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.