Encefalus

Lately I have been reading this book: The Hidden Pattern: A Patternist Philosophy of Mind. The book deals, quite obviously, with philosophy of mind and all the matters that touch this subject, including free will. The author is Ben Goertzel who happens to be a very interesting person. He holds a PhD in mathematics, but has dealt with cognitive science, and economics and currently focuses on AI research. He has written many more books, although this is the first one that I read.

Ben Goertzel

What seperates Ben Goertzel’s writing from that of others is his ability to combine philosophy and eastern religion into a unified perspective, like a new-ager, but unlike a new-ager, he creates logical and mathematical proofs for his problems. Don’t get me wrongs, but those people into new age philosophies have a tendency to mesh-up everything around, creating arguments that seem plausible (at least to those with no formal scientific background), but they are truly meaningless. Ben Goertzel truly embraces the problems from a scientific perspective.

The reason I am writing this article is that I found a very interesting piece of theory in this book. Well, actually, the book is full of interesting theories (and facts) and even though I’m just in the middle of it, it has got me into a lot of thinking. However, what really caught my attention was a theory inspired by quantum mechanics that really simplified the problem of free will.

First, we must explain a few fundamental things about quantum physics.

In quantum mechanics a certain property of a particle can be in superposition of its states, that means, it holds many values all at once. The most famous example is Schroedinger’s Cat. In wikipedia there’s a very good explanation of this experiment

Neuroeconomics Explained, Part One

Neuroeconomics Explained, Part Two

While searching the web the other day, I found two very interesting introductory articles on neuroeconomics on Psychology Today. The author is Paul J. Zak who is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. In his bio on his blog (The Moral Molecule) we read the following

Paul J. Zak is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. Zak also serves as Professor of Neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center, and is a Senior Researcher at UCLA. He has degrees in mathematics and economics from San Diego State University, a Ph.D. in economics from University of Pennsylvania, and post-doctoral training in neuroimaging from Harvard. Professor Zak is credited with the first published use of the term "neuroeconomics" and has been a vanguard in this new discipline (emphasis mine). He organized and administers the first doctoral program in neuroeconomics in the world at Claremont Graduate University. Dr. Zak is a recognized expert in oxytocin. His lab discovered in 2004 that an ancient chemical in our brains, oxytocin, allows us to determine whom to trust. This knowledge is being used to understand the basis for modern civilizations and modern economies, improve negotiations, and treat patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders.  

So, what better way to learn a few things about neuroeconomics than from the founder himself?

Paul J. Zak

Further Reading:

Behavioral economics revisited in the face of the recent economic crisis

I was reading this book the other day: Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life. It’s a very interesting book that deals with the cutting edge of current social and cognitive science: the application of computational modelling in social sciences. I will not talk about the details of this book here (I’ll probably talk about agent-based theories and computational models in other articles). I want to talk about something else in this article. In this book I found a term I had never met before: deductive indeterminism.

This term refers to the inability to deduce by logical means a cause for an observable effect. The book was giving an example of a model of how cities form. The model could start with two possible premises, that people want to aggregate together, or that they want to stay alone. In each of the two cases, the computation resulted in the formation of two big cities. Therefore, no matter the cause the effect was the same. Therefore, we couldn’t deduce the cause. This is what we mean by deductive indeterminism.

The reason I was so glad I found this term, is because this was exactly what I was thinking about history and I couldn’t put it in two words.

The study of history is plagued by the diseases of a posteriori-ness and of deductive indeterminism. The scientific method is based on experimentation. However, in history, experimentation is impossible, since things happen only once. So, what historians do, is write huge volumes of books that contain many vague theories with vague notions and models about the procedures that drive history forward.

Of course, what we mean by the term "history" is a matter unto itself. After all, history can deal with many specific things (and their evolution through time) or with almost everything and anything. It’s actually a profound philosophical matter, since if you think about it for a while, this term carries an immense amount of complexity.

History is, actually, a science of facts. However, what kind of facts should a historian find interest in? If we say historic facts then we have made a fallacy, by basing our theory on a cyclical argument. History deals with historic facts and we call some facts historic, because they are part of the study of history. This is obviously the wrong way of thinking.

Furthermore, the term fact is somewhat ambiguous. After all, how can we be sure that something has really happened and constitutes a fact?

There are clearly many sub-fields of history

Wikipedia defines history as following

History is the study of the past, particularly the written record and oral traditions passed down from generation to generation verbally. New technology, such as photography, sound recording, and motion pictures now complement the written word in the historical record. History is a field of research producing a continuous narrative and a systematic analysis of past events of importance to the human race.^[1] Those who study history as a profession are called historians.

This definition of history is probably good enough. History doesn’t deal with facts, but with records, which we hope to provide accurate descriptions of facts.

Now, that we have dealt with this issue, we must elabore a little bit on the methodology of historical analysis.

The problem with history is that it does not constitute a pure science per se like physics. History constitutes a science according to the roots of the word science, the word scientia (latin for knowledge). However, history lacks the two things.

1) Experimental testing

2) A standard methodology

The second doesn’t constitute a real problem, since many sciences have to deal with this problem (like psychology). The first however, clearly proves the problems that history has to deal with.

Not your average historian…

Therefore, what historians do is to try to combine facts with their theories in order to create a cohesive narration of the events they try to explain. And there’s where the problem lies (along with the incentive for this article).

The narrations that historians provide may seem cohesive, but this does not provide any credibility to their theories. Why is that? The answer is simple: deductive indeterminism. Without the chance to experiment on a certain procedure we can never be sure that a theory is right. Until a theory has been experimentally tested every and any theory is at the same time wrong and right. A posteriori every theory seems valid and invalid at the same time.

Of course, many of you might think, "what is this guy saying?". After all, in our everyday lives, we usually deal with theories about everything (from friends to world scale events) at an intuitional level. The theories that the historians provide clearly seem "intuitive". Therefore, why should we reject them?

The reason is simple (but not intuitive ). Think for a while about non-Euclidean geometries in mathematics and theoritical physics. Do these constructs have anything intuitive in them? No. But scientists accepts them. Why? Because they have been given proof about their validity.

The problem with every social science, is that man, the subject that performs the study, is at the same time the object of the study. Our brain has evolved in a certain way to deal with the social reality that surrounds us. We are not used to deal with the social world in terms of statistics and mathematical models. However, these are the only tools that science has verified as truly valid.

Think for example of psychoanalysis. Many people, when they first learn about it, are convinced by the simplicity of the theory. However, as you delve deeper into psychoanalysis, you see that it gets increasingly complex without any particular reason. Vague notions are intertwined with vaguer theories that seem to go nowhere. The same happens with historical analysis. And the reason is simple. If a theory can’t explain clearly a phenomenon you are forced to increase its level of complexity by adding more definitions and notions in order to make it seem more cohesive. The results are theories that provide no explanation for the phenomenon at study.

Maybe not dude…

A posteriori every theory seems valid and invalid at the same time. So, how could history create valid theories? The constant effort of historians to combine different cultural terms, with not actual definition, from different eras of various civilizations in order to create a model of cause and effect for a certain event is, probably, something doomed to fail. So, where should we look for the answer? The answer lies in experimentation.

However, how can historians experiment with their theories? Can they enter into the time machine and go back in time? Or should they create theories about the future and wait for a hundred years to see what happens?

Well, none of these need to happen. I believe the answer to lie in two seperate schools of thought.

The first one is the reductionist school of thought, where by simplifying social processes at all levels, we can find the basic blocks of social and mental life.

The second one, is the school of computational modelling. As we know, many (or even most) systems in nature are complex and non-linear. Most social systems tend to be complex as well.

Computational Modelling

Therefore, what we truly need is to create a science that is based upon the basic blocks of mental life (which will probably be found in our neurons) and then use this base for the modelling of a society. In that case, we will be able to truly simulate decades, centuries and millenia through a computer.

Of course, can this provide true validity to our theories? Maybe not, but this approach will surely provide a solid and clear foundation upon which we can describe and explain social procedures. Should we be able to find the core of social life, then history will unfold as a complete logical sequence of events with no need to appeal to vague terms and strange theories.

Of course, maybe historical analysis still has some things to offer. After all, in our previous post A different view on economics: maybe all we really need we mentioned how Nouriel Roubini rejected mathematical analysis in economics, and forsaw the credict crunch of 2008 through historical analysis.

Nouriel Roubini

Only time (and science) will tell…

Further Reading:

Neurons, politics and economics

As some of you might have noticed, my RSS feed shows sometimes earlier articles. I am writing this to tell you that I’ll try to solve the problem, so don’t worry. If you want to get updated on the latest articles just visit http://encefalus.com to be sure.

The readers of Encefalus probably remember this article: A different view on economics: maybe all we really need.

I found this article recently in the New York Times: The Behavioral Revolution. It is an article that expresses some views similar to the ones we expressed in A different view on economics: maybe all we really need, indicating how psychology can help economists explain the recent credit crunch (for the recent economic crisis see here: Financial crisis of 2007–2008). The publishing of such an article in a newspaper the size of New York Times, clearly shows that here we have an underlying new trend in economics and psychology that breaks the disciplinary boundaries.

David Brooks, the author of the article, makes some very interesting points based on a basic premise: people are irrational.

However, I am always amazed by the chasms that exist betweent the various disciplinary fields. If people were truly rational , as economists, believe, then psychology would have no place as a science. We would study instead formal logic. The study of psychology is nothing more than the study of the laws that define human behavior. And if people acted based on logic alone, then psychology would have reached its final conclusions a long time ago.

Of course, there is always another view on the subject of rationality. Sure, people are irrational, but we can make two exceptions

1)People act rationally in times of danger, like the recent crisis

2)Through the Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem, the noise inherent to the system that is constituted by the interactions of irrational economic agents, is stabilized, resulting to a kind of symmetry that approaches the normal distribution curve and can be analysed by the current mathematical models that the neoclassical economics (the main trend in economics) use.

The first argument can be summarized and refuted by a few words from The Behavioral Revolution article

Over the past few centuries, public policy analysts have assumed that step three is the most important. Economic models and entire social science disciplines are premised on the assumption that people are mostly engaged in rationally calculating and maximizing their self-interest.

But during this financial crisis, that way of thinking has failed spectacularly. As Alan Greenspan noted in his Congressional testimony last week, he was “shocked” that markets did not work as anticipated. “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”

In addition to this statement by Alan Greenspan, I have a very good blog to show you, concerning the first argument: Predictably Irrational. It is a blog by the author of the book Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely from where I found the above link the the NY Times article. As its name clearly implies, it deals exactly with that subject, the irrationality of the human being. There you’ll find many tiny pieces of the grand puzzle of irrationality that works wonders into our heads, making us taking decisions, while at the same time the true reasons of our decisions remain obscure. These ought to convince you over this fact.

Another case of irrationality…

Of course, Encefalus has written many articles on this subject before, since the deconstruction of the hyper-bolstered ego of the human race, is an activity I am really fond of :-). You can read these articles for more information: Lotteries, poverty and social implications, Lotteries, poverty AND credit cards this time along with the proper social and scientific analysis :), Subliminal messaging, subliminal advertising and subliminal learning for a subliminal post , The cookie effect

The second argument posed can be said to be the standard choice for the mathematics that concern many fields of the social sciences. The modern portfolio theory of economics is based on the premise that the system follows the normal distribution curve.

Now, concerning the second argument, we should take a look back at the article A different view on economics: maybe all we really need, where I mention the french mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.

Benoit Mandelbrot

I copy from the original article 

[...]On the other hand, we got the second view we mentioned above, that we need new math. This view has been expressed in many articles in Scientific American. The oldest (I think) and, probably, the most important is this: How Fractals Can Explain What’s Wrong with Wall Street written by Benoit B. Mandelbrot himself, the mathematician who discovered the famous Mandelbrot Set. 

In this article he discusses how portfolio theory has been based on the wrong assumptions (like the normal distribution curve) and therefore, provides wrong results. He proposed the use of fractal geometry instead, which can explain extreme events. In portfolio theory extreme changes are considered unlikely and, therefore, not worth mentioning. In fractal analysis, extreme events are considered a part of the system.

So, the second argument is false as well.

David Brooks mentions many researchers that have explored the field of irrationality

Economists and psychologists have been exploring our perceptual biases for four decades now, with the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, and also with work by people like Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, John Bargh and Dan Ariely. 

My sense is that this financial crisis is going to amount to a coming-out party for behavioral economists and others who are bringing sophisticated psychology to the realm of public policy. At least these folks have plausible explanations for why so many people could have been so gigantically wrong about the risks they were taking.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been deeply influenced by this stream of research. Taleb not only has an explanation for what’s happening, he saw it coming. His popular books “Fooled by Randomness” and “The Black Swan” were broadsides at the risk-management models used in the financial world and beyond.

In “The Black Swan,” Taleb wrote, “The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup.” Globalization, he noted, “creates interlocking fragility.” He warned that while the growth of giant banks gives the appearance of stability, in reality, it raises the risk of a systemic collapse — “when one fails, they all fail.”

Nassim Taleb

Then the article continues by elaborating on the work of Taleb

In “The Black Swan,” Taleb wrote, “The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup.” Globalization, he noted, “creates interlocking fragility.” He warned that while the growth of giant banks gives the appearance of stability, in reality, it raises the risk of a systemic collapse — “when one fails, they all fail.”

Taleb believes that our brains evolved to suit a world much simpler than the one we now face. His writing is idiosyncratic, but he does touch on many of the perceptual biases that distort our thinking: our tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them; our tendency to overvalue recent events when anticipating future possibilities; our tendency to spin concurring facts into a single causal narrative; our tendency to applaud our own supposed skill in circumstances when we’ve actually benefited from dumb luck.

The article also includes Taleb’s interpretation of the recent crisis

And looking at the financial crisis, it is easy to see dozens of errors of perception. Traders misperceived the possibility of rare events. They got caught in social contagions and reinforced each other’s risk assessments. They failed to perceive how tightly linked global networks can transform small events into big disasters.

Taleb is characteristically vituperative about the quantitative risk models, which try to model something that defies modelization. He subscribes to what he calls the tragic vision of humankind, which “believes in the existence of inherent limitations and flaws in the way we think and act and requires an acknowledgement of this fact as a basis for any individual and collective action.” If recent events don’t underline this worldview, nothing will.

I

In wikipedia, you can find some more clarifications 

In 2006, in The Black Swan

Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deem these events "unlikely".

And then the article, closes with a final observation

This meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It’s a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren’t true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.

This is exactly what I am trying to talk about in this blog. Every social science has social implications. The utter idiocy and megalomania of business executives led to a global crisis. In Dangerous Ideas: Information and cultural revolution in the age of the internet or metacognition in the modern society and in Neurons, politics and economics we mentioned Steven Pinker’s view that only through knowledge society can progress. And true knowledge requires the exploration of ideas that are considered, dangerous, revolutionary or even heretical. Maybe we should start to look into the idea of our own irrationality, lest we avoid another catastrophe.

Go grab it at http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/10/encephalon_57_on_min.html

A very simple title. What logic has to do with Encefalus, a blog that mainly deals with psychological issues?

Logic is something that I was always interested in, not for any special reason, but because I am a math-logic geek. But beyond that, I always believed that you can never really do science, unless you have a complete theory of what you can know and what you can’t. You can never be sure about the truth of your premises and statements, unless you know the rules that constitute a premise true.

I’ve been digging into this subject recently. There are many topics in logic that I haven’t studied thoroughly and I need to. However, when you start  to go a little further in the subject you start to think a lot about many things you didn’t previously. You start to question basic principles that you always took for granted.

So, the book I was reading lately was Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. With Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Wittegenstein believed he had solved every problem of philosophy (even though he refuted many of his claims in Philosophical Investigations, which was published after his death).

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tractatus Logico Philosophicus deals with a lot of the fundamendal issues about how we know the world, and of what we can be certain. It is this thing that had me thinking a lot about about the relationship between psychology and philosophy. You see, in earlier times, philosophy was the only way of systematically dealing with a problem. Once the knowledge about a certain topic increases, it becomes a discipline unto itself and it becomes a branch of science. The first sciences that obviously did that were the physical sciences. Psychology didn’t constitute a science, until Wilhelm Wundt created the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879.

Many philosophers have tried to search for the fundamendal truths we can take for granted. Descartes believed that we can be sure only for our existence. Kant and Wittgenstein speak for a thing-in-itself (although Wittgenstein doesn’t call it that way). The main idea behind all these is that we use our senses to identify things, and our senses are limited to one extent or the other. So, every man of logic, before he starts to ask questions about the universe, he should identify what he can know for sure, what he can try to find, and what he can never know.

Wilhelm Wundt

Of course, when most philosophers tried to investigate these questions, science had not advanced so much. Now, science has advanced so much that philosophy is deemed nearly useless. Most of the problems of philosophy can be answered by science.

For example, Wittgenstein believed that the limits of our world are defined by the limits of our language. However, Steven Pinker has noted in his book The Language Instict that this is completely wrong. For example, think of all the times that you are trying to say something, but can’t find the right words. Think of a melody. Are you thinking that melody in words? I don’t think so.

However, philosophy can still offer a lot to science and our everyday lives through logic. If you study logic and apply it to the everyday scientific practice and to your life, you won’t believe the things you’ll see that go wrong, but you believed they were right. I can offer some examples to see what I mean right here.

I was talking with a friend the other day. I was telling him that a lot of greek university students immigrate to other european countries, because there you can make more money and live a better life. He told me, that if that was the case, then everyone would do it. So, let’s analyse this. Let’s take the logical premise that everyone does it. What happens in this case? If everyone discovered how profitable this can be, then everyone would immigrate, and the whole system would rebalance itself so as this behavior becomes the norm and isn’t exceptionally profitable anymore.

For those of you who didn’t get this right, take a look at that picture.

Normal distribution

This is called normal distribution. It is a curve that many things follow, like IQ. Bill Gates for example, is a person that belongs to the upper 0.2%. Let’s say that back in the 80s, everyone had the abilities of Bill Gates, so everyone was a computer wizard and had the idea and the discipline to work towards a computer revolution. Then, Bill Gates would immediately stop being in the upper 0.2% and would be in the 68% in the middle. Why? Because the system would rebalance itself!

IQ actually is one of the most well known entities that rebalance themselves over each generation. James R. Flynn described what we know as the Flynn Effect. That is, the increament of IQ in every generation for about 20 points. So, in every generation, what was previously considered brilliant, is now considered normal. This is why John McCain who is way past his age can’t get a thing about internet :-P. For more on the Flynn Effect and what IQ constitutes (since it is a disputable topic, what IQ actually measures) you can read a previous article in Encefalus: How the Dark Knight, cartoons and video games make you smarter and what this has to do with the Flynn effect

I’m sorry, but this ain’t no country for old men John…

I call the type of thinking we showed above reverse bandwagon effect. The bandwagon effect is a logical fallacy based on the following assumption: many people do it, so it must be right. In this scenario, we had the reverse type of thinking: if it was the right thing to do, then everyone would do it.

Other example I can offer is with the same guy. We were disputing over the number of cars in the city. You see, here, there are a LOT of cars, which obviously causes an immense amount of traffic, along with pollution and accidents. My position on the subject was that many people here just take the cars to the city center without any particular reason, other the fact that they are too bored to walk and that cars should be banned from some areas of high traffic. Then, my friend responded that maybe many people take the car for a case of medical emergency and the car is obviously a good means of transportation for such situations.

Join the wagon baby!!

Well, let’s analyse this premise. Let’s say that a lot of people every day use the car for a case of medical emergency. Then, what happens is that they get stuck in the traffic that they created. So, they fail to reach the hospitals and they die. And then, since there are less drivers, there is no traffic.

The second example was much simpler than the first and it surely touches subject such as traffic magement and urban planning, but we clearly saw that through the use of logic, even if it was a very simple case, we could see why this argument was wrong.

This is a very good way to use logic in your everyday life. When you make an assumption, take that premise as if it was true and see what happens. You’ll either see that the proposition is sound, or you’ll be lead into a reductio ad absurdum, thus proving that the first premise is wrong.

If you are thinking at what else this could be applied, besides traffic and Bill Gates, maybe you’ll be glad to learn about a guy named Galileo Galilei. The myth says that he discovered that all objects fall with the same speed by throwing two stones from the Tower of Piza. However, this is false. What he did, was take Aristotle’s premises about the heavier object falling first. So, let’s say that indeed the heavier objects fall before the lighter objects. What would happen if we had a heavy object attached to a light object? The heavy object would be pulled down at a speed equal to X, while the lighter object to a slower speed equal to X - P. Therefore, they heavy object should fall at the same time at a speed equal to X, but at the same time not fall at a speed equal to X, but slower, because it has a lighter object attached to it that slows it down. It is self-evident that this whole proposition is apparently false. Therefore, the only way to solve this problem is to accept the fact that all bodies fall at the same speed.

This example clearly proves the "magic" of logic. By sitting at your armchair you can sometimes discover things about the world that you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Of course, science is science because it happens in the laboratory and not on the armchair. But, as it seems, the armchair can have its uses from time to time :-). After all, think of all the fallacies we perform in our everyday lives. Many people still believe that the heavier object fall first. Think of how many Holywood movies you’ve seen that the someone jumps from a cliff and then the hero jumps and reaches him (something which is clearly impossible).

The use of logic in everyday life has further implications. Just think of Wason’s selection task, where Wason proved how wrong our everyday logic can be.

There are more things I’d like to talk about in this post, but it has already become too large. We didn’t touch the subject of evolutionary theory, since evolution defines the way we think, thus limiting and defining the attempts of philosophers to discuss what constitutes truth and the thing-in-itself. We didn’t even talk about epistimology and the attempt to create a valid theory of knowledge. And we didn’t talk about the philosophy of morality and what it has to do with logic. However, we gave some good examples of how logic can have some applications in everyday life and science. Before we close, I want to include an entry in wikipedia with logical fallacies that we should avoid: List of logical falacies. For a list of cognitive fallacies go to: Cognitive Fallacies.

Logical fallacy…

Mind Hacks: Through a lab darkly.

I stumbled upon this article the other day. It comments on some articles that criticize the current method of cognitive research. The current trend in cognitive research is based on lab research. We take the subjects, put them into the lab, strip out all the factors that could alter the result in order to isolate the variable that interests us, and, through the experimental procedure, we try to find data that could lead us to a conclusion about this variable.

Lab darkly, not scanner darkly

However, there is a serious objection. The mind has evolved in order to face the challenges of the natural world. By putting the subjects into an artifical environment we strip them out of this environment. This could be somewhat like trying to take a bear into a zoo and study it there, while ignoring the fact that bears live in forests.

Alan Kingstone and his colleagues propose that we need a paradigm shift in cognitive research. In this article (Cognitive Ethology: A new approach for studying human cognition) he defends his opinion that we need a new field called Cognitive Ethology. (see ethology in wikipedia)

The intention was that by minimizing the complexity of the environment and maximizing the experimental control, investigators could create theories that would be universally valid. However, by the mid-1970s it had become very clear that most statements were true if, and only if, particular laboratory conditions were met. In other words, the relationship between factor A and factor B was predictable if, and only if, specific conditions were established within the lab; the relationship
between factors became unpredictable when these laboratory situations were not met. Thus, for example, memory experiments found that what people remembered depended on factors such as (a) what processing they performed on the stimulus materials; (b) what stimulus materials they expected to receive; (c) what materials were actually presented; (d) what people were doing before their memory was measured; (e)how their memory was measured, and so on and so forth. The take home message was that cognitive processes vary and are affected by what is happening elsewhere within the cognitive system, and therefore cognitive processes depend critically on the specific situational context in which a subject is embedded.

[...]the next generation of researchers would take their words to heart and try to find a solution to the issue. In hindsight, this faith has proven to be grossly misplaced, as the next generation of researchers have adopted one of the pathological responses of the past and grounded their neuroimaging investigations on the false assumption that cognitive processes are invariant across situations. It is precisely this false assumption that allows researchers to make the remarkable claim that the cognitive processes that they engage and measure in a simple, artificial brain neuroimaging situation captures the same fundamental cognitive processes and associated neural systems that are engaged in a complex natural situation.  

The current paradigm in Cognitive Science treats the brain as a modular computer. Inspired by the computer revolution in the 70s and 80s, it was a revolutionary, way of thinking at the time. The neuroimaging techniques that were discovered in the 80s and 90s made it even easier to use this approach in science, since we could trace the parts of the brain that are active at any given procedure, find the relationships among them and try to unravel the "modules" of the brain and what they do. 

So, the mind and the brain are really much like a machine with different parts that we can seperate and study. However, thism theory might seem valid to many scientists, but the current paper says that these assumptions are really like mathematical axioms. We just took them for granted, but we don’t know if they’re true and this has caused a lot of problems concerning the philosophy that lies behind the current research and the methodology we follow (also take a look at this article at Scientific American - The Brain Is Not Modular: What fMRI Really Tells Us: Scientific American)

Laboratory research in the field of human cognition is founded on the critical assumption that human cognition is subserved by processes that are invariant and regular across situations. This invariance assumption enables one to conduct a study in the laboratory and then to propose that the process being measured is expressed in everyday life. Importantly, there is a second assumption that falls out of the first. Given that processes are assumed to be invariant across situations, it follows that one can reduce situational variability without compromising the nature of the process one is measuring. Indeed, a basic objective of the experimental nvironment in the laboratory is to gain as much control over a situation as is possible so that any change can be attributed to the variable that is being manipulated.

[...]Unfortunately, a result that is invariant within the strict confines of the laboratory does not mean that it is reproducible outside the lab. Indeed, even a cursory examination of the literature reveals that there are many instances where even the most minor change within a laboratory situation will compromise the replicability of an effect (e.g. Atchley & Kramer, 2001; Berry & Klein, 1993; Bindemann, Burton, & Langton, 2008; Soto-Faraco, Morein-Zamir, & Kingstone, 2005; Wolfe & Pokorny, 1990). In addition, as any researcher knows all too well, failed replications that are published represent just the smallest tip of a very large iceberg of failed replications that are obtained in the laboratory and never published.

The iceberg of failed replications…

Furthermore, the theory behind modules causes us two further problems. Firstly, the researcher has to convince that the procedure that he studies really exists, and is not a product of the lab.

Ironically, any attempt to test the assumption of invariance against real-life situations is met immediately with obstacles that arise from the second assumption of experimental control. The first obstacle is that cognitive concepts often become defined by the experimental controls that are used to examine them. For instance, reflexive attention is often defined as a process that benefits the detection of, and response to, a visual target stimulus that occurs shortly after the abrupt onset of a peripheral, spatially non-predictive, stimulus event. It is not clear whether such a sequence of events ever occurs naturally in real life, and if it did, how this event could be measured.

Secondly, once a researcher he studies the current "module" of the cognitive system, he has to convince the scientific community that he found in the lab has some relation to the real world. After all, psychology is the study of behavior and consciousness, not of behavior and consciousness in the lab :-P. This raises other sort of problems.

Let us accept for the moment that this first obstacle is somehow overcome, and reflexive attention as defined in the laboratory is measured in the real world. A researcher is then immediately posed with the second obstacle of having to make the case that the data collected in the real-life situation are, in fact, a manifestation of the same process being measured in the lab. This is a daunting, and perhaps an ultimately impossible, obstacle to surmount. Our reservation is derived from the very fact that variables that are controlled in the laboratory are not controlled in real life. Therefore, a
real-world effect that appears to be the product of a controlled laboratory effect can always be re-attributed to factors that were uncontrolled in real life. Conversely, the failure to find evidence of a laboratory effect in the real world can be dismissed, as it is a fallacy to conclude that something does not occur simply because one does not find evidence for its existence. Thus, there is no direct way to demonstrate or refute that causal factors found in a simple lab-based setting are also being expressed in a complex real-world situation. Note that the purported real-world relevance of lab-based findings cannot be falsified; such claims, therefore, are, in this most important regard, unscientific.

An unscientific magazine

Here is one more (more at http://www.somethingawful.com/d/photoshop-phriday/reverse-magazines.php)

Here, we could provide an analogy to make this understood better. Let’s say that someone wants to study basketball. He comes to the conclusion that basketball is a modular game constituted of the abilities of shooting, jumping, running etc. Then, he tests some subjects in their shooting ability and tries to predict how good will they do in the game. The researcher here has made two mistakes.

1)He hasn’t studied the ability of shooting to other abilities. Someone might be a bad shooter, but may have a high average score because he can get under the basket and dunk.

2)The ability required in basketball is not just shooting, but shooting under stress. This means that you have to shoot with a guy’s hand into your face, or while running, or without even looking at the basket.

It is well known in sport coaches that the training for a sport, must be sport specific. That means, that should a basketball player try to run faster, he must train with and without a ball, because if he just trains without a ball, when he is called to sprint to the other side of the court with the ball, he’ll probably forget every motor skill he has acquired.

Of course, all sports are modular to some extent. This explains why squatting for example can be a good training strategy for jumping high. But, squatting alone for basketball, which is our example, would be a fundamendal mistake, that professional coaches obviously don’t do.

Modular science

A happy occurence in this paper is the mentioning of non-linear dynamic systems. According to the authors, the current paradigm can explain linear relationships, but cannot explain non-linear ones.

Driving the nail further into this coffin is the fact that general systems theory (see Ward, 2002; Weinberg, 1975) has demonstrated that tight experimental control can be effective at revealing the basic characteristics of simple linear systems but it is ineffective at revealing the characteristics of complex, non-linear systems, which must surely include the human cognitive system. General systems theory holds that certain stable characteristics of complex systems are only revealed, or emerge, when several variables are able to vary together. Of course, this is precisely what is prohibited in controlled laboratory situations, and it is precisely what occurs in uncontrolled natural situations. 

Non-linear dynamic systems could be the future of psychology. Although there are not many handbooks and articles in field, it shows some promise. The main object of this approach is to emply tools from the fields of nonlinear systems and dynamical systems to psychology. I promise to dedicate another post to this topic, since we can’t elaborate on this topic in just a few words. 

So, what the authors propose is, as we said before, is Cognitive Ethology. Ethology, is the study of a behavior in its natural setting.

Something like that, but in a cognitive setting

A second option, and one that we explore in the remainder of this paper, is to first directly study how people behave in their natural real-world environments before moving into the lab. That is, rather than being locked into a laboratory paradigm with the a priori assumption that the paradigm or task that is being applied is tapping into processes that are expressed in
everyday life-situations, one would instead opt to explore first how people behave as they function within a naturally occurring situation. Once this complex problem space is identified and described then one could begin to move into the laboratory to test hypotheses that are generated by real-world observations. We have called this approach ‘Cognitive Ethology’. 

As you see, all these are fairly interesting, and I recommend you to read the paper. The subject of how science should be performed constitutes a great debate. In this article we discussed about cognitive science and simple cognitive experiments. However, there are other approaches and other implications we should discuss about. 

For example, take a look at that: Top 10 Unethical Psychological Experiments - The List Universe. This article describes some experiments that by today’s standards are deemed inhumane. So, it is self-evident that we should take morality into account as well, when we talk about experimentation, since science is not only a matter of validity, but also, a matter of utility, be it in the society or in the individual. In cognitive science the usual subjects are humans, but in other fields of psychology, they are animals. If the lab experimentation can’t guarantee the promised results, maybe ethology is both the moral thing to do and the right choice from an epistimological perspective.

Before we close this article I want to make a mention to Stephen Wolfram and his theory of the empirical study of very simple computational systems that he explains in his book A New Kind of Science. It is an alternative to the traditiona trend in science to see everything through the field of either mathematics (like in physics) or social analysis (like in political philosophy or sometimes in social psychology). I promise I’ll write more about it in future articles.

Finally, I’ll make a mention to something that many of you my not know: On-line experiments! This article here (Top Ten Online Psychology Experiments) presents what it considers the best online experiments. I am learning to program myself right now at c#. Once I finish with that, I’ll take on php with the purpose to start my own experiments on this site!

Stephen Wolfram

Further Reading:

As new kind of science, as data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete…

Go grab it at Encephalon #56

Lately I have to deal with a lot of things in my life. So, I have been thinking about the relationship between information and the human cognitive system. How much information can we absord at a time? How can we filter the noise out of it and keep the useful stuff? How can we manage our time to perform this task better?

You see, the 21st century is a stressed-out century. Everything is running. So do we. In this article we will discuss how the processing of information by humans could be improved in the following decades.

First of all, we must ponder a while on the role that information plays on the human mind and brain. Well, yeah, surely we’ve all heard about the relationship between genes and culture, culture and behavior etc. However, there are other ways to look at this that you might have not thought of.

Take this link at Seed Magazine: http://revminds.seedmagazine.com/revminds/member/lambros_malafouris/. It is a feature that presents 5 researchers who are breaking the disciplinary bountaries. Lambros Malafouris is a researcher at Cambridge University, who has created what he calls Neuroarchaeology. 

Everything is running, but maybe running isn’t for everyone

The mainstream approach to cognition holds that it happens in the mind and that material culture is nothing more than an outgrowth of our mental capacities. Archaeologist Lambros Malafouris is challenging this deep-seated idea with a radical new notion: the hypothesis of extended mind, which posits that material culture is not a reflection of the human mind but an actual part of it. Take, for instance, a blind man’s stick. "Where does the blind man end and the rest of the world begin?" he says. "You might see the stick as something external, but it plays a very important role in the perceptual system of this person. It extends the boundaries of this human—the stick becomes an integral part of the cognitive architecture."

If material culture is an extension of human cognition, our engagement with it has actively shaped the evolution of human intelligence, Malafouris argues. For example, ancient clay tablets that allowed people to actually write down records were not mere objects, he says. Instead, they became integral adjuncts of the human memory system. The invention of such a technology "changes the structure of the human mind," says Malafouris, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge. Rather than happening wholly in the head, he argues, cognition develops and evolves through the interplay between intelligence and material culture.

Malafouris’s unorthodox view has shaped his approach to his empirical archaeological research, which includes analyses of Paleolithic art, Bronze Age writing tablets, and 21st century neuroprostheses. Indeed, one of his interests involves using the hypothesis of extended mind to understand how future technologies might further sculpt our cognitive processes. He calls this endeavor—which bridges archaeology, cognitive science, neuroscience, anthropology, and philosophy—neuroarchaeology. "A lot of people might still resist the idea of extended cognition and might prefer to see the human brain as the most important component of the human cognitive system," he says. "But I’m trying to develop a new philosophical approach to how we can study the human mind." 

Researcher Lambros Malafouris

Well, as I was reading this, it reminded me of something. It actually reminded me of my own view of Encefalus. I have repeatedly said that this blog is actually an external hard drive of my mind where I can store my thoughts safely for later retrieval. The stream of thought is everflowing, and to catch a glimpse of it is a work that must happen at an instant, before the flow transforms into something else, something new, and something entirely different. So, while the cane is an extension of the blind man, the blog can be an extension of the researcher/thinker/philosopher/anyone.

I am happy that I am not the only person around with this view on blogging. Plos Biology has an article on that: PLoS Biology - Advancing Science through Conversations: Bridging the Gap between Blogs and the Academy.

Of course, Web 2.0 does involve only blogs, but social networking as well. I have expressed some opinion on the matter at articles of my own at: The Digg Factor: The Digg Phenomenon and a Possible Elementary Model of the Core Processes of Digg.

Seed Magazine has another interesting article on how evolution and culture co-exist: How We Evolve. This article presents arguments on how technology, large cities and culture increase the speed of  the evolutionary process.

.

My thoughts

"Intelligence builds on top of intelligence," says Lahn. "[Culture] creates a stringent selection regime for enhanced intelligence. This is a positive feedback loop, I would think." Increasing intelligence increases the complexity of culture, which pressures intelligence levels to rise, which creates a more complex culture, and so on. Culture is not an escape from conditioning environments. It is an environment of a different kind. 

Both events inched toward a threshold that, once crossed, was soon left far behind. The 20th century, in which it took us a mere 60 years to elaborate the horse-drawn carriage into a vehicle that carried us to the Moon, and the howitzer into a 50-megaton nuclear weapon, was another threshold. The forces that we created are on a different scale than those of nature, which works slowly.[...]

The article also proposes that through technology, man could become a driving force of his own evolution, reaching perhaps what I would call a state of Meta-Evolution.

The second face of Homo sapiens‘ eventual exit from history is the more hopeful possibility that we may yet evolve into our own successors. Unlike our forebears, we are aware of evolution, which changes our relationship to it, if only by a little, for we are still natural creatures. We continue to evolve, in the face of hunger, disease and a changing ecosystem; but our virtual habitat of culture could enable us to become both subjects of evolution and conscious co-directors of it. "It’s occurring," says Ehrlich. "There’s no question about it. What’s frightening is the questions we’ll have to ask."

Technology and evolution

Of course, this conversation includes the possible risks that technology brings, like the possibility of mass extinction by nuclear warfare, but we will not delve into this topic in this article. 

The self-evolution concept we presented above is something that can be seen in many places and in many facets. Such a facet is human cyborgs and brain controlled machines. Kevin Warwick is certainly the example of a human cyborg. He is a professor of cybernetics in Reading, England and has implanted electronic devices in his body and connected them with his nervous system. Another example is the famous robot arm monkey

The recent economic crisis made me think a lot about the subject of economics. As I’ve said in earlier posts, I’m very interested in economics, and I believe them to be an integral part of cognitive science, or any science that aims to comprehend the human behavior and civilization (Some thoughts on a new micro-economic model and paradigm, through the integration of psychology into economics, Lotteries, poverty AND credit cards this time along with the proper social and scientific analysis , Lotteries, poverty and social implications , Neurons, politics and economics). The current problems that the economy faces make pretty obvious that the economic theories we have are weak. In this article we will discuss various articles and voices that have appeared in the last years that speak about a paradigm shift in economics.

It is pretty obvious that a main interest of economics is how to predict economic behavior, for example stock market behavior. A common approach to this is technical analysis which is really a mathematical analysis and prediction thereof, of a stock’s future direction, based on some premises. However, it is evident that the math that economists use, in this case, failed them.

Here we are faced with the following dilemma: The math approach is wrong all together, or we need new math.

The first approach, the math are wrong all together, is taken by Nouriel Roubini. Nouriel Roubini is the man who predicted the current recession in 2004. He criticises the mathematical approach to economics, using instead a historical analysis. Wikipedia quotes 

In the 1990s, Roubini studied the collapse of emerging economies. Consistent with the unusual talent noted by Sachs, he used an intuitive, historical approach backed up by an understanding of theoretical models to analyze these countries and came to the conclusion that a common denominator across examples was the large [current account] deficits financed by loans from abroad. Roubini theorized that the United States might be the next to suffer, and in 2004 began writing about a possible/future collapse. 

Professor Nouriel Roubini

This can be said to be true to some extent. Certainly, mathematics can’t predict completely abnormal behaviors, when will happen and what their exact effect will be. On the contrary, a historical analysis can provide common patterns that could indicate common causes and future effects. 

On the other hand, we got the second view we mentioned above, that we need new math. This view has been expressed in many articles in Scientific American. The oldest (I think) and, probably, the most important is this: How Fractals Can Explain What’s Wrong with Wall Street written by Benoit B. Mandelbrot himself, the mathematician who discovered the famous Mandelbrot Set.

Mandelbrot Set

In this article he discusses how portfolio theory has been based on the wrong assumptions (like the normal distribution curve) and therefore, provides wrong results. He proposed the use of fractal geometry instead, which can explain extreme events. In portfolio theory extreme changes are considered unlikely and, therefore, not worth mentioning. In fractal analysis, extreme events are considered a part of the system.

Mandelbrot’s article was written in 1999. This article in Scientific American was written the previous month, almost after a decade of Mandelbrot’s idea of using fractals to analyse market behavior: Mathematicians predicted stock market volatility years ago. The article cites 

Mandelbrot, 83, contends that portfolio theory, which tries to maximize return for a given level of risk, treats extreme events (like, say, yesterday’s market shockers) with “benign neglect: it regards large market shifts as too unlikely to matter or as impossible to take into account.” The faulty assumption of modern portfolio theorists, in Mandelbrot’s view, is that price changes do not drift far from the mean when observing daily ups and downs—so extreme events are exceedingly rare. “Typhoons, in effect, are defined out of existence,” he wrote. 

……..

Perhaps the most telling criticism of Mandelbrot’s work comes from the markets themselves. In the decade or so since his article was published, the use of multifractal market analysis is still largely an academic endeavor. But Mandelbrot should not be judged too harshly. Multifractals may not be in routine use on the trading floors. But Mandelbrot’s work on market extremes has served to broadcast to the Street a notion that has been known forever on the street: Yes, Virginia, sh*t really does happen. 

Benoit Mandelbrot

Well, as it seems the market didn’t absorb Mandelbrot’s ideas. However, this doesn’t mean he was wrong. Moreover, this doesn’t end our discussion here. The need for change in economics is pretty much self-evident, now that the scientific tools we use couldn’t predict or help in the crisis.

This need for change is expressed in many ways. Take another article in Scientific American: The Economist Has No Clothes. In the article we read

The 19th-century creators of neoclassical economics—the theory that now serves as the basis for coordinating activities in the global market system—are credited with transforming their field into a scientific discipline. But what is not widely known is that these now legendary economists—William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Maria Edgeworth and Vilfredo Pareto—developed their theories by adapting equations from 19th-century physics that eventually became obsolete. Unfortunately, it is clear that neoclassical economics has also become outdated. The theory is based on unscientific assumptions that are hindering the implementation of viable economic solutions for global warming and other menacing environmental problems.

It seems, that the author of the article, Robert Nadeau, is not the sole believer in a different kind of economics. Take a look at this site, Post Autistic Economics, which is dedicated to creating an alternative to classical economics. In their history we read 

In March 2003 economics students at Harvard launched their own petition, demanding from its economics department an introductory course that would have “better balance and coverage of a broader spectrum of views” and that would “not only teach students the accepted modes of thinking, but also challenge students to think critically and deeply about conventional truths.”2 

Students have not been alone in mounting increasing pressure on the status quo.  Thousands of economists from scores of countries have also in various forms taken up the cause for broadband economics under the banner “Post-Autistic Economics” and the slogan “sanity, humanity and science”  The PAE movement is not about trying to replace neoclassical economics with another partial truth, but rather about reopening economics for free scientific inquiry, making it a pursuit where empiricism outranks a priorism and where critical thinking rules instead of ideology. 

Robert Nadeau has another article on Scientific American expressing similar views and anxiety about how classical economics have caused, and can’t deal with, the current environmental problems: Brother, Can You Spare Me a Planet? (Extended version)

The physics that the economists used as the template for their theories was developed from the 1840s to the 1860s. During this period, physicists responded to the inability of Newtonian mechanics to account for the phenomena of heat, light and electricity with a profusion of hypotheses about matter and forces. In 1847 Hermann-Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz, one of the best known and most widely respected physicists at this time, posited the existence of a field of energy that could unify these phenomena. This proposal served as a catalyst for a movement called "energetics" in which physicists attempted to explain very diverse physical phenomena in terms of a vaguely defined protean field of energy that fills all space.

The strategy used by the creators of neoclassical economics was as simple as it was absurd—the economists copied the physics equations and changed the names of the variables. In the resulting mathematical formalism, utility becomes synonymous with the amorphous field of energy described in the equations taken from the physics, and the sum of utility and expenditure, like the sum of potential and kinetic energy in the physical equations, is conserved. Forces associated with the field of utility (or, in physics, energy) allegedly determine prices, and spatial coordinates correspond with quantities of goods. Because the physical system described in the equations of the theory in physics is closed, the economists were obliged to assume that the market system described in their theory is also closed. And because the sum of energy in the equations that describe the physical system is conserved, the economists were also obliged to assume that the sum of utility in a market system is also conserved.

Robert Lucas, Jr. is another economist who has a different view on which path economics should take. In Wikipedia we read the following 

One of the most influential economists since the 1970s, he changed the foundations of macroeconomic theory (previously dominated by the Keynesian economics approach), arguing that a macroeconomic model should be built in analogy with microeconomic models. He is well known for his investigations into the implications of the assumption of rational expectations. He developed the "Lucas critique" of economic policymaking, which holds that relationships that appear to hold in the economy, such as an apparent relationship between inflation and unemployment, could change in response to changes in economic policy. He also developed the Lucas-Islands model, which suggests that people are tricked by unsystematic parts of monetary policy, the Lucas-Uzawa model (with Hirofumi Uzawa) of human capital accumulation, and stated the "Lucas paradox" why not more capital is flowing from developed countries to developing countries.  

Does this remind you something? Those of you who read Encefalus will remember my somewhat awkward attempt to discuss the possible principles of a new theory of economics based on psychology at Some thoughts on a new micro-economic model and paradigm, through the integration of psychology into economics. All this also can be conncected with some opinions expressed in another Scientific American article, The Mind of the Market, where Michael Shermer, who’s someone that I respect for his radical views on science and his great articles, discusses how evolutionary theory should be incorporated into economics. Another article on evolution and economics at Scientific American can be found at Evonomics.

Finally, we got some views that might seem a little strange like this: What Can Virtual-World Economists Tell Us about Real-World Economies?  Of course, those of you who read Encefalus, might not be enstraged by this one, since we have expressed similar opinions in previous articles (Seed agrees that video games make you smarter , More proof that video games make you smart , How the Dark Knight, cartoons and video games make you smarter and what this had to do with the Flynn effect. ) . This article explains how the study of virtual economies could help us in the study of real economies.  Of course, it pretty evident that they have their differences, but, nevertheless, you can’t criticize a new approach before you see its results.

So, as you can see, there have been many different views on how economics should change. It’s pretty obvious that this is due to two reasons. First, as science advances, interdisciplinary research becomes even more important, since the boundaries between disciplines are not only blurred, but are withering due to the obvious need for the integration of one science into the other, like for example the integration of psychology into economics. Secondly, the crisis and other global problems, like the climate change, the oil crisis etc. are showing the weaknesses of classical economics. The imperati