Steve:
Those are good additions to my preliminary list. I had a brief
conversation
today with my son (MS Philosophy) and his wife (MS clinical counseling)
about brain/mind swapping: among humans, animals, and aliens. We
considered the trained athlete brain inserted into a non-trained body
and what
might the experience be (i.e. 6ft 6in outfielder brain placed into a 5
ft body.
Would the athlete undershoot getting under the pop fly ball because of
the shortened
legs? at least initially?)
Tin Man: remember the RoboCop movie?
Extensions: I had heard about the pilots who "know" where the tip of the
wings are.
Telepresence: I had not heard of the story you mentioned, but there are
the
disembodied brains living in vats just "thinking" without the drain of a
"body"
in the later Dune series books written by Herbert's son. There are also
the
incorporeal minds that exist as energy not needing a body in other stories.
It seems reasonable to assume there will be differences in their cognition.
During the discussion mentioned at the top of this email I wondered (and
pictured)
if the nerves of the body should be considered part of the brain.
Picture a
brain with the nerves strung out like the tentacles of a jellyfish. And
that is just one
of the senses connected to the brain. We would also have to consider
the "leafs"
attached to the ends of the nerves (i.e. skin) and by adding back in the
pieces all
connected to the brain ... we have the full body again.
So have we considered the cognition of Helen Keller? She only had touch
input
without language references until Sullivan made the breakthru with
water. What
would here cognition resemble? That assumes most of us have a "common"
version of cognition because we all have the basic 5 senses.
The cultural metaphor variation is a good point. I have not read, just
thumbed-thru,
Lakoff's Metaphors book. I will need to read it closely and watch for
any indication he
did / not consider the cultural differences you describe. I recall from
MASH (TV)
that white meant death to the Koreans when Klinger made the mistake of
offering his
wedding dress to his Korean fiance. (2 hr last episode 1984)
Thanks,
Steph T
On 11/13/2011 1:54 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
Stephen -
Following the arc of your "case studies" of re-embodied mind...
I offer a few other examples
Tin Man:
What happens as a human being has a series of prosthetics
replacing body parts. This could be a result of harm (disease,
violence, accident, etc) or even of extensions of the body
modification aesthetic. At what point does a qualitative difference
in our experience of ourselves change? Or is it necessarily an
incremental experience?
Extensional Experience:
Most of us have experienced the extensional nature of tools and
vehicles. Most of us can swing into a parking spot in our familiar
vehicle but have to carefully think/observe our way in when driving an
unfamiliar vehicle. Motorcycle riders and stunt airplane flyers (and
surfers and skiers and ...) all have a similar experience of their
"self" being extended. Carpenters and blacksmiths and artists all
have an extended body defined by their tool set. A newbie to any of
these "extensions" will neither have them encoded into their
proprioception, nor will they have any other neural pathways developed
to allow them to use these tools as comfortably/naturally as they
would their own body parts.
Telepresence:
A friend of mine (Laura Mixon) published a great Science Fiction
Novel (Proxies) based on the theme of a small cadre of child orphans
whose bodies were so afunctional that the government consented to
allowing them to be raised with telepresent robotic bodies. The
practical point was to have "human" operators in space whose
(telepresent) bodies could be designed to meet the rigors of space
(radiation, vacuum, extreme temperatures) but still have the full
range of human judgement available. Of course, like all good
stories, the important things were the relationships these children
formed with eachother and with normal humans, but it made a great
study in the topic of embodied cognition.
As for your question of values (up/down, light/dark as good/bad), I
had the experience of working with Chinese students on Scientific
Visualization projects and was shocked when they consistently felt the
need to turn what seems to westerners as "natural" coding of color
upside down. In particular, in the Chinese (and perhaps other asian
cultures?) red is a symbol of life and green is a symbol of death.
Stop signs and stop lights are encoded red/green opposite, etc. The
Japanese students I worked with pleaded that their contemporary
experience was overly influenced by western customs to know if their
aligned with the west use of Red/Green was cultural or not. I've not
followed that very far, but it served as a great anecdotal awareness
of this concept. It doesn't point so much at embodiment as to
arbitrary but culturally informed.
Just some (more) thoughts.
So I can only look over boundary conditions via imagination and
think about what would happen to a "mind" if it was in different
conditions than the human body.
So at this point I just list a few off-the-wall ideas I could play with:
1. Take a mature mind (person say 35 - 55 yrs old) and place it in
another human body. What would the inputs be like via the
different nerves and 5 senses? Would the sensations be
basically the same with slight or significant differences?
2. Same as #1 but place the mind into an animal body. Ask the
same questions. Something more substantive than just the
fiction of A Once And Future King describing the scrapes
little
Wart (King Arthur) gets into as a fish, bird, etc. I am
not sure
I am up to this task because I can only imagine my own
physical
human body sensations in a new setting with a different
structured
body.
Different physical mechanism (more of them) for smell as a dog
or cat - so would we be able to create words to describe
different
odors like Hobbes does in Calvin & Hobbs?
3. For really off-the-wall, same as #1 but place the mind in the
"body" of an alien species from classical science fiction.
See
Barlow's Guide to Extraterrestrials.
I derive this possible line of thinking from an earlier question
concerning the development
of a supernatural supreme being who is in the Old Testament a
vengeful God,
and in the New Testament, a loving parent. Is human
conceptualizations of a
a supreme being derive from our biology? As a species we have
nurturant parents,
so is it just a form of transference to derive a supreme being as a
ever present "parent"?
If so, what would sea turtles derive as "god" given they are hatched
and on-their-own
from the moment they crawl out of the sand and dash for the sea?
Then back to Barlow's Guide and what would any of those alien species
derive as
supreme beings given their biology?
I have wondered off the topic of embodied cognition. But I think of
it as wondering around
the edges to see what the landscape may contain. I also think
Lakoff's Metaphors can be
helpful in understanding how our human biology affects our choice of
good and bad and the
way those notions enter our language via metaphor. (up is good, down
is bad, etc.)
Would up/down or light/dark be the same metaphors of good/bad for the
Uchjin (floating paint
smears) from Chalker's Well World Series?
As an analogy, I don't have the training or the sophisticated tools
of a mechanical engineer,
but I do have access to some LEGO blocks. So I am playing with these
ideas in a similar manner.
I don't expect to build a real-world Golden Gate Bridge, but if I
make a colorful model with the
LEGO blocks I may be able to discern some basic principles.
I don't have much free time to follow these pathways, though more now
that the kids are grown
and out on their own. I spend most of my time reading.
Thanks,
Steph T
On 11/12/2011 10:32 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
Stephen,
I thought Lakoff's Moral politics was bloody awful -- SHAMEFUL even,
given his earlier stuff which I liked. A terrifying example of
what happens when an Author's publisher gets him to write more books
than he has in him.
I have to admit, I am made nervous by the notion of "embodied
cognition". I mean, where the hell else is it. It's the same kind
of nervousness that overcomes me when people talk about "cognitive
psychology." (What the hell other kind of psychology IS there?)
Such expressions seem to be an attempt to slip dualism in by the
back door. Cognition is just adaptive action of a body. I think
most believers of embodied cognition are hoping to find the little
door in the skull that opens into the room where the teensy little
guy sits looking out through the windows of the eyes and pulling on
the little levers that send the fluids up and down the nerve channels.
Psychology has some wonderful theories. For instance, Skinner has a
wonderful theory of learning. Unfortunately, it applies primarily
to pigeons pressing levers. If only we could cram all humanity into
Skinner boxes, the theory would work fine. Physics has the same
problem, really. Billiard balls would glide along perfectly if it
weren't for friction, but there is friction everywhere where
billiard balls are. If only we had frictionless billiard balls.
But the problem doesn't seem to bother physcists so much The
artificial models of physics are more useful than those of
psychology because, I guess, physicists have a lot better sense of
what happens when the idealized circumstances of the model are
violated. Poor psychologists: you take people out of those skinner
boxes and all hell breaks loose.
At the risk of putting you all through distasteful spectacle of
having Doug and Peter yell at me again, let me remind you of our
discussion of tornados, where Peter seemed to be saying that one
really shouldn't talk about vortices until one had had sixty years
of experience engineering wings and propellers. Sounds like
whatever you learn about propellers in physics one won't get you off
a runway. It won't even get water out of a washbasin.
I think the problem is not that Psychologists don't have good
theories; I think it's more that psychologists don't have good
theories about the kind of questions that people want answers to.
You folks want answers about tornadoes and washbasins, and all we
have to offer is theories about behavior in skinner boxes.
Nick
*From:*[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
*On Behalf Of *Stephen Thompson
*Sent:* Saturday, November 12, 2011 8:54 PM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Theory, and Why It's Time Psychology Got One
Eric:
I just picked up three books in order to learn more about Embodied
Cognition:
1. Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro
2. Where Mathematics Comes From by George Lakoff and Rafael E.
Nunez
3. Philosophy In The Flesh by Lakoff and Mark Johnson
I came to these via Dr Lakoff's Moral Politics, then perusing his
Metaphors We Live By.
Will the 3 books above provide a basic understanding of Embodied
Cognition, even though
they appear to be oriented to Philosophy as opposed to psychology?
I read Dr Dennett's Consciousness Explained back in 1997 and came to
accept the
naturalistic world view - what you see is what there is; no mystical
nor supernatural
stuff.
Of the two links you provided, I found your post to be more clear on
the conflict in psychology
than the PsychScientists' post.
Thanks,
Steph T
On 11/12/2011 8:29 PM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:
Doug, don't fret.
The answer to Jochen's question is "Yes, it is about friggin time we
get a good theory", and Andrew and Sabrina's blog is an excellent
source of ideas for improving psychology. Recently Andrew's blog has
been getting attention from other excellent professionals, including
a Scientific American author who is actively discussing Andrew's
previous post: "Embodied cognition is not what you think
<http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/embodied-cognition-is-not-what-you.html>".
(With more discussion here
<http://fixingpsychology.blogspot.com/2011/11/embodied-cognition.html>.)
Roger,
You are correct that it might seem like psychology should have other
things to worry about, but frankly the problems you mention (rampant
misuse of statistics and the rare forged data scandals) would be a
lot easier to deal with if we had a more unified theoretical base.
Eric
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 07:12 PM, *Douglas Roberts
<[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]>* wrote:
Oh, God. Here we go.
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Jochen Fromm<[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected]> wrote:
> Nick, Eric, what do you think, does Psychology need a theory?
>
>
http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2011/11/theory-and-why-its-time-psychology-got.html?m=1
> -J.
>
> Sent from Android
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Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org
============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps athttp://www.friam.org
============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
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