to realize the potential for creative development of new forms of being--new ways to live as human beings, and new directions for development that have just opened.

Two points are important in this regard: First to realize that by allowing for profoundly creative redevelopment of how we can be as people, we have also allowed for the possibility of controlling who we are as people. Secondly, and on a lighter note, the importance of opening our minds to the fact that the new possibilities that we have made possible may not at all be obvious. The psychological concepts that emerged from physicality (i.e. by our living in a physical world whose constraints led to certain psychological features) are deeply ingrained in our thinking and the fact that we can create alternative concepts may not be readily obvious.

New ways of doing research in the digital world

For the last two months I've been a graduate student. Given this, the following post may be seen as an attempt to try to escape some of the "hard" procedures that graduate students have to face. While not entirely denying that, I would add that this is coupled with the motive of exploring whether new ways of doing research are possible--especially given the changes in information technology that have characterized the lifetime of someone my age (23).

I'll start by going directly to the core of what I'm getting at: Our access to information has changed drastically in the last two decades (especially in the last 5 years for a good many Americans). Anyone with access to the internet has not just instant access to any information that would traditionally be confined to an encyclopedia, but also the ability to use a search engine to find opinions, ideas, facts, and many other kinds of written knowledge. As if this wasn't enough, our social networks have gone from being grounded in the real world to being ubiquitously available online, regardless of differences in space and time, so we can exchange information instantly with those that we were formerly cut off from.

What surprises me is that, as a first year graduate student, this rapidly changing state of affairs has had practically no effect on the way that research is done. Well, that's obviously an overstatement. The way research is done has changed: Modern information technologies are used to make journal articles available faster, and collaboration over great distances is now simultaneous and practical in cases that would have been impossible before. Furthermore, we can email ourselves ideas, and these are immediately available wherever computers are available.

The problem is that these changes reflect nothing more than a willingness to incorporate new technological possibilities into a static and essentially unchanging framework for how research is done. Ironically (at least in the field of developmental psychology in which cognition is often seen as a construction of the cultural environment), there has been little talk of how the ways that research is done ought to change profoundly in response to changes in the availability of information.

This increased availability makes us into truly different people. We have access to information in a way that was previously unimaginable (except for those who could afford a ubiquitous entourage of freakishly learned advisors), and this means that the kinds of things that are worth learning, and the kinds of things that are worth writing about from an academic point of view must change to suit the times.

What those changes ought to be is a subject for a future post...

A discordant domain of needs and wants

The title of this post is, I think, as adequate a description of the life of our myriad desires as any. On this blog I've entered many posts that have to do with topics that that relate to how it is in the nature of biological organisms to have competing desires. To be completely honest, I have come to realize that there seems to be more mystery in the fact that I find this "discord" so interesting than in the structure of the discord itself-or in how the discord relates to our biological makeup.

When one looks at the structure of biological organisms, the existence of this discord seems reasonable in that different parts of our nervous system must compel us to go in different directions, often simultaneously. There's nothing to stop a biological system from developing competing drives so long as there the structure(s) allow for the development of both (competing) functions. Evolution has rooted out the potential for some competing drives but not others.

When I first became interested in this general topic, I thought that an understanding of the biological mechanisms that led to competing/contradictory drives would be the way to explain my feelings of "this is not right." I've learned about these mechanisms (though not in great detail), and written here about how these structures can account for competing desires within a single person.

But this has not provided a resolution for the feelings that led me in this direction in the first place. What has seemed so weird to me about these competing desires is that they run counter to our experience of phenomenological unity.

I think this has important implications for our developing understanding of the relation between phenomenology and biology (how consciousness relates to the body, basically). It implies that certain affective regions of the brain can be active and dominate our experience and our desires, and that when this is happening, other brain regions that may correlate with separate desires may or may not be active-and if they are, then we will feel competing, or at least different desires. The crucial question is "what kind of activity makes one region align with consciousness?" The first answer here would seem to be that the neurons in the particular subnetwork fire, activating the network, and this is what leads us to have the particular kind of experience associated with that brain area.

Consciousness and the Structure of Language

The title of this post is potentially just a little bit misleading. What i will be talking about here is not so much the question of "how" but issues of what I think happens. It will be a preliminary look at a viewpoint that has been forming in my mind.

I'll start out with a general look at certain issues:

One of the hardest things for us to conceptualize coherently are concepts related to conscious experience: the general world of feelings, awareness-conscious experience. We certainly use these terms in our language in everyday life, but when it comes to analysis they seem to escape out normal categories of understanding. For example: where does experience occur? Metaphorically we might respond "in the head," but this is clearly just a poetic response. Although our experience is in a certain way localized in our person in that this is the perspective of the flow of events, and the area of our sensations, it does not "there" in the sense that a table is "there" in the center of a room. Its localization exists in a different way.

Similarly, each of us has a conscious experience, and we think of others as having this too. But where are these other experiences in relation to our own? As in the case above, we may resort to linguistic devices to try to conceptualize this, but we inevitably do a bad job and the best we can hope for is to speak metaphorically, and in a way that ultimately fails to clear things up.

The ways that we have of talking about and making sense of the world seem to be ultimately drawn from, and most appropriate for the physical world rather than the intangible world of conscious experience (of course the physical world exists within conscious experience, but that is a separate issue). Those ways that exist for talking about mental events are at best crude ways of addressing the undeniable existence of our inner mental lives. While these ways allow us to touch on the existence of these things, this area doesn't seem to be appropriately integrated into the rest of our conceptual schema.

At the core of this "conceptual schema" is the identification of the first person, experiencing "I" with the third person "you." By treating these as the same, we allow for the coherent development of a social world that brings us out of (or allows us to ignore) our isolation from others. This comes at a cost: By equating the first and third persons, the differences between the two are pushed out. What separates first person experience from the awareness of the other (third) person--consciousness--is pushed out of the conceptualization, making it the difficult topic to speak about that it is.

It seems that we are unable to trick ourselves by pushing consciousness out: the differences between the first and third person are still immediately obvious to each of us, even though they're ignored by the conceptual schema. As a result, we are compelled to create a concept of consciousness and other related subconcepts to describe experiences which are still undeniably there.

A deterministic world and free choice

A recent article in the NYTimes talks about free will, specifically the tension between the existence of our sense of responsibility for our actions and the fact that we are as people, shaped in who we are (and therefore in what decisions we make) by forces that are beyond our control, i.e., genetics and the environment of our development, and that this actually makes our actions (which are a product of who we are) not in our control.

Both of these stances are valid: we DO feel a responsibility for our actions, even in spite of believing that we as people are who we are because of factors beyond our control. However, I sensed from the beginning that the conclusion was flawed because both premises, although seeming to contradict each other, actually didn't because they spoke about different levels of existence that we tend to confuse. When a problem arises in which two facts about reality appear to contradict each other, I tend to think that there is actually a confusion of logical types. In other words, the confusion occurs because two things that are different, or exist on different levels are made to seem the same. In this way, my thinking is indebted to the work of Gregory Bateson.

The article equates the person who is the result of purely physical processes with the person who makes decisions-decides to do or not to do things. Is this actually the same person?

One commentator (Ivan) replied that the article confused inanimate matter with a conscious thinking human being. I think that Ivan is in the right direction with this. I would pose the question: Does the fact that a sequence of events follows the predictable laws of physics preclude it from occurring because of an intentional choice? While the answer is not a clear no, it's also not at all clear how it could be clearly yes.

I am inclined to think that physical processes may follow physical laws, and that our experience of an intentional domain just occurs in parallel to this. The one troubling conclusion of this is that it implies that although our decisions are intentional, the way that they emerge in our body is also always in keeping with the laws of physics.

Therefore, if we could see every process in our nervous system, and predict our subsequent actions, how would these processes be affected by this knowledge? Say for example that a friend came up and asked us to pick a color, and we looked at the state of our nervous system and found that the system was such that we would most certainly choose green. Once we knew this, we could try to stump the system and decide to choose brown instead. If both the laws of physics and our intentional decisions fully overlap with each other, then our change of choice to brown would have had to correspond to those neural changes that could be read and interpreted as implying that we would end up choosing brown.

Barriers to Progress

I commonly think of myself as, in many contexts, a lazy man. There are things that need to be done in my life that I consistantly don't attend to even when then begin to cause me inconvenience. A persistently appearing example of this is doing laundry. This morning, it became clear to me, as it had for the past few days, that I needed to do some laundry. So dire was this need, that I actually resolved to do it.

When I began to do this I was confronted by the mismatch between the way that I categorized the dirty clothes in my room, and the way that "doing the laundry" demanded the clothes to be categorized. I see the clothes scattered about my room to be in various places along the spectrum between clean and dirty, whereas doing laundry involves the cloths being either clean or dirty. Although in this case the mismatch was between a digital and an analog system of representation, this doesn't have to be the case. A mismatch can also occur between two systems of discrete categories that simply don't match up-such as if I had 4 different levels of cleanliness.

What led me to this state of affairs? I believe that it's my tendency to create categories for things based not on how they must be used, but on certain characteristics of the things themselves. With regards to the clothes, I made categories based on how dirty the clothes were without regard to the fact that the clothes would eventually have to be seen as either clean or dirty.

The merits of this tendency in other areas is a subject for another post.

Gregory Bateson's Levels of Learning

An exciting chapter in an otherwise exciting book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, is concerned with Gregory Bateson's application of the idea of logical levels to the concept of learning. His premise is that the idea of logical levels is applicable to processes of learning, and that the ignorance of this fact leads to confusion in the behavioral and social sciences. What I want to focus on in this post is simply an overview of the different logical levels of learning. I hope in future posts to proceed from there, because this seems to be a topic worthy of exploration.

I imagine each successive logical level of learning as a process of systemic activity in which the learning (understood as specific changes in the system over time) comes to occur in ever larger parts of the system. I will begin by describing the first level.

Learning 1 is commonly understood as simple Pavlovian or operational conditioning. An organism is exposed to a specific environmental event which repeats itself, and this has the result of familiarizing the animal with the contingencies of their behavior in this instance. For example, an animal that repeatedly barks and is given a treat during one session with its owner has learned at level 1 the specific barking>treat contingency.

Learning 2 involves a more substantial type of learning. Rather than learning how to act in a specific situation, an organism that undergoes learning 2 learns to approach novel situations and act in a certain way that has been rewarded in other situations in the past. In other words, learning two is the process whereby an organism learns to act certain ways in certain types of situations, rather than just act in a certain way in a certain situation.

According to Bateson, level 2 is the general ceiling for most people's learning. Despite this, learning at level 3 is attempted with some success-and some destruction. The relationship between levels 1 and 2 is the same as between levels 2 and three. Beyond this level three is (and Bateson admits this) difficult to describe.

It helps to go back down and describe level 2 in more detail, and then scaffold off of this for level three. So, level 2 involves the development of the ability to approach a novel situation and categorize it (and then act towards it) in a certain way. Although the situation facing the organism is novel, the organism still retains its acquired ways of acting. Learning at level 2 gives the organism an intelligent basis upon which to choose a certain alternative.

In contrast, learning 3 involves learning to intelligently choose between sets of alternatives themselves. The choice of alternatives is no longer at the level of the individual situation (as it was at level 2), or at the level of the individual action (level 1). The choice that must be learned to be made intelligently occurs at the level of the sets of alternative interpretations.

So, someone who has learned at level 3 would, upon approaching a novel situation, say to themselves "what set of interpretations offers the most promise in this instance?" Once a decision has been made, the activity occurs on level 2-which interpretation within the selected set will I make-and then on level 1: what is the appropriate action to take in this context?

Linguistic Structure and Overcoming the Barriers of Autism

Bullshitters rely on, perhaps more than any other thing, the structure of language. If someone doesn't know the exact meaning of a particular word, a vague meaning can be constructed if the word has been heard before in conversation because such a context often serves as a pointer arrow directing inquiring minds towards an unknown word's meaning.

Can this be taken a step further? What I mean by this is can one figure out what a whole part of a language (that refers to a specific domain) is simply by making inferences about its structure as it relates to the structure of other parts of the language? This may be confusing, though I think I can ground it by giving the example that got me started on this whole line of thinking.

I work with autistic adults as my job. Some (like Simon Baron-Cohen) have theorized that autism is the absence of an understanding of mental states which leads to problems with communication, social interaction, and imagination.

In line with this theory is the fact that many autistic people have very inhibited language abilities, though some come to have an impressive command over language. Several of the people that I work with fall into this category, and I often find myself wondering what sense they make of those parts of language that refer to mental states. In my experience they don't use these parts of the language outside of situations in which they've been explicitly taught to do so by rote.

Perhaps it's possible that the structure of language could serve as a guide towards the (admittedly artificial) construction of mental concepts in high functioning autistic people who have well developed language abilities. The existence of the linguistic domain of mental terms would not be initially understood, but this is no reason to believe that its structure would escape a careful mind. This structure would exist both within this domain (intrastructure) and between this and other domains (interstructure).

In the coming days, I hope to find out more about how this structure may aid in the acquisition of mental concepts, or something like them...

continuation of the lower post

I've been continuing along the line of thought outlined in the post directly below, and have come to the following conclusions concerning the"realization" method of overcoming undesirable (but still powerfully influential emotions).

I was wondering why the realization the the emotion was "wrong" was so ineffective in the instances I talked about (with the alcoholic not wanting to obey the urge to drink, or the obese person not wanting to follow the urge to eat more). I contrasted these cases with cases in which a certain realization can lead to the abolition of an emotion. As an example of this, take a person who suspects that, at this very moment, his spouse is cheating on him. This person knows where his spouse is, and wants to break in and confront her in the act. Doing so, he goes to the room where she is, breaks down the door and says "AHA!," only to immediately realize that she was indeed not cheating on him. At this moment, the powerful emotions of jealousy and fear that he had probably been feeling likely disappeared, perhaps leaving a residue of anxiety, but largely evaporating. These emotions were declared to be wrong or inappropriate given what was actually happening in the situation he arrived at.

How can it be the the knowledge that the emotions are wrong in this instance immediately lead to the emotions' demise while with the drunk or the obese person, the emotions persist in the knowledge that they are wrong? The reason for the difference, I reasoned, has to do with what I will call the logic of emotions. All emotional reactions are in some way logical. There are certain conditions under which they arise, and other conditions under which they are not activated. The ways that any given emotional reaction obey this is called their logic.

With the suspecting husband, the emotion disappeared immediately after he saw his wife alone because this sight changed the conditions that led to the emotion, making its presence no longer appropriate. With the alcoholic and the obese person, the realization that their pesky emotions were inappropriate did not violate the logic of the emotional response. Instead, their ideas about the drink/food desiring emotions being wrong was not part of the logical system governing the activation of these emotions.

The desire to drink operates in accordance with the conditions of a variety of factors in the alcoholic. First of all, drinking is equated with drunkenness, a positive state which, for the drunk, is preferable to the average non-drunk state. When the alcoholic is not drunk, the system governing the desire to drink is aware that the drunken state is currently unfulfilled, and puts pressure on the system to change this. If this particular alcoholic wants to stop drinking, this urge is, on an abstract logical level in the alcoholic's mind-the level that realizes the futility of drinking and the problems it causes-, subordinate to the desire to not drink. But this abstract logical level does not have complete control over the system.

The emotional logic that led to the desire to drink is unaffected by the knowledge that drinking is not a good solution. This does not change its conditions for activating the emotion. You might say that these are two logical systems speaking a different language.

At this point, it is now appropriate to bring in the alternative explanation for the emotional discord: the competition model. In the competition model, the outcome of competing and contradictory desires is control by the desire (the emotional-logical system) that is strongest at a particular time. While the realization model accounts for how the logical contradiction is not resolved, the competition model accounts for which logical system has the upper hand. In the case of the alcohol/food addict who cannot stop eating or drinking to excess, the emotional logical system governed by the satiated-drunk/non-satiated-sober awareness is stronger than the emotional logical system governed by the doing the right thing/not doing the right thing awareness. Presumably, their relative strength is a factor of the potency of the conceptual duality (drunk/sober, or "do right/do wrong").

Overcoming Drug Addiciton

The topic of overcoming a drug addiction has risen to the center of my interests in psychology in recent weeks because it is such an interesting and illustrative example of the nature of our embodied existence as human beings. By "overcoming drug addiction," I'm referring to the process by which a person attempts to stop using drugs, while at the same time deals with the feeling of wanting to use drugs.

The coexistence within one person of these two competing desires is revealing of what I have referred to in previous posts as the constraints on the adaptive action of living systems. To briefly state this, the possibility for competing and contradictory urges to coexist in a single living system is a likely problem that arises from the fact that the system is autopoetic, and can never exercise completely adaptive control over its whole being. The last point is not a complex one, it's actually an extremely obvious observation about how physical systems have to work. This state of affairs doesn't have to happen, but there is nothing to prevent it from happening given the right conditions.

With drug addiction we can see, in society, the manifestation of this state of affairs in a certain type of way. The drug user is the victim of these competing urges that send contradictory signals, each attempting to have the body controlled in a certain way. For the drug addict who wants to stop using drugs to actually stop using drugs requires the development of control over the body by a value system that recognizes the futility of drug use. In order to attain this control, the value system must be more powerful than the value system that seeks to continue drug use. In other words, the anti drug value system must have greater leverage over the affective processes of the body than the pro drug value system.

This is actually just one view of how this might happen. Another possibility is that the user who formerly "believed" in the emotions that led to drug use, learns to stop believing in these emotions; he/she learns that they are produced by the body in error, from a bodily system that does not "get" the overall picture of what has to be done.

I will refer to these two views as the competition view (the first) and the realization view (the second). Which is correct? Are they compatible?

If we look to our own experience, some aspects of the realization view are very reasonable. Even if one is not a drug addict, it's easy to think of a situation in which one has an emotional response that is undesired (e.g., a dieting person wanting food). Our own experience shows us that we can learn to respond to such emotions by saying "that is exactly the kind of affective reaction that I want to stop happening." In spite of our awareness of its being the problem, the emotional reaction continues to hold sway over our decisions, and so, in the example, the dieting person gives in to eating a cheeseburger, despite thinking what a terrible decision this is.

So, it seems that we can evaluate our affective reactions, but in many cases, this evaluative capacity does not hold sufficient sway over the rest of out body to suppress the emotion's power (though it does in some contexts).

I'm out of time for today, but I will continue to explore this issue in the next post (as the task I set out for myself today remains unresolved). I want to finish up looking at the "realization" method of overcoming emotions and then look at the possible merits of the competition method.

Motivation for acting

When we talk about what people do, especially in the third person, we tend to treat actions as the products of a unified decision-making machine that is supposedly what the human body is. In reality, our lives and our actions are more complicated than this.

Actions are the product of what is called in artificial intelligence a value system. Basically a value system is a system that makes use of a network of action concepts and places value on them, in many cases the value is contingent on a certain place and time. A primitive value system might make use of the concepts of hungry/full and get something to eat/rest, linking these up in a way that leads the creature to go and get food when its hungry and rest when it's not.

Human beings are complex creatures, but we too have value systems like the simple one described above. The difference between us and a simple creature is that we have several value systems existing side by side which compete with each other. At certain time, certain conditions may lead to a certain value system being given precedence over others, and with changing conditions through time, this may change, leading to a different value system to assume control. The experiential product of this is our continual feelings of ambivalence about whatever activity we're pursuing. When we sit down to study for a test, the value system that values scholarly achievement has taken control, and is pushing other value systems (such as the "have sex" system into submission.

The description above was meant to illustrate what I mean by coexisting value systems, and it overlooks a few things. First of all, the value systems in our lives are not completely discrete. Different value systems work together in such a way that the activities that are pursued under the guidance of one value system may be rationalized by another (if they initially produce conflict with the goals of that second value system). In some cases, of course, two value systems maybe be unable to resolve their differences and one will eventually be pushed completely into submission.

The focus of this post is not on these intricate interrelationships, but on the broad fact that we are subject (in our daily pursuit of activities) to guidance from an array of different value systems. When trying to understand another persons actions, it is therefore incorrect to try to create a unified schema for why they act as they do. Instead, it is beneficial to try to understand another's actions as the product of several competing value systems.

Experience and the organization of neural networks

One of the main areas of focus in this blog has been the relation between phenomenology and biology. I've explored this theme from many different angles, and, I'm afraid from the same angle many different times in an attempt to organize my thoughts and create a coherent foundation upon which they may develop. Today, I'm revisiting this topic again from a slightly familiar angle, but I believe that this time the ideas are more coherently organized than in the past, and that a new reader of this blog can find the core ideas well expressed in this post, without having to reread all previous posts.

The issue I want to talk about today is the question of the place of phenomenology (experience) within science, specifically psychology and cognitive science. Traditionally, phenomenology has been the classic example of the kind of domain that is unsuitable for science. It's been my position that although some phenomenological data are inappropriate for scientific work (especially clear scientific work that others can understand easily), there are certain kinds of phenomenal "facts" that are appropriate and actually very helpful for the progress of science.

In a project last year, I focused on exploring the connection between the phenomenal experience of bodily control and the anatomy of the nervous system (and the body as a whole). I thought, and still think that exploring connections such as these is a fruitful way to explore the way that biological systems are associated with consciousness.

A major conclusion of this work was the emergence of the idea that biological systems can never be completely adaptive. By virtue of their existing in the physical world, and being bound by the constraints therein, no living system can ever be completely adaptive since being completely adaptive would require having complete control over its own functions. In a physical world, such an idea makes absolutely no sense. A system can have control over its parts, and can use this control (with the aid of perceptual systems and the interpretation of sensation) to act adaptively, but the operations of the entire system cannot all be controlled adaptively since every mechanism of adaptive control is itself uncontrolled until an additional structure controls it. The quest for complete control ends up with an infinite regress of additional control structures.

Now, a central feature of our embodied existence is this conscious divide between control and no control. We have no direct control over the environment, and no control over many parts of our body, but we of course have control over some. What I'm trying to say here is that the constraints on physical systems that I talked about in the last paragraph show up conveniently in our own embodied experience. This comes as no surprise if one accepts the view that there is a complete correlation between phenomenal states and biological states in any given living system.

Recently, I've been thinking about the extent to which (and the ways in which) we have control over our mental processes. While we can of course control our arms and legs, we can also control our thoughts-but there are limits to this. While we can bring images into our mind at will, we cannot control other aspects of our mental states-such as awareness, otherwise people like me would never suffer the embarrassment of falling asleep in class.

What this means is that our phenomenal awareness of those mental processes that are and aren't under our control is a reflection of the organization of the nervous system. The fact that I can bring certain images into my mind at will reflects the fact that my nervous system has mechanisms of control over the production of mental images. In contrast, the fact that I can't always make myself fully aware or bring myself into deep concentration when I want to is reflective of the fact that full awareness is not amenable to conscious control-or very much conscious control (maybe biofeedback could change this).

By exploring the issue of control with regards to our mental processes, we can make valuable use of phenomenology to make sense of the biological organization of the brain at a very high level. By understanding our phenomenological states in terms of these constraints we are in fact creating an understanding of the underlying neural organization. This is especially helpful given the complexity of the nervous system-a complexity that bars us from seeing the kinds of organization I'm talking about by looking at the neurons themselves (this would be a herculean task).

How much control can we get over our thinking?

In today's post I want to talk about the kinds of influence that we can have over our thoughts. This is by no means a conclusive look at this subject, but merely a first glance intended to clear up very obvious dilemmas, as well as to see how far can be gotten by just thinking some issues out.

What I'm concerned with here is the extent to which we are able to influence the kinds of thinking that we do as human beings. This subject came to interest me after car ride that I took last week. During the car ride, I had what I considered to be a really interesting thought. The content of the thought itself is not important here, suffice it to say that the thought was interesting, and I was excited that my mind was working in a way that led to the thought emerging in my mind. Reacting to this nice surprise, I began to wonder if my positive reaction to the thought might in any way lead to more thoughts of that type in the future. How nice it would be, I thought, that by appreciating a style of thinking, one could guide ones self toward more of that type of thiking, or influence the future probability of it.

Since that day, I've thought about this a good deal, and have made some important progress in understanding it.

First of all, finding that what one is thinking about is interesting does encourage us to think the same thought again. The result of this is that it becomes easier overtime to think about a particular idea, and, I would wager, to think about ideas that are similar in structure to that idea. This is just a matter of classical conditioning: Actions/thoughts lead to either positive negative reactions, and these reactions influence the future probability that we will execute a particular thought/action.

As soon as I began thinking about this, a new issue came to dominate my mind. Although a positive reaction to a certain thought may lead us to rethink that thought in the future (thereby strengthening the connections resposible for that and similar thoughts), a reaction to the processes that led to a thought ("oh that was so clever!) would not be able to influence the future occurrence of those processes. In the example of my thinking in the car, I was excited not just by how interesting I thought the idea I had was, but also by the fact that it was a really creative idea: it was a spontaneously emerging idea that was grounded in concepts I had been thinking about. The question is: By reacting positively to the fact that the idea was creative, could I support the emergence of more creative thoughts in the future?

Operant conditioning accounts for how a positive reaction to one idea can lead to rethinking it and similar ideas more easily. But I'm not sure that it could help us to think more (e.g.) creative thoughts if that's what we want to do. The conditioning mechanisms above worked because the idea itself led to an affective reaction, and therefore, the idea itself was strengthened. The creativity of the idea did not lead to the positive reaction, though it can be held accountable for why the idea was interpreted as creative.

Therefore creativity can not be linked to the affective reaction, it remains untouched by the conditioning process. Broken down, this is what this looks like: A creative process leads an idea to pop into a persons head>>they interpret the idea as the outcome of a creative idea generating process>>>This is something they value, and consequently they are happy to have had the idea>>>They have good feelings about the situation and the idea.

This sequence shows that, although a person can value creativity, as well as interpret ideas as being creative, there is no direct link between the actual creative processes themselves and the positive feedback-Unless the creative processes are reactivated every time the (originally) creative idea is re-thought-which doesn't make logical sense.

An appropriate quote

I want to continue a discussion of the issues I brought up in the previous post. In line with that, here is a quote by Marx (which was used by L. S. Vygotsky) which connects to many of the issues that I brought up and suggests a direction that I want to proceed in in future posts.

"The spider carries out operations reminiscent of a weaver, and the boxes which bees build in the sky could disgrace the work of many architects. But even the worst architect differs from the most able bee from the very outset in that before he builds a box out of boards, he has already constructed it in his head. At the end of the work process he obtains a result which already existed in his mind before he began to build. The architect not only changes the form given to him by nature, within the constraints imposed by nature, but he also carries out a purpose of his own which defines the means and the character of the activity to which he must subordinate his will. (Capital, Pt. 3, ch. 7, sec. I)"

Knowing and Not Knowing

Knowledge is commonly spoken of in binary terms: You either know something of you don't. You know the capital of North Dakota or you don't know the capital of North Dakota. For practical everyday purposes, with facts like the one just mentioned, knowing or not knowing can be effectively talked about in these binary terms. At a deeper level, this superficial treatment glosses over some very interesting issues.

Central to these is the fact that the types of knowledge associated with knowing or not knowing any specific fact cannot be neatly divided into two groups, if one has any interest in the epistemological issues involved with knowing. The reason for this is that there are many ways of knowing-and of not knowing.

When we commonly talk about knowing (as in the example above) we are focusing on a very small subset of the epistemological possibilities. Generally, when a person is asked whether they know the capital of a certain state or country, a good deal of knowledge is already assumed to be in place. The person being asked the question is assumed to understand that the world is divided up into individual entities, and that within each of these is a center of power-the capital. Whether or not the person knows what the particular capital of a particular place is is not a matter of understanding these other concepts, but a matter of having understood how these conditions manifest themselves within a particular country or state.

So, while a person who doesn't know that Bismark is the capital of North Dakota doesn't know that Bismark is the capital of North Dakota, they are a radically different case of not knowing this than a cat would be. The cat doesn't simply fail to have this piece of knowledge, rather, the cat doesn't have the prerequisite for this knowledge (conceptual knowledge about capitals and political entities).

On the other end of the spectrum (with positive states of knowing), a similar situation exists. At my job, I teach different skills to people diagnosed with autism. The skills are taught within discrete programs that are run for each person, and one program (which I happen to find flawed) involves teaching the ability to give the correct amount of money for an item of a particular price (e.g., paying for a $6.25 piece of food with a $10 bill). The people that I teach learn to master paying for a certain combination of differently priced items, and it could be said that they "know how to give change for these items." My problem with this program is that the knowledge learned is somewhat trivial and completely restricted to the context of the program. I'm sorry to say that the people I teach are unable to generalize their performance in these programs to real life circumstances-even if they were to have to pay for an item whose price they had learned to pay for in the program. What they seem to learn is an arbitrary response of giving certain combinations of dollar bills after being asked for a certain amount. If the price was changed slightly so that the same combination of money would still be required (changing $6.25 to $6.95), they would not "get it right." Clearly, when most of us talking about being able to give the right change, we are talking about something very different from what happens here.

As much as I've been critical, the motivations for this simplified sense of knowing or not knowing are obvious: they are useful in everyday circumstances. Nevertheless, it is so incredibly interesting to move beyond this everyday sense and think about the difference between (what Heinz Werner called) achievement and performance, as has been done here.

Where this becomes so interesting is in the study of ethology. A few years I read a book by Nikolaas Tinbergen which showed how a certain type of wasp behaves adaptively with respect to its environment. The wasp would follow landmarks as it left its home and returned in search of food, and would build elaborate structures for its young to develop in. Tinbergen showed how disruptions in these behaviors would lead the wasp to behave in ways that indicated a lack of global knowledge about what it appeared to be doing (from a person's perspective). Other research illustrates this particularly well (although I don't remember the authors): It has been found that Geese will, upon seeing an egg roll out of their nest, do the smart thing, and go to the egg and push it back into the nest with their bill. Most people who see this will say "Of course! The goose cares for its children." In reality, the goose does not appear to be thinking about its children because if the egg is removed after the goose has seen it fall out of the nest, it will continue to push nothing back into its nest. That is, the goose will perform the motions of pushing an egg back into its nest even when there is no egg being pushed.

Above we see them performing a task whose logic is clear to us, yet upon disturbance of this behavior, it becomes clear that the goose doesn't grasp this logic, but is just compelled to perform a series of behaviors that normally happens to have the consequence of achieving a certain end. Even if the goose came to disliked its eggs, it is likely that it would still perform these egg saving acts since it is not protection of the eggs per se that drives the behavior (at least at the level of the individual goose).

If we try to imagine about the umwelt of the goose, we can guess that it may not involve thoughts of care for its eggs driving its behaviors, but rather the pleasure of the behaviors themselves (that happen to protect the eggs)-Fascinating.

As humans, we think of ourselves as being above these instinctual drives, as capable of reflection and comprehension of our actions. Yes, it's hard to understate how our actions are flexibly executed in the service of some distant goal. At the same time, we do have an important similarity with the goose.

Just like the goose, humans engage in adaptive behaviors that seem to be carried out in the service of some goal. Just like the goose seems to act to protect her eggs, people seem to be driven by the desire to reproduce, until one looks closer at what's going on. People go to great lengths to engage in behaviors that lead to reproduction, but it's clear that sexual pleasure, not reproduction, is more often than not the end goal of our activities.

Broadly, the point I'm making is that evolution leads to the appearance of purpose driven activities that from an observer's perspective have a logic of their own. Yet, the way evolution works is that from the perspective of an individual acting animal, these acts are not driven by their evolutionary rationale. For this to be the case-for animals to understand their behavior in the evolutionarily objective way that we do-the animal would have to have the cognitive capacity to understand the situation surrounding their behavior as we do.

The circumstances suggest that this is not the fastest path to being adaptive for most animals. The fastest (most easily evolved) path to an adaptive behavior like acting out of regard for one's offspring does not seem to be through simultaneously developing an understanding and an appreciation for the situation (developing an understanding of one's own offspring as well as an appreciation and a desire to protect them), but by modifying the existing biological circuitry to generate particular types of responses-IN TERMS OF THE EXISTING CIRCUITRY.

This post began far from where it has ended up, but I hope that the progression has been informative. The important point is that evolution, like the teaching program at my job, favors performance over achievement. If the environment demands a particular response, the phylogenetic development of the means to make that response must be adaptive from the start-or occur quickly enough to avoid being weeded out.

How to talk about the unconscious?

I've started thinking about how to talk about the unconscious mind within the framework that I've been developing here on this blog (understanding psychology as the intersection of phenomenology and biology). The struggle that I've been having has to do with the fact that, on one hand, the unconscious mind plays a role in our conscious life insofar as our conscious life is not like some notebook that we periodically take up, write things in, and then put down, leaving it unchanged until the next time we encounter it. Rather, our impressions of things change both within our conscious experience, and beyond that experience. Therefore, unconscious processes are something that have to be dealt with.

But how can we talk about these unconscious events? They don't occur in conscious experience, so its automatically suspect to speak of them in phenomenological terms. When we do this, we're inferring phenomenological content onto unconscious events based on the effects that they've had on our thought processes. While doing this may not seem completely objectionable, I am not strongly in favor of it because it seems to me that if we could really talk about these events as phenomenological processes, then they would be phenomenological processes. The fact that they're not clearly implies that something is different, or perhaps just intervening, to prevent them from becoming phenomenological.

Now, it's entirely possible that whatever is preventing unconscious thoughts from being conscious is inconsequential and these thoughts are just being "blocked" from appearing consciously because of the lack of some other, outside process.

But, I think that this is not a very important concern because the question remains of how to talk about unconscious activity once it gets down to a low enough level. The question is not just at what level do psychological explanations break down, but how they break down.

Dreams of neural implants...

I'm not excited by all technological developments, but I am excited by the development of neural implants that could solve the problem of inputting alphanumeric chartacters into increasingly tiny devices. This particular development has yet to occur (as far as I know), but I see it as inevitable, since I can't think of any other way to solve the incredible inconvenience of using a tiny qwerty keyboard on a phone.

The inconveniences caused by such keyboards exemplify the communication bottleneck in human social activity. The development of culture has left human beings with a rich heritage in which to grow and develop means of expressing ourselves. Yet, in doing so, we are not limited so much by our brainpower, but by our physical appendages.

To continue with the first example, the alphanumeric system is poorly suited to the kinds of devices that we (increasingly) use to communicate, and as a result, our ability to express ourselves through written words on these devices is constricted. With neural implants, we would not have to externalize a clumsy 40+ key keyboard (on the machine input side) or the complex hand movements required to use such a keyboard (on the human output side).

Technologies like a neurally implanted alphanumeric command system would only be the tip of the iceberg. In addition to learning to mentally conjure up letters and numbers, we could learn to externalize the imagery of our minds, painting rich pictures of our imagination for others, and eventually even creating 3d virtual environments in which to interact with others. Presumably, children brought up using such devices could acquire incredible dexterity with them...

The richness of human culture has created within each of us a profoundly rich experience, which while unique is certainly not devoid of any potential for sharing with others. As much as it's interesting to speculate how technological developments might offer the possibility removing "communication bottlenecks" and allowing for an increased sharing of experience, used inappropriately, such devices could jeopardize privacy, and allow for terrible violations of private experience.