[Wittrs] Re: some helpful guidelines for reading Wittgenstein's philo...
- From: "Stuart W. Mirsky" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:52:43 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "gerardoprim" <gerardoprim@...> wrote:
>
> (Stuart) My own personal experience accords with this. I've always felt I was
> aware of what would be my "unconscious" motivations under a Freudian scenario
> so I never put a lot of credence in that kind of stuff. Nevertheless, recent
> experiences of my losing control (in a non-Freudian way, e.g., the blackouts
> from coughin spasms described by me here earlier) have prompted me to
> reconsider. Despite being intensely aware of things around me much of my life
> so that I could generally say with confidence that I never lose control, the
> experiences of losing consciousness and realizing that I had quite obviously
> lost control (including instances when I grabbed onto things while I was
> passing out and pulling them down with me and breaking them in my hands, made
> me realize that there are times when we act without knowing we are doing so,
> without intending, etc. It's only a short jump from that to the sub-conscious
> motivations of Freudian psychology.
> (Gerardo) Your examples cannot be taken as evidence for freudian theory
> because there´re more plausible hypotheses for the same data. Freudian theory
> assumes a complex process of repression of desires, and a symbolic
> substitutive satisfaction of those repressed urges. This has no evidence at
> all. Freudian speculation is based on mere analogy: just as there´re
> conscious thoughts, so there must be unconscious thoughts. Wittgenstein
> compared this issue with proposing an "unconscious toothache": it´s not an
> empirical discovery, it´s a new language game, based on a confusion between
> reasons with causes. Your examples could be explained by much more plausible
> hypotheses: there´re behavioral interactions with your environment, with
> minimal awareness, and a low or null memory of them after your blackouts.
> Nothing of this needs an "unconcious chain of thoughts" or a "symbolic
> satisfaction of repressed urges".
>
No, no, I wasn't proposing they were evidence Gerardo, only that they indicated
to me that I could do things without being aware of what I was doing. This
SUGGESTS to me at least the possibility that the Freudian idea of the
subconscious could also be true. It's not evidence and not an argument, just a
realization I had. I certainly am not proposing that the blackouts occurred
because of some kind of subconscious goings on. I was just coughing really,
really hard, unable to stop and my heart is no longer operating at full
strength so the blood flow to my brain was temporarily reduced. Still, during
at least some of those events, I acted as if I intended to do something but,
lacking consciousness, was unaware of what I was doing.
For instance, in one instance I was standing at the sink in the bathroom and
began a coughing spasm. I recall trying to hold myself up and the next thing I
knew I was on the floor, my head bleeding, my wife standing over me and a
broken stick was in my hand. As I came to I asked her what I was doing with the
two pieces of a stick and she said they were the towel rack. Apparently as I
was falling I reached for that to keep from falling and must have grasped it
pretty tightly because as I fell I held on and the towel rack broke in my
hands. I realized I had blacked out at this point (having already done so a
number of times) but I hadn't realized I had seized and held onto the towel
rack. This surprised me and demonstrated to me that I could act as if I were
intentional and still do so without awareness.
> (Stuart) Yes, that was my longstanding view, too. But now I'm not so sure. If
> I can act unconsciously, intentionally but without consciously intending then
> maybe we shouldn't be so quick to discard some variant of these Freudian
> ideas. As to the rest, if the mind is a layered, process-based system going
> on in the brain, then there could be many layers of awareness corresponding
> with some or all of the layers of the consciousness system.
> (Gerardo) That´s exactly what I consider a pseudoexplanation: if you try to
> explain an observable event by postulating an event that you know even less
> of your explananda, then you have no explanation
> at all: you have two events in need of explanation instead of one.
I think you are missing my point here, Gerardo.
> That´s the same problem of creationist accounts of life or cosmos: whatever
> conception of god is postulated, it will be always much less known that
> whatever observable phenomena we´re trying to explain, so we´ll have a new
> burden (the unexplained god) without any gain. When you postulate "freudian
> mechanisms" and "multilayered consciousness systems" you´re doing the same:
> we have no evidence of such speculations, and there´re much more simple and
> plausible hypotheses for the same explananda. Remember that all the
> explananda is limited to "what can be observed" either publicly or privately:
> public/private stimuli, public/private responses, and physiological events.
> Nothing less and nothing more. A scientific explanation can be proposed by
> explaining the mechanisms of those observable events, without postulating any
> metaphysical realm of wholly unobservable (ie, unobservable even with private
> or indirect methods) events.
>
This isn't about metaphysical realms. However it is manifestly true that
processes happen in our brains while we are thinking, etc. It's strange to take
no account of these in explaining how it happens that brains are conscious in
certain cases. Frankly I go with Dennett here and think there is no reason to
think that we have privileged access to our own minds at all levels. After all,
either the features we associate with consciousness simply pop into being
full-blown (which really IS a dualist supposition) OR they are composites of
more basic features which are not themselves conscious.
> (Stuart) Because Dennett, for all the attacks on him which claim the
> contrary, does not deny subjective experience.
> (Gerardo) Neither does Watson.
>
Fair enough. I don't know enough about him to take a position.
> (Stuart) He mainly aims to reduce it to physical processes in the brain, to
> show they are one and the same. If I read you right (and maybe I don't?)
> Watson is saying we must disregard claims about subjective experience
> entirely. The only thing that counts is what the claimant does.
> (Gerardo) No, that´s not. As I´ve explained, Watson´s claim is that the
> primary data is the report. This doesn´t imply "disregarding claims about
> subjective experience". But you´ll need a theory to interpret introspective
> reports.
>
Again, fair enough.
> (Stuart) Perhaps. I'll just note in passing that your colleague in
> behaviorism here, Glen, thinks that my insistence on recognizing mental
> events as being distinct from behavioral ones, makes me a dualist.
> (Gerardo) You must clarify with Glen the usages of "mental" and "behavioral".
> You have at least two senses of each term: mental as privately experienced
> event, mental as non-experienced mentalist construct (i.e. freudian
> unconscious, multilayered consciousness systems), behavioral as overt
> muscular action, behavioral as interactional S-R event (including private
> occurrences). You´ve acknowledged that "perceptual response" might be
> considered "behavior" in one sense of the term, and that there´re differences
> between private experiences and non-experienced mentalist constructs.
>
Yes. But I have never suggested that what is mental is somehow basic in any
ontological sense. It is, on my view, just another aspect of the physical.
Merely noting that there is a mental as well as a physical aspect to things is
not dualist though some at least want to claim it's "property dualism".
Personally I think THAT concept is rather a mixed metaphor and needs more
explication. As Searle explains it, property dualism is just confused substance
dualism while he, himself, denies being a dualist of any sort himself, while
often speaking of consciousness as if it were an ontological basic in which
case he would be a dualist himself, albeit without admitting it.
Dualism would certainly need to be explored if I were to get into this with
Glen but he's been a mite testy of late so I'm reluctant to open up a new can
of worms!
> (Stuart) Probably a whole other debate would now have to ensue as to what a
> dualist is in his lexicon, mine and everyone else here who is interested. But
> we already did that on Analytic and I'm too tired to try to reprise it -- or
> to want to. Bottom line: I agree that we sometimes (often?) fall into a
> mindset which thinks of the mind as entity-like (a soul). I see that as
> unwarranted and resolvable a la Wittgenstein by seeing how our language leads
> us astray.
> (Gerardo) I´d avoid mere name-calling. I´d object the problem behind the
> name, and the problem is pseudoexplanation. If you postulate an inner causal
> agency, or a mechanism without any evidence (such as Freudian unconscious),
> it explains nothing. And that´s opposite of my actual purpose, which is the
> explanation, prediction and control of privately or publicly observable
> psychological phenomena. I guess it may be ok for other purposes, though,
> e.g. for inventing some fantasies in a metaphysical mood, or writing a sci-fi
> story.
>
I have continuously aimed to avoid metaphysical discussion. I'm interested in
conceptualizing mind in a way that enables us to understand it striaght forward
scientific terms. That's the whole ball of wax as far as I'm concerned. I
certainly haven't argued for anything Freudian here, only pointed out that I
have come to see how I could act without consciously intending to and how that
could like like I had consciously intended to.
> (Stuart) It may be that "representations" is not a good word for this but I
> can't think of any better one.
> (Gerardo) I guess that "correlated events" would be a better name, and much
> more discriminative. We can detect different kinds of events, and then assess
> different kinds of relationships, without obscuring them with the usage of
> unclear concepts.
>
I'm not sure that gets at what I have in mind. At some point we have mental
pictures which are represenations and it's not unlikely, given what we know of
brains, that there are various signal transformations that underlie the mental
representations we are aware of. In that case, they may best be described as
represenations, too, albeit of a different order. "Events" strikes me as too
general here, though it may be the case that each such "representation" is also
some brain event.
> (Stuart) Nevertheless, we shouldn't just conclude that, because we use
> "representation" for images and expressions and arguments, it cannot also be
> used for whatever corresponds to the inputted signals we receive and process
> in our brains. My guess is that there are actually a number of different
> types of such correspondences going on in the brain in order to render
> subjective experience in us.
> (Gerardo) I´m not concluding that "it cannot" be used. We obviously "can",
> but my thinking is pragmatic: we possibly have better options if our purpose
> is empirical and technical research.
>
I think your aim, by your own description, is to study how psychology (the
state of minds) relates to behavior. I'm interested in something a bit
different: to study how brains produce the mental including all possible mental
states. This is not to say there aren't inputs involved but only to ask how do
those inputs become psychological phenomena (including actions and dispositions
to act)?
> > (Gerardo before) I´m not arguing that "mental images" are behaviors, but
> > that "imagery" is behavior (it´s an operant or respondent occurrence of
> > perceptual responses).
> (Stuart) I find that a stretch of the term. When I had that totally private
> image of my computer screen (I had been thinking about it as I looked at it
> intently shortly before I blacked out so it's not surprising that that was
> what I had in my mind when I started coming to. That I was on the floor, my
> eyes closed and then open after having collapsed and fallen there, is
> certainly behavior. That I thought I was still looking at my computer screen
> but could not somehow focus on it and read what was written there and that it
> faded into oblivion the more I tried to read it, hardly seems like behavior.
> It was like a dream of course since I was lying on my back on the ground
> (which was indisputably behavior).
> (Gerardo) It´s "behavior" if you define the term like me, as an interactional
> event. You were having fragments of your usual activity of interacting with
> your computer: trying to focus on the screen and read what was written. But
> you didn´t have the whole interaction, because you were not in front of your
> computer and your organismic conditions were not the usual ones. See that, if
> you try to consider me a kind of reductionist, it´s not a reduction to "overt
> muscular action", but a reduction to "observable phenomena", including the
> private cases.
>
I think that so broadens "behavior" as to render it indistinguishable from what
others call mental events, in which case why bother?
I wasn't observing any phenomenon but recalling a previous observation, i.e., I
was summoning up a memory which was, as Edelman has pointed out and as Hawkins
seconds, incomplete. Hawkins makes an interesting point about this when he
notes that we don't remember whole pictures but only adumbrations, the
structure of the picture, because our brains lack the ability to capture
everything point for point as a computer can. Our brains, he suggests, are
built to retain structural information and then fill in the gaps. That could
certainly explain why it was that the image I was visualizing in my
half-conscious state, while coming to, reflected the general structure of the
last thing I had been intensely focusing on but that, the more I tried to see
the details, the less real the image became. That's because, of course, there
were no details. I hadn't retained them and they weren't before my eyes as I
wrongly supposed, while still in the half-conscious state and trying to see
them better.
Interestingly, as I recall it, it was the condition of trying to focus on the
details and being unable to that seemed to accompany my coming back to full
awareness (to the point, in fact, where it felt to me like it was prompting
that restoration -- but on reflection that explanation makes no sense since I
would have needed to first become more aware before I could realize I wasn't
seeing what I thought I was).
> (Suart) I wouldn't call seeing behavior but I might call looking that. Or
> allowing oneself to see.
> Remember, too, that my examples were not exclusively about perceptions. Yes
> the sensation of having a heart attack is a kind of perception, and losing
> one's vision, too. But suddenly understanding a sign isn't, nor is having an
> image in one's mind that one is most definitely not perceiving.
> (Gerardo) Understanding a sign can be understood as a physiological event
> that changes many dispositions of overt and covert behaviors, which not
> necessarily are overtly or immediately shown.
It CAN but not in this case when the issue was not physiological events but
mental images.
> Having an image can be understood as a covert simulation of a perceptual
> response.
>
I think it makes more sense to explain it as I did above, i.e., that it was the
last thing I had been focusing intensely on and I had retained the general
structure of what I was seeing in my head (kind of an after-image) but, because
our brains don't retain all the details (as Hawkins posits) I was unable to
plug them in from memory and so, the more closely I thought I was looking at
it, the less clear it became -- precisely the opposite of what we would expect
to happen if I were really looking at it.
> > I´ve said that Moore (1980, 1995) divided two
> > categories: (a) interoceptive and propioceptive stimulation, (b)
> > covert behavior (imagery, dreaming, self-talk).
> (Suart) My blackout "dream" involved no self-talk and no narrative, just an
> image I was trying to see, an image that, of course, wasn't there. How is the
> image alone "covert"? Not only is it not shared, it cannot be (directly
> anyway).
> (Gerardo) Having an image can be understood as a covert simulation of a
> perceptual response. Once you´ve learned the complex behavior of "seeing a
> dog", the same activity can be triggered by other causes that are not the
> presence of a dog. There´s no dog, outside or inside: there´s only a covert
> activity that has some similar effects (and other different effects).
>
If you call the image an "activity" and mean anything else but the brain events
that underlay it, then I think you are stretching the meaning of "activity"
beyond where it can sensibly be stretched.
> (Stuart) But insofar as an image is called up, it is already more than
> behavior in any traditional sense. But yes, we could say this brain does such
> and such, given a particular stimulation, so it is at least describable as
> brain behavior. But is that what you want to get at here?
> (Gerardo) It´s a more complex operant control of perceptual activity. It´s
> not merely brain behavior, because we need to assess the contingencies that
> control its occurrence.
>
Seeing is not the same as looking.
> (Stuart) I have no problem agreeing that this makes sense. But I don't think
> it yields to a behavioral account of mind in any traditional sense.
> (Gerardo) That´s because you didn´t know that there were many different
> behaviorist proposals. My point is that, from the point of view of the
> history of ideas, it IS one of the traditions of the behavioral account of
> mind. You can argue that the name is misleading, but the proposal I´m giving
> here has a long history, that comes from the proposals of taking
> "organism-environment relations" as the main focus of psychological research,
> and then extend such analysis of relations to include covert examples. After
> all, if "empiricism" means using the information of all our senses, the
> private cases might be considered included in it.
>
Yes but then it isn't "behaviorism" per se but some hybrid. Frankly I share
some of your preferences for behaviorist accounts. I just think they don't
cover everything and that the solution lies, not in redefining "behavior" so
they do but in broadening the picture of mind so that we see that it's not all
"behavior."
> (Stuart) I never could see how one could not. Did Carnap really deny mental
> events?
> (Gerardo) Well, Quine does deny "mental events", and is not so easy to probe
> him wrong. He says "the contentful mental terms may be seen as denoting
> physiological states of the organism. In either case the states of nerves are
> retained, mental states in any other sense are repudiated, and the mental
> terms are thereupon appropriated to states of nerves". So for Quine all the
> proposal of "mind" or "mental" can be repudiated without any loss: there´s
> just physiology and behavior, and cases of "imagery" or "sensations" would
> be just names of physiological states. (This is not the view of Skinner or
> Kantor, who would consider Quine´s proposal as too reductionistic, because
> the brain is just a component, necessary but not sufficient, of a broader
> system of behavioral interactions between the organism and the environment).
>
Quine's approach as you've defined it strikes me as yet another effort at
redefinition. However, these terms (mental terms) occupy an unusual place in
our language game so it seems we are always busy trying to get our hands around
these particular greased pigs.
> (Stuart) I said from the first that I am no expert on behaviorism. And I'm
> certainly not seeking to "blame" anyone.
> I have little to say against the methodological approach. I think it is a
> reasonable experimental strategy in a wide variety of cases though of limited
> value as an account of minds.
> (Gerardo) "Of limited value" in comparison with what? I guess there´s nothing
> better than the watsonian approach if you´re looking for the replicable
> testing of hypotheses. The alternative is going back to the pre-watsonian
> introspective disagreements.
>
> (Stuart) Agreed. Please recall that I am not one who attacked behaviorism on
> this list, Glen's supposition to the contrary notwithstanding. I merely noted
> that I think a bare bones behaviorist picture, as is sometimes presented, is
> inadequate AND that I don't believe Wittgenstein was either sympathetic to or
> a closet supporter of such a behaviorist thesis.
> (Gerardo) But I think that such "barebones behaviorist picture" is just a
> strawman made by critics, not a proposal made by any real person. See that
> even the more reductionist and eliminativist behaviorists (e.g. Place, Quine)
> are not so dumb in their argumentation. I think it´s not serious to argue
> against a view that possibly nobody supported, just because some people
> carelessly
> ascribe such view to other (mostly unespecified) people.
Well as I've repeatedly said, I am not arguing against behaviorism. I don't
know enough about it. I am arguing against the view you say no one actually
ever held (and I've also expressed my opinion, numerous times, that I'm
inclined to agree that no respectable thinker ever held such a view). My point
is that Wittgenstein certainly cannot be enlisted in the class of simplistic
behaviorists and even expressed his doubts about behaviorism as I recall -- but
I don't know if he thought of it in the simplistic way we have both agreed is
mistaken or not.
However, I do think that some of the moves you have made to render behaviorism
more sophisticated strikes me as a bit weak, i.e., why redefine behavior to
include things not typically understood as behavior? Wouldn't it make more
sense to simply broaden your theory to include behaviors and other stuff (like
mental images, having realizations, etc.)
>Either any real behaviorist proposed such "barebones behaviorist picture" in
>any of his books or articles, or nobody proposed it. If any real behaviorist
>proposed such view, then the critic must identify the author and his claims
>before making his rebutals, instead of pretending that "someone" must have say
>so because that´s what some people say that behaviorists would claim. And if
>nobody defended such picture in any book or article, then what´s the point in
>arguing against a thesis that nobody ever supported? Don´t we have enough with
>analysing real proposals, instead of rebutting imaginary ones?
>
> Best Regards,
> Gerardo.
>
My point is that the broader thesis you have been sketching out here, and
arguing for, is more stipulative than empirical since it involves stipulating
new meanings to terms. While we can always redefine our terms, sometimes
redefinition can go too far. I genuinely see the effort to call mental images
behavior as just such a mistake, whether anyone ever held a more restrictivist
theory of behaviorism or not.
SWM
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