Bead Theory and the Problem of Consciousness - Highlights for Holt's writing

E.B. Holt 1915 book continues to be central to my scholarship. Appended to the book are two articles Holt had published the prior year, on "Response and Cognition." There is much overlap between the works, but in a few places I think the articles add significantly. One is in discussion of explanations that Holt disparagingly calls "Bead Theories", characterized by description of a series of events with no reference to the fact that a larger thing is happening. He begins by describing the how other sciences used to be in the same "unstable" state as psychology, and 100 years later, psychology seems to me not to have improved. Remember that a book published in 1915 must have been started quite a bit before Watson's Manifesto, and that this book was influential in the professional development of J.J. Gibson, B.F. Skinner, and J. Jastrow, along with most others who trained at Harvard in the teens or Princeton in the '30s. Indeed many core aspects of Gibson's Ecological Psychology, and Skinner's attempt to separate of "Psychological" questions from "Neurological" questions can be seen here decades earlier:

Before proceeding … we shall probably find useful an illustration from another science, which was once in the same unstable state of transition as psychology is now. In physics a theory of causation once prevailed, which tried to describe causal process in terms of successive ‘states,’ the ‘state’ of a body at one moment being the cause of its ‘state’ and position at the next. Thus the course of a falling body was described as a series of states (a, b, c, d, etc.), each one of which was the effect of the state preceding, and cause of the one next following. This may be designated as the ‘bead theory ' of causation. In asmuch, however, … [the states] gave no clue toward explaining the course or even the continuance of the process, an unobservable impetus (vis viva, Anstoss, ‘force') was postulated. This hidden impetus was said to be the ultimate secret of physical causation. But, alas, a secret! For it remained, just as the ‘consciousness’ of one's fellow-man remains today in psychology, utterly refractory to further investigation.

Deep Thoughts: The Stomach in a Jar Problem

Many throughout history have wondered about the relationship between mind and stomach. Imagine, if you will, that your body had been almost completely destroyed. Imagine still, that whatever destroyed your body left your stomach remarkably unscathed, and that we put your stomach in a vat. But this vat is a very special kind of vat: It can give you stomach all the physical and chemical signals it would have had if the stomach had stayed in your body, and when your stomach does something, the vat reacts just as your body would. Your stomach could be kept alive like that for quite a long time, perhaps indefinitely. 

What do we know for sure about the brain

If I was going to list everything we knew for sure about the brain, it would be a very, very long list. Instead of trying to do that, I am going to focus on things we know relevant to my last post, which was quite negative about the new "brain mapping" initiative, and which generated a lot of criticism
(http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201304/why-brain-mapping-is-stupid-idea). The title of the post then, should maybe be less “What do we know about the brain?” and more “What are some first principles we can use to understand how the brain operates?”

Why the Brain Mapping project is a Stupid Idea

It was just announced that President Obama wants to start spending one hundred million dollars to "map the brain", and that his oft-times rival Eric Cantor thinks it’s a great idea. But it is a terrible idea, because I can tell you, right now, about half of the big lessons they will learn. Plus, for about a million dollars, I could probably gather a group of experts together to tell you about half of what remains. I'm not sure what, exactly, would be left after that, but I'm sure it would be comparatively cheap to figure out. 

Thinking, Behaving, and Monkeys with Joysticks

I hope that the "thought" experiment I suggested last week stands on its own. The point was, at the least, to make people wonder how strong the causal relationship is between 'thinking about moving' and 'moving', and wonder if they might be very different phenomenon. Here I hope to demonstrate how the standard assumptions about the relationship between thinking and behaving can lead to some pretty awkward descriptions of phenomenon, and how a more embodied approach might do better. (Full disclosure, I'm still struggling with this, and will do a good, but definitely not great job.) Our case study come from the work of Dr. Miguel Nicolelis, who does ridiculously cool 'neuro-engineering' work down at Duke University. Our awkward descriptions of that work come from an interview on the Diane Rehm Show, aired on National Public Radio. There, Dr. Nicolelis describes research that culminates in a monkey moving a cursor on a computer screen via implants that detect neuronal activity in its brain. Here, roughly, is how the study works:

A 'Do It Yourself' Experiment about Thinking and Movement

For a long time now, one central rule in the Western-psychology game has been this: Mind-stuff makes body-stuff happen. In the olden days, stories using that rule might have talked about how thoughts of motion, enacted first on a Cartesian stage, transfer the vital energy needed to create movement in flesh. These days stories using that rule might be about how frontal-cortex based decisions to move, enacted first in an information-based simulations taking place in your brain, transfer motor-commands through neurons to your muscles. This is certainly a more refined and sophisticated way of envisioning the relationship between mind and behavior, but it retains the principles of the simple rule (i.e., same rule-system, different flavor text). As such, the more refined version also retains the primary problem of the original story. What problem? That 'thinking about moving' and 'moving' are just not related in that manner. Let's drop all the other kooky agendas of this blog for a minute, and just do some experimental phenomenology. Here is a 'thought' experiment you can try yourself and do with others.... 

The Experiment

"But what about the brain?"

I received an email inquiry a few days ago from Eric Haaland, who has studied with John Shook. We met during the neuropragmatism conference in DC last summer, and he is hoping to be a kinesiology grad student next semester with Tom Stoffregen at the University of Minnesota. He gave me permission to post his email, lightly edited, to the blog along with a reply. He said....


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I have been reading as much Holt and Skinner as I can find recently as well, and I knew that you were one I could get useful information from.  I know that they both insisted that the [mind] is not 'internal' to the organism, that there is no 'internal' - there is only organism as a process over time.  But I'm failing to put their interpretations of education into descriptive terms.  As animals, we are obviously learning beings, beings that have an innate understanding of our sensorimotor repertoire and how to manipulate the world around us to achieve goals (i.e. affordance perception); but this still seems to fall into the neural network, brain-activation paradigm, which I don't think is the case.

Embodied Cognition

Scientific American had a recent blog entry about embodied cognition, and Andrew Wilson made some additions / corrections / clarifications over on his blog. I thought I would ride their coat tails a bit and try to clarify a few more issues. Andrew states:

Embodiment is not the weak claim that you can see small effects of the behaviour of the body in our mental representations of the world. Embodiment is the radical hypothesis that the brain is not the sole resource we have available to us to solve problems. Our bodies, and the meaning-filled perception of the world they allow, do much of the work required to achieve our goals, and this simple fact changes utterly what our theories of 'cognition' will look like.

The last part is spot on: Taking embodied cognition seriously requires developing theories of cognition that are quite different from mainstream theories. The first part is, I think, a touch muddled: It confuses the basic requirements for believing in embodiment with a particular solution that Andrew (and I) favor. Some of the confusion has to do with a historic shift in who the opponent of embodiment is.

Memory and X-men Origins

Flipping through the TV channels, I caught the last 10 minutes or so of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. For those who don't know, Wolverine is a 'mutant' who's special power is that he can heal himself from virtually any injury. While Wolverine is most well known for having a metal skeleton, complete with metallic claws that grow out of the top of his hands, that is the result of an experiment he was able to live through due to his healing powers. In the original three X-Men movies, Wolverine did not remember much of anything about his past, including the metal-skeleton experiments nor did he remember Sabertooth, a character that, by comic-book cannon, he should have known very well. The Origins movie happens well before the events in the original trilogy. I gather from the last 10 minutes, that it focused on the metal-skeleton experiment, and heavily involve Sabertooth. "How are they going to handle this?" I wondered. Turns out, they had a good plan. The leader of the experiment loads a gun with six bullets and tells someone he is going to go shoot Wolverine in the head. "It won't kill him," the interloper states plainly, "even if you blow his head off, it will grow back." The leader is undeterred, "His brain will grow back, but the memories won't."

Six shots later, three in the head, and Wolverine is on the ground, out for the count. After his healing powers kick in, he wakes up... sans memory. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. The dog tags around his neck give him his name, and the ensuing brief bits of conversation indicate that he doesn't know even his close friends. It is a very clever way to explain the memory loss. As a movie or comic-book gimmick, I give it high marks. But it plays off of a clearly impossible view of how the brain works. The mix of materialism and dualism creates an odd double-think about the relationship between ability, memory, and neural structure. That is, the gimmick works because it plays off of the horrible way in which lay people think about the relationship between the brain and mental abilities... and this way of thinking is encouraged by at least some cognitive psychologists.