Monday, June 28, 2010

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...

Thursday, June 3, 2010

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.