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Subject: PSYCOLOQUY V1 #8 (discussion/squib : 244 lines)
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PSYCOLOQUY                  Fri, 25 May 90       Volume 1 : Issue  8
      New academic group interested in the nature of consciousness.
      Strong, Sperber, Cotnoir and culture
      Ecological Validity of Psychological Experiments

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From: GS109%PHOENIX.CAMBRIDGE.AC.UK@pucc
Subject: New academic group interested in the nature of consciousness.

The CONSCIOUS SYSTEMS NETWORK (CSN) is a recently formed academic group
which should be of interest internationally to students in the cognitive
sciences, psychology, AI, linguistics and, indirectly, the philosophy
of mind.

Our main concern is with the failure of science to understand the
nature of consciousness as the product of a high-level function of the
brain. Examples of the far-reaching consequences of this failure are
our ignorance of the criteria which a brain-event must satisfy to
enter consciousness; the missing neural link between language and
reality; a general lack of clarity about the end-product of the visual
processes and, for instance, the manner in which space is represented
in the brain; failure to understand the neural correlates of mental
events generally; uncertainty about the biological function of
consciousness and about levels of consciousness in the animal world.

The twin objectives of the network are to promote a more rigorous and
methodical scientific attack on the problem of consciousness than has
hitherto been in evidence, and to serve as an organ of information
exchange in this respect. Among our basic beliefs are the following:-

1. Mind, and the relation between mind and brain, cannot be understood
by science until consciousness is understood. Since we take
consciousness to be the product of a high-level function of the brain,
the problem is to find an account of this function in the precise
language of the natural sciences and to unravel the manner in which it
comes to be realized in the neural networks of the brain.

2. Since consciousness is a property of the organism as a whole, the
only proper approach to this problem is a top-down approach, i.e. an
accurately targeted application of systems thinking, the system in
question being the brain-body system.

3. We believe that any key-concepts and hypotheses the investigation
comes to introduce should throughout be defined or formulated in the
precise language of the natural sciences with its unequivocal reference
to observables. For example, any suggestion that consciousness implies
(inter alia) a power of the brain to form internal representations of
external objects, events or situations, should be coupled with a
clarification in causal, functional or structural terms, of the precise
sense in which 'representation' is here to be understood. And, functional
terms should not be used without their prior clarification in nonfunctional
(e.g. causal) terms.

There are two main reasons for this. The greater the intricacy of a
problem, the greater needs to be the care taken not only with the
logic but also with the semantics of any attempted solution. No
logical inference is stronger than the least definite meaning
occurring in the terms of its premises. Secondly, the ultimate success
of the top-down approach depends on its meeting the bottom-up
approach of the neurosciences, which is already conducted in the
precise language of the natural sciences.

4. These strictures apply also to the technical definition of
'consciousness' which the theory needs to introduce. The problem here
is to find a formula that will satisfy the precision demanded and yet
manages to capture enough of the common meaning the term to satisfy
the ultimate object of the exercise.

In his recently published "LIFE, BRAIN, AND CONSCIOUSNESS"
(Elsevier/North Holland, 1990) Gerd Sommerhoff, co-founder of the
group, has shown how these principles may be implemented, and
illustrated the range of new perceptions and answers that may flow
from this line of attack, including tentative answers to the issues
cited at the top of this document.

                                ***

If interested, write to Kevin Murphy, 338 King's College, Cambridge,
UK, CB2 1ST (group secretary), or e-mail to KPM10 @ UK.AC.CAM.PHX.
from JANET, KPM10 @ PHX.CAM.AC.UK from other networks.

------------------------------

From: JERRY BARKOW <BARKOW%AC.DAL.CA@pucc>
Subject: Strong, Sperber, Cotnoir and culture

                       Theories of Culture

     Good to see interest in culture.  I argue at some length, in my
recent book "Darwin, Sex, and Status: Biological Approaches to Mind
and Culture" (University of Toronto Press, 1989), that it is useful to
think of culture as a pool of somewhat organized information.  The
crucial question is not whether culture is "really" particulate but,
rather, what the categories are in terms of which the brain chooses
information from the cultural pool; and the attentional channels and
mechanisms that regulate what kinds of information gets absorbed when
and how.  More globally, individuals select, edit, and refashion
socially transmitted information (culture) according to algorithms
that, at least in the Pleistocene, would have tended to enhance their
genetic fitness.  I use the traditional anthropological terminology (I
am an anthropologist, after all), "mazeway," to indicate the elaborate
set of cognitive maps that the individual builds using (though not
only using) culturally provided information. An individual has a
mazeway, a population has a culture (in which an individual
participates).

     Social scientists (e.g., Marvin Harris) tend to provide theories
theories of culture transmission either for culture change or for
culture stability.  The approach I am sketching out implies that only
one such transmission theory is needed, one that specifies the
"editing" rules in mazeway construction.  "Enculturation" becomes not
a passive process but, as psychologists if not many anthropologists
have long recognized, an active one in which the child and adult play
the roles of editors and revisers.  (Contrast this approach with the
Whiting focus of child training and discipline.)  This is not the
place in which to summarize a rather large book (which some of you may
have already read), but an example of a psychological mechanism
affecting culture transmission and change is the rule "learn
preferentially from the high in status" (a rule that no doubt could
use a great deal more empirical study).  Changing ecological
conditions affect the relative success of "traditional" strategies for
prestige and thus can lead people to change their culture (the hunter
can't find any game but the farmer is doing well so, as an adolescent,
I may learn preferentially from the farmer and follow his strategy --
adolescence is a time of maximum sensitivity to differences in
relative standing).

     How do we acquire cultural information?  I argue that it is
useful (note the deliberately careful choice of words) to think of the
brain as processing information in Miller, Galanter, and Pribram
fashion, using goals, plans, and codes.  At their most basic level,
these are "wired in" by evolution.  But they have many "subs" added to
them, and the more "subs" the more culturally labile the information
in question.  A language acquisition device might be the deepest of
codes, but after that we have a variety of languages, dialects, etc.
The goal of achieving high relative standing may be wired in but after
that we find a plethora of culturally provided subplans for achieving
it.  (I simplify greatly, since I am leaving out a theory of
self-esteem and an analysis of the relationship between primate social
dominance and human striving for social prestige.)  If culture is
information then we may wish to think of it as consisting of subcodes,
subplans, and subgoals.  (Structuralists in anthropology find what I
think of as subcodes in many information domains of which language is
only one.)

     Thinking of culture as particulate is justifiable in some cases
-- that is what transmission theorists like Boyd and Richerson do, and
they provide some interesting results. But they have only one category
of cultural "particle" and one set of transmission rules per
mathematical model, and this is too much of an oversimplification.
Subcodes may be acquired quite faithfully, for example, but the
acquisition of subplans associated with the prestige goal is much more
flexible (a statement that leads to a theory of what the adolescent
identity crisis is about, but I can't summarize an entire book, here,
tempted though I may be).  The real differences between Lumsden and
Wilson and Boyd and Richerson stem from the fact that Lumsden and
Wilson appear to have codes and subcodes in mind, while Boyd and
Richerson seem to be thinking of plans and subplans (Barkow, p. 265).

     The plan/goal/code trichotomy is very provisional -- I think the
information categories the brain uses in receiving and processing
information are far more numerous and subtle, and that the Leda
Cosmides algorithmic approach is the way to go.  But I also think that
the treatment of culture transmission and change that results from
even a simple trichotomy is far more powerful than is the
psychology-free "meme" approach that Dawkins, among others, advocates.

     Comments, anyone?

Jerry Barkow (E-mail to BARKOW@AC.DAL.CA, S-mail to Dept. of
Sociology and Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University, Halifax,
N.S. B3H 1T2.  Canada.)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: steve fuller <FULLER@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU>
Subject: Ecological Validity of Psychological Experiments

<There's a growing body of literature in social psychology (e.g. Gergen, Harre
and Secord, Greenwood, Danziger, Morawski) that casts doubts on the epistemic
value  of  experiments  by  arguing  that  the  lab  is  an "artificial" and
"unrepresetnative"  social  setting  from which to draw conclusions about the
"natural"  workings  of  some  social  practice.  The  critics tend to regard
ethnography  and  history  as  more  "natural"  methods  with which to examine
social life.

However, a telling feature of their argument is a tendency to take the social
character of the lab experiment (e.g. the fact that the experimenter and subject
constitute  a particular  authority  structure)  as  somehow diminishing the
experiment's epistemic significance. In this regard, the critics unwittingly
draw on a long-standing philosophical prejudice that makes revealing the social
constraints  on  some  activity  tantamount  to demonstrating the activity's
illegitimacy.

I would suggest, however, that the social character of the psychology
experiment merely reinforces the idea "acquiring knowledge about people" is
no different from any other human activity in that it is typically conducted
in certain times and places (rather than others), and that attempts to claim
that the activity occurs outside those times and places must bear the burden
of showing how these atypical instances are related to the typical ones.
Thus, claims to the effect that, in ordinary life, we operate with tacit, yet
largely successful theories of interpersonal relations presuppose that the
ordinary situations can be interpreted as approximating controlled settings
in which these theories can be tested. In other words, the "richness" of our
"folk psychology," which allegedly eludes the controls of lab experiments,
is in fact based on an implicit claim that everyday life is fairly regarded as
the scene of pervasive hypothesis testing much like the very lab experiments
that are being debunked. And so, if the possibility of acquiring knowledge
about people from experiments is denied, then it is not clear what is the
paradgimatic social situation for knowledge acquisition that the critics are
presupposing.>

------------------------------

                          PSYCOLOQUY
                        is sponsored by
                  the Science Directorate of
             the American Psychological Association
                        (202) 955-7653

                          Co-Editors:

  (scientific discussion)              (professional/clinical discussion)

     Stevan Harnad                           Perry London
  Psychology Department                 Dean, Graduate School of
  Princeton University             Applied and Professional Psychology
                                          Rutgers University

                       Assistant Editors:

     Malcolm Bauer                           John Pizutelli
  Psychology Department                  Psychology Department
  Princeton University                     Rutgers University

End of PSYCOLOQUY Digest
******************************