Archive for August, 2003

030828 – Are human beings rational?

Thursday, August 28th, 2003

030828 – Are human beings rational?

My wife asked an interesting question: Do I think that human beings are inherently rational.  I think the answer is emphatically no.  Human beings have the ability to learn procedures.  One of the procedures that human beings have discovered, found useful, and passed along culturally is the procedure of logical analysis or logical thinking.  The fact that in many cases logic enables us to find good solutions to certain classes of significant problems ensures that logical analysis will be one of the procedures activated as a candidate for execution in a broad range of external circumstances and internal states.

What strikes me is that the end result of evolution selecting organisms with greater and greater ability to learn and apply procedural patterns has resulted in an organism that is capable of learning to simulate serial computations, at least on a limited scale.  Certainly it was Dennett who put this idea into my mind, but I do not believe that he arrived at this conclusion by the same path that I did.

This raises an interesting question: what kind of pattern and procedural learning capabilities are required in order to be able to simulate serial computations or, more precisely, to be able to learn and execute a logical thinking pattern?  Human beings certainly aren’t much in the way of serial computers.  We’re not fast.  We’re not computationally adept.  We don’t have a lot of dynamic memory.  Our push down stack for recursion seems to be limited to one level.  (The fact that we must use the logical thinking pattern to analyze pathological sentences like, “The pearl the squirrel the girl hit bit split,” rather than the (unconscious) language understanding pattern simply underlines this limitation on our capability for recursion.)

So, is human language ability the result of the evolution of ever more sophisticated procedural pattern learning capabilities?  Is the driving force behind the evolution of such enhanced procedural pattern learning the advantage obtained by the organisms who best understand their conspecifics?  Is this evolution’s de facto recognition that brawn being equal, better brains confer a reproductive advantage?  Now if better understanding of one’s conspecifics is the goal, language ability may just fall out automatically, because if one has a mechanism that can build a model of others, it makes it a lot easier to figure out what the other intends or is responding to.

Clearly, since the ability to take the viewpoint of another person does not manifest itself in children until some time after they have acquired at least the rudiments of language, the manifestation of the ability to take the viewpoint of another person is not a requirement for the acquisition of at least the rudiments of the language.  There seems to be a subtle distinction to be made here: when daddy says “hudie” (the Chinese equivalent of “butterfly”) and looks at, or taps, or points to a butterfly or a representation of a butterfly, something has to help the child attend to both the butterfly instance and the sound.  That something may be the emerging model of the other.  Or maybe it’s the other way around as I suggested earlier: the trick is for the parent to take advantage of his or her own model of the child in order to intuitively construct or take advantage of the situation in which both the butterfly and the sound of the word will be salient to the child.

Still, I keep coming back to the idea that the internal model of the other is somehow crucial and the even more crucial is the idea that the internal model of the other contains the other’s model of others.  As I think about it though, it seems to me that creating an internal pattern, that is to say learning a pattern, based on experience and observation of the behavior of another organism is not a capability that is uniquely human.  It would seem to be a valuable ability to have.  What seems to be special about the patterns we humans develop of other people is that we attribute to the other a self.  An or to animal can get a long way without attributing a self (whatever that means) to other creatures with which it interacts.

Posted in abduction (pattern extraction), evolution, language, learning, modeling, rationality | No Comments »

030826 – Parallel processing in the mind

Tuesday, August 26th, 2003

030826 – Parallel processing in the mind

I don’t know if it originated with Grossberg, but I like the concept of complementary processing streams.  Actually, he talks about it as if it always involves a dichotomy.  Could it not also be multiple (any number) parallel streams?  Certainly, the convergence of inputs from a large number of brain areas on the amygdala indicates that it’s not just dichotomous streams.

Grossberg writes as if he is describing exactly what happens—especially with his neural circuit diagrams, but the more I read, the more they seem fanciful.  Certainly there’s something missing when the diagrams only show neurons in layers 2/3, 4, and 6.

In also seems that there’s something missing from the analysis of the visual “what” pathway.  Edge and Surface processing seem very closely tied throughout.  In visual area V1, the “blob” neurons are surrounded by “interblob” neurons and in visual area V2, the “thin stripe” the neurons alternate with the “interstripe” neurons.  Surely there is some crosstalk between (among) the channels.

Grossberg uses the term “catastrophic forgetting”.  He also talks about complementary channels of processing in the brain.  And he, among others, and talks about a “where” channel to the parietal lobe and a “what” channel to the temporal lobe.  Things then get a little confused.  Part of the point of “catastrophic forgetting” is, in effect that certain memories need to get overwritten, e.g., memories of where a particular movable object is located.  In contrast other memories should not be easily forgotten.

It is not clear that the categories “easily over writable” and “not easily over writable” (or should it be “things that change often” and “things that don’t often change”?) are the same as “where” and “what”.  It’s certainly possible from an evolutionary standpoint that what and where are sufficiently essential aspects of the environment that they should be per se ensconced in genetically determined neural structures.  Nonetheless, is reasonable to ask whether what evolution has provided is also being used in ways unrelated to its evolutionarily determined functionality.

Or alternatively, given that evolution has cobbled together mechanisms capable of recording information with differing degrees of environmental permanence, it seems reasonable to suppose that the same mechanism could show up in different places; although, I am well aware that the essentially opportunistic functioning of evolution leaves open the possibility that the same function is performed in many different ways.  Still, in our environment and the environment of our animal ancestors some things change rapidly and some things don’t.

Posted in evolution, learning, memory, neurons | No Comments »

030820 – The problem of brain design

Wednesday, August 20th, 2003

030820 – The problem of brain design

David Perkins, Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, observes (reported by Beth Potier in Harvard Gazette) ‘It’s far easier for a group of people to pool physical effort than it is for them to effectively combine their mental energy. He illustrates this point with what he calls the “lawn mower paradox”: 10 people with lawn mowers can handily mow a lawn much faster than one, yet it’s far more difficult for the same 10 people to design a lawn mower.

‘”Many physical tasks divide up into chunks very nicely,” he says, but not so with intellectual duties. “It’s pretty hard to say, ‘Let’s make a decision together: you take part A of the decision, I take part B of the decision.'”’

So what the brain has is a large number of interconnected pattern recognition systems.  The individual systems fall into a smaller number of categories, e.g., cortical systems, cerebellar systems, etc.  System categories differ among themselves at the very least in terms of plasticity and responsiveness to various neurotransmitters and neural activity modulators.

These systems each work along the lines proposed by Natschlaeger, Markram and Maass.  This is not to say that I totally buy into their liquid state machine model, but that I do believe that the systems act as an analog fading memory (with digital overtones) and that their structure serves to project their inputs non linearly into a high dimensional space.  Different systems have different memory decay time constants, ranging from short (early visual processing, for example), to medium (audio processing for speech recognition), to long (maintaining context while reading).

I hypothesize that (at least some of) these systems become tuned (and in that sense optimized) over time to their inputs (thus improving the separation of components projected into high dimensional space) by a process approximating Hebbian learning.  This could account for the acquisition of the ability to distinguish among phonemes when learning a language.  In effect, Hebbian learning creates “grooves” into which particular stimuli are likely to fall, thus enhancing the separation of minimally differing phonemes.

Posted in abduction (pattern extraction), learning | No Comments »

030819 – Emotion and incentive

Tuesday, August 19th, 2003

030819 – Emotion and incentive

I really don’t like Joseph LeDoux’s (2002) use of the words emotion and incentive.  He uses emotion to mean just about anything that can affect synaptic plasticity, that is, he defines the term backwards.  That doesn’t work because we don’t know what can affect synaptic plasticity, but we do have a good idea of what we think emotion means.

Similarly, incentive.  To my mind an incentive is a conditional promise of reward in the future.  It takes the form, “if you do this you’ll get that.”  The term is a bit confusing in ordinary speech.  Management announces an incentive program whereby workers who overfill their quotas will receive a significant bonus.  The announcement serves as the incentive for employees to work harder.
Hans-Lukas Teuber (Chair of the M.I.T. Psychology Department while I was getting my Ph.D there) liked to tell the  story of the monkey and the “consolation prize.”  The monkey works to get a piece of banana, but when the monkey gets the piece of banana, he doesn’t eat it, he just sticks it in his mouth and holds it in his cheek.  When the monkey makes a mistake and doesn’t get a piece of banana, he eats some of the banana he was holding in his cheek.  So the monkey “rewards” himself for making a mistake.  Teuber called it a “consolation prize.”

So the (implicit) promise of “a piece of banana if you do this correctly” is the incentive (I actually would have said motivation here—LeDoux can’t because he uses motivation to mean something else).  What’s the banana then?  A reward?  Maybe, but in the context of the situation, the banana is the confirmation that the incentive was correctly understood, and that, in itself is (arguably) rewarding.

It should be rewarding, in any case, by the following argument.  It is clearly adaptive for an organism to be able to reliably predict the way the future will unfold, particularly with respect to possible events that have (can have, may have) some kind of significance to the organism.  It is even more important for an organism to be able to reliably predict the effects of a possible action

“I’ll bet that if I figure out what to do here, I’ll get a piece of banana.  Hmmm.  This looks right.  I’ll do it.  Banana!  Yes!  I was right!”

Or

“I’ll bet that if I figure out what to do here, I’ll get a piece of banana.  Hmmm.  This looks right.  I’ll do it.  No banana?  Bummer!  I didn’t get it right.  I’m gonna eat a piece of banana.”

So, back to the question: what is the banana?  In evolutionary terms, at one level, the banana is nourishment and valuable as such; in this context, however, the banana is real-world confirmation of correct understanding of (at least one aspect) of the real world.

But notice the subtlety here.  Setting aside our knowledge that correlation is not causality (which we seem to do a lot), the banana confirms the existence of a pattern: In the context of this recognizable situation it is to be expected that a problem will be presented and if I correctly figure out what the situation requires and do it, I will get some banana and if I don’t figure out what the situation requires, I won’t get any banana.

If no banana is forthcoming, what is the correct conclusion in this situation?  There are several: 1) I got it wrong (everything else is unchanged); 2) I got it right, but there are no more bananas at the moment (everything else is unchanged); 3) The pattern is incorrect: there are no bananas to be had here.  This is clearly not an exhaustive list of all the alternatives, but it does indicate that the conclusion to be drawn in the situation is by no means obvious.  This is borne out by the well-known fact that behavior patterns established by a random reinforcement pattern are more resistant to extinguishment than patterns established by a 100 percent reliable reinforcement pattern.

Again let’s look from an evolutionary standpoint: Which is more important?  Obtaining a piece of banana or knowing how to obtain a piece of banana?  If I give a man a fish, I have fed him for a day; if I teach a man to fish, I have fed him for life.

An important question for an organism is: Where is food?  The obvious next question is: How do I get there? Once these questions are answered, the next question is: Once I get there, how do I get it?  I have a feeling that in the brain these questions, or rather the answers to these questions, are intimately related.  Ultimately, an organism needs a procedural answer: What steps need to be taken in order to arrive at the desired goal?  The organism needs a sequential plan.  It makes me wonder if the parietal lobe in addition to its involvement with the representation of physical space also is involved with the representation of conceptual space.

Maybe not.  Physical space has obvious nearness relationships that conceptual space does not necessarily have.  On the other hand, George Lakoff’s arguments about the way in which meanings are derived from physical relationships may suggest that parietal lobe involvement (or, more precisely, involvement of whenever part of the brain is responsible for keeping track of the physical organization of the universe with respect to the organism) in the organization of concepts is in fact plausible.

Correlation is not causality, but from an evolutionary standpoint an organism cannot in general afford to do the necessary research to establish reliable causality.  Interestingly, human beings have acquired the ability to reason systematically and have managed in some cases to determine causality.  What is more significant, and many have remarked upon this, is that humans can transmit patterns verbally to other humans.  Not only that, patterns thus transmitted can be used by the receiver almost as if they had been directly precedent or intuited or whatever the appropriate word is to describe the way we acquire patterns.  I say “almost” because I think there must be some difference between patterns established by word-of-mouth and patterns established by other means.

I don’t think, however, that the difference is as simple as the difference between declarative and non declarative memory.  And by the way am not real happy with the use of the word declarative.  And I guess part of the reason for that is that I think some if not much of things that enter “declaratively” ends up stored “non declaratively”.  Which, I suppose, is simply to say that we don’t always consciously examine the implications of things that we hear, but those implications may end up being stored.  Perhaps this is just a matter of “stimulus generalization”, but whatever it is, it feels like a hard and fast distinction between declarative and non declarative memory is ultimately misguided.  And, in fact, studies of “priming” and in individuals whose declarative memory system is damaged in some way seem to me to imply that non declarative priming (whatever that means) also occurs in those whose declarative memory system is intact.

I suppose the argument is simply that there are two kinds of memory, but things start to feel a little too glib when people start to discuss the pathways by which information enters one memory system or the other as if in the intact organism there is no (and can be no) “crosstalk” between the two.  Maybe it’s just that in the course of reviewing the literature of the past thirty years I have concluded that where there are dichotomies it is important, even essential, not to accept them literally, for fear of missing overlooked clues to the functioning of the system.

Posted in conditioning, emotion, evolution, learning, memory, post hoc ergo propter hoc (PHEPH), rewards | No Comments »

030818 – Brain specificity

Monday, August 18th, 2003

030818 – Brain specificity

Let’s not get carried away in the specificity of function assigned to various brain areas.  There’s a serious practical limit to what can be hard-wired in terms of responses to specific situations.  Here’s the problem: evolution can only provide the raw materials for dealing with reality.  The same problems face all animals.  You can build in a conspecific detector, but you can’t build in a grandmother detector because evolution does not know what your grandmother looks like.

It makes me nervous as hell to read about “executive processes.”  Maybe it’s because process to me is a term of art from computer science.  And it seems to me that an executive process requires an executive, which seems to invoke Dennett’s “Cartesian observer”.  Remember, the whole brain is a set of neural circuits with cycles and feedback.

When writers talk about a system that can activate or suppress motor activity, what I think about is the difference between mental imagery and acting out.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »