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)"
Thursday, March 25, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
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.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
The First Law of Consciousness
It's interesting to speculate about the role of the structure of the body in the development of ideas about a separation between the mental and the physical (dualism). I think that a strong argument can be made that dualism is the natural result of organizational constraints related to perception in living systems.
For as long as human beings have conceptualized consciousness, we've certainly known that there is sometimes a correlation between mental events and physical events. We don't see this correlation for all mental events, but it is certainly evident for many. For example, when we interact with the physical objects of our environment, it is clear that these physical events form part of the whole experience.
Scientific experimentation has shown us that the correlation between the mental and the physical is deeper than once thought. It's not just that some mental events correlate with physical events. On the contrary, experiments (like those involving the artificial electrical stimulation of nerve cells in the brain) have suggested that even our most intangible thoughts and feelings can be elicited by the artificial stimulation of certain areas of the brain. As a result, we've become aware of a deeper relation between the mental and the physical. The formerly non-physical nature of feelings, ideas, dreams, etc. has now been shown to be false because these things are physically manifested in terms of activity within a biological system.
Nevertheless, there is a difference between knowing that every mental event is accompanied by a specific pattern of activity in a physical system, and being able to grasp the dynamics of this correspondence-fully knowing the mental in terms of the physical. The physical processes that underlie a given certain mental state cannot be exhaustively known by the organism that is having that mental state as it is having it because such knowledge would require a more advanced physical system, which would in turn require more brainpower-the increasing requirements would feed back on each other!
For as long as human beings have conceptualized consciousness, we've certainly known that there is sometimes a correlation between mental events and physical events. We don't see this correlation for all mental events, but it is certainly evident for many. For example, when we interact with the physical objects of our environment, it is clear that these physical events form part of the whole experience.
Scientific experimentation has shown us that the correlation between the mental and the physical is deeper than once thought. It's not just that some mental events correlate with physical events. On the contrary, experiments (like those involving the artificial electrical stimulation of nerve cells in the brain) have suggested that even our most intangible thoughts and feelings can be elicited by the artificial stimulation of certain areas of the brain. As a result, we've become aware of a deeper relation between the mental and the physical. The formerly non-physical nature of feelings, ideas, dreams, etc. has now been shown to be false because these things are physically manifested in terms of activity within a biological system.
Nevertheless, there is a difference between knowing that every mental event is accompanied by a specific pattern of activity in a physical system, and being able to grasp the dynamics of this correspondence-fully knowing the mental in terms of the physical. The physical processes that underlie a given certain mental state cannot be exhaustively known by the organism that is having that mental state as it is having it because such knowledge would require a more advanced physical system, which would in turn require more brainpower-the increasing requirements would feed back on each other!
Even though we can't fully grasp the dynamics of the biological side of our conscious experience, it's very interesting to speculate what it would be like to have this activity fed back into the perceptual organs so that the nervous system activity that corresponded to our waking experience could be perceived in real time. If we could make any sense out of the activity that we perceived, I would guess that this would have a significant effect on what it's like to experience. Of course, our existence is already defined by the fact that we do have a certain amount of this: we perceive our selves in real time-just not every process that's occurring. I believe it's this incomplete perception that is to blame for dualistic ideas about mind and matter that have arisen over the ages.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
A THEORY OF VALUE
Two contexts in which I might use the term value:
1. A set of items has a numerical value
2. I value a certain piece of music
These seem to be very different uses of the term value, and, while not disputing the differences between them, I want to argue that our use of the term value in both of these instances is indicative of a very abstract and useful concept of value that is equally applicable in both cases.
At the very foundation of this abstract concept of value is the fact that values require evaluators. Valuing is something that is done by organisms (and maybe-someday-by inorganic technology). More specifically, by evaluating, an organism assesses some part of the environment with respect to an existing system of classification. As a result of the assessment, the organism will categorize the assessed in terms of one or more dimensions of classification, which may be affective, moral, numerical, etc. Such is the process of evaluating, and therefore, to say that something has value is to say that it has been appraised by the organism in this manner.
I'm arguing for this abstract concept of value because I see it as forming a very important and basic component of all cognition and action in organisms. Any organism's ability to act in the world will be affected-for better or worse-by how adaptively the organism is able to evaluate in this general sense. The fact that there is such a big gap between e.g. moral values and numerical values does nothing to detract from the validity of this general concept. These very differences illustrate the diversity of means by which evaluating is done. That numerical values seem so different from values like patriotism is a testament to the diverse processes that may lead to values-which are themselves as diverse as the evaluative processes that created them.
From this standpoint, we can go forth and say: What is numerosity? What is patriotism? What is love? From an abstract level of a certain perspective, all of these are the same type of thing: they are all values.
1. A set of items has a numerical value
2. I value a certain piece of music
These seem to be very different uses of the term value, and, while not disputing the differences between them, I want to argue that our use of the term value in both of these instances is indicative of a very abstract and useful concept of value that is equally applicable in both cases.
At the very foundation of this abstract concept of value is the fact that values require evaluators. Valuing is something that is done by organisms (and maybe-someday-by inorganic technology). More specifically, by evaluating, an organism assesses some part of the environment with respect to an existing system of classification. As a result of the assessment, the organism will categorize the assessed in terms of one or more dimensions of classification, which may be affective, moral, numerical, etc. Such is the process of evaluating, and therefore, to say that something has value is to say that it has been appraised by the organism in this manner.
I'm arguing for this abstract concept of value because I see it as forming a very important and basic component of all cognition and action in organisms. Any organism's ability to act in the world will be affected-for better or worse-by how adaptively the organism is able to evaluate in this general sense. The fact that there is such a big gap between e.g. moral values and numerical values does nothing to detract from the validity of this general concept. These very differences illustrate the diversity of means by which evaluating is done. That numerical values seem so different from values like patriotism is a testament to the diverse processes that may lead to values-which are themselves as diverse as the evaluative processes that created them.
From this standpoint, we can go forth and say: What is numerosity? What is patriotism? What is love? From an abstract level of a certain perspective, all of these are the same type of thing: they are all values.
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