Re: death of the mind.

From: dan michaels (feedbackdroids_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/02/04 

Date: 2 Sep 2004 10:22:33 -0700

Wolf Kirchmeir <wwolfkir@sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:<CA0Zc.9839$7i2.526314@news20.bellglobal.com>...
> Alex Green wrote:
> [...]
> > The reason I used this example was that there are three sets of
> > information present: the input information, the action, the effect of
> > the action on the environment. The effect of the action is obviously
> > not encoded in the input, it is also not encoded in the movement of
> > the paw because the SAME MOVEMENT occurs in all 3 cases. The
> > behaviourist knows the effect of the action by observing it but where
> > is the effect in the system input->cat->paw movement? It must be
> > modelled in the cat. As the behaviourist will tell you, the cat moves
> > its paw to kill the mouse, or move the ball, it does not just lob the
> > paw into space with no intention.
>
> The mouse is part of the input, Alex. It's one of the contingencies that
> controls the cat's behaviour. And the effect of the action feeds back to
> the cat - so it _is_ "encoded in the input". Etc. IOW, your analysis is
> simplistic and incomplete.
>
> The behaviorist (me) will tell you that "moving the paw" is not what's
> being explained. It's "moving the paw in the direction of the
> mouse/ball/etc" that's being explained. The behaviorist (me) will also
> point out that the cat's own movements/etc are all part of the "input"
> as you so quaintly put it. And so on.
>

What I do see here, despite some recidivism later on, is an opening up
of the perspective to start viewing the situation as being a true
feedback situation, rather than a classical perspective regards just
S-R. Bateson saw the limitations inherent in the classical behaviorist
approaches, and then adopted the cyberneticist approach, once he
realized it helped explain what he had been observing in his studies
of human societies and had been thinking about for many years
beforehand, as in Naven.

As Nicholas Humphrey said, as I mentioned elsewhere, A is the cause of
B now, but at the same time B was the cause of A earlier on. When 2
sides look at the situation from opposites sides of a "broken loop",
then you get into these interminable discussions regards persepectives
and stances. Put the loop back together, and most arguments dissolve.

> Why is the behaviorist attitude to explanation of cat behaviour useful?
> Because so long as you focus on "intentions" and link them to "internal
> models", you are likely to overlook a slew of environmental factors
> (contingencies) that affect and control the cat's behaviour. The cat and
> its environment constitute a system.
>
> There are no doubt internal states that change in response to the cat's
> environment. However, even if we grant that those state changes somehow
> result in observable behaviours, we cannot infer them, since different
> behaviours may be caused by the same or similar state changes. (In
> logical terms, you can't infer a consequence from an antecedent.) Nor
> can we infer how those state changes result in behaviours. Neurology
> will provide answers, or at least help, I think, but they won't be
> obvious ones. Labelling those internal states as "intentions" or
> "models" isn't helpful, since such labels bring with them all kinds of
> implicit assumptions, many of which are certain to mislead us. For
> example, one of my concepts of model is "something that is functionally
> similar to the prototype, such that functions of the model can be used
> to describe/predict functions of the prototype." That could be anything
> from a material object (a scale-model of a ship in a testing pool) to an
> abstract sytem of concepts (a set of mathematical equations describing
> the motions of the planets.) It might even be a neural net, though at
> this stage we simply don't know enough to be able to say so with any
> confidence. And if a neural net does in fact "model" (cat + mouse), it
> does so in ways that must be unlike the models we are accustomed to.
> Why? Because in this case the neural net is itself part of the system it
> models....
>
> Much of human psychology as "applied" in psychotherapy suffers from the
> same defect - there's all kinds of talk about attitudes, beliefs, etc,
> while what's actually happening in a given situation is being ignored.
> One of the consequences of this is that psychotherapy fails more often
> than it cures.

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