Last week I posted about Wilhelm Wundt, and said that he was a structuralist, as distinct from a functionalist, in psychology. What does this mean? It means that his goal was to break down consciousness into elements, and then to suggest how the elements combine, or could have combined, to create the whole structure that we know through introspection. For Wundt the structure begins with sensation. At first blush a sensation is a physical fact -- light striking an eye, for example, The physical facts are much the same for us as they are for other creatures. But we are humans, with minds. So (WW's line of thought here)... we have apperception, a process that turns sensations into something different. Apperception turns sensation into intuition. Wundt saw his laboratory's experiments were an effort at learning something about this transformation. One issue that troubled him was: how does the human mind acquire its intuition of space? These three dimensio...
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I believe I may have mentioned at some point in the history of this blog, or its precursor, that at least one great physicist, Roger Penrose, believes quantum mechanics offers the key to the understanding of how consciousness arises within the function of the human brain. Today, I simply want to make the observation that quantum computing is no longer a hypothesis. It is a fact. Google declared its breakthrough this year. Some of the premier quantitative-analytic hedge funds in the world, including Renaissance and DE Shaw, have high hopes for quantum computing and expect that it will help them discover and make profitable use of now-invisible patterns in the markets. Let us be clear on what Google is saying. It says it has physical operating computers that make use of the quantum aspects of matter to outperform conventional (digital) computers for some specific tasks, a situation it grandly calls quantum supremacy. The qualifying phrase there, "some specific tasks,"...
I suspect I've mentioned Steven Pinker in this blog before, although I'm too lazy to look it up right now. I've got a Big Thought about Pinker, but I have to get to it in stages. First: who is he? Second: what is the Context of the Big Thought. Third: the Big Thought. Who Is He? The lengthy wikipedia article attached to his name will tell you. But in case you're lazy: Pinker teaches psychology at Harvard. He got his Ph.D. in the field with a thesis on "The Representation of 3D Space in Mental Images," which suggests that cognitive psychology is his especial concern. Aside from his scholarly works -- to which I will return in a bit -- he is the author of several books aimed at broad audiences, including THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE (2011) and ENLIGHTENMENT NOW (2018). He is generally considered a conservative intellectual, but since "conservative" still often means counter-Enlightenment, and Pinker is an Enlightenment enthusiast, that may...
Psychologists and philosophers continue the study of cognitive development: discussion didn't freeze with Piaget's work. Though I'm afraid that realization would have made him frown, as pictured here. And it appears that some new acronyms have come into vogue in the field. There are three zones of conceivably-accomplishable tasks. There are things a growing child at a particular moment just cannot do yet, things the child could do, with a little help from his friends, more knowledgeable others, and things he can do solo. The as-yet-undoable tasks don't appear to have an acronym. The more knowledgeable others are, unsurprisingly, called MKOs. The things the kid can do solo represent together his "actual development level" (ADL). The things he can do if assisted by an MKO are his "zone of proximal development (ZPD)." So says Bekah's Blog, here: https://bekahbblade.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/vygotsky-and-learning/
Do we have direct introspective access into our own minds, or (if you believe in distinguishing, say, between ego and id) into some portion of our own minds? In The Opacity of Mind (2011), Peter Carruthers offered a "no," answer, along with an explanation of why we think we do. Carruthers argues that natural selection has bred into us an ability to read each other's minds. My ability to infer that an acquaintance is angry at me, and perhaps scheming up an ambush to kill me, is of obvious survival significance, and the gene lines that led to such an ability were naturally the ones that account for our dedicated mental subsystem for understanding one another. This system involves observations of behavior, facial expressions, tones of voice, etc. The SAME system, which of course relies upon behavior, facial expressions, etc., is also responsible for our understanding of our selves, Carruthers submits. There is no "inner sense" to it, though the subsyste...
"We can conduct certain tests assuming that certain memeplexes (e.g., science, logic, rationality) are foundational, but at a later time we might want to bring these latter memeplexes into question too. The more comprehensively we have tested our interlocking memeplexes, the more confident we can be that we have not let a meme virus enter into our mindware." Keith Stanovich, THE ROBOT'S REBELLION (2004).
There has been much talk of late about a "replication crisis" in psychology. Important experimental results, sometimes results that have generated considerable bodies of literature, peer-reviewed and otherwise, have turned out to have been resting on sand when subjected to rigorous efforts at replication. One notorious example involves the "power pose" (standing, feet apart, hands on hips, chin up). Striking the power pose was supposedly proven to have a range of valuable psychological effects, including the reduction of stress. Except that it doesn't. The effect was the consequence of data mining and statistical noise. Such failed replication efforts have reopened talk about whether psychology deserves the title "science" at all. Fortunately, for those of us who will to believe that there IS such a science, some important results have survived efforts at replication. This is especially so it appears in the study of cognition, a very Jamesian bra...
Yesterday I discussed Damasio's book Descartes' Error, and the use it made of the James-Lange theory of emotion. As I promised, I move now to Damasio's 1999 book, The Feeling of What Happens, which moves on from matters of emotion and rationality to the related but distinct issue of consciousness. Consciousness, he says, is a chain rather than a single link. It is the collective noun for a number of closely related facts, each more rare in the natural world than the one before. The following are the links in the chain: 1) non-conscious neural signalling gives rise to 2) a proto-self, which permits the development of 3) a core self, which is only here-and-now, but which when added to memory becomes 4) an autobiographical self, which finally permits something that may be distinctively human ... 5) extended consciousness, (which he also calls "consciousness post-language") and finally, 6) conscience. Damasio devotes a good deal of effort to giving separ...
My sometimes random web-surfing has just brought me in contact with what seems to be a thing in the world of psychotherapy. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) apparently takes its name as a mutant of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is well established. David M. Clark of Oxford was a pioneer in CBT, in the 1980s, merging the already established (but until then adversarial) cognitive and behavioral approaches, originally with the idea of helping people cope with trauma and anxiety disorders. That much I knew. What I didn't know until recently was that this, too, gets the dialectical twist from the see-saw brigade. Hegelian badness looms over everything. Just one word: Aaaaargh.
Sensible proposition recently advanced by Nicholas Humphrey: for the first few months of life an infant possesses not one unitary self but several different sub-selves. Native intelligence, memory, and the reception of sensory information. These seem to be the cores of the chief sub-selves Humphrey has in mind. Each has to learn that it is on the same team as the others, and ultimately each becomes a "faculty" of a single self. This reminds me of William James' phrase "blooming buzzing confusion." The phrase refers especially to the confusion of the data of the different senses into one unhelpful congealed lump in the infant mind. But part of the confusion may indeed by the absence of a single integrated self to do the integrating of the data. They aren't on the same team until they decide that they are on the same team.
I have a vague memory of having written something much like this before, but I don't mind repeating myself. One of the best known of William James' many well-known well-crafted sentences is this, from PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY: "The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space." This is sometimes misquoted, and we get a "great booming, buzzing confusion" instead. The mistake is worth correcting when it occurs, because "booming buzzing" simply contrasts two very different sounds. It refers, then, only to one of the sense and no particular sort of event, and is a good deal less confused than what James has in mind. The words "blooming bu...
One critical fact about the philosophy of William James is that it is a good deal more subtle than many newcomers to philosophy expect it to be. The crude use of the word "pragmatism" to mean "unprincipled" or "opportunistic" has contributed to the false impression that there isn't a lot of intellectual/philosophical substance to it. Also, the fact that much of what James wrote on the subject was written with a wider audience in mind than his fellow academics, has had the unfortunate side effect of giving it a reputation in some quarters as the philosophy for those without the patience, or perhaps the intellectual heft, to read real philosophy. Barzun, in A Stroll with William James, devoted his own considerable gifts to clearing up such misconceptions. I won't retread that ground here but will move to a related problem: we associate pragmatism as much with Dewey as with James, and through Dewey it has come to have a close connection wit...