Research has been done in psychology showing that while people can readily supply reasons for their behavior, these appear to be incorrect and created after the fact. In other words, these post hoc rationalizations are nice, believable stories that we come up with based on what we've just done.
The question that follows this very interesting finding is, "Well, what are the actual reasons for people's behavior? How can we discover these?" Presumably if the reasons why people think they do what they do are wrong, then there must be an accurate explanation somewhere. The question is, what is the nature of this "actual" explanation?
Some might be inclined to give an alternative intentional, psychological reason as the "true cause" of the behavior in question. I believe that such an approach is incorrect. Attributing intentional psychological causes to behavior, e.g. "I did it because I selfishly wanted you all to myself!" implies that these intentional causes exist unconsciously, hidden beneath our incorrect explanations. This implies a hidden, yet unified self that exists below the surface, which I find troubling, not because its "scary" but because it doesn't really make a lot of sense.
A much more reasonable option is to see any given action as the product of many different unconscious motivational cues coming together at any one point in time (in cases where our actions are not entirely and intentionally consciously guided--in these cases our understanding of why we did something is probably accurate).
Following this, the idea of someone doing something for any reason only exists on the level of linguistic-semiotic sense making. It's not that we're unaware of the causes of some of our actions. It's that if one asks for the "actual cause" of any given action, this is a question that often makes not sense on the linguistic-semiotic level.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Friday, February 4, 2011
Insanity
Is it possible that insanity (or simply the tendency to come to believe unreasonable things) is actually an adaptation that allows people to adjust to new states of affairs that may be less desirable without becoming miserably unhappy? In the same way that the potential for genetic mutations is a crucial part of evolutionary processes, a tendency for brain pathology might be a way for the brain to adapt to a new set of surroundings that might not automatically be fit for a happy adaptation...
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Human Rationality
I've recently become somewhat obsessed with the idea of "rational human action." Before I go any farther down what I think will be a contentious road, I will first say that I am by no means denying the amazing rational abilities of human beings, but as the reader might be beginning to suspect, I am calling the extent of their operation into question. It's my view that the rational abilities that we do have produce such impressive results that we jump to the conclusion that our behavior is entirely rational, as well as to the other questionable conclusion that non-rational behavior (or incompletely rational behavior) is useless.
My conclusions here are primarily based on my own experiences navigating my own life, and because of that they are certainly biased, and I'm willing to admit that I am definitely "less rational" than most other people in my social sphere. Yet, the extent of my own irrationality is so great that even if other people are substantially more rational than I am, they are still necessarily quote irrational.
But all of this is getting ahead of an important preliminary point: What is rationality in the first place? By rationality, I mean the type of propositional thinking that we use to navigate both the immediate physical world in front of us, as well as the symbolic world that we navigate when we make plans for the future. This rationality is similar to what I've called in the post below this the "logic of experience." For example, walking down the street, there is a light pole directly in front of me, and open sidewalk to the left. Rationality is the process that involves the integration of the various meanings present before me-the relation between the lightpole, the open sidewalk, my current goal/activity of walking in a specific direction in a specific part of the environment. Each of these has a variety of meanings and possible meanings, and my rationality is the process that weaves these meanings together, enabling me to acheive my goal within the constraints and possibilities of the conditions confronting me. As I mentioned above, rationality is not just used in the concrete physical world, but also the purely symbolic world. Planning my day, I take into account various factors such as what I want to do, what resources I have at my disposal, how much time I have, etc. Even though these various factors aren't in front of me, I can manipulate them symbolically to make symbolic plans.
These kinds of rational activity occur all the time. They might be called the "bread and butter" of our experience, and they occur consciously and unconsciously. But not all that we do is rational for various reasons. For one thing, we don't always take all that we know into account when we're making a decision. We might forget factors or constraints that would have otherwise affected what we would choose to do. In addition, the meanings of the various components that go into our decision making process are not completely stable. Just as the effect of someone yelling at 90 dB in a small room depends on the shape/size of the room, or the resulting bounce of a 200 lb man landing on a trampoline depends on other activity on the trampoline, so too does our evaluation of different possibilities depend on the other activity going on in our mind.
What accounts for the difference between this "less rational" functioning and the more clearcut rational thinking described above (e.g., I move to the left to avoid a light pole because I can't walk through it)? The difference seems to be the strength of the constraints. In the first examples, the constraints press tightly onto the decision making process, making for only one clear path of action. In the second example, the constraints allow for more flexibility; there isn't just one good course of action. Our ability to think through those types of situations is influenced by how much we are able to bring to mind that is relevant to our decision, even though, as I said, the weight of the factors we bring forth is partially a function of our mental state at the time (e.g., although I have a constant susceptibility to being sunburned, my susceptibility to taking this fact into account changes depending on whether I'm feeling reckless or health conscious).
There's another limitation to human rationality that I have not yet dealt with that I will mention briefly. So far, I have spoken about how people act rationally/irrationally in simple cause>effect situations. The rationality of a given decision depends on the framing of the relevant aspects of the decision (i.e., what is taken as cause and effect), as well as the knowledge involved in making the decision. A woman's decision to drive to work is rational if she must go 20 miles in 20 minutes, and owns a car. If she knows that a crucial bridge was washed away in a storm, blocking her path, her decision to drive to work is no longer rational (though it would have been if she had not known about the washout).
In the above example, the distinction between rationality and irrationality is clearcut and obvious. In the real world, things are often much more complicated. In the real world, the difference between knowing and not knowing something covers a large gray area in which certain things are to different degrees implied, but not explicitly obvious. Some effects of our actions are usually predictable, whereas others only show up under close examination. Still, no amount of examination is capable of showing us the complete implications of our actions, and in this way our rationality is limited.
My conclusions here are primarily based on my own experiences navigating my own life, and because of that they are certainly biased, and I'm willing to admit that I am definitely "less rational" than most other people in my social sphere. Yet, the extent of my own irrationality is so great that even if other people are substantially more rational than I am, they are still necessarily quote irrational.
But all of this is getting ahead of an important preliminary point: What is rationality in the first place? By rationality, I mean the type of propositional thinking that we use to navigate both the immediate physical world in front of us, as well as the symbolic world that we navigate when we make plans for the future. This rationality is similar to what I've called in the post below this the "logic of experience." For example, walking down the street, there is a light pole directly in front of me, and open sidewalk to the left. Rationality is the process that involves the integration of the various meanings present before me-the relation between the lightpole, the open sidewalk, my current goal/activity of walking in a specific direction in a specific part of the environment. Each of these has a variety of meanings and possible meanings, and my rationality is the process that weaves these meanings together, enabling me to acheive my goal within the constraints and possibilities of the conditions confronting me. As I mentioned above, rationality is not just used in the concrete physical world, but also the purely symbolic world. Planning my day, I take into account various factors such as what I want to do, what resources I have at my disposal, how much time I have, etc. Even though these various factors aren't in front of me, I can manipulate them symbolically to make symbolic plans.
These kinds of rational activity occur all the time. They might be called the "bread and butter" of our experience, and they occur consciously and unconsciously. But not all that we do is rational for various reasons. For one thing, we don't always take all that we know into account when we're making a decision. We might forget factors or constraints that would have otherwise affected what we would choose to do. In addition, the meanings of the various components that go into our decision making process are not completely stable. Just as the effect of someone yelling at 90 dB in a small room depends on the shape/size of the room, or the resulting bounce of a 200 lb man landing on a trampoline depends on other activity on the trampoline, so too does our evaluation of different possibilities depend on the other activity going on in our mind.
What accounts for the difference between this "less rational" functioning and the more clearcut rational thinking described above (e.g., I move to the left to avoid a light pole because I can't walk through it)? The difference seems to be the strength of the constraints. In the first examples, the constraints press tightly onto the decision making process, making for only one clear path of action. In the second example, the constraints allow for more flexibility; there isn't just one good course of action. Our ability to think through those types of situations is influenced by how much we are able to bring to mind that is relevant to our decision, even though, as I said, the weight of the factors we bring forth is partially a function of our mental state at the time (e.g., although I have a constant susceptibility to being sunburned, my susceptibility to taking this fact into account changes depending on whether I'm feeling reckless or health conscious).
There's another limitation to human rationality that I have not yet dealt with that I will mention briefly. So far, I have spoken about how people act rationally/irrationally in simple cause>effect situations. The rationality of a given decision depends on the framing of the relevant aspects of the decision (i.e., what is taken as cause and effect), as well as the knowledge involved in making the decision. A woman's decision to drive to work is rational if she must go 20 miles in 20 minutes, and owns a car. If she knows that a crucial bridge was washed away in a storm, blocking her path, her decision to drive to work is no longer rational (though it would have been if she had not known about the washout).
In the above example, the distinction between rationality and irrationality is clearcut and obvious. In the real world, things are often much more complicated. In the real world, the difference between knowing and not knowing something covers a large gray area in which certain things are to different degrees implied, but not explicitly obvious. Some effects of our actions are usually predictable, whereas others only show up under close examination. Still, no amount of examination is capable of showing us the complete implications of our actions, and in this way our rationality is limited.
Complexity and Human Life
For this post (and hopefully several future posts), I'm going to focus on the relation between the ideas of chaos and complexity and human life, looking at how the principles of the former are manifested in the latter. I aim to show that the essence of adaptive, living systems is most easily seen in this relationship.
To start off, complexity and chaos will be talked about here in a slightly simplified and non-mathematical way that is most in line with my own understanding. While a more thorough understanding may allow for more analytical possibilities, the types of things I want to look at here are at a basic level and don't require this in depth analysis. I'm going to be looking at the ideas of chaos and complexity as exemplified by the phenomena of sensitivity to initial conditions. This is commonly understood with examples like the "butterfly effect."
If we take a look at human life, we get some validation for the butterfly effect. Small events that happen to each of us can have very large consequences. There is a multitude of examples of this, from a chance lottery win, to getting stuck in traffic and missing a flight that would later crash, and so on. Yet, these sequences of small event>huge consequence are not all the same. On one hand there are those examples like the one's just mentioned in which a drastic consequence is the result of seemingly arbitrary conditions. Yet there are just as many events in our lives that follow the small event>drastic outcome pattern which are less arbitrary. A man who happens to see his wife doing something that implies infidelity divorces his wife and breaks up a family. Or the president of one country makes a brief highly offensive remark to another leader, sparking a war. In these two examples, huge consequences follow small events, but their unfolding is not arbitrary, but rather an understandable sequence of human action.
This shows that human beings (and this is certainly true for other animals) incorporate the chaotic dynamics of complex systems into the processes of daily life. While this is not surprising since organisms are complex chaotic systems, it is impressive that living systems are able to make sense of and then utilize the complex chaotic processes for their own gain.
Making sense of a chaotic system is not an easy task, and in most situations in which people try to do this, they fail. Predicting the stock market, the weather, or international affairs is only possible in the short term, and sometimes not even then. Our failures in doing this seem to suggest that in those situations in which we are able to predict the complex dynamics of chaotic systems, the dynamics of these systems must be set up in a predictable way that at least partially makes sense to us.
The situations in which human beings and other animals do make sense of the behavior of complex chaotic systems all involve the prediction of one's own or another animal's behavior (or they are trivial short term predictions like predicting a thunderstorm based on approaching clouds). The basis for such prediction lies in the experientially derived logic of one's own experience. From living in the world, an organism is affected by a range of emotional states coupled to their acts. The unfolding of this coupled affective>active>affective>active sequence yields patterns over time that the animal uses to know itself, or to know others (in those cases when an animal can know others, as humans can). In other words, there are patterns in this affective>active sequence that comprise the "logic of experience." The logic of experience comprises a predictive schema for understanding the interlinking between the affective, motivational, and active dimensions of experience.
The logic of experience is learned from firsthand experience, and although it makes sense of physical processes in the world (along with their affective dimensions), it is a different logic than the logic of physical processes, or "folk physics" (which is also learned from experience, but lacks an affective dimension). The logic of experience allows us to predict processes in systems that are so complex that they would endlessly baffle our capacity for folk physics (imagine trying to predict another's actions, even in the most trivial of circumstances based solely on the interaction of physical particles in their body and the surrounding environment). This logic is, in essence, an evolved mechanism of making sense of chaos.
To start off, complexity and chaos will be talked about here in a slightly simplified and non-mathematical way that is most in line with my own understanding. While a more thorough understanding may allow for more analytical possibilities, the types of things I want to look at here are at a basic level and don't require this in depth analysis. I'm going to be looking at the ideas of chaos and complexity as exemplified by the phenomena of sensitivity to initial conditions. This is commonly understood with examples like the "butterfly effect."
If we take a look at human life, we get some validation for the butterfly effect. Small events that happen to each of us can have very large consequences. There is a multitude of examples of this, from a chance lottery win, to getting stuck in traffic and missing a flight that would later crash, and so on. Yet, these sequences of small event>huge consequence are not all the same. On one hand there are those examples like the one's just mentioned in which a drastic consequence is the result of seemingly arbitrary conditions. Yet there are just as many events in our lives that follow the small event>drastic outcome pattern which are less arbitrary. A man who happens to see his wife doing something that implies infidelity divorces his wife and breaks up a family. Or the president of one country makes a brief highly offensive remark to another leader, sparking a war. In these two examples, huge consequences follow small events, but their unfolding is not arbitrary, but rather an understandable sequence of human action.
This shows that human beings (and this is certainly true for other animals) incorporate the chaotic dynamics of complex systems into the processes of daily life. While this is not surprising since organisms are complex chaotic systems, it is impressive that living systems are able to make sense of and then utilize the complex chaotic processes for their own gain.
Making sense of a chaotic system is not an easy task, and in most situations in which people try to do this, they fail. Predicting the stock market, the weather, or international affairs is only possible in the short term, and sometimes not even then. Our failures in doing this seem to suggest that in those situations in which we are able to predict the complex dynamics of chaotic systems, the dynamics of these systems must be set up in a predictable way that at least partially makes sense to us.
The situations in which human beings and other animals do make sense of the behavior of complex chaotic systems all involve the prediction of one's own or another animal's behavior (or they are trivial short term predictions like predicting a thunderstorm based on approaching clouds). The basis for such prediction lies in the experientially derived logic of one's own experience. From living in the world, an organism is affected by a range of emotional states coupled to their acts. The unfolding of this coupled affective>active>affective>active sequence yields patterns over time that the animal uses to know itself, or to know others (in those cases when an animal can know others, as humans can). In other words, there are patterns in this affective>active sequence that comprise the "logic of experience." The logic of experience comprises a predictive schema for understanding the interlinking between the affective, motivational, and active dimensions of experience.
The logic of experience is learned from firsthand experience, and although it makes sense of physical processes in the world (along with their affective dimensions), it is a different logic than the logic of physical processes, or "folk physics" (which is also learned from experience, but lacks an affective dimension). The logic of experience allows us to predict processes in systems that are so complex that they would endlessly baffle our capacity for folk physics (imagine trying to predict another's actions, even in the most trivial of circumstances based solely on the interaction of physical particles in their body and the surrounding environment). This logic is, in essence, an evolved mechanism of making sense of chaos.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, October 25, 2010
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...
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...
Friday, September 3, 2010
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
