You don't know what you want!

Sometimes discussion on other people's blog get so big, it is time to move at least part to another location. Neuroskeptic had a great post about the trap of extreme scientism, which combines the ideas that A) science can solve all problems and that B) one should not act except based on scientific evidence. The post is "My Breakfast With Scientism", and it starts with a man trying to determine which of two cereals he wants to eat. He realizes he needs some scientific evidence to determine which he should eat.... and things get much, much worse from there. Because an over-worship of science involves significant skepticism of normally routine claims and decisions, you end up in a very similar place to Descartes's over-worship of rationalism. You know:

Hey Descartes! You claim you are doubting everything.... but how can you be sure? }:- P

The comments on Neuro's post got into some really interesting ground that seems more appropriate for this blog... so I'm moving it over here. In particular, a commenter named "DS" asserted that "what he wants" is a scientifically admissible fact of the highest caliber. It isn't. But explaining why is can be difficult....

The myth of knowledge... and ethics

Lee Rudolph, a topologist I have collaborate with on emotion perception, emailed an inquiry relevant to discussion my blog's continued discussion of the myth of knowledge... in this case knowledge regarding ethics. Recall that they myth of knowledge holds that there is a tight connection between "having learned about", "being able to articulate", "demonstrating capacity for doing", and "doing in the moment". I'm modifying what is below from an email Lee wrote to the K-group (or Kitchen group), an large international research group which centers... for the moment... around activities at Clark University. It is about a good, old-fashioned financial scandal (though it has the scent of some of psychology's recent scandals).

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.

How is that Psychology? - Rat Pup Huddling

In a past-life I was going to be an agent based modeler, working with Jeff Schank at UC Davis. He spent many years modeling rat pup huddling... in a psychology department. My main interest in the work was that it showed how a group of organisms could perform very complex behavior, even when no individual organism knew what it was doing, or had access to sufficient information to coordinate what it was doing. As I'll talk about below, this is a special case of the phenomenon where groups of simple and dumb systems can produce intelligent actions.

The Myth of Knowledge

Spurred by Sabrina's comment on my first post, and some of the things I have been writing about on Gary's blog "Minds and Brains", I wanted to talk a little bit about the Myth of Knowledge. This is an intense vestige of dualism, and of enlightenment philosophy. The modern notion of Knowledge is a brilliant 18th and 19th century idea, which is just plain wrong. I'm a big fan of anachronistic ideas like this - the great chain of being, intelligence, etc. - but they are hypotheses that are false, and they are now interfering with our building a more coherent psychology.

The Myth of Knowledge 

Once upon a time it was believed that one of the most basic psychological kinds was 'knowledge', i.e., a person 'knowing' something. Well, not a person, but a mind. The body sits there, but the mind/soul/spirit knows things. Several hundred years of philosophy (from at least Descartes on) started with epistemology, i.e., started with a knower and with things known. But what is it to know something?