Posts Tagged ‘behavior’
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn”*…
In what does our personhood consist? From what/where does it come? João de Pina Cabral unpacks the seminal thinking of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and the advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that suggest that a person is not self-contained, but the outcome of a lifelong process of living with others…
It matters to understand what constitutes a person. After all, if there is one feature that distinguishes human society from other forms of sociality, it is that, at around one year of age, most human beings attain personhood: they learn to speak a language, develop object permanence – the understanding that things do not disappear when out of sight – and relate to others in consciously moral ways. Should all persons be accorded the same rights and duties by virtue of this condition? These are weighty questions that have occupied social scientists and philosophers since antiquity – particularly at moments such as the present, when war and imperial oppression once again raise their ugly heads.
Nevertheless, this question cannot be approached as a purely moral matter, for in order to determine what rights and duties may be attributed to persons, it is necessary to establish what persons are. This longstanding perplexity can now be addressed in increasingly sophisticated ways, following a century of sustained anthropological enquiry.
In September 1926, two of the most eminent anthropologists of the day met in person for the first time in New York. Both were Jewish and born in Europe, but one – Franz Boas – had become an American citizen and was a leading figure at Columbia University in New York, while the other – Lucien Lévy-Bruhl – was a professor in Paris. Both were highly learned, humanistically inclined and politically liberal; they respected one another, yet they did not seem to agree about the matter of the person.
Lévy-Bruhl had begun his career as a philosopher of ethics. His doctoral thesis focused on the legal concept of responsibility. He was struck by the fact that responsibility first arose between persons not as a law, but as an emotion – a deep-seated feeling. He argued that co-responsibility implies a bond between persons grounded less in reason than in the conditions of their emergence as persons. As children, individuals do not emerge out of nothing, but through deep engagement with prior persons – their caregivers. Thus, moral responsibility could not have arisen from adherence to norms or rules; rather, norms and rules emerged from the sense of responsibility that humans acquire as they become persons.
This led him to question how we become thinking beings. Do all humans, after all, think in the same way? He began reading the increasingly sophisticated ethnographic accounts emerging from Australia, Africa, Asia and South America, and was deeply influenced by an extended trip to China. He was an empirical realist, but also a personalist – that is, he accorded primacy to the person as such, refusing to subsume the individual into the group. In this respect, he was not persuaded by the arguments of the great sociologist Émile Durkheim concerning the exceptional status of the ‘sacred’ or the special powers of ‘collective consciousness’. Lévy-Bruhl soon arrived at a striking conclusion: in their everyday practices and especially in their ritual actions, the so-called ‘primitive’ peoples studied by ethnographers did not appear to conform to the norms of logic that had been regarded as universally valid since the time of Aristotle.
As a friend of his put it, Lévy-Bruhl discovered that such peoples are characterised by ‘a mystical mentality – full of the “supernatural in nature” and prelogic, of a different kind than ours’. Indeed, the basic principles of Aristotelian logic that continue to guide scientific thinking – underpinning modern technological development – seemed to be ignored by premodern peoples. Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle (p or not-p) did not appear to apply to their ‘mystical’ modes of thought, both because they tended to think in terms of concrete objects rather than abstractions, and because they exhibited what Lévy-Bruhl termed ‘participation’…
[de Pina Cabral traces the development of Lévy-Bruhl’s thought, starting with Plato’s concept of methexis; elaborates on Lévy-Bruhl’s ideas; and traces te advances in cognitive science and developmental psychology that support them…]
… the very experience of personhood – that is, the sense that I am myself – is not ‘individual’, since its emergence presupposes a prior condition of being-with others. The self arises from a sharing of being with others, from having been part of those who are close to us. One does not emerge as an addition to society, but rather as a partial separation from the participations that initially constituted one’s being.
As I become a person, I learn to relate to myself as an other; I transcend my immediate position in the world. Without this, I would not be able to speak a language, since the use of pronouns presupposes reflexive thought. Thus, as Lévy-Bruhl had already insisted in his notebooks, participation precedes the person. Intersubjectivity is not the meeting of already constituted subjects, but the ground from which subjectivity emerges. Participation, therefore, may be understood as the constitutive tension between the singular and the plural in the formation of the person in the world. In 1935, the great phenomenologist Edmund Husserl expressed this insight clearly in a letter to Lévy-Bruhl where he thanked him for his ideas on participation:
Saying ‘I’ and ‘we’, [persons] find themselves as members of families, associations, [socialities], as living ‘together’, exerting an influence on and suffering from their world – the world that has sense and reality for them, through their intentional life, their experiencing, thinking, [and] valuing.
In acting and being acted upon together in human company during the first year of life, children become ‘we’ at the same time as they become ‘I’, which means that persons are always, ambivalently, both ‘I’ and ‘we’. Participation and transcendence will remain sources of theoretical perplexity for as long as the ‘we’ is approached as a categorical matter – a question of ‘identity’ – rather than as the presence and activity of living persons in dynamic interaction with the world and with one another.
By contrast, once we accept that personhood is the outcome of a process – the encounter between the embodied capacities of human beings and the historically constituted world that surrounds them – participation loses its mystery. As Lévy-Bruhl put it in one of his final notes: ‘The impossibility for the individual to separate within himself what would be properly him and what he participates in in order to exist …’ Participation, therefore, is the ground upon which everyday social interaction is constituted. The ‘mystical’ (or transcendental) potential within each of us – that which animates the symbolic life of groups – is part of the very process through which each of us becomes ourselves…
How does one become a person? “We” before “I”: “To be is to participate,” from @aeon.co.
A (if not the) next question: how does personhood emerge when the formative interactions are increasingly mediated/attentuated by technology?
* Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 4, Scene 3
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As we get together, we might send behaviorist birthday greetings to a man whose work focused on how one might train the “persons” who emerge: Kenneth Spence; he was born on this date in 1907. A psychologist, he worked to construct a comprehensive theory of behavior to encompass conditioning and other simple forms of learning and behavior modification.
Spence attempted to establish a precise, mathematical formulation to describe the acquisition of learned behavior, trying to measure simple learned behaviors (e.g., salivating in anticipation of eating). Much of his research focused on classically conditioned, easily measured, eye-blinking behavior in relation to anxiety and other factors.
One of the leading theorists of his time, Spence was the most cited psychologist in the 14 most influential psychology journals in the last six years of his life (1962 – 1967). A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Spence as the 62nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
“Small irritations can lead to exaggerated reactions”*…
From the annals of abnormal behavior…
In the late 19th century, a rare and highly unusual neuropsychiatric condition was observed among a group of French-Canadian lumberjacks living in the Moosehead Lake region of northern Maine. Those affected exhibited an extreme and exaggerated startle reflex. When startled by a sudden movement or loud noise, they reacted with dramatic involuntary responses, such as leaping into the air, screaming, repeating words, or instantly obeying shouted commands. It was reported that the “jumpers” were primarily of French descent, born in Canada, and worked as lumbermen in the Maine woods.
The mystery of the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine first drew the attention of the scientific community in 1878, when prominent American neurologist George Miller Beard informed members of the American Neurological Association at its annual meeting that he had heard accounts of these lumberjacks and their unusual nervous condition. Two years later, Beard himself travelled to the Moosehead Lake region to see first-hand if the accounts were true. He wasn’t disappointed…
I found two of the Jumpers employed about the hotel. With one of them, a young man twenty-seven years of age, I made the following experiments:
1. While sitting in a chair, with a knife in his hand, with which he was about to cut his tobacco, he was struck sharply on the shoulder, and told to “throw it.” Almost as quick as the explosion of a pistol, he threw the knife, and it stuck in a beam opposite; at the same time he repeated the order “throw it” with a certain cry as of terror or alarm.
2. A moment after, while filling his pipe with tobacco, he was again slapped on the shoulder and told to “throw it.” He threw the tobacco and the pipe on the grass, at least a rod away, with the same cry and the same suddenness and explosiveness of movement…
After observing and examining many jumpers, Beard concluded that jumping was a type of nervous disorder. In a paper published in 1881, Beard wrote:
Jumping is a psychical or mental form of nervous disease, and is of a functional character. Its best analogue is psychical or mental hysteria, the so-called ‘servant-girl hysteria,’ as known to us in modern days, and as very widely known during the epidemics of the middle ages.
Beard surmised that the syndrome of jumping might be tied to tickling:
This disease was probably an evolution of tickling. Some, if not all, of the Jumpers, are ticklish—exceedingly so—and are easily irritated by touching them in sensitive parts of the body. It would appear that in the evenings, in the woods, after the day’s toil, in lieu of most other sources of amusement, the lumbermen have teased each other, by tickling, and playing, and startling timid ones, until there has developed this jumping, which, by mental contagion, and by practice, and by inheritance, has ripened into the full stage of the malady as it appears at the present hour.
Jumping was also found to be strongly tied to families indicating a genetic condition…
[There follow a series of accounts of “jumpers” in other locations (almost all timber-adjacent) and of the evolving explantions offered by experts, concluding…]
… In 1965, Reuben Rabinovitch, an assistant professor of neurology at McGill University, wrote a letter to the editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal , where he described a children’s game he had witnessed in the Laurentian Mountains, north of Montreal. In this game, a child would secretly follow another, jab them in the ribs, and imitate the sound of a kicking horse. The “victim” was expected to respond by mimicking the sound, leaping into the air, and flinging their arms outward. This form of horseplay, he noted, often continued into adulthood, particularly in isolated villages or lumber camps where recreational outlets were scarce.
Rabinovitch concluded that the Jumping Frenchman syndrome was not a neurological disorder per se, but rather a conditioned reflex that developed out of the monotony and social isolation of life in lumber camps. According to this interpretation, the behaviour became institutionalized within a close-knit community as a form of interaction and entertainment. When the traditional logging camps gradually disappeared, so too did the jumping behaviour.
Further support for this view came in 1986, when two Canadian neurologists and a psychologist studied eight individuals in Quebec who exhibited jumping behaviours. The researchers found that all of the men had developed the condition during adolescence, shortly after beginning work in lumber camps. They reported being teased and provoked by other workers until the jumping behaviour became ingrained.
Based on this evidence, some scholars have argued that the Jumping Frenchman syndrome is not a medical condition or a case of collective hysteria, but a classic case of operant conditioning —a learned behaviour reinforced by social stimuli—that developed in a closed community.
The long and the short of it is that the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine may have more to do with human nature than with neurology. In the rough, close-knit world of lumber camps, where entertainment was scarce, a peculiar habit took hold, that slowly developed into a cultural quirk, or even a very strange joke that went too far. As the lifestyle that nurtured it faded, so did the jumping.
Nothing conclusive has yet been established. The National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) still lists Jumping as “an extremely rare disorder” with “no specific therapy”. While it acknowledges the theory of operant conditioning, NORD notes that some researchers believe that jumping Frenchmen of Maine may be a somatic neurological disorder, caused by a gene mutation that occurs after fertilization and is not inherited from the parents or passed on to children.
The organization concludes that further research is needed to understand the exact causes and underlying mechanisms of the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine, as well as other culturally-specific startle disorders…
“The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine,” from @AmusingPlanet.
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As we query curious comportment, we might send birthday greetings of uncertain provenance to Charles Thomas Jackson; he was born on this date in 1805. A physician and scientist, he was active in medicine, chemistry, mineralogy, and geology, in that lattermost of which he was particularly distinguished.
That said, he is probably best remembered for a series of spectacular claims he made to the work of others: the discovery of guncotton (Christian Friedrich Schönbein), the telegraph (Samuel F. B. Morse), the digestive action of the stomach (William Beaumont), and the anesthetic effects of ether (William T. G. Morton). These claims continued until, in 1873, he was hospitalized at McLean Hospital. It was widely believed at the time that the reason was mental illness, either through a seizure or having a manic episode upon seeing Morton’s tombstone.
In fact, Jackson had suffered a left brain stroke that affected his language area. While he never regained his speech, he was cooperative and did not exhibit “inappropriate behavior of insanity.” By unanimous vote of the McLean Asylum Trustees, Jackson was hosted as a guest at the hospital at no charge for the entire duration of his stay as a recognition of his [very real] past contributions.
“Form follows function – that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union”*…
In the quote above, Frank Lloyd Wright was glossing his mentor, Louis Sullivan… He might have been alluding to the work of L. Mahadevan. In a conversation with Steven Strogatz, Mahadeven explains how complex biological forms and behaviors– from brain folds to insect architecture– emerge through the interplay of physical forces, environment and embodiment…
What links a Möbius strip, brain folds and termite mounds? The answer is Harvard University’s L. Mahadevan, whose career has been devoted to using mathematics and physics to explore the form and function of common phenomena.
Mahadevan, or Maha to his friends and colleagues, has long been fascinated by questions one wouldn’t normally ask — from the equilibrium shape of inert objects like a Möbius strip, to the complex factors that drive biological systems like morphogenesis or social insect colonies…
… Mahadevan tells Steven Strogatz what inspires him to tackle these questions, and how gels, gypsum and LED lights can help uncover form and function in biological systems. He also offers some provocative thoughts about how noisy random processes might underlie our intuitions about geometry…
… STROGATZ: I feel like it’s relevant for our discussion today because it seems like you’ve been interested in this interplay between shape and force, certainly from your early work and it looks like you’re still thinking about it these days.
MAHADEVAN: Partly, yes. I would say a lot of what I am trying to do nowadays is more biologically motivated and inspired. But flow, shape and increasingly now thinking about sentient systems, understanding how we learn what we learn. I’m very much interested in embodiment as a way in which sentient organisms find their way and function in the world… and particularly with social insects, but a little bit with humans as well…
“Does Form Really Shape Function?” It’s so much more interesting than that… @stevenstrogatz.com and @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
(Image above: source)
* Frank Lloyd Wright
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As we blend, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream introduced a new flavor, Cherry Garcia.
“The conundrum of free will and destiny has always kept me dangling”*…
… as it’s kept thinkers dangling for centuries. Dan Falk considers two new books– one arguing that free will is an illusion; the other, that free will is the (very real) result of evolution…
You’re thirsty so you reach for a glass of water. It’s either a freely chosen action or the inevitable result of the laws of nature, depending on who you ask. Do we have free will? The question is ancient—and vexing. Everyone seems to have pondered it, and many seem quite certain of the answer, which is typically either “yes” or “absolutely not.”
One scientist in the “absolutely not” camp is Robert Sapolsky. In his new book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, the primatologist and Stanford professor of neurology spells out why we can’t possibly have free will. Why do we behave one way and not another? Why do we choose Brand A over Brand B, or vote for Candidate X over Candidate Y? Not because we have free will, but because every act and thought are the product of “cumulative biological and environmental luck.”
Sapolsky tells readers that the “biology over which you had no control, interacting with the environment over which you had no control, made you you.” That is to say, “everything in your childhood, starting with how you were mothered within minutes of birth, was influenced by culture, which means as well by the centuries of ecological factors that influenced what kind of culture your ancestors invented, and by the evolutionary pressures that molded the species you belong to.”
…
Many scientists and philosophers beg to differ. Prominent among them is Kevin Mitchell, a neuroscientist at Trinity College in Dublin. In his new book, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Mitchell argues that although we’re shaped by our biology, it’s that very biology that made us, over the course of billions of years of evolution, into free agents. Even the earliest and most primitive creatures had some capacity to control their destinies. When a single-celled organism moves toward a food source, or away from danger, it has entered, however meekly, into a new world of agency and freedom. Simple organisms, Mitchell writes, “infer what is out in the world” and “make holistic decisions to adapt their internal dynamics and select appropriate actions.” He adds: “This represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe.”…
n a universe where the mindless laws of nature push bits of matter around, it might indeed seem miraculous that free will—agency—can emerge. As I made my way through Free Agents, I thought of a New Yorker cartoon where two scientists are at a blackboard filled with equations. In the middle, instead of an equation, the first scientist has written, “Then a miracle occurs.” The second guy says to him, “I think you should be more explicit here in step two.”
But emerge it does, according to Mitchell, and he’s adamant that there is nothing miraculous about it. Rather, in living creatures like us, freedom is enabled by the underlying biology…
Yes, there are physical and chemical processes operating within the brain—how could there not be?—but that does nothing to take away our freedom, he says. “It comes down to the idea that if we can find the machinery inside the brain that is active when we’re making a decision, then maybe decision making just is being done causally by that machinery,” he told me. “I don’t think that view is right, because I think you can have a completely different view, which is, yes, there is some machinery that we use to make decisions; but it’s machinery we use to make decisions. We’re making the decisions.”
…
A fascinating look at a volley of new insights that has reignited the debate over whether our choices are ever truly our own: “Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not,” from @danfalk in @NautilusMag.
As Eistein observed, “I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will…Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.
To which Stephen Hawking added: “I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”
* that well-known philosopher, William Shatner
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As we muse on motive, we might send categorical birthday greetings to Konrad Zacharias Lorenz; he was born on this date in 1903. A zoologist and ornithologist, he founded the modern field of ethology. His work– popularized in books like King Solomon’s Ring, On Aggression, and Man Meets Dog– revealed how behavioral patterns may be traced to an evolutionary past and explored the roots of aggression. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for developing a unified, evolutionary theory of animal and human behavior… which was, overall, determinist.
“Sheer dumb sentience”*…
As the power of AI grows, we find ourselves searching for a way to tell it might– or has– become sentient. Kristen Andrews and Jonathan Birch suggest that we should look to the minds of animals…
… Last year, [Google engineer Blake] Lemoine leaked the transcript [of an exchange he’d had with LaMDA, a Google AI system] because he genuinely came to believe that LaMDA was sentient – capable of feeling – and in urgent need of protection.
Should he have been more sceptical? Google thought so: they fired him for violation of data security policies, calling his claims ‘wholly unfounded’. If nothing else, though, the case should make us take seriously the possibility that AI systems, in the very near future, will persuade large numbers of users of their sentience. What will happen next? Will we be able to use scientific evidence to allay those fears? If so, what sort of evidence could actually show that an AI is – or is not – sentient?
The question is vast and daunting, and it’s hard to know where to start. But it may be comforting to learn that a group of scientists has been wrestling with a very similar question for a long time. They are ‘comparative psychologists’: scientists of animal minds.
We have lots of evidence that many other animals are sentient beings. It’s not that we have a single, decisive test that conclusively settles the issue, but rather that animals display many different markers of sentience. Markers are behavioural and physiological properties we can observe in scientific settings, and often in our everyday life as well. Their presence in animals can justify our seeing them as having sentient minds. Just as we often diagnose a disease by looking for lots of symptoms, all of which raise the probability of having that disease, so we can look for sentience by investigating many different markers…
On learning from our experience of animals to assess AI sentience: “What has feelings?” from @KristinAndrewz and @birchlse in @aeonmag.
Apposite: “The Future of Human Agency” (a Pew round-up of expert opinion on the future impact of AI)
Provocative in a resonant way: “The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things.”
* Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312
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As we talk to the animals, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to J. P. Guilford; he was born on this date in 1897. A psychologist, he’s best remembered as a developer and practitioner of psychometrics, the quantitative measurement of subjective psychological phenomena (such sensation, personality, attention).
Guilford’s Structure of Intellect (SI) theory rejected the view that intelligence could be characterized in a single numerical parameter. He proposed that three dimensions were necessary for accurate description: operations, content, and products.
Guilford also developed the concepts of “convergent” and “divergent” thinking, as part of work he did emphasizing the importance of creativity in industry, science, arts, and education, and in urging more research into it nature.
A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Guilford as the 27th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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