Deep thoughts: P Zombie Couches

 

I wrote several years ago about the classic "Stomach in a Jar" problem that has vexed philosophers for decades. I write today about the equally complex Philosophical Zombie Couch problem, which has fascinated philosophers since Keith Campbell and Robert Kirk introduced the idea in the early 1970s, and David Chalmers popularized it in the mid 1990s. Many of you will not be familiar with the problem, so let me lay it out simply to start out with. 

You could summarize the argument with a single premise: We can all imagine an object with all the properties of a couch, but which does not contain couchishness. 

Defining key terms in Ecological Psychology

Andrew Wilson and I had a tiff on twitter about whether "Affordances" are by-definition "perceivable". Well... backing up... it was a tiff about whether it is fair for a researcher to start talking about something as an example of an affordance, when they have not bothering to demonstrate that the thing in question is perceived. This actually has deep implications for all the key terms in Ecological Psychology. As it is the type of thing you can't really discuss in 240 characters, we decided to return to the blogosphere. Who knows, maybe we can crank out a second blog-driven co-publication when this is done!*

I am extremely sensitive to the problems that occur in a theory when terms start to get mutually inter-defined. You quickly end up with tautologies, and tautologies stop your theory from being a theory in any proper sense. My post-doc advisor and occasional co-author Nick Thompson wrote about this problem extensively in the context of learning theory and evolutionary theory and other contexts in psychology. I don't think any prominent members of the Eco Psych community have such a problem when they are doing research. However, when they start writing theory, the problem pops up fairly often, and it is behind many of the long-term disputes in the literature. The temptation to inter-define terms is strong, because when terms are mutually defined, deduction is easier, and that makes the theory feel intellectually safe and well-founded. However, that feeling is misleading in a scientific context. you can't test things that are deducible from each other, so if you find yourself just stating things that are true by definition, you don't have a theory anymore, because the exact part this is supposed to be testable can't be tested. The way out of this is to rigorously ensure that your terms point to things that can be verified independently of each other, leaving it open for testing whether the things in question relate in the manner proposed. 

How we got to the muddle of "The Hard Problem" in psychology

Once upon a time we knew almost nothing about how vision worked, then, at just about the same time, all of the following happened:

1. Artists figured out perspectival drawing, and people went nuts over it.
2. It was discovered that they eye of a bull could act like a “camera obscura.” Camera obscuras were small dark rooms in the middle of a garden, built so that they cast an inverted view of the garden in one wall, by virtue of a pinhole in the opposite wall. Those were all the rage, because rich creepers could jerk off in them while spying on the ladies walking the garden. At that point, everyone assumed that vision was this passive thing that started with a still image in the back of the eye, and involved the opposite of whatever intellectual activity artists engaged in when creating a flat picture.

The problem with alternatives to cognitive psychology

In the last post, I pointed out the problem with cognitive psychology: While often hopelessly ambiguous, it creates a practical and useful sense of solidity, making it easy to use for normal professional activities. But what about alternative approaches?

Alas, the situation is almost the complete opposite for most attempts to get “beyond cognitivism”: They are not, or at least do not seem, useful in the above sense. They are not flexible, in that they are picky about which theoretical constructs are plugged into a given hole; they are not utilitarian, in that it is often unclear how to implement a program of research based on the theories, even if you agree with them completely; and they are non-conformist, in that they involve rejecting the way lay westerners think of the world. Further (or perhaps as a result), though the terms used might be quite concrete, they provide a firm illusion of being hopelessly ambiguous. The combination of little flexibility, little usefulness, unintuitiveness and seeming ambiguity, make it difficult for aspiring psychologists to understand, and further, once the neophytes become convinced, it will be difficult for them to go about standard professional activities. (p. 195)

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 is going on in philosophy: Searle's goals

There are some philosophers I really disagree with, but whom I also really like. In general, this is because we share similar views as the overarching goal of our efforts. This common ground is sometimes found in articles specifically about doing philosophy,  but it is also found in the introductions to works I otherwise might not like. A great example of this is found in Searle’s “Freedom and Neurobiology”. While I don’t like his solution to the Big Questions that the book deals with, I love the way he sets up the problem:

How to Explain Behaviorism: We are Reflections of our World

This is the second in my ongoing series of articles trying to provide basic lead ins to behaviorist theory. The first is here.

How to Explain Behaviorism, version 2: 

We are Reflections of our World

A friend of mine asked for advice online. She is a teacher, working with a 9 year old girl who is "Bossy, has to be right, have things her own way. Failing is not an option, so she lies about failing at anything." The inquiry generated many suggestions, all good. Someone suggested that maybe the daughter is afraid of admitting failure, because she covets approval. Another suggested that maybe sibling dynamics might be at play, especially if there is an older sibling who is very successful. Had the daughter been taught that everyone makes mistakes and that it is ok to admit them? When it was mentioned that the girl is choleric, someone suggested that spending times with other cholerics might help. (By the way, fascinating that the Waldorf Schools still uses those terms!) Maybe playing sports would help if, she could find a coach who rewards efforts and teamwork. Etc., etc., etc. So many suggestions were offered, but... not a single person proposed either a more detailed study of the behavior in question or a systematic study of the child's environment.

What would I like to know, before I began an intervention? Things like: Which particular types of situations is she bossy in? To whom is she bossy? What, exactly, does that "bossiness" look like? How do those around her respond? In particular, how often does she get what she wants? Is the thing she wants --- the thing that stops an instance of bossiness --- what she is ostensibly asking for or is it something else? 

Even if I thought like my friend's other advisers, I would still want to know these things, because I like to have a good understanding of the problem I am trying to solve before I try to solve it. But I don't think like the other respondents, I think like a behaviorist. In this context, one important implication of being a behaviorist is that I think my types of investigations might well tell us everything we need to know. That is, we might well learn everything we need to know about the daughter's "bossiness" if we know what the behaviors looks like (its "topology") and the circumstances under which they occur (the aspects of the world that the behavior is a function of).

This is because, behaviorists view behavior as a reflection of the world. If you live in a world where being obstinate works, you will be obstinate. If you live in a world where being unobtrusive works, you will be unobtrusive. If you sometimes live in a world where it works to be obstinate and you sometimes live in a world where it works to unobtrusive, and there is a way to tell which world you are in at any given time, then you will adaptively switch between being obstinate and unobtrusive. Etc., etc., etc. Of course, you cannot make these adjustments instantly, so there is a heavy developmental component. So what I really mean is that at any given time you are changing to better fit the world you exist in, and if your world stays stable long enough, you will come to reflect it very well. 

Sometimes you can see this most clearly when things go wrong. For example, my wife and I became quite frustrated at our children's inability to be quite when instructed to do so. This is the type of skill that some kids (by dint of past experience) are good at, and other kids (by dint of past experience) are bad at, and our kids were showing no improvement towards the right behavior. After sitting back and observing for a bit, I pointed out that sometimes when we said "be quite" we meant "talk more quietly", but other times we meant "stop talking." Because the same signal was used in both cases, it was no wonder our kids were not matching their behavior to the situation! So we made a new rule, and we now distinguished between "be quiet" and "be silent." Once there was a reliable signal in the world that told our kids what to do, they began to reflect it almost instantly. They are still not perfect, but neither is our use of the terms. 

When you start to think this way, you get reflexive answers to many common questions (many of which you probably shouldn't say out loud).  "Why don't children pay better attention in class?" Because class is boring. "Why does Bobby keep kicking Linda?" Because good things happen when he does. "Why do my kids act so differently when I raised them the same?" Because you didn't. "Why does Jane act so confident, but Bob doesn't?" Probably because good things happen when Jane acts confident and bad things happen when Bob acts confident (or at least that has been the case in the past). 

But what about when people don't seem to reflect their environment well? There are several things that could be going on. I can't list them all, but a top 4 would probably be: 1) Their world might not contain any signals that their behavioral system can latch onto, or the signals are so weak they will need special training to attune to them. This often occurs when a novice enters a world full of experts, which is part of the natural state of childhood. 2) They could still be adjusting to the world. Adjustment may be very slow if the person used to be well attuned to life in a different world. Also, if the world changes faster than a person can adjust, that person might never attune very well. This could happen for example, if you have a job where the boss rapidly changes, and the bosses have wildly different styles. 3) The person could have a damaged adjustment system. Such effects could be transient (e.g., during a blood sugar crash), or relatively permanent (e.g., the fate of most professional boxers). If so, the person could be stuck in a state of partial attunement, where their behavior still reflects the environment, but never quite as well as you think it should. 4) The person could be attuned to aspects of the environment that you do not appreciate. Never neglect this possibility. This last part is so important, I will end with three examples, one young kid example, one teenage example, one adult example. 

Unexpected Attunement - Young Kid Example
Most kids like to play "birthday". This usually involves asserting, seemingly out of no where, that it is your birthday, or someone else's birthday, and then proceeding to do a rough reproduction of certain aspects of birthday activities. "How creative," the parents think, "what an imagination!" This is a great example of a situation in which people think that the behaviorist approach will fall apart. But the behaviorist begs you to examine the world of the child. From that perspective, the child is doing exactly what adults do. The way birthdays work is that someone walks into the room and says "Today is Grandma's birthday, lets give her a call" or "It is Merryn's birthday on Sunday, so we should invite people over." That is the initiation of the "birthday" game, from the perspective of the young child, who does not live in a world where there were any preceding steps. Thus randomly stating that it is someone's birthday is simply a part of a larger pattern of adult imitation, and should be displayed by kids who live in a world where imitating adults tends to create good outcomes. We need not hypothesize anything else behind the behavior.

"But," you object, "the child thinks it is his birthday." I'm really not sure what that objection means. Absent further evidence, I suspect the child is simply playing a game that involves the world birthday. Does the child really believe that today is the anniversary of the day of his birth on the Gregorian Calendar. Really? I don't know many 2 or 3 year olds who think that. "Well, no, I don't mean that he understands what a birthday is, I just mean that he thinks it is his birthday." Alright, I guess, but I think that just gets us back to my assertion that, for the child, "birthday" is a thing you get to say at fairly arbitrary times. and that if others agree with you then it initiates a particular type of game. 

Unexpected Attunement - Teenage Example
A frequent complaint from my friends with teenagers: "Why does he think the world revolves around him?" My most common response "He isn't wrong." The parent objects "Oh yes he is, he's gonna have a rude awakening one day." And the parent is right in a broad sense; the adult world does not revolve around their particular child. But the teenager is also right; the world the teen is in does revolve around them. Their school is focused on them, their friends are focused on them, their home life is focused on them, their TV and other media experiences are focused on them. Back in the day (a few hundred years ago) parents tried to move kids as quickly as possible to be part of the adult world, but now we have designed a world in which there is a buffer time, during which our teenagers and young adults are in a world that is revolving around them. Why does a kid who has more than enough complain when they don't have more? It is not because they "think" they don't have enough, in any grand sense, it is because in their world complaining works, and they are correctly attuned to that world.

Unexpected Attunement - Adult Example
My wife is fidgity, but not always fidgity. She has been for as long as she could remember: lots moving around, not much standing still. It was "just who she was", and there was no obvious cause of it, or the variation in it. She recently did a "tilt table test" where they strap you to a board an then repeatedly transition the board from standing you straight up and down, to lying you flat, to holding you almost completely upside down. It turns out she has postural orthostatic hypotension. Basically, her blood pressure drops dramatically when her orientation changes, and it also happens if she stays still for too long in a vertical position. When she has higher blood pressure (e.g. she has been drinking more water and eating more salt) it is not as bad, but if she has had even minor diuretics (e.g., coffee) it is worse. Her fidgiting, the behavior, was attuned to an aspect of the world that was very hard to observe, but it was attuned nonetheless. If you live in a world where being still makes you nauseous and dizzy, and moving makes you feel better, then you move.

Libertarianism and American Philosophy II

Why the politics all of a sudden? Aside from a long time interest, I will be doing an interview this Monday at 8 pm for John Shook's "Humanist Matters." John has great knowledge of American Philosophy (he runs pragmatism.org, edits Contemporary Pragmatism and has numerous books and articles), he is also a prominent atheist (e.g., The God Debates), and a prominent humanist. We have a lot to talk about, but an ongoing discussion we have had is whether my libertarian leanings are compatible with my other beliefs. As I said in the last post, I think it is possible to provide a grounding for libertarian ideas within the context of philosophers such as Peirce, James, Dewey, and Holt, and I think it is worth the effort to see where this leads. In this post, I want to talk about honesty regarding psychology, in relation to politics.

Libertarianism and American Philosophy

Over the course of the past decade, I have come to realize that I lean strongly towards “libertarian” political ideas. However, I did not arrive at this position through one of the seemingly standard methods, such as falling in love with Ayn Rand, worshiping rich people, or trying to find some justification for being a jerk.* Rather, I have come to realize, my libertarian ideas are connected strongly with aspects of American Philosophy, a philosophy most people see as more strongly connected with Progressive Era of US politics than with Libertarian ideas of today. For some time I have been wanting to produce something serious about the connection between the philosophy I have been writing about, and my preferred approach to politics. At the moment, however, all I can offer is a rough sketch:

* Edit: I know this lead in is a bit hyperbolic. There are certainly other ways to become a libertarian.

All it takes to be a behaviorist... or... Manifesto, Take 2

There is much confusion over what it means to be a behaviorist. This is largely due to silly posturing by Big Names over the past 100 years ago. Rather than work to develop the theory and implications of behaviorism based on broad first principles, researchers developed their own niche specializations, and then each declared "Behaviorism" to be "What I do." I don't want to dwell on this history here, but rather present a sketch of how behaviorism should be understood.

TSRM 1981 & The New Connecticut Approcah to Eco Psych

Warning: If you aren't interested in Ecological Psychology, this will probably be a boring post....

In past posts I talked about the two ecological psychologies article by Cutting, which asserted that Turvey and Shaw were doing something fundamentally different from Gibson. I've also argued that Gibson was doing something grounded in American Philosophy, which his latter standard bearers did not appreciate. Much of the impetus for the new direction comes from the debate in 1981 between Fodor and Pylyshyn on the one hand and Turvey, Shaw, Reed, and Mace on the other. I've already summarized F&P's arguments, and stated in two places the main points I think should have made in a reply. If you recall, F&P started all this by publishing a 58 page critique of Gibson's 1979 book. Apparently, TSRM felt the need to up the anti with a 68 page reply. Good lord. Luckily for F&P we were past the days of duels!

TSRM is a philosophical tour de force, bordering on an unfocused mess. They spend an incredible amount of time getting sidetracked into trying to undermine more or less everything F&P say.  I don't want to discuss too much of that here, and instead want to summarize how they defend the ecological approach, and where they see the field going. 

Note regarding Eco Psych and Epistemology

Continuing the theme of propping Ecological Psychology against its detractors through reference to American Philosophy. One challenge holds that Eco Psych has no implications for epistemology and no relevance in understanding phenomenon such as "thinking". But the philosophical lineage descended from pragmatism breaks down divisions commonly assumed in the Continental traditions. In that context, the relevance of Eco Psych is clear....

Specification and Perception - Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981)

After doing a mediocre job suggesting a that Gibson's needs to be defended from within the Pragmatism-lineage (as opposed to, say Descartes's lineage or Kant's), something more blunt and obvious might be in order. I have argued that much confusion was created in the past debates over ecological psychology because its critics were not treating it as part of the pragmatic lineage, and its defenders met the attack on the critics’ terms. This lead, I think, to the defenders formalizing ecological psychology in a way that loses some of the unique potential of the approach. The trouble seems to have originated, largely, in the 1981 criticism by Fodor and Pylyshyn, which was replied to in the same year by Turvey, Shaw, and Mace. While the resulting "TSM" model of ecological psychology has led to much success, I won't deny that for a minute, I think that much of the current confusion within the field of ecological psychology traces back to this exchange. Below I will go back through Fodor and Pylyshyn's paper, to point out where I think they unfairly set out their challenge, i.e., where they tried to judge ecological psychology based on premises the pragmatic tradition rejects. In the next post, I will sketch what I think the reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn should have been. In a later post, I will go through Turvey, Shaw, and Mace's paper, to show how the acceptance of Fodor and Pylyshyn's premises lead them to conclusions at the heart of current debates in the field.

Design, and why we should and shouldn't care about deep theory

Bjoern Bremb, who guy who gave the very cool research talk at WCALB, linked to a good essay on his own blog where he argues that we should banish the term 'design' from our discussions of evolution. I started responding to his comment, but before I knew it, enough was written, and the subject had shifted enough, to justify another post. I appreciate the desire to banish 'design'. I used to hold that view myself, and I think it is a much better position than using the term sloppily. That said, I am now convinced that the current way we discuss evolutionary theory has some deep problems, and that many of those problems could be solved through a fight to reclaim the concept of design. Alas, I'm less convinced that most people should care, e.g., that the work of the day-to-day biologist or psychologist is being negatively impacted by their vague commitment to a problematic version of evolutionary theory. This will not be quite as articulate as I would like, but I will try to explain, in a roundabout way: