“Model” and “modeling” are the most abused, distorted, misleading, selfserving terms in the contemporary scientific dictionary. Taking a hard look at this very soft and messy business is most commendable.
—Rudolf Kalman, p. 1292, discussion of What is a statistical model? by Peter McCullagh
In an introduction to psychodynamic ideas, Jonathan Shedler writes:
“If behavior were unavoidably determined, there would be no reason to practice psychoanalytic therapy or, for that matter, any form of therapy.”
Although I’m not sure about free will, I don’t think this is a necessary consequence of having no free will. And maybe that there might be a reason is important for therapists with clients who believe that behaviour is determined.
Suppose we have no free will. Two claims still seem difficult to refute:
Maybe therapy — a type of inter-personal contact — is part of the big causal network in the universe? Seem uncontroversial? So that is the reason for therapy — even if we have no free will. It’s another link in the causal chain, hopefully more likely to improve someone’s experience than some other links, however unavoidable and pre-determined going to see the therapist, etc, might be.
“… the rational agent is not simply the one who follows the normative canons of logic and probability theory, and neither is she the one who follows adapted heuristics for action choice or ‘somatic markers’. Rather the rational agent is the critically self-aware agent; the one who is aware why she acts, and who modifies her own behaviour according to her self-knowledge. As Karl Popper (1990) wrote, ‘A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right’…”
Lambie, J. A. (2008). On the irrationality of emotion and the rationality of awareness. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 946-971
A while back I posted a list of quotations attempting to define cognition. In discussing and searching for these, I came to the conclusion that definitions of these kinds of global, general, concepts are only useful as department labels. They allow people to work out, vaguely, to whom they could talk to learn about a topic that interests them. Concepts like “cognition” should be defined with that goal in mind, in a way that causes as least confusion as possible. For instance it seems likely that separating cognition and emotion, or cognition and perception, or equating cognition with conscious deliberative thought, are all bad ideas.
Adams (2010) likes definitions. He suggests that philosophers ask cognitive scientists:
of the processes which are cognitive, what (exactly) makes them cognitive? This is the question that will really irritate, and, I’ve discovered, really interest them. It will interest them because it is a central question to the entire discipline of the cognitive sciences, and it will irritate them because it is a question that virtually no one is asking. [emphasis original]
He gives some examples of processes which are clearly to him not cognitive, e.g., processes that regulate blood sugar levels, thermo-regulatory processes such as capillary constriction and dilation.
He also provides a list of necessary conditions for a process to be cognitive:
This all left me rather cold. I don’t understand what this list helps to explain. I’m not sure it’s even wrong.
Why not, for instance, allow cognitive processes regulate blood sugar levels? If, at an abstract level of analysis, this turns out to be useful, for instance if performing a task which may be analysed in a cognitive fashion seems to influence blood sugar levels, then why not make it a cognitive process?
The word “cognitive” seems to cause more trouble than it’s worth so maybe we should stop talking about “cognitive processes” altogether. As I wrote in a previous post:
It used to be considered bad form to refer to something as a neural process unless it referred to synapses, but is this still the case? There are various levels of “neural” from absence of neural due to lesions and BOLD activation patterns, down to vesicle kissing and gene expression. Maybe behavioral neuroscience is allowed up another level to more abstract representations currently called “mental” or “cognitive”, and the mental can be returned to refer to the what-it-feels-like. Similarly maybe psychologists are behavioral neuroscientists focusing on an abstract level of explanation.
That probably wouldn’t help either. If only we could find a pill to take which makes us less anxious about the meaning of individual words and phrases.
Reference
Adams, F. (2010). Why we still need a mark of the cognitive. Cognitive Systems Research, 11, 324-331
What is a “mental” process? The stuff we’re conscious of and can’t quite put into data, or a limbo between real, wet, neural processes, and observable behavior — sort of a structured version of the latent variables used by psychometricians (who often seem allergic to things cognitive and processy).
The best-known analogy is the computer. The hardware stuff you can kick is analogous to the brain; the stuff you see on the screen is, I suppose, the phenomenology; and then the software, all of which correlates with processes you could detect in the hardware if you looked hard enough, some but not all of which affects the screen, is cognition.
From the engineering perspective, the point of the levels is clear. When you want, say, to get your computer to take draws from a Gaussian distribution, you probably don’t want to fiddle around directly with the physical memory chips in your PC. It’s much less painful to rely on years of abstraction and just type a command in your favorite stats package. You intervene, via the keyboard, at the level of software, and care very little about what the hardware is doing.
What is the point of the levels for understanding a system?
Scientists want to explain, tell an empirically grounded story about, people-level phenomena, like remembering things, reasoning about things, understanding language, expressing emotions. Layers of abstraction are necessary to isolate the important points of this story. The effect of phonological similarity on memory processes would be lost if expressed in terms of neurotransmitters. Pragmatic language effects in reasoning tasks would be difficult to grasp if expressed in terms of gene expression.
Now what I don’t quite understand is when the neural becomes the cognitive. There already are many levels of neural, not all of which you can poke. Thinking here about the sorts of things you can do with EEG and MEG where the story is tremendously abstract, though dependent on stuff measurable from the brain.
Maybe a clue comes from how you intervene on the system. Here, again, I’m not sure how the cognitive-level helps. You can intervene with TMS (or ECT, I suppose), you can intervene with drugs, or you can intervene with verbal instructions and other stimuli. You can also intervene socially and culturally. How do you intervene cognitively or mentally? Is this the correct way to think about it?
It used to be considered bad form to refer to something as a neural process unless it referred to synapses, but is this still the case? There are various levels of “neural” from absence of neural due to lesions and BOLD activation patterns, down to vesicle kissing and gene expression. Maybe behavioral neuroscience is allowed up another level to more abstract representations currently called “mental” or “cognitive”, and the mental can be returned to refer to the what-it-feels-like. Similarly maybe psychologists are behavioral neuroscientists focusing on an abstract level of explanation.
What is logic? What is an “arbitrary variable”? What is a consequence relation? What is deduction? Why should the excluded middle be rejected? Are proofs mental constructions or are they Platonic entities out there somewhere? These are the sorts of questions I associate with the philosophy of logic. Other questions, related to the details of logics, are just mathematics, pursued (sometimes amateurishly) in philosophy departments, but moving increasingly to computer science and pure mathematics.
I think sociophilosophy is a way to get back to the philosophy of logic. How does the process of constructing new logics actually work? From where do the ideas come? What impact does this have on the status of concepts like proof?
Think how the debates work, in research groups, between student and supervisor, at workshops. (Yes, here follows a rapid sketch of Lakatos.) Conjectures suggested, refuted, adapted, proofs sketched, fixed, attacked, repaired, interactively… until a final proof is produced. The final proofs must have non-formal bits — otherwise there’d be infinite regress — so how on earth do mathematicians decide when something has really been proved? Why does proof work so much better than empirical methods? (Though sometimes things fall apart, e.g., the serious problem with Frege’s logic, discovered by Russell, or more recently the problem with Martin-Löf’s type theory logic, discovered by Girard.)
I think it’s revealing when you present a class with a bunch of sentences which just have in common that they are if-thens. Not everyone sees the same structure. Some can’t see beyond the superficial if-then. And, as history as shown, logicians and linguists also see different things in the very same natural language.
Though inventing logics is a human activity, there’s something Out There constraining what pops out. How does what’s out there do the constraining?
Now over to psychology.
Increasingly it’s seen as a necessary (and obvious) that psychologists of reasoning take ideas from logic (many still resist). Though not just off the shelf. Logicians don’t care about psychology. One of the earliest discoveries, the figural effect, is bizarre when approached from logic. Look at how automated theorem provers work, for instance: miles away from how people do things. Obviously the maths logicians produce will not immediately model cognition. But there are important ideas in there. (And, trivially, given a fixed interpretation of a task, logics give the right answers to the questions.)
The relationship between psychologists and logicians is very similar to the relationship between biologists who care about how birds fly and aeronautical engineers who just want to build things that fly — by whatever means necessary. The well-rehearsed story goes somewhat like this. Biologists can learn about flight from the physicists and engineers, e.g., lift, drag, air pressure, and so on. They have no need to learn the details of the most recent jet engines. The engineers learned a bit by looking at the phenomena of flight. Wings still feature a lot, and nature got there first with that idea. However flapping the wings in a bird-like fashion was given up very early… And so on.
I think that when people wonder, why the hell should logic care about psychology, they’re in the same mode of thinking. And I agree. Engineers building reasoning systems have no reason to care about psychology, but they might get ideas — very important though primitive ideas which are very quickly generalised, polished, and forgotten.
But issues related to the philosophy of logic can be informed by psychology. For instance, how do people see and represent the world? How do they analyse what they see? How do constraints related to cognitive control and memory representations influence logical analyses. How do processes of abstraction work? How do groups of logicians get together to overcome their individual cognitive failings. What is the relationship between amateur (often implicit) and professional logic, i.e., the role of specialisation and expertise.
In a few months I’ll be giving a talk on making these sorts of ideas more concrete (complete with data — yes data — which I think is at least tenuously connected to the issues), so comments and references very welcome! (Thanks to Leon for prompting the writing of this post.)
The nature of consciousness — the real consciousness, not some empirically measured proxy thereof — is still pretty elusive.
The main problem to me seems to be, why do we have a phenomenological feeling of free will, being in control, any feeling of being at all, if it’s all just an epiphenomena, if everything is predetermined, if we are all just in the service of history? The likes of Dennett get around the problem by making appeal to different levels of description: personal and subpersonal. Have your cake and eat it — everything is true! We are and are not in control!
Certainly it is the case that people do things without being consciously aware of them. No high-brow examples are needed, no appeal to Freud or to being tricked by social psychologists to do things “we” don’t choose to: think about bladder control. You only become conscious of what your bladder is up to when your internal sphincter muscle lets go and your external sphincter (the one that feels under your control, or IS under your control, depending on your religious perspective) has to do some work. So there’s no doubt that bodies, including brains, do stuff of which their phenomenal conscious — er — guest? is unaware.
There’s also no reason to rule out that the bit of you which feels like You is not the only conscious bit of your body. Your enteric nervous system, controlling what your gut is up to, has half as many neurons as does your brain. That’s still a lot. Maybe it feels like it’s in control, and inhabiting an environment as natural to it as is “our” environment of fields and trees and icecream to us! Maybe your internal sphincter and associated nervous system is very conscious.
The general strong position is that everything is conscious, known as panpsychism. Sounds crazy. Even blades of grass have a bit of consciousness. But it’s taken seriously by philosophers such as Fodor as a possible solution to the problem of where does consciousness come from.
Where is this going?
Beware of easy explanations. Philosophers have been pondering this for centuries. The important aspects of consciousness — the real stuff — cannot be directly measured. How you interpret the measurements is influenced by your theory of how things work, implicit or explicit.
It’s been a while since we had any quotations from Slavoj Žižek. Here are some from Conversations with Žižek by Žižek and Glyn Daly.
On the nature of philosophy
“… Kant was always a model philosopher … [his] problem is not speculation about mortality of the soul. He asks a simple question: ‘What is it that we have to presuppose is true by the mere fact that we are active as ethical agents?’ … That is what philosophy is about, not ‘I philosopher believe in a certain structure of the universe etc.’ but an exploration or what is presupposed even in daily activity.”
On dialogue
“It took me some time to learn this, but I think that I truly became a philosopher when I understood that there is no dialogue in philosophy. Plato’s dialogues, for example, are clearly fake dialogues in which one guy is talking most of the time and the other guy is mostly saying ‘yes, I see, yes my God it is like you said — Socrates, my God that’s how it is’. I fully sympathise with Deleuze who said somewhere that the moment a true philosopher hears a phrase like ‘let’s discuss this point’, his response is ‘let’s leave as soon as possible; let’s run away!’ Show me one dialogue which really worked. There are none! I mean, of course there were influences that pass from one philosopher to another …”
The gap of subjectivity
“Let’s say a neurobiologist shows you a genomic formula stating that ‘this is you’ — you encounter yourself objectively. Isn’t it precisely in this encounter of ‘this is you’ that you will experience the gap of subjectivity at its purist? … This dream of total self-objectivization will also confront us radically with its opposite, with the gap of subjectivity.”
Tolerance and giving money to charity
“The ultimate logic of tolerance and anti-harassment is ‘I want to be alone’: it’s about how to have contact with others, but contact without contact; how to keep a proper distance. … I would say that this is also why humanitarian causes are so popular. They are not simply an expression of love for your neighbour, they are exactly the opposite. That is to say, the function of money in giving to humanitarian causes is the same as the function of money as isolated by Lacan in psychoanalysis: money means I pay you so that we don’t get involved.”
“… In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others.
“I bow before the authority of special [people] because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. [...] there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subbordination.”
—Mikhail Bakunin, What is Authority?
Any Hegel scholars around? Žižek (2006, pp. 208–209):
“Where, then,do we find traces of Hegelian themes in the new brain sciences? The three approaches to human intelligence—digital, computer-modeled; the neurobiological study of brain; the evolutionary approach—seem to form a kind of Hegelian triad: in the model of the human mind as a computing (data-processing) machine we get a purely formal symbolic machine; the biological brain studies proper focus on the “piece of meat,” the immediate material support of human intelligence, the organ in which “thought resides”; finally, the evolutionary approach analyzes the rise of human intelligence as part of a complex socio-biological process of interaction between humans and their environment within a shared life-world. Surprisingly, the most “reductionist” approach, that of the brain sciences, is the most dialectical, emphasizing the infinite plasticity of the brain.”
This is the beginning of an interesting (or at least confusing) section on relationships between society, brain, mind, free-will, and so on, and so forth. A reading group would be tremendously helpful. (Page 13 discusses fisting, if that acts as a motivator. Yes, I have just been scanning through for the important topics.)
Reference
Slavoj Žižek (2006). The Parallax View. The MIT Press.
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