Is that to say that the concept of 'whiteness' is entirely meaningless?
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09 May 19
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If he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful. —E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (1925) -
But there are some basic conceptual problems hovering about the interpretation of brain scans as pictures of mentation. In parsing these problems, it becomes apparent that the current “neuro” enthusiasm should be understood in the larger context of scientism, a pervasive cultural tendency with its own logic. A prominent feature of this logic is the overextension of some mode of scientific explanation, or model, to domains in which it has little predictive or explanatory power. Such a lack of intrinsic fit is often no barrier to the model nonetheless achieving great authority in those domains, through a kind of histrionics.
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In his 2001 book The New Phrenology: The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain, Uttal shows that there has been no convergence of mental taxonomies over time, as one might expect in a mature science. “Rather,” he writes, “a more or less expedient and highly transitory system of definitions has been developed in each generation as new phenomena are observed or hypothetical entities created.”
Uttal suggests that the perennial need to divide psychology textbooks into topic chapters — “pattern recognition,” “focal attention,” “visual memory,” “speech perception,” and the like — has repeatedly induced an unwitting reification of such terms, whereby they come to be understood as separable, independent modules of mental function. The ad hoc origin of such mental modules subsides from the collective memory of investigators, who then set out to search for their specific loci in the brain.
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Such dichotomous mental categories are regularly employed by social scientists who have taken up neuro-talk, and in the popular press: the amygdala is said to be the seat of emotion, the prefrontal cortex of reason. Yet when I get angry, for example, I generally do so for a reason; typically I judge myself or another wronged. To cleanly separate emotion from reason-giving makes a hash of human experience, and seems to be attractive mainly as a way of rendering the mind methodologically tractable, even if at the cost of realism.
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Trying to identify a universal, merely formal element of real-life lying and disentangle it from emotional capacities, moral dispositions, and worldly situations, on the supposition that the function “lie” has its own distinct ontology, may make as much sense as trying to separate the whiteness of a golf ball from the ball, to use Uttal’s analogy.
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Those who would use science to solve real human problems often must first translate those human problems into narrowly technical problems, framed in terms of some theoretically tractable model and a corresponding method. Such tractability offers a collateral benefit: the intellectual pleasure that comes with constructing and tinkering with the model. But there is then an almost irresistible temptation to, as E. A. Burtt said, turn one’s method into a metaphysics — that is, to suppose the world such that one’s method is appropriate to it.
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One immediately obvious (but usually unremarked) problem is that this method eliminates from the picture the more massive fact, which is that the entire brain is active in both conditions. A false impression of neat functional localization is given by the presentation of differential brain scans which subtract out all the distributed functions. This subtractive method is ideally suited to the imaging technology, and deeply consistent with the modular theory of mind. But is this modular theory of mind perhaps attractive in part because it lends itself to the subtractive method?
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But for a certain kind of intellectual, the mere act of positing that some mystery has a mechanical basis gives satisfaction. A heady feeling of mastery rushes in prematurely with the idea that in principle nothing lies beyond our powers of comprehension. But to be knowable in principle is quite different from being known in fact. Hands-on mechanical experience frequently induces an experience of perplexity in formally trained engineers. We may be emboldened to speculate, in a sociological mode, whether a lack of such mechanical experience “enables” a certain intellectual comportment which doesn’t give the machine its due, and isn’t sufficiently impressed with this difference between the knowable and the known.
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Yet the natural scientist knows just as surely that our best account of that universe is, in many cases, not forthcoming from physics. We turn instead to chemistry or biology. The need for such “special” sciences that take higher-level structures as given does not compromise the bedrock ontological supposition that there is a single universe, made up of physical particles. One can have one’s materialism while admitting the autonomy of higher-level disciplines. There is much confusion on this point, and it seems to be bolstered by a fear that to be less than completely reductive in one’s explanatory posture somehow commits one to “spiritualism.”
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Even within physics, lower-level accounts sometimes presuppose structure that is identifiable only at a higher level, or depend upon boundary-conditions that cannot be generated from within the lower-level account. Even something as simple as a volume of gas displays “emergent properties” (here, an irreversible tendency toward equilibrium) that cannot be derived from the collisions between individual gas molecules (which are symmetric with respect to time).
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Rosen quotes Paul Root Wolpe, a professor of social psychiatry and psychiatric ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, as saying, “I work for NASA, and imagine how helpful it might be for NASA if it could scan your brain to discover whether you have a good enough spatial sense to be a pilot.” But consider: NASA currently tests your spatial reasoning directly — the intellectual capacity itself, not a neurological correlate of it. This is done by putting you in a flight simulator and observing your performance in a pragmatic context similar to the one you would face as a pilot. But such a pragmatic orientation doesn’t offer the excitement that comes with accessing a hidden realm of causation.
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Bracketing the questions of the mind-body problem is unsatisfying. But such a lack of metaphysical satisfaction may be something we need to live with. To do so is a form of sobriety, as against the zeal of those who rush off to reform law, public policy, and ethics as though these ultimate questions had been settled, and always in such a way as to overturn what we know first-hand of our own agency.
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19 Dec 13
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19 Sep 10
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02 Aug 08
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21 Jul 08
Keith MacDonaldThe lmits of neuroscience as a basis for criminal or public policy
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16 Jul 08
Sam Kitonyi"there are some basic conceptual problems hovering about the interpretation of brain scans as pictures of mentation."
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If he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful. —E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (1925) -
With its due regard for the heterogeneity of our mental experience, this modularity thesis is indeed attractive as a working hypothesis. The difficulty lies in arriving at a specific taxonomy of the mental. The list of faculties Fodor gives in the paragraph above could be replaced with an indefinite number of competing taxonomies—and indeed, Fodor gives a taxonomy of taxonomies. The discipline of psychology exhibits a lack of agreement on the most basic elements of the mental.
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Uttal suggests that the perennial need to divide psychology textbooks into topic chapters—“pattern recognition,” “focal attention,” “visual memory,” “speech perception,” and the like—has repeatedly induced an unwitting reification of such terms, whereby they come to be understood as separable, independent modules of mental function. The ad hoc origin of such mental modules subsides from the collective memory of investigators, who then set out to search for their specific loci in the brain.
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In describing an engine, one might be tempted to say, “the opening of the intake valve is caused by the movement of the rocker arm.” Except that the rocker is, in turn, set in motion by the camshaft, the camshaft by the crankshaft, the crank by a connecting rod, the rod by the piston. But of course, the piston won’t move unless the intake valve opens to let the air-fuel mixture in. This logic is finally circular because, really, it is the entire mechanism that “causes” the opening of the intake valve; any less holistic view truncates the causal picture and issues in statements that are, at best, partially true.
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“These allegedly seminal studies look exclusively at ... people who were instructed to lie about trivial matters in which they had little stake. An incentive of twenty dollars can hardly compare with, say, your freedom, reputation, children, or marriage—any or all of which might be at risk in an actual lie-detection scenario.”
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This is to treat lying as a “cognitive” process in the narrowest sense, as opposed to a mental act with inherent ethical content and pragmatic consequences. Here cognitive science reveals its roots in “the linguistic turn” in philosophy that began with the rise of logical positivism a century ago. The logical positivists were preoccupied with consistency of sentences, and conceived reason to be syntactical or rule-like. It is what computers do. Such a view takes no account of what Henri Bergson called “the tension of consciousness,” that feature of an embodied being who has interests and finds himself situated in a world.
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Add Sticky NoteTrying to identify a universal, merely formal element of real-life lying and disentangle it from emotional capacities, moral dispositions, and worldly situations, on the supposition that the function “lie” has its own distinct ontology, may make as much sense as trying to separate the whiteness of a golf ball from the ball, to use Uttal’s analogy.
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Just because such technologies aren’t adequate to our mental reality doesn’t mean they won’t be deployed; the checkered history of past lie detection technologies shows this.
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One immediately obvious (but usually unremarked) problem is that this method eliminates from the picture the more massive fact, which is that the entire brain is active in both conditions. A false impression of neat functional localization is given by the presentation of differential brain scans which subtract out all the distributed functions.
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The problem with the subtractive method, he wrote, is that “in many experiments there are [not one, but] several differences between critical and control conditions,” on such dimensions as perception (a word is seen or not on a screen), attention, classification (the word may be a noun or verb or meaningless pseudo-word, for example), motor response (the subject may be required to hit a button as part of his or her response), search processes (the subject may need to recall the word), and semantic inferences. Given that “an area is found to ‘light up’ ... it is not clear which of the many different cognitive processes relates to the difference in brain activity.”
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Perhaps the most fundamental limitation of functional imaging, vis-à-vis the claim that it allows us to “peer inside the mind,” is that there is a basic disconnect of time scale. Brain scans are emphatically not images of cognition in process, as the neural activity of interest occurs on a time scale orders of magnitude faster than hemodynamic response (the proxy for neural activity measured by fMRI).
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one must make a distinction between ontological reduction and explanatory reduction. This distinction is a commonplace in the philosophy of science, but it is routinely ignored in the hype surrounding cognitive neuroscience. The error goes like this: from the fact that some phenomenon is composed of and dependent upon more fundamental parts, it is thought to follow that any explanation of the higher-level phenomenon can be replaced by, or translated without residue into, an explanation at the lower level of its parts. Once this reduction is (putatively) accomplished, the ontological status of the higher-level phenomenon is demoted to that of mere phenomenon: appearance versus reality. Our gaze is shifted away from the thing we initially wanted to understand, to some underlying substrate. This procedure is thought to be enjoined by the conviction we all share with the natural scientist: there is only one universe, and it is made up of physical particles.
Yet the natural scientist knows just as surely that our best account of that universe is, in many cases, not forthcoming from physics. We turn instead to chemistry or biology. The need for such “special” sciences that take higher-level structures as given does not compromise the bedrock ontological supposition that there is a single universe, made up of physical particles. One can have one’s materialism while admitting the autonomy of higher-level disciplines. There is much confusion on this point, and it seems to be bolstered by a fear that to be less than completely reductive in one’s explanatory posture somehow commits one to “spiritualism.”
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Even something as simple as a volume of gas displays “emergent properties” (here, an irreversible tendency toward equilibrium) that cannot be derived from the collisions between individual gas molecules (which are symmetric with respect to time).
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“most patients who suffer from ... lesions involving the inferior orbital frontal lobe do not exhibit antisocial behavior of the type that would be noticed by the law.” It is merely that people with such lesions have a higher incidence of such behavior than those without.
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Rosen quotes Paul Root Wolpe, a professor of social psychiatry and psychiatric ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, as saying, “I work for NASA, and imagine how helpful it might be for NASA if it could scan your brain to discover whether you have a good enough spatial sense to be a pilot.” But consider: NASA currently tests your spatial reasoning directly—the intellectual capacity itself, not a neurological correlate of it. This is done by putting you in a flight simulator and observing your performance in a pragmatic context similar to the one you would face as a pilot. But such a pragmatic orientation doesn’t offer the excitement that comes with accessing a hidden realm of causation.
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In the seventeenth century, one of the grand problems of science was to explain why things fall down. Descartes had developed a strictly mechanical, billiard-ball model wherein imperceptible particles impinging from above push things downward. There were other, competing mechanical models. The problem was that no such mechanical picture could account for the findings of Galileo—namely, that bodies fall with a uniformly accelerated motion and the acceleration for all bodies is identical, regardless of size. This impasse surrounding what we now call gravity could be resolved by positing a force of attraction between bodies. Newton did just this, but in doing so he was attacked by the more doctrinaire “mechanicists,” for whom it was a matter of principle that there could be no action at a distance. Newton was accused of re-introducing scholastic “occult qualities” into nature, precisely the kind of explanation that the mechanical philosophy set out to banish, just as the current reductionism in psychology wants to banish spooky notions like “soul.”
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While the mechanical philosophy confidently posited hidden mechanisms, on the assumption that there must be some cause that is similar to the ones we can see operating in the world, Newton was content to leave causes mysterious. He then proceeded to give a mathematical description of how bodies move under the mysterious attractive force: the inverse square law of gravity. Accepting the obscurity of gravity’s causes seems to have freed Newton up to attend to the phenomena, and thus to accomplish his mathematization of the phenomena. The intransigently reductive position adopted by the mechanical philosophers was abandoned. It is worth noting that our understanding of gravity, though transformed by Einstein, remains agnostic on causes. Instead of spooky action at a distance, now we have even spookier distortions of space-time. Physicists seem to be less easily spooked than cognitive scientists.
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Needless to say, brain states are objective facts, whereas our introspective experience of our own mental life is inherently subjective. But this divide between the objective and subjective, between the brain and the mind, does not map neatly onto cause and effect, nor onto any clear distinction between a layer of reality that is somehow more fundamental and one that is merely epiphenomenal. For example, if you are told your mother has died, your dismayed comprehension of the fact, which is a subjective mental event, will cause an objective physiological change in your brain.
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27 Jun 08
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26 Jun 08
Social Ataxia"There is a host of cultural entrepreneurs currently grasping at various forms of authority through appropriations of neuroscience, presented to us in the corresponding dialects of neuro-talk."
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25 Jun 08
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21 May 08
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22 Apr 08
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21 Apr 08
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analogy
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Public Stiky Notes
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