On Saturday 06 September 2008, Mike Tintner wrote: > "Our unreliabilty is the negative flip-side of our positive ability > to stop an activity at any point, incl. the beginning and completely > change tack/ course or whole approach, incl. the task itself, and > even completely contradict ourself."
But this is starting to get into an odd-mix of folk psychology. I was reading an excellent paper the other day that says this very plainly, written by Gerhard Werner: The Siren Call of metaphor: Subverting the proper task of Neuroscience http://www.ece.utexas.edu/~werner/siren_call.pdf > The case of Neuro-Psychological vs. Naturalistic Neuroscience. > For grounding the argument, let us look at the case of > ‘deciding to’ [34] in studies of conditioned motor behavior in > monkeys, on which there is a rich harvest of imaginative experimental > work on scholarly reviews available. I write this in profound respect > for the investigators who conduct this work with immense ingenuity > and sophistication. However, I question the soundness of the > conceptual framework on which such experiments are predicated, > observations are interpreted, and conclusions are formulated. I > contend that current practices tend to disregard genuine issues in > Neurophysiology with its own definitions of what legitimate > propositions and criteria of valid statements in this discipline are. > > Here is the typical experimental protocol: the experimenter > uses some measure of neural activity of his/her choice (usual neural > spike discharges), recorded from a neural structure (selected by > him/her on some criterion, and determines relations to behavior that > he/she created as link between two events: an antecedent stimulus ( > chosen by him/her) and a consequent, arbitrary behavior, induced by > the training protocol [49]. So far, the experimenter has done all the > ‘deciding’, except leaving it up to the monkey to assign a “value” to > complying with the experimental protocol. Different investigators > summarize their experimental objective in various ways (in the > interest of brevity, I slightly paraphrase, though being careful to > preserving the original sense): to characterize neural computations > representing the formation of perceptual decision [12]; to > investigate the neural basis of a decision process [37]; to examine > the coupling of neural processes of stimulus selection with response > preparation [34], reflecting connections between motor system and > cognitive processes [38] ; to assess neural activity indicating > probabilistic reward anticipation [22,27]. In Shadlen and Newsome’s > [37] evocative analogy “it is a jury’s deliberation in which sensory > signals are the evidence in open court, and motor signals the jury’s > verdict”. Helpful as metaphors and analogies can be as interim steps > for making sense of the observation in familiar terms, they also > import the conceptual burden of their source domain and lead us to > attribute to the animal a decision and choice making capacity along > principles for which Psychology has developed evidential and > conceptual accounts in humans under entirely different conditions, > and based on different observational facts. Nevertheless, armed with > the metaphors of choice and decision, we assert that the observed > neural activity is a “correlate” [19] of a decision to emit the > observed behavior. As the preceding citations indicate, the observed > neural activity is variously attributed to perceptual discrimination > between competing (or conflicting) stimuli, to motor planning, or to > reward anticipation; the implication being that the neural activity > stands for (“represents”) one or the other of these psychological > categories. So, Mike, when you write like: > "Our unreliabilty is the negative flip-side of our positive ability > to stop an activity at any point, incl. the beginning and completely > change tack/ course or whole approach, incl. the task itself, and > even completely contradict ourself." It makes me wonder how you can assert the existence of a neurophysical basis of the existence of 'task', in terms of the *brain*, not in terms of our folk psychology and collective cultural background that has given us these names to these things. It's hard to talk about the brain from the biology-up, yes, that's true, but it's also very rewarding in that we don't make top-down misunderstandings. - Bryan ________________________________________ http://heybryan.org/ Engineers: http://heybryan.org/exp.html irc.freenode.net #hplusroadmap ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=111637683-c8fa51 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
