Minds and Brains

Pragmatism Series

Part I
Part II

William James’ Principles of Psychology is a remarkable book. One of the most striking chapters is chapter IV, “Habit”. It starts by claiming

When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits. (104)

This is one of James’ most famous expressions. It represents, I think, a powerful argument against Cartesian psychology. Indeed,

The strongest reason for believing that [attention and effort] do depend on brain-processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law. (126)

That our mental life is undoubtedly structured by asymmetric rules of psychology provides a powerful abductive argument against the Cartesian — ultimately Platonic —  taxonomy of Reason above and against base emotions and habits. After James, Heidegger was perhaps the most systematic critic of the dualisms stemming from Descartes, Locke, and Kant. Like James, Heidegger inverted the traditional mental hierarchy by placing greater emphasis on factical thrownness and our “falling” into habit, idle chat, and the socially scripted comportments of Das Man and the they-self.  All this is evidence against the dualist hypothesis. An analytic of humanity must be finite for indeed,

the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed. (105)

We see in James a clear statement of naturalistic philosophy of mind, an attempt to embody the mind and ground it in natural reality. It’s curious that Husserl accused Heidegger of also trying to naturalize consciousness in his marginalia of Being and Time. Moreover, James’ broad understanding of cognition seems to me light-years ahead of his time. We see in this chapter a lucid account of what was considered a modern neuroscientific fact: brain plasticity and Hebbian learning (“fire together, wire together”):

The only thing [nervous currents] can do [to brain matter], in short, is to deepen old paths or to make new ones; and the whole plasticiy of the brain sums itself up in two words when we call it an organ in which currents pouring in form the sense-organs make the extreme facility paths which do not easily disappear. (107)

The most complex habits, as we shall presently see more fully, are, from the same point of view, nothing but concatenated discharges in the nerve-centres. (108)

Moreover, James’ mental metaphors were far ahead of his time. He had already clearly saw the importance of homeostatic equilibrium and the basic ideas of dynamic systems theory and how they theoretically apply to cognitive function. The image is vague, but the substance is there:

…[W]e can only fall back on our general conception of a nervous system as a mass of matter whose parts, constantly kept in states of different tension, are as constantly tending to equalize their states.

I won’t go into the details, but it seems clear that James’ understood the idea of phase state changes and Deleuzian singularities, albeit abstractly. Speaking of Deleuze, I am really looking forward to taking John Protevi’s Deleuze class in the Fall; it’s going to rock! (I’m planning on digging into Deleuze this summer with Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and Protevi’s Political Physics and Political Affect.)

Anyway, James’ chapter on Habit is also brilliant in regards to its understanding of child development and the process of mastering embodied skills. He quotes at length a Dr. Carpenter from 1874 who said

It is a matter of universal experiences that every kind of training for special aptitudes is both far more effective, and leaves a more permanent impress, when exerted on the growing organism that when brought to bear on the adult. (110)

This kind of stuff is bread and butter to the Dreyfusian Heideggerians. It’s no surprise to me that many people accuse such scholars of reading Heidegger in terms of American pragmatism. Often this is seen as a narrow reading, but this critique only works if one assumes that James’ understanding of humanity was itself narrow. On the contrary, James’ mental taxonomy was phenomenologically rich, perhaps more so than the purely “formal indication” of Heideggerian phenomenology. Indeed, in developing a mental taxonomy, he says

Most of the performances of other animals are automatic. But in [humanity] the number of them is so enormous, that most of them must be the fruit of painful study. (113)

From this, James’ extracts a general principle: “habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts our performed.”

One may state this abstractly thus: If an act require for its execution a chain, A, B,C,D,E, F, G, etc., of successive nervous events, then in the first performances of the action the conscious will must choose each of these events from a number of wrong alternatives that tend to present themselves; but habit soon brings it about that each event calls up its own appropriate successor without any alternative offering itself…(114)

This might not sound obviously Heideggerian, but upon close inspection, we can see that it is.

We all of us have a definite routine manner of performing certain daily offices connected with the toilet, with the opening and shutting of familiar cupboards, and the like. Our lower centres know the order of these movements, and show their knowledge by their “surprise” if the objects are altered so as to oblige the movement to be made in a different way. (115)

From this passage, we can see that Heidegger’s phenomenology of the ready-to-hand was not original; it had been anticipated by American pragmatism decades earlier. Like Heidegger, James says that our primary mode of interaction with the world is characterized by familiarity. We are intimately familiar with the usability of our surroundings and how they afford us opportunities for acting. We become so familiar or “at home” in our dwelling that when something familiar doesn’t work how it normally works, readiness-to-hand “breaks down”, or we become “surprised”, as James put it. The mental taxonomies are roughly isomorphic.  However, I think James’ taxonomy is more accurate, because it has a phenomenological account of initiation and voluntary will that Heidegger is either unable or unwilling to address. Indeed, James says

A strictly voluntary act has to be guided by the idea, perception, and volition, throughout its whole course. In a habitual action, mere sensation is a sufficient guide, and the upper regions of brain and mind are set comparatively free….

In habitual action…the only impulse which the centres of idea or perception need send down is the initial impulse, the command to start.(115-116)

The only psychologist I know who captured this notion of “initial commands” as well as James did is Julian Jaynes and his notion of “structions” or “neural instructions”. Furthermore, Jaynes’ notion of “behavioral reactivity” and his distinction between automatic nonconscious cognition and volitional conscious narratization is drawn from Jamesian mental taxonomies as well. A post on Jaynes and James will probably be forthcoming soon…

After laying out his taxonomy of habit and will, James’ uses this to provide some moral lessons from which we can rethink education of the young. I will end this post with one one of my favorite passages ever:

Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast. (127)

After attending the incredibly stimulating Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, AZ, I have become convinced that I need to read Williams James more carefully to determine the influence he had on German phenomenology, particularly Husserl, and Heidegger from Husserl. I had originally read him before I studied phenomenology closely but now I think a fresh reading in light of my current knowledge will be useful for establishing historical precedent, considering James’ international renown during his hey-day. This is slightly ambitious, but I think it would be helpful to my research to work through The Principles of Psychology chapter by chapter and write up a corresponding blog post. Forcing myself to write a summary for each chapter and make my associations explicit will help me internalize James so that I can work him into my research vocabulary.  These summaries will not purport to capture everything James’ had to say. Instead, I want to pull out key quotations and then comment on them in relation to contemporary findings in phenomenology and cognitive science.

Chapter 1

Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions. (PP 1)

Right away we see the necessity  of phenomenology, the science of phenomena, for psychological science. James rightly understands the futility of trying to understand neural conditions without knowing what exactly is being conditioned. The explanandum must be lived experienced itself. A phenomenologically blind neuroscience is does not know what it is trying to explain. Julian Jaynes said the same thing:

Even if we had a complete wiring diagram of the nervous system, we still would not be able to answer our basic question. Though we knew the connections of every species that ever existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they varied in its billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, we could never — not ever – from a knowledge of the brain alone know if that brain contained a consciousness like our own. We first have to start from the top, from some conception of what consciousness is, from what our own introspection is. We have to be sure of that, before we can enter the nervous system and talk about its neurology. (OC 18)

Next, James discusses the two most influential schools of thought on explaining psychological behavior, the Soul theory and the “associationist” theory.  I assume the Soul theory of consciousness is well-known to most of my readers, so I will not elaborate here. The associationist theory however, is worth commenting on. Such a theory is

a psychology without a soul by taking discrete ‘ideas’, fain or vivid, and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions, and forms of succession, such things as reminiscences, perceptions, emotions, volitions, passions, theories, and all the other furnishings of an individual’s mind may be engendered. (PP 1-2)

However, James’ points out that an explanation at this level of ideality is practically useless when it comes to explaining why memory works better under particular conditions, or why the mind is irrational and prone to sloppy error.

Such peculiarities seem quite fantastic; and might, for aught we can see a priori, be the precise opposites of what they are. (PP 3)

I take this critique of “ideas” theory to be transferable to modern cognitivist theories of representations. Saying that perception is explained by something “standing for something else” in the brain does not explain much of anything until you show how that function actually works without resorting to circular arguments. If you explain the representations by their causal role in aiding functionality, then you need to show why we cannot just explain the entire system in causal terms, rather than saying one thing stands for another — a devishly vague statement. Instead of resorting to ideas,

The fact that the brain is the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is indeed so universally admitted nowadays  that I need spend no more time in illustrating it, but will simply postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the book will be more or less of a proof that the postulate was correct. (PP 4)

This sounds like a modern precursor to Merleau-Ponty, Gibson, and Varela. James’ emphasis on the embodied nature of cognition is reinforced by

the general law that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change. (PP 5)

Cognition is for changes in the body. Moreover, James’, like Jaynes, seems to establish a dual-process theory of consciousness wherein there can be intelligent nonconscious operations. Indeed,

Standing, walking, buttoning and unbotting, piano-playing, talking, even saying one’s prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things. The performances of animal instinct seem semi-automatic. (PP 5)

I take this to be a historical precedent to the Jaynesian idea that cultural zombies are possible. I have recently argued this in my latest paper, “What Is It Like To Be Nonconscious?“. I take this to mean that there are two levels of consciousness. One is intelligent and embodied, grounded in action. I call this the “Reactive mind”, following Jaynes notion of “behavioral reactivity”. The reactive mind constitutes the normal cognitive state of humans and nonhumans alike. This was the mentality that humans were in for probably 99% of their evolutionary development (until the rise of civilization). The other level of consciousness is consciousness proper, that operation wherein narratization occurs within a virtual mindspace opened up by metaphorical processes of spatialization. The question then is

Shall the study of such machine-like yet purposive acts as these be included in Psychology? (PP 6)

The answer is of course yes. A proper psychology must “[take the] mind in the midst of all its concrete relations” (PP 6). Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity has a similar methodological approach. For Heidegger, as for Jaynes and James, we must examine lived human experienced in terms of it concrete finitude. But phenomenology is methodologically a priori in that we must first uncover the phenomena to be studied before we objectify and neurologize.

Given there are intelligent nonconscious acts, what is their nature? James’ answer is that they are directed towards an end with varying means. He uses an example of iron filings being attracted to a magnet. A teleological (means/end) explanation (like “Iron loves magnets) is only useful as a metaphor, because if you put a card between the filings and the magnet, the filings will never move around the card in order to satisfy their desire.

Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. (PP 7)

This is the crucial phenomenological difference between living and nonliving things. And insofar as phenomenology is ontology (according to Heidegger), teleological behaviors marks an ontological distinction between tables and humans.

The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon. We all use this test to discriminate between an intelligent and a mechanical performance. We impute no mentality to sticks and stones, because they never seem to move for the sake of anything, but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no sign of choice. So we unhesitatingly call them senseless.(PP 8 )

Anyone who is familiar with Heidegger will recognize the bold sentence as familiar.

We have interpreted worldhood as that referential totality which constitutes significance. In Being-familiar with this significance and previously understanding it, [humans let] what is ready-to-hand be encountered as discovered in its involvement. In Humanity’s Being, the context of references or assignments (of worldly things) which significance implies is tied up with human’s ownmost Being — a Being which essentially can have no involvement, but which is rather that Being for the sake of which Dasein itself is as it is…significance, as worldhood, is tied up with the existential “for-the-sake-of-which”. (SZ 123)

But how can teleological explanations by accepted in scientific discourse? James has an eloquent answer.

In the lengthy discussions which psychologists have carried on about the amount of intelligence displayed by lower mammals, or the amount of consciousness involved in the functions of the nerve-centres of reptiles, the same test has always been applied: Is the character of the actions such that we must believe them to be performed for the sake of their result? The result in question, as we shall hereafter abundantly see, is as a rule a useful one, — the animal is, on the whole, safer under the circumstances for bringing it forth. So far the action has a teleological character; but such mere outward teleology as this might still be the blind result of vis a tergo.

We thus arrive at a Jamesian  principle, echoed in Heidegger, Gibson, Jaynes, and Charles Taylor:

no actions but such as are done for an end, and show a choice of means, can be called indubitable expressions of Mind.

I am super excited to begin an online reading group for Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. My copy hasn’t arrived in the mail yet, but I got a sneak peak at a few chapters on google books, and from what I have read, I am going to have a beef to pick with some of the things he says about Heidegger. This is not surprising given that I have a rather unorthodox interpretation of early Heidegger, especially in regards to the exegesis of Being and Time.

That I disagree with pretty much everyone (with few exceptions) concerning what Heidegger was actually arguing for and against is becoming increasingly apparent to me as I read more and more shallow attempts to assimilate him into a convenient historical box without taking seriously the radical implications that his critiques of Descartes, Locke, and Kant have for reconceptualizing philosophy of “mind.” Most scholars working with Heidegger seem to only be discussing Heideggerian philosophy on the surface level and subsequently fail to see his work as a plausible alternative to the tradition of Western metaphysics/epistemology. Instead, people seem to see Heidegger as only reacting against that history,working within those very frameworks and never being able to actually move past the stale dialectics that define the history of philosophy with its “scandal” of knowledge concerning a body-external world. On my view then, it is a shallow and theoretically naive reading of Being and Time to say that early Heidegger remained completely within the conceptual schemes of Kant. I firmly believe that if we  “updated” Heidegger jargon into a more contemporary theoretical framework, we would see that, well, actually, Heidegger overcame Kantian thought as early as Being and Time and no, he wasn’t a transcendental idealist in the same vein as Husserl. To think otherwise is to ignore Heidegger’s potent critique against the interalist representationalism of modern philosophy.

It seems to me then  that the only reason the radicalized implications of Heideggerian philosophy haven’t been more widely discussed is that philosophers haven’t found a more intelligible theoretical foundation to interpret Heidegger in terms of. So while scholars like Dreyfus understand very well just what Heidegger is arguing against, and have a vague understanding of what he is arguing for, they do so completely within the vocabulary of “Heideggerese.” In my opinion, we will never make progress on incorporating Heideggerian insights into contemporary philosophy of mind so long as we are bent on “preserving” Heidegger into his own historical niche, treating him like just another dead white philosopher who said some pretty radical things, but shouldn’t be taken so seriously because of all his jargon and strange word plays.

Wrong! Heidegger utilized wordplay because he realize that the analytic of Dasein, indeed the very conception of what constitutes Dasein, will always been an evolving enterprise given that shifting nature of our metaphors and self-interpretations concerning cognition and the mind. In contemporary philosophy of mind we shouldn’t be trying to understand how Heidegger-language is an alternative to Kantian vocabulary (although it is); we should we trying to understand how Heidegger-language is an alternative to the computationalism of contemporary cognitive science! This is the real meat and potatoes of good Heideggerian philosophy and I am glad that people like Andy Clark and Alva Noë are beginning to work our the consequences of this (the concluding section of Clark’s recent book is entitled “The Heideggerian Theater”).

What is great is that a lot of phenomenologically oriented cognitive scientists are starting to realize this and have  been reaching haphazardly for a suitable theoretical foundation to “translate” Heidegger into. If you have ever read anything on this website, you will probably know that I already think there is such a framework in the work of James Gibson and his ecological approach to visual perception. But I will rant about that some other time.

Coming back to Lee Braver’s book, I am exicted by project of finding a common theoretical framework to discuss Heidegger and the continentals in relation to both the history of analytic and continental philosophy alike; seeing in just what respect Heidegger agrees and disagrees with the metaphysical tradition. Although I suspect I will have to argue heavily in favor in re-categorizing Heidegger (I think he supports Braver’s R1 Independence thesis, contrary to Braver), I am looking forward to this discussion as it might potentially elevate the level of Heideggerian discourse past convenient platitudes and shallow summaries typical of most scholarship and into a real discussion of his revolutionary rejection of traditional accounts of cognition.

edit: I got the book in the mail today and have been reading the early Heidegger section more closely to see what Braver has to say about Heidegger and R1.  It seems like Braver is confusing the issue when he says (rightly) that for Heidegger, “present-at-hand objects are real” and then a few pages later that being is dependent on Dasein, so therefore he must be rejecting the Mind-Independence thesis, despite holding that present-at-hand objects “really” exist. It is plainly obvious from reading any Heidegger that being (that which determines entities as entities, to us i.e. the basic act of explicit, interpretive perception) is dependent on Dasein. This is clear. As Heidegger defines it, being has to be Dasein dependent because no other animal has explicit interpretation of objects as objects e.g. a tree as a tree, a pen as a pen, my child as my child, with all the referential holism tied into that perceptual relationship tacitly.

But, as Braver framed it, R1 implies that “the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects.” On this view, provided we understand Heideggers ontic/ontological distinction between the “physical world” and the lifeworld we cope in, Heidegger would be perfectly fine saying that the brute, physical-behavioral world is independent of us according to R1. And this is where Braver gets confused about Heidegger’s critique of Kant’s nouema because Heidegger only has problems with the traditional account of how we basically interact with the world (representational perception) and not the fact that there is an external, objective world at all. Of course there is an external world! I don’t know how post-Darwinian thinking could ever deny this.

So yes, Braver is right to say that Heidegger rejects the noumena, but misunderstands Heidegger’s reasons for doing so. It isn’t because there is no mind-independent reality “out there,” its because Kant claimed our perceptual access was mediated by representations. See Being and Time pg 51 for his critique of Kantian representationism as being circular. Thus, Dreyfus is right to say that the proper level of analysis for understanding Heidegger’s critique of Kant is through representational perception versus non-representional “direct” perception. Heidegger is thus a realist, but not a metaphysical realist per se, but rather a “direct realist” in the tradition of Reid. Braver seems to miss this by ignoring the fundamental importance for Heidegger of getting our account of perceptual acces right.

Sometimes I sit in class and think about the nature of perception and reality. That sounds cliche, but I often find myself wondering whether I am really perceiving the professor as they give a lecture. What am I looking at? Am I merely perceiving representations, or ideas, in my head, or am I really looking at the external world? How can I reconcile the fact that visual information from the environment must be filtered through my nervous system before it is perceived with the sensation that I am directly looking at the world. On one hand, the representational theory of perception makes sense because it seems like there is always going to be this “gap” between my perception and reality, mediated through my sensory organs. On the other hand, it makes evolutionary sense that animals would develop a direct perceptual system in order to save cognitive resources. “Perception is cheap, representation is expensive.”

So what am I looking at when I perceive the world? Ideas in my head or real objects? James Gibson proposed a solution that he thought solved these dualistic paradoxes when he came up with the concept of the ambient optic array. Light is bouncing all around the environment, reflecting information about surfaces and textures, eventually settling into invariant “visual angles”. It is the information in this ambient optic array that we perceive. We don’t perceive the world. We don’t perceive representations in our head, projected onto a Cartesian theater. We directly pickup information from the invariant visual angles of light in the ambient optic array.

This is a mind/body/world system. It embedded and embodied. It is confusing to talk about sense-data stimulating the retina, and the brain “perceiving” this data, as if it was projected onto our cortex and the mind just mysteriously “reads” the data. This leads to conceptual muddles such as mind/body dualism and the representational theory of perception. Gibson thought it made more sense to talk about a ecologically embedded perceptual system picking up information directly from the environment. The distinction between this information pickup and the representational theory of perception is subtle. The difference lies in the fact that with the representational theory there is this impossible divide between between “internal” world of the mind and the “external” physical world. Somehow information crosses this metaphysical gap. Gibson thought it was much more parsimonious and evolutionarily sound to talk about perception in terms of direct pickup by a holistic agent in the environment. The information in the ambient optic array is structurally isomorphic to the firings of the nervous system, which is embedded in a whole body, capable of moving about in the world. By utilizing this ecological approach to perception, Gibson was able to drop the conceptual muddle of a “mind” perceiving ideas driven by the sense organs, but rather, a Self perceiving the environment through invariant structures in the light reflected in the environment. This is why the phenomenology of perception always puts the environment “out there”, in the world, as opposed to “inside” the internal chambers of the mind.

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I just read an interesting paper by Eric Dietrich and Arthur B. Markman entitled “Discrete Thoughts: Why Cognition Must Use Discrete Representations.” In the paper, they first give a definition of general mental representations and make a distinction between discrete and continuous representations. Then they outline seven arguments for why they think discrete representations are necessary for any system that discriminates between two or more states.

Their definition of general mental representation is I think robust and conceptually useful. They define a representation to be any internal state that mediates or plays a mediating role between a system’s inputs and outputs in virtue of that state’s semantic content. They define semantic content in terms of information that is causally efficacious and in terms of what that information is used for. What this means is that representations have to be a part of mental causation. This approach reminds me a lot of Hofstadter’s work, which I have talked about here. Hofstadter emphasizes how mental representations, which mediate between the environmental stimulus and the behavioral output by virtue of being causal at the appropriate level of analysis. I take Dietrich and Markman to mean the same thing when they say that mental representations must be “psychologically real”. In Hofstadter’s terminology, the symbols must be active.

Next, the authors offers a definition of discrete representation. “A system has discrete representations if and only if it can discriminate its inputs.” If a system categorizes, then it has discrete representations. In contrast, a continuous representation would be more tightly bound to its correspondence with the environment. It would be coupled in such a way that it wouldn’t have the ability to make distinctions between its inputs. This is illustrated by the examples of a watt governor and a thermostat. In a watt governor, the arm angles of continuous representations of the speed of the fly wheel, and in contrast, a thermometer must make an on/off discrimination of the continuous representation of the varying bimetal strip. The discrete representation supervenes on the continuous representation.

Finally, the authors give seven arguments why cognition requires discrete representations. I won’t go over the arguments in detail, I will just list a brief summary taken from the text.

1. Cognitive systems must discriminate among states in the represented world.
2. Cognitive systems are able to access specific properties of representations.
3. Cognitive systems must be able to combine representations.
4. Cognitive systems must have some compositional structure.
5. There are strong functional role connections among concepts in cognitive systems.
6. Cognitive systems contain abstractions.
7. Cognitive systems require non-nomic representations.

In their conclusion the authors discuss the claim that it follows from the presence of discrete representations in the cognitive system that the best paradigm for cognitive science must be computationalism. They argue that any system that utilizes discrete representations must be finite and has deterministic transitions between states which can be constructed into an algorithm. Thus, the mind can be described as a computationalism system. I think this is a clever argument and places computationalism into its proper role as the dominant paradigm in cognitive science. Until conflicting evidence shows that when it comes to general mental phenomena there is a better methodological framework, we shouldn’t deny computationalism’s place as the best explanatory paradigm.

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In a 1994 paper entitled “On Distinguishing Epistemic From Pragmatic Action” published in Cognitive Science, David Kirsh and Paul Maglio make an fascinating distinction between actions that change the world(pragmatic) and actions that change the nature of our mental tasks(epistemic). That sounds interesting you say, but how did the researchers go about showing such a distinction? By playing Tetris! Or rather, watching other people play Tetris.

I am sure almost all of you are familiar with the game Tetris so I won’t bother going into too much detail describing how one plays it. Basically, various geometric shapes called “zoids” fall one at a time and you have to arrange them in a row. One is allowed to rotate the zoids to best fit them into the virtual environment. The key idea behind using Tetris as their methodological domain was that Tetris is requires real-time, split-second interactive cognitive and perceptual performance. This allowed the researchers to tease out how people offload cognitive computation onto the external world in order to ease up the difficulty of the mental task at hand. This sort of external manipulation is called epistemic action and as I mentioned above, is distinguished from an action that merely seeks to change the nature of the world. Epistemic actions improve cognition by doing the following:

Reducing the memory involved in mental computation, that is, space
complexity;

Reducing the number of steps involved in mental computation, that is,
time complexity;

Reducing the probability of error of mental computation, that is,
unreliability.

Kirsh and Maglio found that advanced Tetris players perform a variety of epistemic actions to reduce their internal computational effort. In contrast to less-advanced players who rotate the zoids in their head, advanced players would physically rotate the zoids. This seemingly simple action changes the way the mind handles the computational task of rotating the zoids in the game and thus allows the player to manipulate the virtual world with more reliability and speed.

Such data suggests that standard theoretical frameworks in cognitive science might not be enough to explain the full extant to which humans utilize the external environment in ways that alter their mental landscape to improve cognitive performance. Instead of breaking up the world into a dualism of physical space and information-processing space, it might be more theoretically useful to have a more unified and fluid space where both pragmatic and epistemic actions can take place. This approach gives more credence to the idea that we are fundamentally in the world, embedded and embodied, with a perceptual and cognitive repertoire that doesn’t make hard and fast distinctions between the inner and outer realms.

Reference:

Kirsh, D., & Maglio, P (1994) On Distinguishing Epistemic from Pragmatic Action. Cognitive Science: A Multidisciplinary Journal, Vol. 18, No. 4: pages 513-549

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I have been hearing a lot of buzz lately about Asim Roy’s newly published paper Connectionism, controllers, and a brain theory. What is all the hype about? Well, Roy claims to be offering a “new theory for the internal mechanisms of the brain.” Sounds exciting doesn’t it? What could Roy be proposing that is so revolutionary? Roy proposes that…wait for it… some parts of the brain control other parts! I suppose most of you aren’t exactly blown away, and I certainly wasn’t either.

Roy’s rhetoric is obviously pretty overblown, but let us give him the benefit of the doubt and move on to his actual arguments. He starts off by claiming that connectionist theory “postulates that the brain does not have controllers in it.” He quotes Rumelhart, Hinton, and McClelland as saying “there is no central executive overseeing the general flow of processing.” Seems pretty non-controversial to me though. They seem to be merely saying that there isn’t a homunculus in the system, controlling everything with a immutable Will. Philosophy 101. So what is Roy actually arguing against? A straw man? Sort of, but not quite. Roy argues that in connectionist models, there is a “controller” in the system that controls the learning algorithms and thus connectionist theories are essentially rooted in control-theoretic modeling.

But, as peter over at conscious entities mentioned, connectionist theorists haven’t exactly gotten to the point where they are proposing a general architectural model of how the brain works. It seems entirely plausible that when connectionist models get to that point of complexity, they wouldn’t hesitate to propose that some modules control other modules. Otherwise, I don’t see how one could get a theory that modeled high-level cognition. The way Roy structured his arguments, I don’t think anyone would argue against the idea that “there are parts of the brain that control other parts.” Furthermore, Roy himself undermines his claim for proposing a “new paradigm” when he says things as trivially obvious as:

It should be pointed out that this theory does not posit that there is a single executive controller in the brain. [b]Instead it envisions “multiple distributed controllers” controlling various subsystems or modules of the brain[/b]. The main argument of the paper that connectionists use “executive controllers” is only pointing out that their algorithms use a “central controller.” But different modules in the brain using connectionist-type learning can have their separate controllers.

I’d also like to point out that Roy was beaten by at least ten years on his emphasis of controllers. In his 1997 book Being There, Andy Clark says:

The idea here is that the brain should not be seen as primarily a locus of inner descriptions of external states of affairs; rather, it should be seen as a locus of inner structures that act as operators upon the world via their role in determining actions…This perspective leads to a rather profound shift in how we think about mind and cognition-a shift I characterize as the transition from models of representation as mirroring or encoding to models of representation as control

So contrary to Roy’s strong rhetoric, people sympathetic to connectionist theory such as Clark have been thinking about the mind and the brain in terms of action-oriented controllers for many years. In conclusion, I agree with Roy’s essential argument that there are parts of the brain that control other parts of the brain, but I don’t think this is a revolutionary of a paradigm as he thinks it is. Roy himself quotes from all over the neuroscience literature showing that it is riddled with control-theoretic terms, and by his own argument, he shows that connectionist theory is also already steeped in control theory. Surely, the connectionists themselves understand this. So who is Roy arguing against here?

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Research by Adolph, Eppler, and Gibson on infant responses to slopes has provided insight into the interplay between perception and action. In the research, infants with different forms of mobility(crawlers or walkers) were encouraged to ascend and descend slopes with different degrees of steepness. The walkers were wary of slopes of 20 degrees or more whereas the crawlers fearlessly attempt slopes of 20 degrees or more. As the crawlers increased in experience, they learned to avoid descending the steeper slopes. However, when crawlers first begin to walk this avoidance pattern seems to disappear and they again plunged down the steep slope without hesitation.

These results seem to indicate that the perceptual knowledge that infants gain about the world is action-specific. Infants do not learn about slopes in general but rather, they learn about slopes-and-crawling and then slopes-and-walking. Research along these lines paints a picture of perception as being for specific action-routines. Thus, theoretical frameworks in cognitive science should be geared towards “motocentricity” rather can “visuocentricity”. This re-conceptualization ties in with what James Gibson posited almost 30 years ago in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception: that perception is tied in what we can do with perceptual information. Our perception of a chair is intimately coupled with the fact that chairs are for sitting. Gibson claimed that these perceptual affordances for action are directly perceived in the environment around us. So when an infant looks at a slope, he perceives that the slope affords for falling. The only trouble is putting such information about the environment into use using the context-specific motor schemas available to the infant.

References:

Karen E. Adolph, Marion A. Eppler, Eleanor J. Gibson (1993) Crawling versus Walking Infants’ Perception of Affordances for Locomotion over Sloping Surfaces Child Development, Vol. 64, No. 4 (Aug., 1993), pp. 1158-1174

The Italian Neuroscience Mafia is at it again: Giacomo Rizzolatti and cohorts recorded the brain activity of macaque monkeys in the F5 and F1 areas while they were grasping with their hands and then when they were grasping with a pair of pliers. Remarkably, the same neurons fired in the same order when they were grasping with their hands as when they were grasping with the tool. Furthermore, the same neurons also fired in the same order when the monkeys used “reverse pliers” that required closing and then opening the hand in order to grasp the food. Because of this, the researchers concluded that “the capacity to use tools is based on an inherently goal-centered functional organization of primate cortical motor areas.”

Their evidence clearly shows that there are cortical neurons in the F5 and F1 area that code for for the goal of motor acts, instead of the motor act itself. These neurons are then connected to neurons that more specifically code for the motor act of opening and closing. Furthermore, the researchers show evidence that amidst the goal-directed neurons in the F5 area, mirror neurons are also involved, which code for goal-directed actions during the observation and execution of an act and are rich in the F5 area.

Jake Young over at Pure Pedantry has an interesting article on cognition and emotion. He summarizes a review paper by Luiz Pessosa that argues that cognition and emotion are not separate. He goes through a number of different arguments in favor of such a thesis, which I will not list here, but needless to say, seem quite compelling. However, since Antonio Damasio’s work in the 90s, I don’t think this is a very radical hypothesis( Damasio published Descarte’s Error in 1994). Fascinating article nevertheless.