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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New ways of doing research in the digital world

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

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

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

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

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

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

A discordant domain of needs and wants

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

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

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

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

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

Consciousness and the Structure of Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A deterministic world and free choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barriers to Progress

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

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

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

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

Gregory Bateson's Levels of Learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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