[DS] Now you're asking the question I've wanted to get at for thirty years.
Everyone seems to feel pain when they sit on a hot stove, so I'm thinking biological reflex. But there's more: this reflex seem species specific and responds to stimulus in a predictable way. It's a feeling and a separate feeling from the heat feeling that will eventually be registered at the brain. So the experience of sitting on a hot stove yields two pieces of information: one, is the pervasive conscious (conscious that's important) negative, location specific, feeling of pain; the other, is the local, sometimes conscious, feeling of heat. [Krimel] On the whole reflexes only tend to become specific much lower on the food chain than the species level. When you are talking about a human's response to a hot stove you are talking about a vertebrates response to heat or at very least a mammal's response to heat. [DS] I'm on record as believing that these are two different kinds of reflex: the pain I've called (after Pirsig) the valued reflex; the heat I've called the corresponding reflex because it generates a nerve impulse to the brain that corresponds to the sensation stimulus. [Krimel] There is a whole hierarchy of reflexes. From inter-muscular connections to neural reflex arcs. Many of these can be demonstrated in animals whose brains have been severed from their spinal cords. I don't believe the responses to sudden heat or brain actually require much connection to the motor centers of the brain. There is also an array of fixed action patterns that are complex systems of reflexive action that can be mediated by conscious control. These would include blinking, swallowing, walking, breathing etc. [DS] I've postulated two other kinds of reflexes: the simple reflex (what biology thinks of as the only kind of reflex) and the learned reflex (what we call ideas or knowledge) that are stored in the cerebral cortex. [Krimel] Reflexes of all sorts can be shown to respond to conditioning. These responses vary as a consequence of their history. Pavlov demonstrated this well. In fact all of classical conditioning is about autonomic learning. Very complicated voluntary behaviors can also be learned without any conscious activity at all. The Iowa Gambling Effect suggests that subjects "know" which of four decks of cards results in more losses well before they are conscious of having a preference. We have all sorts of habits that we never consciously learn. In fact most focused learning activities are intentionally designed to make behavior unconscious or habitual. Learning to play an instrument or to paint or to drive are all activities aimed at producing habitual behaviors that will not require conscious effort. So there is a kind of learning that aims to modify reflexes and a kind that aims to produce a habit. But you can't actually learn a reflex. If you have any thoughts on these reflexes (esp. valued reflexes and their relation to RMP's concept of Quality) I would be grateful to hear them.-david swift Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
