Category: Theory

Many thanks to Ulrich Mohrhoff for reminding me of the Jerry Fodor article I was trying to remember where he explains his theory of mental representation to his aunt.

The article is called “Fodor’s Guide to Mental Representation: The Intelligent Auntie’s Vade-Mecum”, published in Mind, (New Series, Vol. 94, No. 373, Jan., 1985, pp. 76-100) and reprinted in Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science (ISBN 0262071533).

The whole article doesn’t seem to be available online, but the first page does seem to appear on JSTOR.

The opening paragraph is wonderful:

It rained for week and we were all so tired of ontology, but there didn’t seem to be much else to do. Some of the children started to sulk and pull the cat’s tail. It was going to be an awful afternoon until Uncle Wilfred thought of Mental Representations (which was a game we hadn’t played for years) and everyone got very excited and we jumped up and down and waved our hands and all talked at once and had a perfectly lovely romp. But Auntie said she couldn’t stand the noise and there would be tears before bedtime if we didn’t please calm down.

Link to first page of ‘Fodor’s Guide to Mental Representation’.

18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume makes a dig at John Locke in the footnote to one of his most famous books – A Treatise of Human Nature.

Hume wrote that completing the Treatise, at the age of 26, affected his mental health, causing ‘philosophical melancholy and delirium’.

Footnote 1. I here make use of these terms, impression and idea, in a sense different from what is usual, and I hope this liberty will be allowed me. Perhaps I rather restore the word, idea, to its original sense, from which Mr LOCKE had perverted it, in making it stand for all our perceptions.

Link to Wikipedia page on David Hume.
Link to online copy of A Treatise of Human Nature.

ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone just had an excellent edition on artificial intelligence and whether a computer could ever simulate the mind.

The guest on the show is philosopher Matt Carter, who’s also just written a book on the subject called Minds and Computers (ISBN 0748620990).

For half an hour, the programme is a remarkably comprehensive guide to some of the key issues in the philosophy of artificial intelligence and computational models of mind.

Alan Saunders: Is it an interesting question because we think that perhaps we could develop computers that are like us in some intellectual respect and to whose rights we will perhaps have to give recognition? Or is it because we think that the computational model will tell us something about our own minds?

Matt Carter: It’s an excellent question, and I think the answer is both. There’s a sense in which we really hope to understand our own minds better through this kind of computational understanding, and certainly the computational theory of mind is currently by far the most dominant theory in the philosophy of mind and the culture of sciences broadly. But there are also a number of people working on strong artificial intelligence projects, and the ultimate goal of those projects is to produce man-made artifacts that have minds in precisely the same sense, or some very similar sense, in which we take ourselves to have minds.

Link to Philosopher’s Zone on ‘Minds and Computers’.

A curious term from anthropology describing the tendency for someone to come up with a counter-example from some usually obscure and remote tribe when anyone makes a general claim about human culture.

Bongo-bongoism: the venerable but ultimately sterile anthropological practice of countering every generalization with an exception located somewhere at some time.

Apparently, it was first used by anthropologist Mary Douglas in her book Natural Symbols.

Link to the culture evolves! blog (where I found the definition).

Christopher Green, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto produces a weekly podcast that examines crucial events in the history of psychology.

Each episode of This Week in the History of Psychology looks at a significant development that happened in the same week during the past.

Prof Green also runs the fantastic Classics in the History of Psychology website that has an archive of some of the most important documents in the field.

Link to This Week in the History of Psychology podcast (via BPSRD).
Link to Classics in the History of Psychology website.

Pat: I once heard a funny idea about what will happen when we eventually have intelligent machines. When we try to implant that intelligence into devices we’d like to control, their behaviour won’t be so predictable.

Sandy: They’d have a quirky little “flame” inside, maybe?

Pat: Maybe

Chris: So what’s so funny about that?

Pat: Well, think of military missiles. The more sophisticated their target-tracking computers get, according to this idea, the less predictable they will function. Eventually you’ll have missiles that will decide they are pacifists and will turn around and go home and land quietly without blowing up.

Characters in a whimsical coffee house conversation tackle the idea that artificial intelligence may actually make devices less, not more, reliable.

From p90 in Douglas Hofstadter’s chapter in The Mind’s I (ISBN 0465030912) by Hofstadter and Dennett.

A quote from a recent paper by psychiatrist Dr Paul Mullen on the difficulties with diagnostic manuals for mental illness, such as the DSM and ICD.

Mullen argues that the definitions of mental illnesses are designed in an open-minded way to aid diagnosis and stimulate debate but end up trapping us into a narrow definition of mental distress:

Those who create these manuals are neither fools nor rogues. They know that classificatory systems grow and develop. They welcome research, debate, and change. They are often painfully aware of the compromises and hopeful approximations which go to create the final authoritative text.

But this intellectual honesty does not translate into the practices and ideologies which DSM and ICD sustain in the cities of psychiatry and psychology. In today’s field of mental health if you seek research funding or publication, you are forced into the languages of DSM or ICD.

To claim rebates for clinical work or to present expert testimony to courts and tribunals, increasingly, the language of these diagnostic manuals is imposed upon you. To even contribute to the professional debates on nosology you are constrained within the premises which sustain the manuals.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.

The New York Times has an in-depth article on the increasing use of neuroscience evidence in court cases and how this is shaping concepts of justice and responsibility.

The article examines the science and technology which is being used as the basis of this evidence and questions whether courts are competent to use the knowledge.

It also looks at whether the notion of free will is being eroded by excusing criminal acts on the basis of disturbed brain function.

To suggest that criminals could be excused because their brains made them do it seems to imply that anyone whose brain isn’t functioning properly could be absolved of responsibility. But should judges and juries really be in the business of defining the normal or properly working brain? And since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn’t this mean all behavior could potentially be excused?
…
Proponents of neurolaw say that neuroscientific evidence will have a large impact not only on questions of guilt and punishment but also on the detection of lies and hidden bias, and on the prediction of future criminal behavior. At the same time, skeptics fear that the use of brain-scanning technology as a kind of super mind-reading device will threaten our privacy and mental freedom, leading some to call for the legal system to respond with a new concept of “cognitive liberty.”

If you want to keep track of developments in this area, you could do a lot worse than reading a great new blog called The Situationist from the Harvard Law School’s Project on Law and Mind Sciences.

It’s got some fantastic contributors and, so far, has published some great articles.

Finally, if you want a good academic review of the area and have access to the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the feature article from the March edition is on ‘Cognitive Science and the Law’.

Unfortunately, neither of the authors have put the full version online, but the abstract is listed on PubMed.

Link to NYT article ‘The Brain on the Stand’.
Link to blog The Situationist.
Link to abstract of TiCS article ‘Cognitive Science and the Law’.

ABC Radio’s All in the Mind just had an edition on transhumanism, where evolutionary psychologist Prof Leda Cosmides gives a critical commentary on the movement which seeks to to extend human abilities and lifespan through technology.

The programme is particularly interesting, as transhumanism is still on the scientific fringe, and it’s rare to see one of the scientific mainstream make a serious attempt at a critique.

Cosmides takes the movement to task for what she sees as an oversimplification of psychology to fit with technological developments, and a naivety in assuming that human instincts can be engineered without wider consequences.

If you want more of a background to transhumanism, George Dvorsky recently published a transhumanist dictionary, as we reported recently on Mind Hacks.

Link to All in the Mind on ‘Prospects for a Transhuman mind?’.

The New English Review has a thought-provoking article by Theodore Dalrymple (the pen name of psychiatrist Anthony Daniels) who argues that modern neuroscience will not be able to provide a perfect self-understanding, and even if it could, disaster would follow.

Dalrymple is an interesting character, as he’s one of the few conservative writers in the area of mind, brain and mental health who has both experience of working in psychiatry across the world, and a vast academic knowledge.

His writing is distinctly against the mainstream of much modern medicine, particularly in the field of addiction, which, he argues, is often explained by social factors that minimise personal responsibility and disempower the patient.

In this article, Dalrymple argues against the enthusiasm for neuroscience as the ‘great new hope’ which has captured popular imagination in recent decades.

Those who say that we are on the verge of a huge increase in self-understanding are claiming that enlightenment will suddenly be reached under the scientific bo tree. The enlightenment will have to be sudden rather than gradual because, if it were gradual, we should already be able to point to an increase in human contentment and self-control brought about by our already increased knowledge. But even the most advanced societies are just as full of angst, or poor impulse control, of existential bewilderment, of adherence to clearly irrational doctrines, as ever they were. There is no sign that, Prozac and neurosurgery notwithstanding, any of this is about to change fundamentally.

Link to article ‘Do the Impossible: Know Thyself’ (thanks Karel!)

Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland is interviewed on ABC Radio’s In Conversation where she talks about her work on understanding how our concepts of the mind can map on to the developing field of neuroscience.

Churchland is particulary known for eliminative materialism, which argues that our everyday understanding of the mind is generally false and won’t ever map onto the brain as neuroscience understands it.

It’s been a powerful, influential but controversial argument in cognitive science.

I mean my idea was something like this: consider the follow analogies. Suppose that you were in a time capsule and you were able to go back to, let’s say the 12th century, and say to a monk who was puzzling deeply about the nature of fire. And you said to him, Look, let me tell you what it is; it’s rapid oxidation and you would go on to talk about how exactly that occurred. Now the thing about it is that, since he does not even know about elements, he still thinks there’s just earth, air, fire and water, it isn’t going to make much sense to him. So you’ve given an answer, but lacking the surrounding theoretical context it would be very hard for him to make sense of it.

And my point about the brain now is that if I were given, in an analogous way, the answer to what it is that makes for conscious states in the brain, given that how much we don’t know about fundamentals in neuroscience, I would likely not be able to make sense of the answer.

Link to In Conversation with Patricia Churchland.

The LA Times has an interesting article on evolutionary theories of depression that also discusses how these might lead to new and improved treatments for the condition.

The fact that mental illness is both widespread and disabling is a puzzle in evolutionary terms, if you believe that a vulnerability to psychological disorder is strongly inherited.

Indeed, the evidence suggests that there is a significant inherited component in mental illness, although the extent of this influence is debated.

If this is the case, the question arises ‘why do we still have mental illness if inheriting the risk for it makes you much less likely to reproduce?’. Surely it should have been ‘bred out’ of the population?

Some use this as an argument to suggest that the role of genetics in mental illness has been overstated, and that the majority of risk arises from environmental factors, particularly those that cause stress and trauma.

Others suggest that the same inherited attributes that increase risk for mental illness can be beneficial when they don’t result in serious impairment.

For example, research has suggested that people who are at high risk for schizophrenia, or have slight or fleeting psychosis-like thoughts, are more likely to be creative or original thinkers [pdf].

More recently, it was reported that a gene called DARPP-32 increases risk for schizophrenia as well as being linked to the more efficient use of a key brain circuit in the frontal lobe.

This might explain why genes that increase these tendencies are still in the gene pool, and only when too many of these traits are inherited is the person very likely to suffer ill-effects when confronted by severe life stresses.

A similar theory was put forward by the late Dr David Horrobin is his book The Madness of Adam and Eve: How Schizophrenia Shaped Humanity (ISBN 0593046498).

As an aside, Horrobin was famously the subject of a controversy after a critical obituary was published in the British Medical Journal, leading to an angry reaction and the journal publishing an apology.

The LA Times article is a great overview of evolutionary theories of depression that might help answer questions about why someone might inherit a tendency to be depressed.

If this tendency is understood as an exaggerated form of something that might be beneficial in small doses, it may give clues to new treatments, and the article looks at what treatments researchers are considering with this in mind.

Link to LA Times article ‘The mind, as it evolves’.

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert on the unwritten vow taken by psychologists. From p3 of Stumbling on Happiness (ISBN 9780007183135).

Few people realise that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter or at least an article that contains the sentence: ‘The human being is the only animal that…’ We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words.

Most of us wait to relatively late in our careers to fulfil this solemn obligation because we know that successive generations of psychologists will ignore all the other words that we managed to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship and remember us mainly for how we finished The Sentence.

We also know that the worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those psychologists who finished The Sentence with ‘can use language’ were particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with hand signs.

And when researchers discovered that chimps in the wild used sticks to extract tasty termites from their mounds (and to bash each other over the head now and again), the world suddenly remembered the full name and mailing address of every psychologist who ever finished The Sentence with the words ‘uses tools’.

So it is with good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they might just die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.

The BPS Research Digest has a concise article on a key way of determining how much genetics influences the expression of a psychological trait – the twin study.

The article is part of a new series where professional researchers are asked to write short articles on key topics.

This one is by Dr Angelica Ronald from London’s Institute of Psychiatry who researches the autism spectrum.

Twin designs address the nature-nurture question. Behaviour geneticists compare how alike one twin is with the other twin on whatever variable they are interested in; in my case this is autistic behaviours. If genes influence variation in autistic behaviours, identical twin pairs who share all their genes will be highly similar in their degree of autistic behaviours whereas fraternal twins will be much less similar. This is what we have found.

Twin studies have been essential in understanding the effects of genetics but are controversial with some researchers as there are various ways of determining the outcome which may not always be in agreement.

Link to BPSRD article ‘Why psychologists study twins’.

George Dvorsky has published a guide to the terms and buzzwords of transhumanism – an optimistic movement that seeks to apply current and future scientific discoveries to extending human experience and abilities.

Transhumanists are interested in neuroscience as a way of improving on the natural human range, either through optimising the biological systems already present or extending them with technological interfaces.

They are variously treated with excitement, suspicion and amusement by mainstream scientists who tend to be conservative by nature.

However, the movement has attracted some leading lights in the sciences who are not put off by the sometimes science-fiction focus of the transhuman mission.

You may see lots of references to the Singularity, a key concept in transhumanist thought.

It’s exact meaning differs depending on the context, but one of the most influential definitions is from Ray Kurzweil who uses it to describe the notional point when computers will overtake the abilities of the human brain.

Needless to say, this puts the back up of many philosophers and cognitive scientists who believe that computers will never be able to fully emulate human intelligence or consciousness.

There’s plenty more of these thorny issues touched on by Dvorsky’s dictionary, so have a look through if you want to know what the dreamers of neuroscience are thinking about.

Link to ‘Must-know terms for the 21st Century intellectual: Redux’.

“The highest activities of consciousness have their origins in physical occurrences of the brain, just as the loveliest melodies are not too sublime to be expressed by notes.”

Playwrite and author W. Somerset Maugham with a wonderful analogy on the relationship between mind and brain. From his 1949 book A Writer’s Notebook (reissue ISBN 0140186018).