Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!usc!apple!amdahl!kp From: kp@uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Chess, Reductionism, Probablistic Determinism. Summary: "False correlation" sounds incoherent to me Message-ID: Date: 12 Apr 90 02:15:19 GMT References: <491fffd5.1a4d7@cicada.engin.umich.edu> <2080@aipna.ed.ac.uk> <365@ntpdvp1.UUCP> <366@ntpdvp1.UUCP> <16ai029B9byy01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> <15855@muvms3.bitnet> Reply-To: kp@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA Lines: 73 In article <15855@muvms3.bitnet> edm002@muvms3.bitnet writes: >In article <16ai029B9byy01@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com>, kp@uts.amdahl.com (Ken Presting) writes: >> The attribute of rituals that gets my attention is their *concreteness*, >> combined with their *futility*. (Ahh, that explains everything! :-) >> >> Not that all rituals are always futile - this is precisely why ritual >> is fascinating. Why would grown organisms with important things to... > > Isn't this what Skinner called "adventitious conditioning"? Skinner's >hypothesis was that ritual behavior arose when an operant made a false >stimulus-response correlation. . . . The biggest problem I have with this suggestion is the the application of "false" to "correlation". Inverse or negative correlations I can understand, and I can understand low correlation coefficients. I can even understand temporary, accidental, and non-repeatable correlations. But to apply the term "false" at all, to any correlation, no matter how pathological, is an example of the basic problem of behaviorism - there are concepts that scientists apply to each other's work which are completely useless in explanations of animal behavior. Falsehood is one of these concepts, and for Behaviorism to be consistent, it must eliminate that term entirely from its vocabulary. Now, I have no problem at all with using a system of describing animal (including human) behavior which does not include any semantic, intentional, or normative concepts. On the contrary, I think that no explanation of animal bahavior can be satisfying unless all *observations* can be accounted for in non-intentional terms. However, it is *clearly false* that all *concepts* can be reduced to behavioristic terms. Truth and falsehood cannot be reduced to syntactic terms (by Tarski's theorem), and syntax cannot be reduced to typographic terms (think of cyphers and Pig-Latin). But a very significant (I would say the most interesting) part of human behavior consists of applying semantic, intentional, and normative terms to people, places and processes. The conjunction of these two positions makes theorizing about behavior very difficult. I would say that any attempt to simplify the issue is at best a deferral, and at worst an evasion, of real questions. I see no alternative to the hypothesis of unconscious (ie non-intentional) psychological processes, and a difficult and confusing project of explaining subjective experience in terms of them. > I've wondered if we couldn't extend the concept of adventitious >conditioning to a behavioral explanation of religion in human culture. >Religious ritual is nothing more than a stimulus-response correlation that does >not correlate with the actual s-r sequence Oh? How would you propose to distinguish religious ritual from mathematical calculation? Or any other rule-governed activity with a problematic epistemological foundation? I would not attempt to defend (most) religious doctrines, but any attentive philosophy undergraduate would be prepared to debunk most contemporary justifications of mathematical theory and practice. The plain fact is that very many mathematicians believe wholeheartedly in a Platonic Heaven. This is an example of what I am calling a *fantasy*, and when such a belief is used to explain one's own behavior, that behavior is what I call a *ritual*. I don't see much hope for finding an "actual s-r sequence" that correlates with the method of indirect proof, or mathematical induction. Fred, I apologize for the harsh tone of this reply. I actually have a great deal of sympathy for any method that professes to have strict scruples, and does not shy away from applying those scruples to the "sacred cows". But, please, not as a blunt instrument! Ken Presting ("A scruple is a two-edged blunt instrument")