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#21
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Re: Pinker's Blank Slate
Good to hear from you, Fred.
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... My social life is a bit dry at the moment, as I'm heavily pre-occupied with the final 5 weeks of my undergraduate degree. This reminds me: I happened upon this forum when I was a junior in high school . . . time sure flies. Last edited by Carey N; April 14th, 2006 at 02:02 PM.. |
#22
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Re: Pinker's Blank Slate
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Another reason you're not receiving responses, particularly from JimB, is that your posts are too long: write succinctly and you'll have a much better chance of drawing JimB out of his shell. Quote:
Second: using terms like "mental image" and "emotional marker", for which no physical basis has been empirically described, [edit] makes me wary. I could well be mistaken here, but this problem seems to be characteristic of all psychology. I don't believe your commuincation skills are poor; I think psychology is a messy science, and no one can satisfactorily explain the truly proximate causes of behavior (yet). The draw of evolutionary psychology is its focus upon ultimate causes and its tolerance of black boxes around the vast tangle of neural mechanisms that have been moulded by millions of years of natural selection. It's great that you're interested in those black boxes, but in my opinion you're never going to get anywhere with verbal models and frontal lobotomy case-studies. Best, Carey Last edited by Carey N; May 14th, 2006 at 12:58 PM.. |
#23
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Re: Pinker's Blank Slate
Darn, I did it again. I always give people far too much credit for intelligence and good intentions. I should have known from your past fawning posts to JimB that your previous post would be a thinly veiled insult.
This particular post is even more laughable. Reading back through the archives it seems that there were were some interesting discussions at first. That's what sucked me in. It now seems that JimB's main or only interest in moderating this forum is in spreading his ideology. Unless someone supports those views or otherwise praises him he only responds with insults. The rest of your post is about what one can expect from an undergrad psych student - self-important and largely ignorant of the real world. This is a forum about evolutionary psychology. It's a place where people should be able to politely discuss complicated ideas in a free-form way - and maybe learn something. All that should be required is a sincere interest, a willingness learn and the ability to be respectful. I think I have proven myself in that respect (so far anyway) far more than any of you (not including Tom and Todd whose posts have been both intelligent and respectful). I happen to know some real scientists. None of them have an interest in spreading some ideology. In fact, they avoid that crap like the plague. None of them respond to sincere questions or observations of non-scientists by calling them nonsense or bullshit. Those are the terms used by various flavors of true-believers when they run into heretics - and wanna-be scientists trying to impress others. You say my use of terms like "mental image" and "emotional marker", for which no physical basis has been empirically described, smacks of nonsense. Your classless insult is belied by the fact that those terms come from the writings of the foremost neuroscientists in their field - which I have carefully read and re-read. Your (and JimB's) inability to discuss those concepts intelligently is a matter of your own blindness - to borrow a phrase. It's interesting that you think those terms are nonsense - while just-so stories about the superior fitness for white males to oversee democracy in the world and occupy the highest positions in academic research are examples of good scientific discourse. Neither Fred nor JimB has responded once to any of my posts with other than ideology and insults. The fact is I don't share their worldview and for ideologues that's all that counts. Fred is here to insult atheists and JimB wants to express his anti-PC venom and his apparent love for eugenics. That's it. Neither of them have any sincere interest in evolutionary psychology that I can see - and looking at your posts I see that you don't either. In the future if you want to say something to me then start by being honest about your motivations because my bullshit detector is now set to ten. Margaret |
#24
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Re: Pinker & BS-o-meters
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#25
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Re: Pinker's Blank Slate
Well . . . I'm going to try my hardest not to become part of this feud and reply without reciprocating the tone in your most recent post.
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I'm spreading ideology? I criticized the terms you are using for their lack of empirical clarity, and then you call me an ignorant, wanna-be, fawning idiot . . . why be so defensive unless you yourself are defending an ideology? Also: the terms you use seem nonsensical to me, yes, but my comment was not designed as a personal insult. Fred has made the same point: by criticizing your ideas, I'm not trying to belittle you. In fact, the only phrase that could be perceived as insulting in my previous post is "smacks of nonsense", but immediately thereafter I made sure to clarify that this was a general problem in the field of psychology, not your problem in particular. Quote:
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I have never once commented positively (or at all, that I know of) on the superior white male fitness idea - I don't know if someone else has used that phrase, or if you're making an inference from JimB's discussion of heritable variation in mathematical aptitude. It seems as though you're taking pot shots at a straw man. Quote:
Lastly, you did not address my point about neural networks - it seems to me that any mechanistic theory of behavior that isn't completely rooted in networks cannot be very rigorous. This is NOT to say that environment has nothing to do with behavior: one of the most interesting features of neural networks is their plasticity, contingent on environmental influence. In this sense, your "slate with a grid pattern on it" metaphor is suitable, but I don't think verbal models can go much further than that. If you believe strongly otherwise, please explain your stance. Quote:
Last edited by Carey N; April 15th, 2006 at 12:42 AM.. |
#26
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Re: Pinker's Blank Slate
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Your post to her obviously was reasonable & discerning, but of course you already know that. OTH, perhaps TomJ (also an atheist who insists that mass murderers are somehow not “morally responsible†for their behavior and that they are “just following their social instinctsâ€), who currently seems to be something of a self-appointed advocate for her, can explain how “Margaret's feelings were hurt for valid reasons,†this time by your comments (rather than mine). Sorry to hear your social life is a bit dry, but you should have plenty of time for all that social stuff after you kick-ass in these final 5 weeks of school—plus you may even be a bit more marketable with your shiny new degree—all the best. |
#27
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Re: Pinker's Blank Slate
Carey said,
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Your final paragraph was interesting. Quote:
You seem to be saying in your post that unless I have a formal theory to present then there's nothing worth discussing. I disagree. It seems to me that the purpose of an online forum is to trade ideas and learn. No-one is being forced to agree or accept anything here. It's not a peer reviewed journal. It's just exposing others to what you're thinking about - and being exposed to their ideas. That's a very personal and vulnerable thing to do. That's why people generally go out of their way in these situations to be polite and disagree without insulting the other person. OK, here's a question. If neural networks are one of the last great mysteries of biology how can you be so sure that the true proximate causes of behavior lie within them? That's a rhetorical question. I asked it to suggest that this is all a mysterious area and that any models, verbal or mathematical, could help us (me anyway) understand what's going on in there. I would completely agree with your underlying assertion that behavior in vertebrates is the result of what goes on in neural networks. Also, that we need to understand neural networks to understand brains. Bill Calvin has written some interesting things about neural networks- as has LeDoux in Synaptic Self. My Somatic Behavior Choice Theory should be called The Somatic Behavior Choice Hypothesis. That's not even right though because people might think that somatic describes behavior and not behavior choice. Oh well. I'll use hypothesis anyway so as not to be haughty. But, why would you assume that it is based on a single book and a single case study. I did not list all the books and papers that I've read. I did not describe the theory except in the most general way and I offered little or no support for it. But that does not mean that I did not do that reading or that I don't have support for it. I think a better response would have been, "OK, it sounds pretty far-fetched but let's see what you've got" or something like that. Skepticism is different from derision. I'd enjoy explaining my reasoning if anyone here was actually interested. I'd also like to hear your specific ideas on how neural networks affect behavior. In either case though we should first agree on what we each mean by proximate cause and behavior. Why don't you go first and we'll see if we can carry on a conversation without others wrecking it with insults. Margaret |
#28
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Re: Pinker's Blank Slate
Carey, In my last post I said,
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If I write posts more as a stream of consciousness they get misunderstood in worse ways so over the years I've evolved this style. I just love thinking about these things and none of my close friends would even understand what we're talking about here. I'm sure others here know a lot more about this stuff than I do (like you maybe) and I'm afraid perhaps of letting that be too obvious in my posts. So I'm really careful about what I say. Even if my rhetorical style is irritating I can say that I am being as honest as I can. Margaret |
#29
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Re: Pinker's Blank Slate
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Here's a pretty close analogy: ant colonies exhibit a staggering array of collective behaviors, including complex navigation, hunting, and decision-making. We often speak of the colony as a super-organism with intentions and needs to satisfay, which is fine for evolutionary explanations because the colony, in many ways, is a unit of selection. When we wish to know how such collective behavior is executed, however, it's no use to think of the "wants" of the colony. All that matters is the ant-to-ant and ant-to-environment interactions - ant networks, so to say - which together produce behavior at the colony level. Human brains exhibit arguably more complex behavior than ant colonies, but the principle is the same. It's perfectly suitable to speak of a person having desires, emotions, etc. at the individual level when thinking about the evolutionary explanations of behavior. But if we want to know how exactly a behavior is produced, what matters are sensory systems (receive stimuli), network interactions (process stimuli), and neural output (leading to behavior). On the other hand, if one asks "why did Bob hit Brad in the face", it's not necessarily constructive to answer "well, the visual stimulus of Brad was received by Bob's retinas, translated into a pattern of neural input that triggered a memory, linked in the CA3 region of his hippocampus, of Brad trripping him yesterday. This in turn initiated a cascade of interactions in Bob's brain, leading to sensations of anger, the will the retaliate, etc., and finally to muscular coordination that resulted in Bob's fist connecting with brad's jaw." One would normally just say "Well, Brad tripped Bob yesterday, so Bob got him back by hitting him in the face." My point is that some kind of balance should be struck between the terminology used to represent emotions, etc. and the neural mechanisms responsible for them, so that we don't go off telling just-so stories. So: proximate cause, in my understanding, refers to the cascade of mechanical and chemical interactions within (or between, in the case of collective behavior) organisms that result in a behavior, and they are investigated with physics, chemistry, and sometimes simulation modeling (e.g., for ant swarms or fish schools*). This is why I don't like "mental image" and "emotional tag" . . . what quantitative meaning do these terms really have? Ultimate questions, in contrast, refer to evolutionary explanations that discuss why a behavior was selected for in a particular environment, and can be addressed with verbal, mathematical (e.g. populations and quantitative genetics, game theory, etc.), and simulation models. Quote:
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* Good Example: Couzin, I.D., Krause, J., Franks, N.R., and Levin, S.A. (2005). “Effective leadership and decision-making in animal groups on the move.†Nature 433: 513-516 Last edited by Carey N; May 14th, 2006 at 01:00 PM.. |
#30
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Re: Pinker's Blank Slate
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Also - by all means, explain your hypothesis in detail. I appreciate the risk you take in expressing your ideas, and you won't receive any ridicule from me. Last edited by Carey N; April 15th, 2006 at 12:52 AM.. |
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