Re: cognitive != observable?

Hello Dr. Sizemore,

"Glen M. Sizemore" < in message
news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> GS: Teleological? There is nothing teleological about explaining some
> phenomenon by pointing to events in the past. Evolution does exactly that.
> It would be teleological if I explained some phenomenon by reference to
the
> future as is done when cognitive "science" and philosophy talks about
> expectations, purposes, etc.

Eray: I think I've used the wrong term, although I had the right idea on my
mind. What I meant was "cause and effect explanation". You are right,
teleology is concerned with ends. Although it still makes sense if you
think of the current behavior as the end, and the behavior as the
designing process, the end doesn't have to be in the future with
respect to our present being.

GS: Can't say that I follow this, Eray.

Eray: The philosophical problem that I see should be reformulated as
follows: the behavior of an organism is caused by its mind first and
foremost. It doesn't matter whether this has been created by God or
learnt. Everything has causes, and you can take that chain of causes
as far as you would like to; what has caused a particular change in
mind (environment or something else) is not the direct cause of
behavior at an instant itself.

GS: Yes......of course I am familiar with this position. It is simply
Newtonian Determinism (despite the gratuitous mentalism). You want to claim
that your vision of science is correct, and the things that I say are not
scientific because I do not point to causes that are temporally contiguous
with their effects. The problem with this view is that we cannot currently
do much with it. This might be too pragmatic for you, so let's examine it
from another point of view. The immediate cause of behavior - at least that
portion of behavior that is constituted of movement is produced when certain
biochemicals occupy post-synaptic receptors at neuromuscular junctions.
Would you have it that what has caused this secretion is not the cause of
the behavior? BTW, where does the "change in mind" occur in this chain? What
would we measure (other than behavior) to know that the alleged "mind" had
changed?

Eray: There is a trivial thought experiment that demonstrates this: a child
can pop out of nowhere, with no causation at all and start behaving.
Here, there is a child that just appeared in a flash, and he can read
all right. How can you explain the origin of child's behavior? I think
you will not be able to explain it, the only course now is to denythat such
a thing can happen.

GS: This misses the point. The point has nothing to do with whether or not
we can conceptualize a person or animal as a machine, the point is that we
cannot look inside the machine and see the selective forces that produced
its characteristics in cases where the thing did not "simply pop into
existence." Even if your thought experiment could be real, it doesn't change
the fact that real people do what they do because they have been exposed to
contingencies of reinforcement. This POV will, in fact, become obsolete if
we are able to give people extensive behavioral repertoires, without
arranging contingencies, simply by directly messing with nervous tissue. Let
me know when this happens, OK, Eray? Because right now it isn't science at
all - it is science fiction.

Eray: That is why it seems behaviorists are attributing behavior itself an
assumed metaphysical role. I can see no scientific or philosophical
reason why we should take that as the principal substance of our
mental processing because as the thought experiment shows, denying the
possibility of the thought experiment is the sole resolution for the
radical behaviorist and in doing so you will have made behavior some
kind of forbidding God. (However, it is very fruitful to accept the
environment as the fuel of psychology, without a complex environment
there is a low limit to the complexity of the individual) I can
imagine that one could say "but this isn't impossible in the physical
world, so it must be an invalid thought experiment". However, you
should take into account the fact that if we make an AI that does not
learn, but is completely designed by engineers and knows how to read
and write, a behavioral explanation will get unnecessarily complex. In
fact, I think it will get so complex that it will lose its persuasive
power which may hold in some cases. It will be especially hard to talk
of reinforcement learning in a cognitive agent that cannot learn.

GS: I have already dealt with most of this as irrelevant to the issue,
because the issue is how contingencies of reinforcement alter behavior and
how this effect is mediated by the nervous system. In any event, though, I
doubt that we will ever produce AI that can do a lot of things without
making it "trainable" but, again, that isn't the issue.


Eray: Let's ask the readers if they "can explain a child's reading by
pointing to the educational practices that produced it."

GS: Are you saying that people do not attribute a child's ability to read to
its exposure to - at least in part - a history of educational practices?

Eray: Will they find it doable?

GS: I must be missing your point because it seems silly to argue about
whether or not a child reads because - at least in part - of exposure to
certain educational practices.

Eray: I also think this kind of explanation explicitly
disallows one from explaining creativity or consciousness which are
not fictious entities, even if they are misunderstood to a large
extent.

GS: Well, you would have to make an argument for me to respond. I can,
however, respond that I see no evidence that "creativity" and
"consciousness" are things. Certainly not in the sense that one can point to
evidence that, say, atoms are things. These are terms that appear to be used
when certain sorts of behavior is observed. Later, because of indoctrination
into mentalism, we simply claim that they are hypothetical things. But
nothing changes the fact that they - from a scientific standpoint - are
simply inferences* from behavior, that have no other characteristics, that
are used to explain the behavior from which they are inferred. If you would
tell me how to measure these things independently of behavior than we will
talk about their being "entities." And, no, you don't just get to point to
physiology and say that it is "mind."

Eray: I have tried to clarify a little. I hope my objection is more
comprehensible now, sorry for the confusion in the previous post. I
did my best for 6:00 am.

GS: I think I see most of what you are driving at here.

Regards,

Glen

"Eray Ozkural exa" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message