Originally posted by bbarrDidn't think I'd sneak that one by you.
Maggoteer, I expect better than ad hominim argument from you. Of course not tea leaves silly, introspection.
and
"My direct access to the content of my mental states allows me to determine (with close to infallibility) my motivations,"
This actually is studied scientifically you know, and introspection is far from infallibible is rather well established. Self-delusion really has been posited as a necessary trait for human survival.
bbarr says:
"Yet you just toss off that inferences drawn from behavior may be more or less accurate than those drawn from introspection; well this is surely logically possible, but hardly plausible."
Hmm, not only do I find it logically plausible, I find YOUR inproven assertion, one so common among the philoshoper types, the one about the infallible results of introspection, to be the niave view, the one logically and physically inconsistent with the facts.
So to cut to the chase, I am arguing that the philsophical "autonomous man" does not exist, and that arguments based upon it are necessarily flawed. Too much evidence shows that people, why even philosophers, are quite fallible in their introspective abilities.
But I do look forward to your enumerating my many mistakes!
Ciao😛
Originally posted by missleadfirst of all i was being sarcastic! ((((big huge DUH!!!)))) second i don't think he is even human
Thanks for your support.
Don't get me wrong.I think he is a very silly person.
That publicity thing.You are right.People like me and you are not made judges.
I still believe we can judge only behaviour.
I will never judge another person.
Linda
Originally posted by castlewallCastlewall, you're obviously not familiar with the British brand of sarcasm. "Thanks for your support", in Linda's post was a deeply facetious comment to you... Try renting some Monty Python movies, you'll see that "two people divided by a common language" is really truer than you might think!
first of all i was being sarcastic! ((((big huge DUH!!!)))) second i don't think he is even human
Originally posted by maggoteerHey Michael, I have to respectfully disagree with all this talk of behaviourism being a good and useful enterprise. Sartre may well get it exactly right when he says that a man is the sum total of his actions. What he is saying is that a man's impact on the world is the sum of his actions, not the man's character. So, he is not propping up the Skinnerian position of hardcore behaviourism but really using the argument in a different sense.... Ok, that may be entirely wrong, but at least is how I read the arguments presented so far...
I must really like this thread, I keep responding....
First I take it you mean a persons "true" essence and motivations, which can be different than their self professed essence and motiviations, which may or may not be any more or less accurate than infereneces drawn from behavior.
And if the goal is to understand the "true" motivation of a pers ...[text shortened]... the person, I have no reason to assume some eneffably effable "something more" is necessary.
"And if the goal is to understand the "true" motivation of a person, then inferences from behavior are the strongest, perhaps only, evidence one has"
This is simply untrue. Watson, Skinner and co back in the 20s and 30s believed this, and led psychology into a dark of age of rats in boxes. Their position was precisely that we cannot know what goes on inside the head, so if we can't know it, it doesn't exist. Man is the sum total of his inputs, (reinforcers, punishers, etc) and thus his behaviour can be completely predicted from knowing these inputs, and what happens in the black box is irrelevant. Chomsky disproved this fundamentally in the 50s, by showing that language could not exist without a system of generative grammar, a system that is impossible without some sort of internal, non-behaviouristic process going on. Since the position of behaviourism has been shown to be false (no room here to really get into the details) it follows that there must be mental states that are separate from behaviour. (No one would disagree with this, I hope) - now, I agree that behaviour is a good predictor of mental state, but it's not perfect, and often incorrect. Polygraph tests (as controversial as they are) would not exist if this method of prediction were perfect. In my field of research, evidence from both ERP (event-related potentials) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) (I'm sure you're aware of both of these, but not everyone is) is showing that we are reaching a point where we can reliably predict whether or not someone is attempting to deceive in a given situation, based entirely on patterns of electrical scalp activity, or even activity in given areas of prefrontal cortex. Is this not evidence other than [b]"the only evidence one has at hand is evidence from behavior"[\b]? Does it not show that there are other, perhaps more effective methods of attributing mental states to others than behaviour alone?
I don't have time to get further into the other arguments right now, but I will get back to you early next week (it's conference time!)... I'm looking forward to reading your reply, this has been a good topic for discussion so far,
Joe
Originally posted by kyngjI think I'm gonna argue that with fMRI etc, one now has a more reliable measure of behavior, and my previous attempts at measuring behavior by looking at body posture, shuffling of feet, averting of eyes were less direct. One's pattern of prefrontal stimulation is an excellent behavior, simply one we couldn't measure before.
....we are reaching a point where we can reliably predict whether or not someone is attempting to deceive in a given situation, based entirely on patterns of electrical scalp activity, or even activity in given areas of prefrontal cortex. Is this not evidence other than "the only evidence one has at hand is evidence from behavior"? Does it not show that ther ...[text shortened]... her, perhaps more effective methods of attributing mental states to others than behaviour alone?
Oh, I do hope that once the ice beneath me completely cracks (it's awfully thin by now), you and bennett will kindly toss me a rope! Even if you derive no outwardly observable pleasure from doing so.
Actually can you (or anyone) point me in the direction of a nice synopsis of Choamsky; I am utterly unfamiliar with his work. My one short attempt long ago ended quickly with gritted teeth and a snarl....
enjoy the conferences!😕
Originally posted by maggoteerI like it, excellent attempt to climb out of the hole... quite how we can stretch the definition of behaviour to include brain activation I'm really not sure! As for Chomsky... well, let me see... As far as I can tell it's not too wise to read the original Chomsky on linguistics, you might want to check out work by his acolyte Stephen Pinker, who manages to write a fairly lucid and readable account of the whole behaviourism vs cognitive revolution (as it relates to language) in Words and Rules. It's a decent book, although a little too heavily on the nature side of the dumb, continuing nature vs. nurture debate....
I think I'm gonna argue that with fMRI etc, one now has a more reliable measure of behavior, and my previous attempts at measuring behavior by looking at body posture, shuffling of feet, averting of eyes were less direct. One's pattern of prefrontal stimulation is an excellent behavior, simply one we couldn't measure before.
Oh, I do hope that once ...[text shortened]... rt attempt long ago ended quickly with gritted teeth and a snarl....
enjoy the conferences!😕
The basic idea behind Chomsky's work was that behaviourism as it stood strictly was untenable. The strict version being that everything we do is learned, we come into the world as a blank slate, and our entire self and personality could be read as a history of which stimuli (+ve and -ve) had impinged upon us over time. Obviously there must be some truth in this - things that happen to us do affect how we are, but Chomsky attacked this by showing that in order for us to have language, we could not be the sum of our experiences. Language as a system is inherently infinite, somebody made a similar point in the "longest sentence" thread, that there is no possible longest sentence, because the rules of grammar allow that any number of clauses, subclauses etc, can be combined.... If we have a system that is capable of producing an infinite number of utterances, then that system itself must have something occurring inside of it that precludes a simple stimulus-response explanation...
OK, I'm really losing the ability to argue cogently now, maybe you should just do a google search on Chomsky and Linguistics and see if anything coherent and readable comes up,
good luck!
Joe
Originally posted by kyngjyour words are but my command,oh wisemaster:
OK, I'm really losing the ability to argue cogently now, maybe you should just do a google search on Chomsky and Linguistics and see if anything coherent and readable comes up,
good luck!
Joe
http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm
http://monkeyfist.com/ChomskyArchive
where I have printed out and will slowly attempt to read: "A Review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior" by Chomsky.
It's interesting that I started coming across as a recalcitrant Skinnerist since last time, oh so many years ago, when I read Skinner's Walden II for some class, I was such a diehard antiSkinnerist. And it was then and there in that very class, that I started my diatribe against the philosophical construct of the "autonomous man". And I still haven't learned to not sing that song, probably because the Great-Big-Experimentalist-In-The-Sky keeps me over fed and under shocked. 😛
Originally posted by kirksey957interesting kirk. Well my glib answer is that I see sin fitting in quite nicely right next to me in the passenger seat, telling me how little sin 20 bucks gets you in todays market ...
I would be interested in how you guys see the concept of sin fitting in to this discussion. It seems like we have moved so far beyond the rat lab and polygraphs that we now have MRI's and PET's to observe the brain. What constitutes our "soul?" Kirk
But more to your point; since I've never been able to nail down what my soul is, or how it differs from my consciousness (well, pretending for the moment that I have a consciousness, which I actually doubt, being perfectly content as a soulous automaton...), I kinda ...rarely think about it....
so, as our spiritual leader, what is the difference between my soul and my concsiousness?
I feel like making some stultifyingly ill-informed comments at this point:
The concept of consciousness strikes me as an extreme simplification. The various parts of the brain interact to varying extents at different times. If I ask you to say what you are thinking, all you can give me is some idea of what's going on in the speech centres of the brain, and I must infer how the rest of the brain is interacting with it. If instead I had asked you to write down what you were thinking, you could (perfectly reasonably) give me a different answer, because slightly different parts of the brain are involved in writing to speaking. Thus there is no single consciousness, only many consciousnesses, some stronger than others, but which wax and wane over quite short periods of time (<1s in some cases). Perhaps, however, these have distinct effects on memory, so that when you recall what you were thinking, it appears you were only thinking of one thing at a time.
As for motivation, this is usually a higher-order phenomenon than the actions themselves, as it involves many different functions, including emotions. It is therefore an emergent property of the system and cannot be easily separated from the processes leading up to action: to use an analogy, an ant doesn't 'want' to make a nest, though it might 'want' to dig a hole; the nest results because of the ant's interaction with other ants. Upon seeing such organisation, some might be led to believe that there is something in charge, perhaps the queen, an idea taken (😠😠😠) by Star Trek, in that they came up with a perfectly good Borg collective and spoilt it by having a 'queen' acting not in a reproductive, but in an intellectual capacity. In the case of ants this is clearly nonsense as a queen ant is no more intelligent than any other ant. In a similar way, evolution does not select for those animals that 'want' most fervently to propagate their genes, it selects for behaviour with the same end result, but which may involve (as it is more efficient) relatively simple mental processes which cannot encompass such a desire.
Sorry, I'm rambling now. I'd better get back to my Dynamics problem sheet 😞
Originally posted by kyngjI have whated most of the monty pithon movies and u need to take your attidude and take a hike😠
Castlewall, you're obviously not familiar with the British brand of sarcasm. "Thanks for your support", in Linda's post was a deeply facetious comment to you... Try renting some Monty Python movies, you'll see that "two people divided by a common language" is really truer than you might think!