Re: death of the mind.

From: David Longley (David_at_longley.demon.co.uk)
Date: 08/28/04 

Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2004 21:37:21 +0100

In article <4130c2d8@news03.toast.net>, Glen Foy
<spam33@butter.toast.net> writes
>
>"Glen M. Sizemore" <gmsizemore2@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>news:4130a74f$1_5@news.athenanews.com...
>> GF: The world is unimaginably complex. It is too complex to "use".
>>
>> GS: Where is the argument for this assertion?
>
>Let's take the example of visual perception, and let's approach it from the
>point of view of computation.
>
>A computer cannot deal with a "real" visual image. It represents a visual
>image as an array of discrete pixels. Each pixel has a particular hue and a
>particular brightness. Real images are a continuum and have a much greater
>number of colors and degrees of brightness. The array of pixels is a model.
>The model is computable. The real image is not.
>
>Interestingly, the eye, to some extent at least, takes the same approach.
>Real images are transformed into an activation pattern of rods and cones on
>the retina. And like pixels, the number of rods and cones is necessarily
>finite.
>
>I would argue that this transformation of a real image into an activation
>pattern of rods and cones is a type of low level model making. The model
>can be used. The real image is too complex.
>
>-Glen
>
>
I reckon what you're consistently doing (wrong) here and elsewhere is
*assuming* the very things that need to be explained. This is the common
malpractice of folk psychology (and its tarted up version which
pretentiously calls itself "cognitive science").

I suspect you won't get anywhere close to grasping what Behaviour
Analysis is really all about unless/until you're really prepared to
accept that our articulated common-sense (folk-psychology) may be full
of unreliable assumptions, (heuristics) and that these actually beg many
of the important questions (which in turn serve as premises for a stream
of other misleading inferences and conclusions) many of which the
science of behaviour has gone some way to answering in a different way.
If you think about the nature of research you might see why this must be
true to some extent and why there is likely to be natural resistance to
this.

One additional sting is that many folk don't seem to appreciate the
extent to which a lot of psychology is just an explication *of* these
heuristics and their biases. That's a hint as to why it's so silly to go
looking "in the brain" for presumed "inner mechanisms" and for even less
enlightened others to look to that research for guidance as to how to
build "intelligent systems".

That's not to say that a lot of well respected individuals don't do
exactly that. Sadly, what seems to drive so many of them, like so many
others, is fame and funding at the expense of fact.

Try reading some of the online SEAB papers which have been referenced
here before (search for SEAB, .pdf and pigeon lab in Google Groups). 

-- 
David Longley
http://www.longley.demon.co.uk/Frag.htm