The phrenologists are all dead, but their torch is yet carried. When they drew lines on the human skull separating this mental faculty from that one – cautiousness, acquisitiveness, sight, wit – they were continuing a long line of flawed enquiry into the brain and mind which still dominates the field today.
REDUCTION OF THE MIND
When confronted with the problem of the mind, human beings often attempt explanation by rendering mundane its various components, and in doing so hope to solve the mystery of its structure. From the earliest philosophers, to the phrenologists, through to the behaviourists and the modern cognitive neuroscientists, this battery of reduction has tried to make a breech in the mind’s defences to no avail. It remains horrifyingly unified, despite all attempts at reductive analysis.
Psychologists often attempt to study the mind by reducing it to smaller functional components. Pre-psychology these components of the mind were often called faculties; today they are often called mental processes. The terms are interchangeable. Mental processes themselves are the various observed abilities of the mind – attention, memory, perception, learning, problem solving, and so on.
Typically, psychologists attempt to infer the nature of mental processes from experimental data that examines behaviour. Mental processes are in the process of experimentation asserted to be quantifiable things produce behaviour. The logical leap here is quite profound, but utterly pervades the field. Based on observations of behaviour (reaction times, percent of responses correct, responses to a questionnaire, brain activity, or more esoteric social measures) underlying mental processes are described and defined.
The Myth of Mental Processes
In The New Phrenology, William Uttal argues that psychologists are creating divisions where there may be none, based on mostly arbitrary criteria. In dividing the processes of the brain up in such a way, we are assuming that such division is not only possible, but that the function and structure of these mental entities is therefore knowable.
Uttal makes the argument that the reason nobody has ever comprehensively described the processes of the mind is that these processes don’t exist, or at least have not ever been proven to. What we are observing are the properties of mind, rather than separate mental entities that can be described by what behaviours they cause. Trying to distinguish a mental process from the mind is, he says, like trying to separate the whiteness of a golf ball from the golf ball itself. Its property of whiteness cannot be subtracted from the thing itself.
The Struggle for Definition
Worse still than the reification of mental processes, no unified or stable taxonomy of mental processes has ever been established, nor does one seem forthcoming. Mental processes are constantly renamed, reshaped, deleted, invented and combined.
Uttal provides a brief list of mental processes currently under discussion in psychological research, including: “semantic information processing”, “short-term memory storage”, “executive processes”, “sensory learning”, “temporal and spatial context memory”, “mathematical thinking”, “visual memories”, “face perception”, “conceptual knowledge”, “working memory”, “verbal working memory”, “pleasant and unpleasant emotions”, and “anticipation of pain”. These impressive sounding names disguise the transient and improvised nature of these terms.
Some, like executive processes, have remained in vogue for just under a generation. Most are invented ad-hoc – sensory learning, conceptual knowledge, working memory – to describe and faux-explain behaviour, and fall out of favour after a short time if they ever catch on. Already some of the more recent and best known terms like short and long term memory are vanishing from the lexicon of psychologists.
Uttal further reinforces the point by providing several taxonomies of mental
processes from various theoretical eras. A simple comparison shows how each list is almost utterly alien to the ones produced before and after it. Each generation erases the one that came before it, and nothing is gained or passed on. Our singular inability over centuries of philosophy and science to provide a credible description of the contents of the mind raises doubts about the possibility of ever doing so, and certainly casts doubt on the ever-shifting taxonomy developed by modern researchers.
The reason why no progress has been made towards proper taxonomy of mental processes is that nobody has ever been able to establish or agree for any sustained period on which ones exist. This is primarily because nobody has any valid means of establishing what processes exist in the brain, or if they even can be teased out from one another.
The experimental psychologist E.G. Boring once famously said that “intelligence is what intelligence tests measure”. This sentiment could be extended to the field more generally– “mental processes are whatever research measures”.
But psychology doesn’t stop at merely attempting to name and describe the components of the mind. The cutting edge of psychological science is a field called cognitive neuroscience, which attempts to localise mental constructs within discrete physical modules within the brain. Before jumping into this discussion, some background is required.
PHRENOLOGY
Fig. 1. Typical Rhizzoner brain anatomy. Note the enlarged Hitler Lobe.
Based on the assumption that the mind could be broken down into constituent parts, the phrenologists of the early 1800s sought to find physical evidence of these parts, localise them, and relate them to behaviour. They followed in the footsteps of philosophers of antiquity and the middle ages who had also sought to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of mental faculties and then locate these faculties in the “organ of the mind”.
Today phrenology is mostly criticised for its lack of scientific rigor when it came to its assumption that a physically larger brain region (observed in the shape of the skull) indicated greater functioning in that region. Mostly ignored or even praised are the other assumptions its investigations abided by. Specifically, phrenologists assumed that
1. The mind can be reduced to a series of mental faculties
2. Localised brain regions are the substrates of mental faculties
Due to these assumptions, phrenology is often credited as stating the case for modern cognitive neuroscience, which wholeheartedly embraces these ideas. I would not disagree.
Why are these assumptions troubling? Intuitively they appeal to virtually everyone who considers the problem, but further examination raises many questions. As previously discussed, the first assumption is scientifically spurious to say the least, and leads to an unjustified reductionist explanation of the mind.
The second assumption is no better. Undoubtedly the brain is the physical substrate of our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, but the phrenologists took things a crucial step further. They believed that these faculties or processes must be produced somewhere – if we could find where, we would understand how the mind maps onto the physical activity of the brain, and understand the organisation and structure of the mind.
It is easy to see how one assumption leads to another almost inexorably. Take away the first, and the second seems ludicrous – how can we divide the brain if we cannot divide the mind? The psychology of later years would regardless continue to attempt a reduction into parts of the mind, and then associate these parts with brain regions with mixed success.
BEHAVIOURISM
In the middle of the 20th century, the dominant paradigm in psychology was behaviourism. Behaviourism sought to completely negate the intrusion of the brain into the study of psychology, and eschewed study of mental activity, considering not just the mind but also the brain unanalysable. It instead wished to study behaviour, which was considered the only truly scientific measure in psychology, since it was not hypothetical or inferred but directly observed.
Notably, behaviourism postulated that the basis of all behaviour originates from learned responses to stimuli, and that outside making these associations the brain does very little. That is, beyond a few reflexive and very basic a priori behaviours imprinted biologically, everything we do, say, think, is the result of associations we make between behaviours and stimuli. Its disciples reduced the brain and mind to a series of reflexive associations, completely abandoning an attempt at substantial explanation of the mind, and developing a profoundly reductionist account of all human behaviour.
We can see in behaviourism an understandable reaction against the endless formulation of lists of mental processes, an activity that had endured and even prospered after the disbanding of phrenology. Behavioural psychology, in a rare move, retreated from this activity, considering it profoundly unscientific, but erred in its own interpretation of the brain and mind. While it eschewed the likely fictional mental entities described by most preceding psychology, it introduced its own radically reductionist approach to science into psychology.
THE COGNITIVE ‘REVOLUTION’
The fatal assumption of behaviourism was that mental processes were considered irrelevant to experimental psychology. This assumption was the one eventually seized on by the new wave of anti-behaviourists, who soon coalesced into the cognitive psychologists.
Cognitive psychology emerged out of a self-styled “cognitive revolution”, and focussed itself on the study of cognition. Cognition simply refers to the activity of mental processes. This new paradigm was unsatisfied with the reduction of human psychology to mere external behaviour, arguing that a description of what behaviour went on in the mind between stimulus and response was required to properly understand the mind. Doing this would, as you can no doubt guess, require developing a comprehensive list of these mental processes through scientific investigation.
Cognitive psychology did not shed, but rather embraced behaviourisms focus on behaviour as the only reliable method of investigating the mind. The only difference was that cognitivists would not correlate behaviour with stimulus-response conditions, but rather with mental processes.
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE
Out of cognitivism was born cognitive neuroscience, the marriage of cognitivism’s preoccupation with correlating mental processes and behaviour, and the anatomical concerns of neuroscience. We are most of us quite familiar with the results and ideology of cognitive neuroscience, since it pervades the popular understanding of the mind and brain. Modern research technologies are supposedly bringing us closer and closer to an understanding of ourselves. Developments in imaging technologies allow us to see into the brain as it acts, and studies finding correlations between thousands upon thousands of newly minted mental processes and neural activity are on the cutting edge of research. Every day the public hears astounding reports from these scientists, and buy their astounding books. New brain regions are constantly being discovered; their functions at last apparently understood. The hidden storerooms of memory, thought, personality, love, even religious ecstasy are definitively located in small and innocuous little corners within the wrinkled folds of the brain.
What exactly does cognitive neuroscience do when it examines the brain? Let us briefly examine the brain and the techniques used to measure its activity.
Neurology
Brains are made of a kind of cell called neurons, cells similar in function to the nerve cells found all throughout the body. Neurons are capable of transmitting electrical signals to one another. The brain consists of billions of intricately interconnected neurons, each of which has many connections to the neurons surrounding it. Arms called axons and dendrites branch out from the surface of the neuron to connect it to its neighbours at a small receptive gap called a synapse. The activity of the brain is based on billions upon billions of these simple, but collectively extremely complex interactions.
Technology and techniques for studying the brain
Naturally, scientists have sought to measure the activity of the brain in the hopes of understanding it, though until recently these methods have been constrained by technology. One of the earliest technologies, still widely used today, is the electroencephalogram (EEG). These devices can measure electrical activity in the brain via electrodes placed on the outside of the skull, summarising millions of neurons’ activity into a waveform of amplitude.
More recently, and more relevant to a criticism of contemporary psychology, psychologists have gained access to advanced scanning technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI. The physics behind the MRI is complex, and it suffices to say that MRIs can generate a real-time, high resolution, three dimensional image of the human body at virtually no risk to the person being scanned. The medical and research potential of such a scan is of huge significance, and the MRI is probably one of the greatest breakthroughs in medical history. Unsurprisingly, psychologists have been keen to apply this technique to their own field, leading to the development of the functional MRI, or fMRI. FMRI techniques measure blood flow to regions of the brain as an indicator of neural activity, since neurons need oxygen and energy to operate, and blood supplies oxygen and energy.
THE NEW PHRENOLOGY
It is a match made in heaven. A field fixated on reduction of the mind into subcomponents, and a device able to correlate activity in the brain with whatever mental processes one desires. At last, psychologists had found a technique for fulfilling the promise of phrenology. The result has been an explosion of correlational research that claims to find the physical substrates, or “modules” that originate every mental process.
The first problem with this approach relates back to earlier in this discussion. If we contest the existence of separable mental processes, then the whole enterprise is rendered useless. If there are no mental processes, then correlating them with physical activity is clearly pointless, and what we are observing is noise that cannot be so easily labelled or subdivided into localised functioning.
Yet researchers point to the neural activity in regions of the brain during different cognitive tasks or behaviours, and claim that this activity is correlated with, and therefore the physical substrate of, whatever mental process is under investigation. For example, during tasks requiring self-control, inhibition, or decision making, greater activity is typically measured in the frontal lobe of the brain. Hence, the frontal lobe is almost universally believed to be substrate of the high level “executive functions” that produce behaviours of decision making and inhibition. The reasoning could not be more crude, and rely on more flimsy assumptions. How can we be so sure that activation in a brain region indicates that the observed behaviour is being generated there? This assumes that the brain is so simple a device that greater activity over a large area indicates the process is occurring in that activated area. It could just as easily be argued that brain activity during behaviour could be acting as a remote control, or an inhibitor, or an unrelated flourish, or virtually any other possible explanation. Likely none of these are correct – the best and most honest answer any scientist can give is that we simply do not know enough about the brain to so confidently assume that localised neural activity can be correlated with any specific mental process or behaviour.
Just as serious are the criticisms of the scientific rigour and reliability of cognitive neuroscience. In another work, Reliability in Cognitive Neuroscience: a Meta-Meta Analysis, Uttal demonstrates the issues that plague the investigations of cognitive neuroscience. This deserves a whole discussion on its own, and it suffices to say that researchers rarely find consistency in brain activation between individuals or even within the same individual on different occasions, further weakening their claims. The same issue complicates lesioning research, which investigates correlations between localised brain damage and loss of mental functioning. Simply put, cognitive neuroscientists are unable to explain the vast variation in results obtained from fMRI scans both within and between subjects, instead opting to simply average their results and produce maps of activation which do not represent any actual brain activity they recorded.
DIRECTIONS
Uttal states his own case in this way: the mind is not divisible but unified. It cannot be reduced to subcomponents, or at least not subcomponents whose definitions are based on behavioural observations as is presently done. He says that the mind may not be analysable, and cannot be understood in this sense. In regards to cognitive neuroscience, correlations of mental processes with brain activity do not provide proof of localisation of mental processes, and do not identify the substrates of these processes. However he also seems to favour a return to a kind of soft behaviourism, for which I have no taste.
Personally I do not believe that the mind is unanalysable. While the mind - the most arcane and mysterious entity we know of - is difficult for science to address it arises out of analysable physical events. Even if cannot be assayed directly by our current methods, we may find in the functioning of the brain at the microscopic level, through comprehensive analysis, some shadow of the mind. We may find the gap between the structure of the brain and its activity and glimpse the nature of experience.
The brain, for me, is a system of conscious motion, a feeling most neuroscientists do not share. The inner life of the mind is characterised by continuity and death is cessation of what in the living is ceaseless. Yet cognitive neuroscience focusses on states and discrete “events” which may not even be events at all. When neuroscientists observe the brain they seek to capture its behaviour in snapshots, to compare levels and patterns of activation. What may be more fruitful is examining its motion, like a series of tubes carrying fluid endlessly in a self-propagating system that achieves continuity of experience through continuity of motion. Marx believed that capitalism only made sense in motion, that its complexities and relationships were invisible when they stood still. He did not dwell overly on the surface appearance of his subject matter and spend his time inferring inner systems from behaviour like his contemporaries. He built ideas after lengthy analysis, far reaching ideas, and applied them from the inside out, tested them, and ultimately discovered not just what our society does, but what it is. When examining a system as complex as the brain-mind, we may do well to follow his lead.
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
if it?
i guess i dont know enough about the subject to comment. i was going to say that if you can get bits of the brain to light up in repeatable experiments then thats a good indication of causation, but if you say it's not repeatable then i guess not?
Cheers.
With the collapse of the USSR and the complete propaganda victory against soviet science, as well as the crude reductionism of laymen in communist parties who think science is bourgeois propaganda (or more precisely that this makes it useless), serious analysis of dialectical thinking in the natural sciences is probably less advanced than Engels's. I would be interested to hear your general thoughts.
Gibbonstrength posted:your pdf awaits...
conec posted:
You have infantile speech disorder? That`s a shame! Are there any other reddit teens majoring in psychology here?? J/w
BAD POSTS
Oh my god conec you learned to write, congratulations!! This is truly a great day for the 'zone. Even capitalizing - Wow!
my knowledge of neurology/neuroscience is at a pretty surface nursing school level, but it's my hunch that "lower-level" processes like vision, hearing, shape recognition, pain, proprioception, etc can be reduced to functional units but that thought and intelligence is a vastly complex emergent system that cannot and will not ever be mappable
Edited by chickeon ()
honestly i think the unfathomable complexity of the brain is really comforting. how terrifying would the prospect of psychologists (and marketers, corporations, cops, the cia, whoever) having a complete map of thought be? it's the pig's wet dream, to really know how these scum operate
dank_xiaopeng posted:how terrifying would the prospect of psychologists (and marketers, corporations, cops, the cia, whoever) having a complete map of thought be? it's the pig's wet dream, to really know how these scum operate
the future is now
dank_xiaopeng posted:don't look at me, i'm just a nsa heuristic-analysis webcrawler that got stuck in a infinite redirect loop trying to index prodromal schizoid irony here nd achieved sentience
do you vote though?
dank_xiaopeng posted:my knowledge of neurology/neuroscience is at a pretty surface nursing school level, but it's my hunch that "lower-level" processes like vision, hearing, shape recognition, pain, proprioception, etc can be reduced to functional units but that thought and intelligence is a vastly complex emergent system that cannot and will not ever be mappable
Here's some functional units for you Read -> Comprehend -> Post
babyhueypnewton posted:This post is amazing. Have you read The Dialectical Biologist by Levins and Lewontin? They have a weak version of dialectics but it's the only example I could think of with thinking dialectically about natural science and it's clear that a lack of dialectical thinking is a fatal flaw in analyzing the brain.
levins & lewontin are part of a cool tradition of leftist biologists. they own. stephen j (short for jay) gould is cool but he's more liberal. haldane was ftw, and "He continued to admire Stalin, describing him in 1962 as "a very great man who did a very good job".
Gibbonstrength posted:...Behaviourism sought to completely negate the intrusion of the brain into the study of psychology, and eschewed study of mental activity, considering not just the mind but also the brain unanalysable. It instead wished to study behaviour, which was considered the only truly scientific measure in psychology, since it was not hypothetical or inferred but directly observed.
...Notably, behaviourism postulated that the basis of all behaviour originates from learned responses to stimuli, and that outside making these associations the brain does very little. That is, beyond a few reflexive and very basic a priori behaviours imprinted biologically, everything we do, say, think, is the result of associations we make between behaviours and stimuli. Its disciples reduced the brain and mind to a series of reflexive associations, completely abandoning an attempt at substantial explanation of the mind, and developing a profoundly reductionist account of all human behaviour.
...While it eschewed the likely fictional mental entities described by most preceding psychology, it introduced its own radically reductionist approach to science into psychology.
...The fatal assumption of behaviourism was that mental processes were considered irrelevant to experimental psychology.
You describe a pretty hardcore, unrealistic form of behaviorism here, and it seems like you're straining to lump it in with the villains of your essay. For the practical purposes of psychology, the mind's inner workings are often irrelevant in the face of reinforcement and punishment. Not only external states (behaviors) but internal ones (emotions, thoughts, perceptions, or any other loose category of mental activities) are altered, invoked, suppressed, reproduced, through the basic mechanisms of behaviorism. Your use of the term "reductionist" in this context is like calling Newtonian physics "reductionist" for not accounting for special relativity - it's technically correct but well irrelevant to the discipline's material goals. To put it bleakly, behaviorism is the honest half of CBT, it is the explicit admission that psychology is social control, whereas the part that deals with "cognition" exists to allow oppressors to make value judgments about which "cognitions" are socially appropriate.
Panopticon posted:i guess i dont know enough about the subject to comment. i was going to say that if you can get bits of the brain to light up in repeatable experiments then thats a good indication of causation, but if you say it's not repeatable then i guess not?
Well what I'm driving at is that getting bits of the brain to light up doesn't really show anything. All you show is that the brain has differentiated electrical activity throughout it while it does things. If the nature of those "things" (the mental processes) is unknown, poorly understood or impossible because they don't really exist like that, then what exactly are you correlating your brain images with?
The second point is that the images you get don't prove localisation at all. We have no idea what brain activity means, even something as basic as "does greater activation indicate an increase in processing?" And yes, there's a big issue with reliability in these scans, because they rarely if ever are consistent. What neuroscientists tend to find is a bunch of differentiated activity all across the brain with a few bright spots, which they then label as the centres or loci of the process in question. So it's weak science to say the least.
dank_xiaopeng posted:i agree with your main argument, yeah correlating complex cognition with specific areas of brain activity observed on fMRIs and other imaging is reductive, but how do you explain the reliably predictable changes in behavior that emerge after patients suffer from brain lesions in specific areas? (for example, lesions in the right fusiform gyrus cause an inability to recognize faces in a high percentage of cases)
my knowledge of neurology/neuroscience is at a pretty surface nursing school level, but it's my hunch that "lower-level" processes like vision, hearing, shape recognition, pain, proprioception, etc can be reduced to functional units but that thought and intelligence is a vastly complex emergent system that cannot and will not ever be mappable
swampman posted:I'm pretty ignorant of this subject, but it's my hunch that "lower level" processes like smell, literacy, object throwing, the accommodation reflex, odors, gamete production etc can be reduced to functional units but that the immortal soul is obscured from Man's eyes until xher day of Judgment come, be xhe Negroid, or be xhe baptised into the Catholic faith
the lesioning stuff is really overrated. The logic, for everyone's benefit, is that when someone gets brain damage to a specific area psychologists observes changes to their behaviour and correlate regions to functioning, based on loss of observed loss of function. Firstly, just because we damage a part of the brain and the patient loses, say, their ability to see motion, does not necessarily mean that area processed motion in vision. Who is to say the damage did not merely interrupt part some more vast and distributed process, or loops, or damage an inhibitor which then caused an overactivity of some other group of neurons which then interrupted the motion vision process, and so on.
It is also really unreliable empirically. Much like fMRIs, the same effects are rarely observed between individuals, and additionally people with lesser damage sometimes never recover while those with huge brain damage can recover most of their functioning. There's really rhyme or reason to most of it.
The only place localisation does exist is in the direct interfaces between sensory organs and the brain. For example the point where visual sensory information hits the brain is basically a bunch of neurons that form a 1:1 scale model of our field of vision. However, as soon as you go beyond that initial layer its a complete mystery. I'm not sure I'd even consider this a localisation of function since no mental activity is actually occuring there, its just the point where raw neural data is imported into the brain.
babyhueypnewton posted:This post is amazing. Have you read The Dialectical Biologist by Levins and Lewontin? They have a weak version of dialectics but it's the only example I could think of with thinking dialectically about natural science and it's clear that a lack of dialectical thinking is a fatal flaw in analyzing the brain.
With the collapse of the USSR and the complete propaganda victory against soviet science, as well as the crude reductionism of laymen in communist parties who think science is bourgeois propaganda (or more precisely that this makes it useless), serious analysis of dialectical thinking in the natural sciences is probably less advanced than Engels's. I would be interested to hear your general thoughts.
Thank you I haven't really read anything about Soviet science or how Marxism relates to science, so I'd just be making things up if I tried to talk about it too much. I know it's something youve talked about before and I'd be interested to learn more. My little bit about Marx at the end wasn't really guided by any reading I've done, his method just seems appropriate at face value. I would also say Freud approached psychology from a more valid perspective that was in some ways similar to Marx's. I don't want psychology to abandon empirical research, it just needs to admit what it doesn't know, and stop pretending to understand the components of the mind.
c_man posted:levins & lewontin are part of a cool tradition of leftist biologists. they own. stephen j (short for jay) gould is cool but he's more liberal. haldane was ftw, and "He continued to admire Stalin, describing him in 1962 as "a very great man who did a very good job".
getfiscal posted:Alright so the biological base produces a superstructural subject which has relative autonomy. But does this subject have a topology?
yes...no....maybe....
I think the role of white matter is underrated and maybe explains something more than it appears to. White matter transmits neuronal signals quickly through the insides of the cerebral cortex, and maintains the signal strength no matter how far it carries it. Normally neuroscientists just say this allows the brain to transmit information from module to module or whatever. My interpretation is that white matter allows the brain to bring distant neurons closer, in a kind of simulated proximity. So the shape of the mind will be very different to the shape of the brain. In fact it may be able to change its shape to whatever it likes via the differential use of white matter.
swampman posted:You describe a pretty hardcore, unrealistic form of behaviorism here, and it seems like you're straining to lump it in with the villains of your essay. For the practical purposes of psychology, the mind's inner workings are often irrelevant in the face of reinforcement and punishment. Not only external states (behaviors) but internal ones (emotions, thoughts, perceptions, or any other loose category of mental activities) are altered, invoked, suppressed, reproduced, through the basic mechanisms of behaviorism. Your use of the term "reductionist" in this context is like calling Newtonian physics "reductionist" for not accounting for special relativity - it's technically correct but well irrelevant to the discipline's material goals. To put it bleakly, behaviorism is the honest half of CBT, it is the explicit admission that psychology is social control, whereas the part that deals with "cognition" exists to allow oppressors to make value judgments about which "cognitions" are socially appropriate.
That's true I'm focusing more on the harder version of behaviourism and simplifying it a lot. I don't want to give the impression that I really dislike behaviourism, because I think they had a noble goal and everything. My point was to try and show how the only paradigm in psychology that really stood up to the "mental faculties" crowd ended up reinventing itself as cognitive psychology, from which the hardcore localisers of cognitive neuroscience emerged. So clearly something was wrong in the bones of behaviourism since it spawned something like cog psych and cog neuroscience.
As a descriptor and predictor of behaviour, behaviourism was a huge success, it just cant take psychology any further than that. It seems like you see psychology as a mostly behavioural science, which is fair enough, but I see it's end point as explanation of the mind rather than just a positivist description. That's just what interests me more, I'm not claiming it's the only valid position.
b) Doesn't the persistence of certain conceptions of mental processes, such as the one outlined above, to some extent undermine the claim that lists or taxonomies of mental processing are short-lived, are insufficiently robust to be included in developing models, and therefore are ultimately arbitrary?
c) If certain mental processes do prove to be sufficiently robust that they are carried over from model to model, does this not suggest that it could be possible, in time, to develop a suitably stable taxonomy of mental processes, perhaps even one that is compatible with a model of a unified mind?
Gibbonstrength posted:Personally I do not believe that the mind is unanalysable.
I mean, you have to start somewhere? Why not with the most theoretically primitive and yet experimentally advanced methods possible?
Some portions are pretty graspable. Like our understanding of the optic nerve and image reconstruction is pretty good, even with experiments on memory (e.g. http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/ ).
fwiw i had a roomie in kock's lab. i mean it's an impossible project imho and i agree but there's no sense stoppin folks from tilting windmills if it makes good literature...or something?
a big bone to pick that i, as someone more experienced in the issues that plague microbiology, is that working out which processes are important or are even present, and distinguishing between physically different processes that can look the same is extremely difficult. simply rattling off a list of processes that are supposed to be happening as a direct function of neurons doing stuff bypasses the actual biophysical question of how (or even 'if') it could actually be happening. given how little we know about how single neurons work, not to mention the fact that neurons specialize and interact with other types of cells and are affected by metabolism (almost certainly through undiscovered mechanisms, in addition to what we know about) etc the claims that behavior is "understood" in terms of when neurons light up strikes me as missing the entire point. lewontin makes a similar argument (among others) against a lot of the evo-psych crowd who want to explain homosexuality as being adaptive somehow, without any reason to think it has a genetic basis, let alone how that would possibly function.
Lessons posted:a) OP, do you believe that, for example, the human mind has the capacity to retain roughly seven digits at a time, with very little variation in the number of digits retained between individuals? Could this particular capacity of the human mind be described as a mental process?
b) Doesn't the persistence of certain conceptions of mental processes, such as the one outlined above, to some extent undermine the claim that lists or taxonomies of mental processing are short-lived, are insufficiently robust to be included in developing models, and therefore are ultimately arbitrary?
c) If certain mental processes do prove to be sufficiently robust that they are carried over from model to model, does this not suggest that it could be possible, in time, to develop a suitably stable taxonomy of mental processes, perhaps even one that is compatible with a model of a unified mind?
A. I agree that the mind has observable properties/abilities or whatever name we want to use. This is really an observation though, not a process. observations like these only tell you what the mind can do, rather than anything about its structure, or what sub-structures are responsible. There's no reason to suggest, to use your example, that this kind of memory is handled by a special process called short term memory. What handles this process is at this point indivisible structurally from any other observable property of the mind. I'll try and illustrate why.
To present an extreme example, what is to suggest that the process that controls language comprehension doesn't also control short term recollection of numbers? In a typical experiment we might, say, "load" the language process with some reading task while also requiring a subject to remember a string of numbers. If either task suffers in accuracy/speed during the test then the same process is assumed to be "used up" on one, causing the other to suffer. This is the basis of most working memory and attention research, from which taxonomies of processing are developed.
This kind of method, a very common one, makes unjustified assumptions about how the mind works. For example, how do we know that "loading" a process causes its performance to suffer? Can we make that claim that we can test the limits of processing, or if specific forms of processing can even occur at different levels of accuracy or efficiency? they may simply operate on or off, or in some other unknown way. There may be countless interactions, inhibitions, excitations, quirks of structure, and so on, acting in this scenario that drawing hasty conclusions necessarily blinds us to.
My roundabout point is that we can't claim to know that the mind is divisible into lesser processes based on observations of behaviour, considering how little we know about the mechanisms or structures it uses to produce those observed behaviours.
B. Your example isn't a great one because short term memory has so far as i know been abandoned as a theory of memory. At this point it's been further reduced and revised though it's not really an area I have much interest in so I can't give you specifics beyond that. Point being, there isn't a stable taxonomy even with apparenty fundamental concepts like divisions of memory, which is itself a pretty recent development.
C. I do not think that a consistent taxonomy is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of mental processes, but it is necessary.
You can certainly have mental processes exist in concert with a unified mind, but you can't build those by inferring evidence for ad hoc entities from behavioural observations.
While uttal, whose work I'm basing a lot of my writing off, believes the mind is unified I don't necessarily agree with him. I don't believe that we can never find the underlying processes or mechanisms of the mind, but I do believe that the current system of making gross and fairly crude assumptions about the structure of the mind (often invoking misguided parallels with how computers work in the case of memory) has no chance of teasing out any useful information.
Edited by Gibbonstrength ()
c_man posted:*slovene accent*the problem with putting together a taxonomy of mental behaviors is that it is not reductionist enough, i claim
a big bone to pick that i, as someone more experienced in the issues that plague microbiology, is that working out which processes are important or are even present, and distinguishing between physically different processes that can look the same is extremely difficult. simply rattling off a list of processes that are supposed to be happening as a direct function of neurons doing stuff bypasses the actual biophysical question of how (or even 'if') it could actually be happening. given how little we know about how single neurons work, not to mention the fact that neurons specialize and interact with other types of cells and are affected by metabolism (almost certainly through undiscovered mechanisms, in addition to what we know about) etc the claims that behavior is "understood" in terms of when neurons light up strikes me as missing the entire point. lewontin makes a similar argument (among others) against a lot of the evo-psych crowd who want to explain homosexuality as being adaptive somehow, without any reason to think it has a genetic basis, let alone how that would possibly function.
yeah I agree entirely. Even if we take the assumptions of cognitive psychology as being correct, where do their methods lead? Will we understand or know the mind any better after having perfectly correlated brain activity with behaviour? This kind of science is bound to hit a dead end, but I'd rather it be derailed earlier and spare us the wasted time
Gibbonstrength posted:To present an extreme example, what is to suggest that the process that controls language comprehension doesn't also control short term recollection of numbers? In a typical experiment we might, say, "load" the language process with some reading task while also requiring a subject to remember a string of numbers. If either task suffers in accuracy/speed during the test then the same process is assumed to be "used up" on one, causing the other to suffer. This is the basis of most working memory and attention research, from which taxonomies of processing are developed.
This kind of method, a very common one, makes unjustified assumptions about how the mind works. For example, how do we know that "loading" a process causes its performance to suffer? Can we make that claim that we can test the limits of processing, or if specific forms of processing can even occur at different levels of accuracy or efficiency? they may simply operate on or off, or in some other unknown way. There may be countless interactions, inhibitions, excitations, quirks of structure, and so on, acting in this scenario that drawing hasty conclusions necessarily blinds us to.
I recently sprained my finger, making this thread even more frustrating to read. Like you understand the scientific method right? You understand what validity is?
Gibbonstrength posted:yeah I agree entirely. Even if we take the assumptions of cognitive psychology as being correct, where do their methods lead? Will we understand or know the mind any better after having perfectly correlated brain activity with behaviour? This kind of science is bound to hit a dead end, but I'd rather it be derailed earlier and spare us the wasted time
i may have mentioned this the last time this came up, but a lot of the "sciences" which primarily produce correlations between phenomena without making constrictive, observable claims about the underlying physical structure make me imagine if someone decided that the only reason that those people who sent electric shocks through a line of monks in renaissance parties weren't being scientific was that they didn't take good enough data.
Gibbonstrength posted:This kind of science is bound to hit a dead end, but I'd rather it be derailed earlier and spare us the wasted time
death is certian. lets die now and just get everything over with i guess
but really, just as IWC trolls, i want to make boku bux by trolling the taxpayer into funding my research so...sorry, i guess?
Gibbonstrength posted:To present an extreme example, what is to suggest that the process that controls language comprehension doesn't also control short term recollection of numbers?
The experimentation on this is actually much different from what you think. Studies of short-term recall present a variety of tasks: remembering digits, images of objects, short sentences, etc., and the recall capacity is consistent throughout. This, in itself, suggests that short-term recall operates separately from other mental tasks, like mathematical skill, object recognition and and language comprehension respectively. Perhaps you're still skeptical, but as far as I'm concerned that's compelling evidence.
I'm not even sure what it would mean for short-term recall to be governed by the same process as language comprehension, (or whatever more reasonable example you want to provide). When you have two mental processes that operate differently in observable and quantifiable ways it only makes sense to categorize them as different processes, and really the most you could say is that one is a sub-process of the other or both are sub-processes of another process.
Your example isn't a great one because short term memory has so far as i know been abandoned as a theory of memory.
I'm not talking about short-term memory though, I'm talking about digit recall. In contemporary psychology it'd be called working memory capacity or executive functioning. Our understanding of digit recall hasn't been abandoned or replaced and if anything it was the catalyst for the development from mid-century conceptions of short-term memory to current conceptions of working memory.
My roundabout point is that we can't claim to know that the mind is divisible into lesser processes based on observations of behaviour, considering how little we know about the mechanisms or structures it uses to produce those observed behaviours.
Yeah I would say this is probably the central disagreement between you and contemporary psychology. You're not presenting this fairly though because it's not a matter of psychologists' unwarranted assumptions and you standing in the default position, it's conflicting conceptions of the mind. "The mind cannot be observed through behavior" is itself an assumption, and one that all research psychologists reject implicitly, so if you want to do more than poke holes in existing psychological models, (which I'm all for, mind you), then you'll have to justify that assumption which is more a philosophical task than a scientific one.