Posted by
Stephen Thompson on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Theory-and-Why-It-s-Time-Psychology-Got-One-tp6988785p6991025.html
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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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
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
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
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
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at
http://www.friam.org