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Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

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Jochen Fromm-5

Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?

http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1

-J.

Sent from Android

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Oh, God. Here we go.

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?
>
> http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1
> -J.
>
> Sent from Android
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

Roger Critchlow-2

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Jochen Fromm-5

Between this study http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026828 reporting that statistical errors in psych papers correlate with the unwillingness of authors to share their original data, and the career of social psychologist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel lately unraveled after years of fabricating data for his own papers and his grad students' dissertations, I'd think that theory would be last issue on psychology's mind.

-- rec --

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?

http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1

-J.

Sent from Android

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Jochen Fromm-5

Doug, don't fret.

The answer to Jochen's question is "Yes, it is about friggin time we get a good theory", and Andrew and Sabrina's blog is an excellent source of ideas for improving psychology. Recently Andrew's blog has been getting attention from other excellent professionals, including a Scientific American author who is actively discussing Andrew's previous post: "Embodied cognition is not what you think". (With more discussion here.)

Roger,
You are correct that it might seem like psychology should have other things to worry about, but frankly the problems you mention (rampant misuse of statistics and the rare forged data scandals) would be a lot easier to deal with if we had a more unified theoretical base.

Eric

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 07:12 PM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:

Oh, God.  Here we go.

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?
>
>
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1
> -J.
>
> Sent from Android
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

Stephen Thompson

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Eric:

I just picked up three books in order to learn more about Embodied Cognition:

    1. Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro
    2. Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez
    3. Philosophy In The Flesh by Lakoff and Mark Johnson

I came to these via Dr Lakoff's Moral Politics, then perusing his Metaphors We Live By.
Will the 3 books above provide a basic understanding of Embodied Cognition, even though
they appear to be oriented to Philosophy as opposed to psychology?

I read Dr Dennett's Consciousness Explained back in 1997 and came to accept the
naturalistic world view - what you see is what there is; no mystical nor supernatural
stuff.

Of the two links you provided, I found your post to be more clear on the conflict in psychology
than the PsychScientists' post.

Thanks,
Steph T

On 11/12/2011 8:29 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:

Doug, don't fret.

The answer to Jochen's question is "Yes, it is about friggin time we get a good theory", and Andrew and Sabrina's blog is an excellent source of ideas for improving psychology. Recently Andrew's blog has been getting attention from other excellent professionals, including a Scientific American author who is actively discussing Andrew's previous post: "Embodied cognition is not what you think". (With more discussion here.)

Roger,
You are correct that it might seem like psychology should have other things to worry about, but frankly the problems you mention (rampant misuse of statistics and the rare forged data scandals) would be a lot easier to deal with if we had a more unified theoretical base.

Eric

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 07:12 PM, Douglas Roberts [hidden email] wrote:
Oh, God.  Here we go.

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm [hidden email] wrote:
> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?
>
>
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1
> -J.
>
> Sent from Android
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Nick Thompson

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Stephen,

I thought Lakoff’s Moral politics was bloody awful – SHAMEFUL even, given his earlier stuff which I liked. A terrifying example of what happens when an Author’s publisher gets him to write more books than he has in him.

I have to admit, I am made nervous by the notion of “embodied cognition”. I mean, where the hell else is it. It’s the same kind of nervousness that overcomes me when people talk about “cognitive psychology.” (What the hell other kind of psychology IS there?) Such expressions seem to be an attempt to slip dualism in by the back door. Cognition is just adaptive action of a body. I think most believers of embodied cognition are hoping to find the little door in the skull that opens into the room where the teensy little guy sits looking out through the windows of the eyes and pulling on the little levers that send the fluids up and down the nerve channels.

Psychology has some wonderful theories. For instance, Skinner has a wonderful theory of learning. Unfortunately, it applies primarily to pigeons pressing levers. If only we could cram all humanity into Skinner boxes, the theory would work fine. Physics has the same problem, really. Billiard balls would glide along perfectly if it weren’t for friction, but there is friction everywhere where billiard balls are. If only we had frictionless billiard balls. But the problem doesn’t seem to bother physcists so much The artificial models of physics are more useful than those of psychology because, I guess, physicists have a lot better sense of what happens when the idealized circumstances of the model are violated. Poor psychologists: you take people out of those skinner boxes and all hell breaks loose.

At the risk of putting you all through distasteful spectacle of having Doug and Peter yell at me again, let me remind you of our discussion of tornados, where Peter seemed to be saying that one really shouldn’t talk about vortices until one had had sixty years of experience engineering wings and propellers. Sounds like whatever you learn about propellers in physics one won’t get you off a runway. It won’t even get water out of a washbasin.

I think the problem is not that Psychologists don’t have good theories; I think it’s more that psychologists don’t have good theories about the kind of questions that people want answers to. You folks want answers about tornadoes and washbasins, and all we have to offer is theories about behavior in skinner boxes.

Nick

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Stephen Thompson
Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:54 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Oh, God.  Here we go.

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm [hidden email] wrote:

> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?

http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1

> -J.

> Sent from Android

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Carl Tollander

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Levers? There are levers? I was supposed to be pushing levers?

Dang, that explains it.

C.

On 11/12/11 9:32 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Stephen,

I thought Lakoff’s Moral politics was bloody awful – SHAMEFUL even, given his earlier stuff which I liked.   A terrifying example of what happens when an Author’s publisher gets him to write more books than he has in him.

I have to admit, I am made nervous by the notion of “embodied cognition”. I mean, where the hell else is it. It’s the same kind of nervousness that overcomes me when people talk about “cognitive psychology.” (What the hell other kind of psychology IS there?) Such expressions seem to be an attempt to slip dualism in by the back door. Cognition is just adaptive action of a body. I think most believers of embodied cognition are hoping to find the little door in the skull that opens into the room where the teensy little guy sits looking out through the windows of the eyes and pulling on the little levers that send the fluids up and down the nerve channels.

Psychology has some wonderful theories. For instance, Skinner has a wonderful theory of learning. Unfortunately, it applies primarily to pigeons pressing levers. If only we could cram all humanity into Skinner boxes, the theory would work fine. Physics has the same problem, really. Billiard balls would glide along perfectly if it weren’t for friction, but there is friction everywhere where billiard balls are. If only we had frictionless billiard balls. But the problem doesn’t seem to bother physcists so much The artificial models of physics are more useful than those of psychology because, I guess, physicists have a lot better sense of what happens when the idealized circumstances of the model are violated. Poor psychologists: you take people out of those skinner boxes and all hell breaks loose.

At the risk of putting you all through distasteful spectacle of having Doug and Peter yell at me again, let me remind you of our discussion of tornados, where Peter seemed to be saying that one really shouldn’t talk about vortices until one had had sixty years of experience engineering wings and propellers. Sounds like whatever you learn about propellers in physics one won’t get you off a runway. It won’t even get water out of a washbasin.

I think the problem is not that Psychologists don’t have good theories; I think it’s more that psychologists don’t have good theories about the kind of questions that people want answers to. You folks want answers about tornadoes and washbasins, and all we have to offer is theories about behavior in skinner boxes.

Nick

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Stephen Thompson
Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:54 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Eric:

I just picked up three books in order to learn more about Embodied Cognition:

    1. Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro
    2. Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez
    3. Philosophy In The Flesh by Lakoff and Mark Johnson

I came to these via Dr Lakoff's Moral Politics, then perusing his Metaphors We Live By.
Will the 3 books above provide a basic understanding of Embodied Cognition, even though
they appear to be oriented to Philosophy as opposed to psychology?

I read Dr Dennett's Consciousness Explained back in 1997 and came to accept the
naturalistic world view - what you see is what there is; no mystical nor supernatural
stuff.

Of the two links you provided, I found your post to be more clear on the conflict in psychology
than the PsychScientists' post.

Thanks,
Steph T

On 11/12/2011 8:29 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:
Doug, don't fret.

The answer to Jochen's question is "Yes, it is about friggin time we get a good theory", and Andrew and Sabrina's blog is an excellent source of ideas for improving psychology. Recently Andrew's blog has been getting attention from other excellent professionals, including a Scientific American author who is actively discussing Andrew's previous post: "Embodied cognition is not what you think". (With more discussion here.)

Roger,
You are correct that it might seem like psychology should have other things to worry about, but frankly the problems you mention (rampant misuse of statistics and the rare forged data scandals) would be a lot easier to deal with if we had a more unified theoretical base.

Eric

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 07:12 PM, Douglas Roberts [hidden email] wrote:
Oh, God.  Here we go.  
   
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm [hidden email] wrote:  
> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?  
>   
>   
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1  
> -J.  
>   
> Sent from Android  
> ============================================================  
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv  
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College  
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org  
>   
   
============================================================  
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv  
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College  
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org  
   
   
Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
============================================================  
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv  
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College  
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org  
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Stephen Thompson

Nick,
There are two related problems worth distinguishing.

1) The first problem is, as you put it, "psychologists don’t have good theories about the kind of questions that people want answers to." This is indeed a problem, and is a valid criticism of some aspects of psychology / the progress psychology has made as a science.

2) The second problem is, "Psychologists have good theories, which render the kinds of questions that people ask incoherent." This is not at all a problem. It might even be a sign of good and healthy progress.

So far as I know, the progress of all other recognized sciences has routinely rendered lay questions about the field incoherent. For example, "Why is it that all planets rotate in perfect circles?", "How do fire, air, and earth combine to form wood?", "Why does life spontaneous generate an animal corpse, but not if the corpse is covered in lye?", etc. Thus, we would expect that a "good theory" of psychology would allow a psychologist to tell people that at least some of their questions are incoherent, or at least misguided, and therefore unanswerable.

Also... Having theories about normally living humans derived from rats in a Skinner box is no worse, at least in principle, than having theories about natually occuring chemicals derived from experiments with purified chemicals in a sterile lab. I have never seen colleagues in other sciences criticized for controlling for extraneous variables. Is it really that surprising or problematic that behavior is more predictable when we can control the environment, but less predictable when we cannot control the environment and do not know about an organism's past history?

(Apparently cranky,)
Eric

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 11:32 PM, "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Stephen,

I thought Lakoff’s Moral politics was bloody awful – SHAMEFUL even, given his earlier stuff which I liked.   A terrifying example of what happens when an Author’s publisher gets him to write more books than he has in him.

I have to admit, I am made nervous by the notion of “embodied cognition”. I mean, where the hell else is it. It’s the same kind of nervousness that overcomes me when people talk about “cognitive psychology.” (What the hell other kind of psychology IS there?) Such expressions seem to be an attempt to slip dualism in by the back door. Cognition is just adaptive action of a body. I think most believers of embodied cognition are hoping to find the little door in the skull that opens into the room where the teensy little guy sits looking out through the windows of the eyes and pulling on the little levers that send the fluids up and down the nerve channels.

Psychology has some wonderful theories. For instance, Skinner has a wonderful theory of learning. Unfortunately, it applies primarily to pigeons pressing levers. If only we could cram all humanity into Skinner boxes, the theory would work fine. Physics has the same problem, really. Billiard balls would glide along perfectly if it weren’t for friction, but there is friction everywhere where billiard balls are. If only we had frictionless billiard balls. But the problem doesn’t seem to bother physcists so much The artificial models of physics are more useful than those of psychology because, I guess, physicists have a lot better sense of what happens when the idealized circumstances of the model are violated. Poor psychologists: you take people out of those skinner boxes and all hell breaks loose.

At the risk of putting you all through distasteful spectacle of having Doug and Peter yell at me again, let me remind you of our discussion of tornados, where Peter seemed to be saying that one really shouldn’t talk about vortices until one had had sixty years of experience engineering wings and propellers. Sounds like whatever you learn about propellers in physics one won’t get you off a runway. It won’t even get water out of a washbasin.

I think the problem is not that Psychologists don’t have good theories; I think it’s more that psychologists don’t have good theories about the kind of questions that people want answers to. You folks want answers about tornadoes and washbasins, and all we have to offer is theories about behavior in skinner boxes.

Nick

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Stephen Thompson
Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:54 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Eric:

I just picked up three books in order to learn more about Embodied Cognition:

    1. Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro
    2. Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez
    3. Philosophy In The Flesh by Lakoff and Mark Johnson

I came to these via Dr Lakoff's Moral Politics, then perusing his Metaphors We Live By.
Will the 3 books above provide a basic understanding of Embodied Cognition, even though
they appear to be oriented to Philosophy as opposed to psychology?

I read Dr Dennett's Consciousness Explained back in 1997 and came to accept the
naturalistic world view - what you see is what there is; no mystical nor supernatural
stuff.

Of the two links you provided, I found your post to be more clear on the conflict in psychology
than the PsychScientists' post.

Thanks,
Steph T

On 11/12/2011 8:29 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:

Doug, don't fret.

The answer to Jochen's question is "Yes, it is about friggin time we get a good theory", and Andrew and Sabrina's blog is an excellent source of ideas for improving psychology. Recently Andrew's blog has been getting attention from other excellent professionals, including a Scientific American author who is actively discussing Andrew's previous post: "<a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/embodied-cognition-is-not-what-you.html" onclick="window.open('http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/embodied-cognition-is-not-what-you.html');return false;">Embodied cognition is not what you think". (With more discussion <a href="http://fixingpsychology.blogspot.com/2011/11/embodied-cognition.html" onclick="window.open('http://fixingpsychology.blogspot.com/2011/11/embodied-cognition.html');return false;">here.)

Roger,
You are correct that it might seem like psychology should have other things to worry about, but frankly the problems you mention (rampant misuse of statistics and the rare forged data scandals) would be a lot easier to deal with if we had a more unified theoretical base.

Eric

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 07:12 PM, Douglas Roberts <doug@...> wrote:

Oh, God. Here we go.

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm <jofr@...> wrote:

> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?

>

>

<a href="http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1" onclick="window.open('http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1');return false;">http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1

> -J.

>

> Sent from Android

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at <a href="http://www.friam.org" onclick="window.open('http://www.friam.org');return false;">http://www.friam.org

>

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at <a href="http://www.friam.org" onclick="window.open('http://www.friam.org');return false;">http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at <a href="http://www.friam.org" onclick="window.open('http://www.friam.org');return false;">http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

Stephen Thompson

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Cousin! (if I may be so bold):

After 27 yrs in boring finance, I find these ideas, well, stimulating.
I thought Moral Politics a tough read - but only because it was densely packed with
ideas. It seems to me the Strict Father model and the Nurturant Parent Model explains
a lot of what passes for policy positions on the conservative and progressive sides,
respectively.

Granted I don't have much background in the field with which to compare, but it doesn't
have the distaste of Asimov's phrase of "fake knowledge" (the superstitious stuff). So
it seems to me a useful set of models with which to view the political arena.

An associate of mine in town in the software engineering community also thinks Moral
Politics was not a good book. But so far I haven't heard an organized refutation. Is there
another model or framework I should examine for an alternative view?

I am even more novice to the concept of embodied cognition. However, just on the surface
it seems to be an extension of Dennet's Consciousness and Darwin's Dangerous Ideas
books. There is no mind-body duality, therefore the mind-body are connected and it may follow
that the body affects the brain and thus the workings of the brain called mind.

I don't have the training or even the amateur readings to be able to examine that train of thought
as a psychologist would. So I can only look over boundary conditions via imagination and
think about what would happen to a "mind" if it was in different conditions than the human body.

So at this point I just list a few off-the-wall ideas I could play with:
     1. Take a mature mind (person say 35 - 55 yrs old) and place it in
           another human body.   What would the inputs be like via the
           different nerves and 5 senses? Would the sensations be
            basically the same with slight or significant differences?

     2. Same as #1 but place the mind into an animal body. Ask the
          same questions. Something more substantive than just the
          fiction of A Once And Future King describing the scrapes little
          Wart (King Arthur) gets into as a fish, bird, etc. I am not sure
          I am up to this task because I can only imagine my own physical
          human body sensations in a new setting with a different structured
          body.

          Different physical mechanism (more of them) for smell as a dog
          or cat - so would we be able to create words to describe different
          odors like Hobbes does in Calvin & Hobbs?

     3. For really off-the-wall, same as #1 but place the mind in the
          "body" of an alien species from classical science fiction. See
           Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials.

I derive this possible line of thinking from an earlier question concerning the development
of a supernatural supreme being who is in the Old Testament a vengeful God,
and in the New Testament, a loving parent. Is human conceptualizations of a
a supreme being derive from our biology? As a species we have nurturant parents,
so is it just a form of transference to derive a supreme being as a ever present "parent"?
If so, what would sea turtles derive as "god" given they are hatched and on-their-own
from the moment they crawl out of the sand and dash for the sea?

Then back to Barlow's Guide and what would any of those alien species derive as
supreme beings given their biology?

I have wondered off the topic of embodied cognition. But I think of it as wondering around
the edges to see what the landscape may contain. I also think Lakoff's Metaphors can be
helpful in understanding how our human biology affects our choice of good and bad and the
way those notions enter our language via metaphor. (up is good, down is bad, etc.)

Would up/down or light/dark be the same metaphors of good/bad for the Uchjin (floating paint
smears) from Chalker's Well World Series?

As an analogy, I don't have the training or the sophisticated tools of a mechanical engineer,
but I do have access to some LEGO blocks. So I am playing with these ideas in a similar manner.
I don't expect to build a real-world Golden Gate Bridge, but if I make a colorful model with the
LEGO blocks I may be able to discern some basic principles.

I don't have much free time to follow these pathways, though more now that the kids are grown
and out on their own. I spend most of my time reading.

Thanks,
Steph T

On 11/12/2011 10:32 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Stephen,

I thought Lakoff’s Moral politics was bloody awful – SHAMEFUL even, given his earlier stuff which I liked.   A terrifying example of what happens when an Author’s publisher gets him to write more books than he has in him.

I have to admit, I am made nervous by the notion of “embodied cognition”. I mean, where the hell else is it. It’s the same kind of nervousness that overcomes me when people talk about “cognitive psychology.” (What the hell other kind of psychology IS there?) Such expressions seem to be an attempt to slip dualism in by the back door. Cognition is just adaptive action of a body. I think most believers of embodied cognition are hoping to find the little door in the skull that opens into the room where the teensy little guy sits looking out through the windows of the eyes and pulling on the little levers that send the fluids up and down the nerve channels.

Psychology has some wonderful theories. For instance, Skinner has a wonderful theory of learning. Unfortunately, it applies primarily to pigeons pressing levers. If only we could cram all humanity into Skinner boxes, the theory would work fine. Physics has the same problem, really. Billiard balls would glide along perfectly if it weren’t for friction, but there is friction everywhere where billiard balls are. If only we had frictionless billiard balls. But the problem doesn’t seem to bother physcists so much The artificial models of physics are more useful than those of psychology because, I guess, physicists have a lot better sense of what happens when the idealized circumstances of the model are violated. Poor psychologists: you take people out of those skinner boxes and all hell breaks loose.

At the risk of putting you all through distasteful spectacle of having Doug and Peter yell at me again, let me remind you of our discussion of tornados, where Peter seemed to be saying that one really shouldn’t talk about vortices until one had had sixty years of experience engineering wings and propellers. Sounds like whatever you learn about propellers in physics one won’t get you off a runway. It won’t even get water out of a washbasin.

I think the problem is not that Psychologists don’t have good theories; I think it’s more that psychologists don’t have good theories about the kind of questions that people want answers to. You folks want answers about tornadoes and washbasins, and all we have to offer is theories about behavior in skinner boxes.

Nick

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Stephen Thompson
Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:54 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Eric:

I just picked up three books in order to learn more about Embodied Cognition:

    1. Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro
    2. Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez
    3. Philosophy In The Flesh by Lakoff and Mark Johnson

I came to these via Dr Lakoff's Moral Politics, then perusing his Metaphors We Live By.
Will the 3 books above provide a basic understanding of Embodied Cognition, even though
they appear to be oriented to Philosophy as opposed to psychology?

I read Dr Dennett's Consciousness Explained back in 1997 and came to accept the
naturalistic world view - what you see is what there is; no mystical nor supernatural
stuff.

Of the two links you provided, I found your post to be more clear on the conflict in psychology
than the PsychScientists' post.

Thanks,
Steph T

On 11/12/2011 8:29 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:
Doug, don't fret.

The answer to Jochen's question is "Yes, it is about friggin time we get a good theory", and Andrew and Sabrina's blog is an excellent source of ideas for improving psychology. Recently Andrew's blog has been getting attention from other excellent professionals, including a Scientific American author who is actively discussing Andrew's previous post: "Embodied cognition is not what you think". (With more discussion here.)

Roger,
You are correct that it might seem like psychology should have other things to worry about, but frankly the problems you mention (rampant misuse of statistics and the rare forged data scandals) would be a lot easier to deal with if we had a more unified theoretical base.

Eric

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 07:12 PM, Douglas Roberts [hidden email] wrote:
Oh, God.  Here we go.
 
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm [hidden email] wrote:
> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?
> 
> 
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1
> -J.
> 
> Sent from Android
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
> 
 
============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
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Nick Thompson

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Carl Tollander

Yeah. I know it’s dark in there, but feel around. You will find them. You will know you have a hold of one, when you can hear the pineal gland sloshing back and forth when you wiggle the handle. Or was it the pituitary. Darn.

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2011 10:33 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Levers? There are levers? I was supposed to be pushing levers?

Dang, that explains it.

C.

On 11/12/11 9:32 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Stephen,

Nick

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Stephen Thompson
Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:54 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Oh, God.  Here we go.

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm [hidden email] wrote:

> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?

http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1

> -J.

> Sent from Android

> ============================================================

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

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> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

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Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

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Jochen Fromm-5

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Douglas Roberts-2

Doug, your comment made me laugh :-) You don't like discussions about
Psychology? I think Psychology is fascinating, and everyone can relate to
it. And you will find much more beautiful female students in Psychology and
Sociology than in Physics or Computer Science ;-)

John Lawler made an interesting remark about psychological theories on
Google+ http://goo.gl/KOpnk One reason why I like Google+ : unlike
Facebook, it allows you to connect to scientists and interesting people.

-J.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Roberts" <[hidden email]>
To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <[hidden email]>
Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2011 1:12 AM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

> Oh, God. Here we go.

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Douglas Roberts-2

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Jochen,

I retrospect, I don't think we need a theory of Psychology. I do,
however, believe that we would all benefit from a nice, long
discussion regarding a Philosophy of Psychology...

:)

--Doug

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 3:27 AM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Doug, your comment made me laugh :-) You don't like discussions about
> Psychology? I think Psychology is fascinating, and everyone can relate to
> it. And you will find much more beautiful female students in Psychology and
> Sociology than in Physics or Computer Science ;-)
>
> John Lawler made an interesting remark about psychological theories on
> Google+ http://goo.gl/KOpnk One reason why I like Google+ : unlike
> Facebook, it allows you to connect to scientists and interesting people.
>
> -J.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Douglas Roberts" <[hidden email]>
> To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <[hidden email]>
> Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2011 1:12 AM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One
>
>
>> Oh, God. Here we go.
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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>

Steve Smith

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Stephen Thompson

I find all of Lakoff's writing difficult and most of it equally rewarding.

Lakoff's work in politics does not impress me nearly so much as his
other work. I actually agree with his basic tenet of nurturant parent
vs authoritarian parent but only as a first order approximation. I
think he beats the dead horse beyond recognition much less utility.
I disagree that Lakoff's publisher was responsible for the problems with
Moral Politics.... Complicit, yes! But the responsibility lies with
Lakoff and I suspect the shadow of Chomsky that he must live in. Most
of the subtleties of the war between generative syntax (Chomsky) and
generative semantics (Lakoff) are over my head.

I sympathise with Nick in his question of "where else would it come
from?", referring to "embodied cognition". That said, I have to say
that Lakoff and Nunez kicked my ass pretty well with their "Where
Mathematics Comes From". Before reading them, I had, somehow imagined
that cognition *did* come from somewhere else... though I don't believe
I'd ever really considered where.

Perhaps this was a hazard of coming to linguistics and psychology with a
strong CS and Math background and with the ever present overlay of
"emergence" on the tip of every apparently complex phenomenon. I admit
to having accepted Mathematics as a Platonic Truth to be discovered, not
invented (or contrived/devised?).

I now realize how anthropocentric even mathematics is... the duality
of invented/discovered is still open for me, but it has a new flavor.
If we had 4 rather than 5 digits on each appendage, surely we would
prefer an octal over decimal number system (to start with the simpler
concepts of mathematics).

I'm a deep proponent of Lakoff's idea of our conceptual systems as being
fundamentally metaphorical, and am in fact seeking (very lazily) to
relate semantic networks to layered metaphor complexes and to perhaps
find examples of autocatalytic networks therein. Meme complexes if you
will that maintain their own coherence. Big Ideas within religion,
politics, even art and science would seem to fit that pattern.

I *like* the idea that all thinking ultimately grounds out in
experience, even if we have false ground-planes based in various
inherited memes, paradigms, etc.

- Steve

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Steve Smith

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Stephen Thompson

Stephen -

Following the arc of your "case studies" of re-embodied mind...

I offer a few other examples

Tin Man:
    What happens as a human being has a series of prosthetics replacing body parts. This could be a result of harm (disease, violence, accident, etc) or even of extensions of the body modification aesthetic.   At what point does a qualitative difference in our experience of ourselves change? Or is it necessarily an incremental experience?

Extensional Experience:
    Most of us have experienced the extensional nature of tools and vehicles.   Most of us can swing into a parking spot in our familiar vehicle but have to carefully think/observe our way in when driving an unfamiliar vehicle. Motorcycle riders and stunt airplane flyers (and surfers and skiers and ...) all have a similar experience of their "self" being extended.   Carpenters and blacksmiths and artists all have an extended body defined by their tool set. A newbie to any of these "extensions" will neither have them encoded into their proprioception, nor will they have any other neural pathways developed to allow them to use these tools as comfortably/naturally as they would their own body parts.

Telepresence:
    A friend of mine (Laura Mixon) published a great Science Fiction Novel (Proxies) based on the theme of a small cadre of child orphans whose bodies were so afunctional that the government consented to allowing them to be raised with telepresent robotic bodies. The practical point was to have "human" operators in space whose (telepresent) bodies could be designed to meet the rigors of space (radiation, vacuum, extreme temperatures) but still have the full range of human judgement available.   Of course, like all good stories, the important things were the relationships these children formed with eachother and with normal humans, but it made a great study in the topic of embodied cognition.

As for your question of values (up/down, light/dark as good/bad), I had the experience of working with Chinese students on Scientific Visualization projects and was shocked when they consistently felt the need to turn what seems to westerners as "natural" coding of color upside down.   In particular, in the Chinese (and perhaps other asian cultures?) red is a symbol of life and green is a symbol of death.   Stop signs and stop lights are encoded red/green opposite, etc.   The Japanese students I worked with pleaded that their contemporary experience was overly influenced by western customs to know if their aligned with the west use of Red/Green was cultural or not. I've not followed that very far, but it served as a great anecdotal awareness of this concept. It doesn't point so much at embodiment as to arbitrary but culturally informed.

Just some (more) thoughts.

So I can only look over boundary conditions via imagination and
think about what would happen to a "mind" if it was in different conditions than the human body.

So at this point I just list a few off-the-wall ideas I could play with:
     1. Take a mature mind (person say 35 - 55 yrs old) and place it in
           another human body.   What would the inputs be like via the
           different nerves and 5 senses? Would the sensations be
            basically the same with slight or significant differences?

     2. Same as #1 but place the mind into an animal body. Ask the
          same questions. Something more substantive than just the
          fiction of A Once And Future King describing the scrapes little
          Wart (King Arthur) gets into as a fish, bird, etc. I am not sure
          I am up to this task because I can only imagine my own physical
          human body sensations in a new setting with a different structured
          body.

          Different physical mechanism (more of them) for smell as a dog
          or cat - so would we be able to create words to describe different
          odors like Hobbes does in Calvin & Hobbs?

     3. For really off-the-wall, same as #1 but place the mind in the
          "body" of an alien species from classical science fiction. See
           Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials.

I derive this possible line of thinking from an earlier question concerning the development
of a supernatural supreme being who is in the Old Testament a vengeful God,
and in the New Testament, a loving parent. Is human conceptualizations of a
a supreme being derive from our biology? As a species we have nurturant parents,
so is it just a form of transference to derive a supreme being as a ever present "parent"?
If so, what would sea turtles derive as "god" given they are hatched and on-their-own
from the moment they crawl out of the sand and dash for the sea?

Then back to Barlow's Guide and what would any of those alien species derive as
supreme beings given their biology?

I have wondered off the topic of embodied cognition. But I think of it as wondering around
the edges to see what the landscape may contain. I also think Lakoff's Metaphors can be
helpful in understanding how our human biology affects our choice of good and bad and the
way those notions enter our language via metaphor. (up is good, down is bad, etc.)

Would up/down or light/dark be the same metaphors of good/bad for the Uchjin (floating paint
smears) from Chalker's Well World Series?

As an analogy, I don't have the training or the sophisticated tools of a mechanical engineer,
but I do have access to some LEGO blocks. So I am playing with these ideas in a similar manner.
I don't expect to build a real-world Golden Gate Bridge, but if I make a colorful model with the
LEGO blocks I may be able to discern some basic principles.

I don't have much free time to follow these pathways, though more now that the kids are grown
and out on their own. I spend most of my time reading.

Thanks,
Steph T

On 11/12/2011 10:32 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Stephen,

I thought Lakoff’s Moral politics was bloody awful – SHAMEFUL even, given his earlier stuff which I liked.   A terrifying example of what happens when an Author’s publisher gets him to write more books than he has in him.

I have to admit, I am made nervous by the notion of “embodied cognition”. I mean, where the hell else is it. It’s the same kind of nervousness that overcomes me when people talk about “cognitive psychology.” (What the hell other kind of psychology IS there?) Such expressions seem to be an attempt to slip dualism in by the back door. Cognition is just adaptive action of a body. I think most believers of embodied cognition are hoping to find the little door in the skull that opens into the room where the teensy little guy sits looking out through the windows of the eyes and pulling on the little levers that send the fluids up and down the nerve channels.

Psychology has some wonderful theories. For instance, Skinner has a wonderful theory of learning. Unfortunately, it applies primarily to pigeons pressing levers. If only we could cram all humanity into Skinner boxes, the theory would work fine. Physics has the same problem, really. Billiard balls would glide along perfectly if it weren’t for friction, but there is friction everywhere where billiard balls are. If only we had frictionless billiard balls. But the problem doesn’t seem to bother physcists so much The artificial models of physics are more useful than those of psychology because, I guess, physicists have a lot better sense of what happens when the idealized circumstances of the model are violated. Poor psychologists: you take people out of those skinner boxes and all hell breaks loose.

At the risk of putting you all through distasteful spectacle of having Doug and Peter yell at me again, let me remind you of our discussion of tornados, where Peter seemed to be saying that one really shouldn’t talk about vortices until one had had sixty years of experience engineering wings and propellers. Sounds like whatever you learn about propellers in physics one won’t get you off a runway. It won’t even get water out of a washbasin.

I think the problem is not that Psychologists don’t have good theories; I think it’s more that psychologists don’t have good theories about the kind of questions that people want answers to. You folks want answers about tornadoes and washbasins, and all we have to offer is theories about behavior in skinner boxes.

Nick

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Stephen Thompson
Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:54 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Eric:

I just picked up three books in order to learn more about Embodied Cognition:

    1. Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro
    2. Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez
    3. Philosophy In The Flesh by Lakoff and Mark Johnson

I came to these via Dr Lakoff's Moral Politics, then perusing his Metaphors We Live By.
Will the 3 books above provide a basic understanding of Embodied Cognition, even though
they appear to be oriented to Philosophy as opposed to psychology?

I read Dr Dennett's Consciousness Explained back in 1997 and came to accept the
naturalistic world view - what you see is what there is; no mystical nor supernatural
stuff.

Of the two links you provided, I found your post to be more clear on the conflict in psychology
than the PsychScientists' post.

Thanks,
Steph T

On 11/12/2011 8:29 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:
Doug, don't fret.

The answer to Jochen's question is "Yes, it is about friggin time we get a good theory", and Andrew and Sabrina's blog is an excellent source of ideas for improving psychology. Recently Andrew's blog has been getting attention from other excellent professionals, including a Scientific American author who is actively discussing Andrew's previous post: "Embodied cognition is not what you think". (With more discussion here.)

Roger,
You are correct that it might seem like psychology should have other things to worry about, but frankly the problems you mention (rampant misuse of statistics and the rare forged data scandals) would be a lot easier to deal with if we had a more unified theoretical base.

Eric

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 07:12 PM, Douglas Roberts [hidden email] wrote:
Oh, God.  Here we go.
 
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm [hidden email] wrote:
> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?
> 
> 
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1
> -J.
> 
> Sent from Android
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
> 
 
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Marcos

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Jochen Fromm-5

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?
>
> http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1

Why should psychology have a theory when it isn't even properly a
science? Science deals with the objective. As soon as it tries to
breach that barrier you get delusions grandeur.

...Ducks...

marcos
sf_x

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Bruce Sherwood

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Eric Charles

I was intrigued to read somewhere that as recently as about a hundred
years ago there were criticisms of "lab" experiments, even in physics,
because what can you learn about Nature with a contrived unNatural
experiment?

Bruce

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 10:51 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Also... Having theories about normally living humans derived from rats in a
> Skinner box is no worse, at least in principle, than having theories about
> natually occuring chemicals derived from experiments with purified chemicals
> in a sterile lab. I have never seen colleagues in other sciences criticized
> for controlling for extraneous variables. Is it really that surprising or
> problematic that behavior is more predictable when we can control the
> environment, but less predictable when we cannot control the environment and
> do not know about an organism's past history?
>
> (Apparently cranky,)
> Eric

Eric Charles

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Jochen Fromm-5

Heh, :- )
Much of the problems in modern psychology arose, historically, because people studying the "physical sciences" thought they could escape the problems of dualism by foisting them off onto psychology. But use of scientific instruments in no way escapes the "subjective" "objective" problem, if such a problem exists. That is a very different conversation however.

Eric

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 03:21 PM, Marcos <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?
>
>
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1

Why should psychology have a theory when it isn't even properly a
science?  Science deals with the objective.  As soon as it tries to
breach that barrier you get delusions grandeur.

...Ducks...

marcos
sf_x

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Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601

Stephen Thompson

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Steve:

Those are good additions to my preliminary list. I had a brief conversation
today with my son (MS Philosophy) and his wife (MS clinical counseling)
about brain/mind swapping: among humans, animals, and aliens. We
considered the trained athlete brain inserted into a non-trained body and what
might the experience be (i.e. 6ft 6in outfielder brain placed into a 5 ft body.
Would the athlete undershoot getting under the pop fly ball because of the shortened
legs? at least initially?)

Tin Man: remember the RoboCop movie?

Extensions: I had heard about the pilots who "know" where the tip of the
wings are.

Telepresence: I had not heard of the story you mentioned, but there are the
disembodied brains living in vats just "thinking" without the drain of a "body"
in the later Dune series books written by Herbert's son. There are also the
incorporeal minds that exist as energy not needing a body in other stories.

It seems reasonable to assume there will be differences in their cognition.
During the discussion mentioned at the top of this email I wondered (and pictured)
if the nerves of the body should be considered part of the brain. Picture a
brain with the nerves strung out like the tentacles of a jellyfish. And that is just one
of the senses connected to the brain. We would also have to consider the "leafs"
attached to the ends of the nerves (i.e. skin) and by adding back in the pieces all
connected to the brain ... we have the full body again.

So have we considered the cognition of Helen Keller? She only had touch input
without language references until Sullivan made the breakthru with water. What
would here cognition resemble? That assumes most of us have a "common"
version of cognition because we all have the basic 5 senses.

The cultural metaphor variation is a good point. I have not read, just thumbed-thru,
Lakoff's Metaphors book. I will need to read it closely and watch for any indication he
did / not consider the cultural differences you describe. I recall from MASH (TV)
that white meant death to the Koreans when Klinger made the mistake of offering his
wedding dress to his Korean fiance. (2 hr last episode 1984)

Thanks,
Steph T

On 11/13/2011 1:54 PM, Steve Smith wrote:

Stephen -

Following the arc of your "case studies" of re-embodied mind...

I offer a few other examples

Tin Man:
    What happens as a human being has a series of prosthetics replacing body parts. This could be a result of harm (disease, violence, accident, etc) or even of extensions of the body modification aesthetic.   At what point does a qualitative difference in our experience of ourselves change? Or is it necessarily an incremental experience?

Extensional Experience:
    Most of us have experienced the extensional nature of tools and vehicles.   Most of us can swing into a parking spot in our familiar vehicle but have to carefully think/observe our way in when driving an unfamiliar vehicle. Motorcycle riders and stunt airplane flyers (and surfers and skiers and ...) all have a similar experience of their "self" being extended.   Carpenters and blacksmiths and artists all have an extended body defined by their tool set. A newbie to any of these "extensions" will neither have them encoded into their proprioception, nor will they have any other neural pathways developed to allow them to use these tools as comfortably/naturally as they would their own body parts.

Telepresence:
    A friend of mine (Laura Mixon) published a great Science Fiction Novel (Proxies) based on the theme of a small cadre of child orphans whose bodies were so afunctional that the government consented to allowing them to be raised with telepresent robotic bodies. The practical point was to have "human" operators in space whose (telepresent) bodies could be designed to meet the rigors of space (radiation, vacuum, extreme temperatures) but still have the full range of human judgement available.   Of course, like all good stories, the important things were the relationships these children formed with eachother and with normal humans, but it made a great study in the topic of embodied cognition.

As for your question of values (up/down, light/dark as good/bad), I had the experience of working with Chinese students on Scientific Visualization projects and was shocked when they consistently felt the need to turn what seems to westerners as "natural" coding of color upside down.   In particular, in the Chinese (and perhaps other asian cultures?) red is a symbol of life and green is a symbol of death.   Stop signs and stop lights are encoded red/green opposite, etc.   The Japanese students I worked with pleaded that their contemporary experience was overly influenced by western customs to know if their aligned with the west use of Red/Green was cultural or not. I've not followed that very far, but it served as a great anecdotal awareness of this concept. It doesn't point so much at embodiment as to arbitrary but culturally informed.

Just some (more) thoughts.
So I can only look over boundary conditions via imagination and
think about what would happen to a "mind" if it was in different conditions than the human body.

So at this point I just list a few off-the-wall ideas I could play with:
     1. Take a mature mind (person say 35 - 55 yrs old) and place it in
           another human body.   What would the inputs be like via the
           different nerves and 5 senses? Would the sensations be
            basically the same with slight or significant differences?

     2. Same as #1 but place the mind into an animal body. Ask the
          same questions. Something more substantive than just the
          fiction of A Once And Future King describing the scrapes little
          Wart (King Arthur) gets into as a fish, bird, etc. I am not sure
          I am up to this task because I can only imagine my own physical
          human body sensations in a new setting with a different structured
          body.

          Different physical mechanism (more of them) for smell as a dog
          or cat - so would we be able to create words to describe different
          odors like Hobbes does in Calvin & Hobbs?

     3. For really off-the-wall, same as #1 but place the mind in the
          "body" of an alien species from classical science fiction. See
           Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials.

I derive this possible line of thinking from an earlier question concerning the development
of a supernatural supreme being who is in the Old Testament a vengeful God,
and in the New Testament, a loving parent. Is human conceptualizations of a
a supreme being derive from our biology? As a species we have nurturant parents,
so is it just a form of transference to derive a supreme being as a ever present "parent"?
If so, what would sea turtles derive as "god" given they are hatched and on-their-own
from the moment they crawl out of the sand and dash for the sea?

Then back to Barlow's Guide and what would any of those alien species derive as
supreme beings given their biology?

I have wondered off the topic of embodied cognition. But I think of it as wondering around
the edges to see what the landscape may contain. I also think Lakoff's Metaphors can be
helpful in understanding how our human biology affects our choice of good and bad and the
way those notions enter our language via metaphor. (up is good, down is bad, etc.)

Would up/down or light/dark be the same metaphors of good/bad for the Uchjin (floating paint
smears) from Chalker's Well World Series?

As an analogy, I don't have the training or the sophisticated tools of a mechanical engineer,
but I do have access to some LEGO blocks. So I am playing with these ideas in a similar manner.
I don't expect to build a real-world Golden Gate Bridge, but if I make a colorful model with the
LEGO blocks I may be able to discern some basic principles.

I don't have much free time to follow these pathways, though more now that the kids are grown
and out on their own. I spend most of my time reading.

Thanks,
Steph T

On 11/12/2011 10:32 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Stephen,

I thought Lakoff’s Moral politics was bloody awful – SHAMEFUL even, given his earlier stuff which I liked.   A terrifying example of what happens when an Author’s publisher gets him to write more books than he has in him.

I have to admit, I am made nervous by the notion of “embodied cognition”. I mean, where the hell else is it. It’s the same kind of nervousness that overcomes me when people talk about “cognitive psychology.” (What the hell other kind of psychology IS there?) Such expressions seem to be an attempt to slip dualism in by the back door. Cognition is just adaptive action of a body. I think most believers of embodied cognition are hoping to find the little door in the skull that opens into the room where the teensy little guy sits looking out through the windows of the eyes and pulling on the little levers that send the fluids up and down the nerve channels.

Psychology has some wonderful theories. For instance, Skinner has a wonderful theory of learning. Unfortunately, it applies primarily to pigeons pressing levers. If only we could cram all humanity into Skinner boxes, the theory would work fine. Physics has the same problem, really. Billiard balls would glide along perfectly if it weren’t for friction, but there is friction everywhere where billiard balls are. If only we had frictionless billiard balls. But the problem doesn’t seem to bother physcists so much The artificial models of physics are more useful than those of psychology because, I guess, physicists have a lot better sense of what happens when the idealized circumstances of the model are violated. Poor psychologists: you take people out of those skinner boxes and all hell breaks loose.

At the risk of putting you all through distasteful spectacle of having Doug and Peter yell at me again, let me remind you of our discussion of tornados, where Peter seemed to be saying that one really shouldn’t talk about vortices until one had had sixty years of experience engineering wings and propellers. Sounds like whatever you learn about propellers in physics one won’t get you off a runway. It won’t even get water out of a washbasin.

I think the problem is not that Psychologists don’t have good theories; I think it’s more that psychologists don’t have good theories about the kind of questions that people want answers to. You folks want answers about tornadoes and washbasins, and all we have to offer is theories about behavior in skinner boxes.

Nick

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Stephen Thompson
Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:54 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

Eric:

I just picked up three books in order to learn more about Embodied Cognition:

    1. Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro
    2. Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez
    3. Philosophy In The Flesh by Lakoff and Mark Johnson

I came to these via Dr Lakoff's Moral Politics, then perusing his Metaphors We Live By.
Will the 3 books above provide a basic understanding of Embodied Cognition, even though
they appear to be oriented to Philosophy as opposed to psychology?

I read Dr Dennett's Consciousness Explained back in 1997 and came to accept the
naturalistic world view - what you see is what there is; no mystical nor supernatural
stuff.

Of the two links you provided, I found your post to be more clear on the conflict in psychology
than the PsychScientists' post.

Thanks,
Steph T

On 11/12/2011 8:29 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:
Doug, don't fret.

The answer to Jochen's question is "Yes, it is about friggin time we get a good theory", and Andrew and Sabrina's blog is an excellent source of ideas for improving psychology. Recently Andrew's blog has been getting attention from other excellent professionals, including a Scientific American author who is actively discussing Andrew's previous post: "Embodied cognition is not what you think". (With more discussion here.)

Roger,
You are correct that it might seem like psychology should have other things to worry about, but frankly the problems you mention (rampant misuse of statistics and the rare forged data scandals) would be a lot easier to deal with if we had a more unified theoretical base.

Eric

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 07:12 PM, Douglas Roberts [hidden email] wrote:
Oh, God.  Here we go.
 
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm [hidden email] wrote:
> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?
> 
> 
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1
> -J.
> 
> Sent from Android
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> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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> 
 
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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Eric Charles

Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
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Roger Critchlow-2

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

In reply to this post by Eric Charles

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 7:29 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES <[hidden email]> wrote:

Roger,
You are correct that it might seem like psychology should have other things to worry about, but frankly the problems you mention (rampant misuse of statistics and the rare forged data scandals) would be a lot easier to deal with if we had a more unified theoretical base.

Eric --

Well, admittedly, it's been a bad few weeks for psychology in the news, not the sort of run of luck one would want to generalize too far.

But I don't see how having a theory helps if the practice doesn't involve sharing observations made under reproducible conditions so they can be independently verified.

Forget the statistical faux pas, and look at the PLOS paper: 49 papers from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition published in the second half of 2004, "all corresponding authors had signed a statement that they would share their data for such verification purposes", the data was requested in the summer of 2005, and

Responses to Data Requests

Of the 49 corresponding authors, 21 (42.9%) had shared some data with Wicherts et al. Thirteen corresponding authors (26.5%) failed to respond to the request or any of the two reminders. Three corresponding authors (6.1%) refused to share data either because the data were lost or because they lacked time to retrieve the data and write a codebook. Twelve corresponding authors (24.5%) promised to share data at a later date, but have not done so in the past six years (we did not follow up on it). These authors commonly indicated that the data were not readily available or that they first needed to write a codebook.

In more than half of the papers the supporting data effectively doesn't exist? And more than a quarter of the authors don't even feel obliged to make excuses? Is this the behavior of a community of researchers collectively seeking a consensus of reproducible observations?

-- rec --

Nick Thompson

Re: Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

I predict eric’s response will be that people would not be so blase about data if they felt that psychology were not just a matter of opinion and experiments were not just a matter of showing off your ideas, as opposed to proving them. But we’ll see.

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, November 13, 2011 5:35 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One

On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 7:29 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES <[hidden email]> wrote:

Roger,
You are correct that it might seem like psychology should have other things to worry about, but frankly the problems you mention (rampant misuse of statistics and the rare forged data scandals) would be a lot easier to deal with if we had a more unified theoretical base.

Eric --

Well, admittedly, it's been a bad few weeks for psychology in the news, not the sort of run of luck one would want to generalize too far.

But I don't see how having a theory helps if the practice doesn't involve sharing observations made under reproducible conditions so they can be independently verified.

Responses to Data Requests

Of the 49 corresponding authors, 21 (42.9%) had shared some data with Wicherts et al. Thirteen corresponding authors (26.5%) failed to respond to the request or any of the two reminders. Three corresponding authors (6.1%) refused to share data either because the data were lost or because they lacked time to retrieve the data and write a codebook. Twelve corresponding authors (24.5%) promised to share data at a later date, but have not done so in the past six years (we did not follow up on it). These authors commonly indicated that the data were not readily available or that they first needed to write a codebook.

-- rec --