Re: Turing Machines and Physical Computation
From: David Longley (David_at_longley.demon.co.uk)
Date: 11/26/04
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Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 18:59:26 +0000
In article <GtIpd.155286$R05.112941@attbi_s53>, patty
<pattyNO@SPAMicyberspace.net> writes
>David Longley wrote:
>> The following are taken from a series of messages posted internally
>> within a closed network back in 1990. I thought they might be worth
>> citing once again (although without their original context for reasons
>> which some of the more thoughtful here will understand).
>
>I doubt that anyone can guess why you posted this here again.
I know. That's why I posted it. You're supposed to do some work to make
the connections.
>
>> A lot has been
>> said here since. Most folk here won't see a fraction of what it's all
>> about for many reasons that I've already covered. Some might be wise to
>> take their emotional responses as something to further act upon.
>
>Well i went through it again in detail. I understand most of the
>pieces. I have commented on what i got from each in this context. In
>one case i have expressed my own emotion as i felt it was an
>appropriate dialectic to Quine's (and your) own emotional judgment.
Your affective behaviour is not the issue. You will easily be misled if
you just assess what you read in terms of how it makes you "feel".
>However, why you have concatenated these particular pieces together and
>included your own piece about naloxone, i cannot guess.
The piece about naloxone is actually implicitly about the endogenous
opiates, their receptors, and "habit formation" (also known as
"learning", although I don't use that term much. Instead I tend to talk
of changing operant levels through reinforcement of behaviours). If you
want some hints on where this goes you would need to look into the
monoamines like dopamine, activity, the nucleus accumbens and the the
mesolimbic system/ventral striatum. I said not long ago that there were
two classes of responding (behaviour) which I found very dramatic a)
ICSS and b) neophobia. Once you have looked into some of that, you might
like to look into (primarily) young males and especially adolescents,
testosterone, alcohol, and the above system, especially viz a viz the
field I am always implicitly referring to (cf. PROBE).
>
>> ON THE COMPUTER "METAPHOR"
>> 'It has always bothered me that models of psychological
>> processing were thought to be inspired by our understanding of
>> the computer. The statement has always been false. Indeed, the
>> architecture of the modern digital computer - the so-called Von
>> Neumann architecture - was heavily influenced by people's (naive)
>> view of how the mind operated. Perhaps I had better document
>> this. Simply read the work on cybernetics and thought in the
>> 1940's and 1950's prior to the development of the digital
>> computer. The group of workers included people from all
>> disciplines: See the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, or "Her
>> Majesty's Conference on Thought processes". Read the preface to
>> Wiener's book on cybernetics. Everyone who was working together -
>> engineers, physicists, mathematicians, psychologists,
>> neuroscientists (not yet named) - consciously and deliberately
>> claimed to be modelling brain processes.'
>> Reflections on Cognition and Parallel Distributed Processing
>> D.A. Norman
>> (Ch 26, p534, Parallel Distributed Processing Volume 2)
>> McClelland J and Rumelhart D 1986
>
>I get that computer behavior and human behavior are essentially
>different. Why they are so different is certainly what we came here to
>discuss.
>
And that's what "Fragments" is largely about as I have said many times.
>> 'A trait is EFFECTIVE if there is a hard and fast
>> routine by which we can check for it, without guesswork
>> or imagination...It came to be appreciated, in the mid-
>> thirties, that recursiveness affords a sharp explication
>> of effectiveness. This has come to be called Church's
>> Thesis....By its nature, Church's Thesis was not open to
>> formal proof; for the thesis equated a precise property,
>> recursiveness, with a property - effectiveness - that
>> was to be rendered precise only by the thesis itself.
>> But the thesis was supported by such instances as could
>> be mustered, and soon it was pretty well clinched by
>> Alan Turing's pioneer work in the abstract theory of
>> computing machines. His formulation of mechanical
>> computability, in terms of ideal mechanization, turned
>> out to be equivalent to recursiveness. Mechanical
>> computability, surely, is very much what our intuitive
>> talk of effectiveness was aiming at all along; so
>> Church's Thesis is well sustained.'
>> -
>> Quine (1987)
>> Recursion
>
>?
Thread title - but we call it "rule governed behaviour" - do you not get
it yet? What is "rule governed behaviour" Patty? How does it relate to
PROBE?
>
>> 'The first three chapters actually grew out of two
>> earlier papers. Those papers were, in part, polemics
>> against the views of my good friend and student Jerry
>> Fodor. Fodor I hasten to say, is not the main target of
>> this book; but I have retained some of my polemic
>> against what I call "MIT mentalism"... The main target
>> of the present book is one H Putnam (one of my former
>> selves) and those who have adopted his views. Or perhaps
>> it would be more accurate to say that the present book
>> doesn't have a "main target"; for its aim is not so much
>> to refute one particular view as to establish the need
>> for a different way of looking at problems about "mental
>> states". At any rate, the intended contribution of these
>> three chapters to that end is to do two things: (1) to
>> establish a close connection (discovered and emphasised
>> throughout his career by W V Quine) between problems
>> about meaning and problems about belief fixation, by
>> showing that the holistic character of belief fixation
>> in science bears deeply on the issue of individuation of
>> "meanings" (or "contents" or "intentions", as they are
>> called by various philosophers; and (2) to argue that,
>> in fact, thinking of "meanings" (or "contents") as
>> "theoretical entities" - as scientific objects, objects
>> which can be isolated and which can play an explanatory
>> role in scientific theory - is a mistake. In the course
>> of the argument I defend the view that there is no
>> criterion for sameness of meaning except actual
>> interpretative practice - a view made famous by Quine
>> and Davidson'
>> H Putnam (1988)
>> Representation and Reality
>
>>From this i select the pertinent quote to be: "there is no criterion
>for sameness of meaning except actual interpretative practice", which
>works fine for me. I then go a bit beyond that quote to observe that
>"interpretive practice *establishes* meaning" [*]. I then fail to see
>how meaning would not be relative to the agent practicing the
>interpretation. Yet, i believe, you have denied that implication. Now
>i do see how my quote [*] would be considered nonsense, were it our
>agenda to excise the very concept called "meaning" from our ontology.
>Sans that agenda, however, it makes total sense. In fact we could
>define "meaning" as that which interpretive practice establishes, or
>perhaps more precisely: meaning is that which changes as a result of
>interpretive practice. One, of course, hopes that the agenda is not
>going to be used to justify the agenda. Is it?
The term "meaning" is scientifically (and technologically) useless. It
is mentalistic (intensional). That's why Quine talks of exorcising it.
What do we deal with instead? We have been through this at great length,
and you will see Quine say it very explicitly in his comment on Hacking.
What work do you think he is referring to there?
>
>Incidentally that dispute is the only connection that i can find
>between your collage here and recent context in c.a.p.
But all you are doing there is stating what you don't know. I know that.
I've also suggested what you must do to change that (or are you now
doing a Verhey etc on me?). It just doesn't do to tell people you can't
see something. You are the one who has to change that not me.
>
>
>> 'We cannot individuate concepts and beliefs without
>> reference to the ENVIRONMENT. Meanings aren't "in the
>> head."
>> The upshot of our discussion for the philosophy of mind
>> is that propositional attitudes, as philosophers call
>> them - that is, such things as 'believing that snow
>> is white' and 'feeling certain that the cat is on
>> the mat' - are not "states" of the human brain and
>> nervous system considered in isolation from the social
>> and nonhuman environment. A fortiori they are
>> not "functional states" - that is, states definable
>> in terms of parameters which would enter into a
>> software description of the organism. FUNCTIONALISM,
>> CONSTRUED AS THE THESIS THAT PROPOSITIONAL
>> ATTITUDES ARE JUST COMPUTATIONAL STATES OF
>> THE BRAIN, CANNOT BE CORRECT'.
>> The arguments I just summarised were, it might be
>> pointed out in this connection, arguments against
>> methodological solipsism.
>> H. Putnam (1988)
>> 'Representation and Reality'
>> (Professor of Mathematical Logic Harvard)
>
>Again we get it that meanings are not in the head; rather they are
>established by interpretive practice. The practice is public behavior
>which is not in the head.
>
But people don't "get it" do they. They spend an awful lot of time in
c.a.p and elsewhere showing that they don't get it. So do you, you just
don't see it. Nearly all the posts to c.a.p tacitly assume it. When it's
pointed out, those doing so don't see what they are doing and just deny
that they are doing it! It's called lack of insight. This is why this
discipline (behavioural science) is so difficult. Most of the
mathematicians and computer scientist folk here and elsewhere are
"metaphysical" never mind, methodological solipsists. I can see that, so
could Glen. So could Skinner and Quine. You can't.
>> -
>> 'I subscribe entirely to these sentences of Count Verri:
>> On the Nature of Pleasure and Pain: The only moving
>> principle of man is pain. Pain precedes every pleasure.
>> Pleasure is not a positive state.'
>> -
>> Immanuel Kant 1781
>> -
>> -
>> 'Meanwhile our eager-beaver researcher, undismayed by
>> logic-of-science considerations and relying blissfully
>> on the "exactitude" of modern statistical hypothesis-
>> testing, has produced a long publication list and been
>> promoted to a full professorship. In terms of his
>> contribution to the enduring body of psychological
>> knowledge, he has done hardly anything. His true
>> position is that of a potent-but-sterile intellectual
>> rake, who leaves in his merry path a long train of
>> ravished maidens but no scientific offspring.'
>> -
>> P. E. Meehl (1967)
>> Theory Testing in Psychology and Physics
>> Philosophy of Science pp 103-115
>
>I wonder why this quote was included here or what its context is.
The Kant quote leads onto the neophobia abstract. The Meehl paper is a
pointer to one of the segments of "Fragments" which covers the point in
detail - it's a damning critique of mainstream psychology as well as a
pointer to the actuarial vs. clinical section of "Fragments"
>
>> -
>> -
>> C56.
>> -
>> Naloxone enhances neophobia
>> -
>> J.F.W. DEAKIN & D.C. LONGLEY*
>> (introduced by T.J. Crow)
>> -
>> National Institute for Medical Research,
>> Mill Hill, London, NW7 1AA
>> -
>> Several studies report that naloxone, an opiate receptor
>> antagonist, reduces deprivation induced eating and drinking.
>> However, in the present study, naloxone (5mg/kg,i.p.) did not
>> reduce food intake of rats maintained on a 22 h deprivation - 2 h
>> feeding schedule. In contrast, naloxone (5 mg/kg,i.p.)
>> progressively reduced water intake in deprived animals to 46% of
>> saline treated controls. No effects of naloxone (1, 5 mg/kg) on
>> established bar pressing for food or water were observed with
>> either continuous or fixed ratio schedules of reinforcement.
>> However, naloxone (5mg/kg) accelerated extinction of responding
>> when food and water were no longer available.
>> -
>> Animals treated with naloxone (5mg/kg) during training of the
>> bar-pressing ate only 26% of the pellets delivered whereas
>> controls ate all pellets delivered. Since the animals had not
>> previously experienced the pellets or the operant apparatus, the
>> possibilities arose that naloxone effects were due to enhanced
>> neophobic effects of the novel food pellets or novel apparatus
>> cues, or were due to conditioned taste aversion. Therefore, food
>> novelty, apparatus novelty and timing of injections were
>> independently varied in different groups of 8-10 rats treated
>> with saline or naloxone. Rats were maintained at 85% body weight
>> with 12g lab chow per day. On experimental days 46 small pellets
>> (Cambden instruments) were placed on a small petri dish in the
>> home cage of some groups or released from a pellet dispenser in
>> an operant box for other groups. The dependent variable was the
>> number of pellets eaten over 15 minutes.
>> -
>> Naloxone (1,5 mg/kg i.p.) injected 5 or 20 min before test almost
>> completely suppressed pellet eating if the animals had not been
>> previously exposed to the pellets (p<0.01 't' test vs saline
>> groups). This occurred independently of whether tests were
>> carried out in the home cage or novel operant box. Naloxone
>> induced suppression of pellet eating was almost completely
>> abolished in either environment if animals had been exposed to
>> the pellets for the five preceding days in the same or different
>> environment. Naloxone (5mg/kg, i.p.) administered immediately
>> after pellet eating tests failed to suppress subsequent pellet
>> eating.
>> -
>> Thus, naloxone suppressed pellet eating if the pellets were novel
>> and if naloxone was administered before eating tests. The results
>> suggest naloxone enhances neophobic effects of novel foods and
>> that suppression of novel pellet eating is not due to enhanced
>> effects of novelty of apparatus cues or to conditioned taste
>> aversion.
>> -
>> Reference
>> -
>> FRENK, H & ROGERS G.H. (1979) The suppressant effects of naloxone on
>> food and water intake in the rat.
>> Behav. Neural. Biol, 26, 23-40.
>
>Hmmmm ... why was this included ?
As I said, habit formation. Those in the EAB consider the analysis of
the control of operant behaviour to be the analysis of "intelligent"
behaviour. We see your computer "rule governed" behaviour (programming)
as only a part of this. We see computer scientists as naive and
misguided technicians in this respect when they speak of "AI" as they
get behaviour wrong. They tend to be pre 1929 Carnapian as I have said
before, and they won't be told that they have simply got their facts
wrong (I have explained this before - it's a factual error as clear as
pointing out to someone that they are wrong when they say that "snow is
black").
>
>
>> -
>> PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH PHARMACOLOGICAL SOCIETY (BPS) 1-3 April 1981
>> (Also British J Pharmacology 1981)
>> 'A word now about similarity: subjective similarity,
>> which is crucial to the learning process. I don't think
>> anyone has an innate notion of similarity. What one has
>> incontestably is an innate subjective behavioral
>> standard of similarity. It can be tested in people and
>> other animals by conditioning.
>> -
>> It is unfortunate that my phrase 'standard of
>> similarity' suggests judgment or deliberate comparison
>> on the subject's part, but I am at a loss for another
>> word. What is afoot is just conditioning,
>> discrimination, reinforcement, extinction. It is what
>> Stemmer and some other psychologists treat under the
>> head of 'generalization class', but I prefer to allow
>> differences of degree. If a subject is rewarded for a
>> response to one stimulation and penalized for the same
>> response to another, then a third stimulation is
>> subjectively more similar to the first than to the
>> second, for him, if it elicits the response.
>
>... or he is being deceitful, or is no longer interested in responding
>... or has interpreted the third stimulus in a different context
>... or in other words examining external behavior alone is not a
>scientific method for determining the subjective similarity of the
>stimulus ... hmmm, you go into that (p, p*, p**) in detail below ?
The above makes no sense at all as you mix languages.
>
>> -
>> Since it is basic to the mechanism of any learning, any
>> conditioning, a similarity standard must be there to
>> start the first learning. That is why I say it is
>> innate. But our similarity standards evolve very
>> decidedly as we learn, and that is part of what I was
>> dealing with in 'Natural Kinds'......
>> .....
>> I first took up subjective similarity under the head of
>> 'quality space' on page 85 of WORD AND OBJECT. In ROOTS
>> OF REFERENCE I went into it more fully under the head of
>> 'perceptual similarity'. I was concerned with it for its
>> role in tying stimulations to observation sentences, as
>> a basis for a theory of evidence...'
>> -
>> Quine
>> 'Comment on Hacking'
>> In Perspectives on Quine (1990)
>> -
>
>Hmmmm ... why was this included ?
>
I've already explained. I've also explained before that the fact that
what goes on inside the head can vary dramatically between individuals
should be taken as a clear indication that it doesn't matter! The point
here is that hoards of people are discussing things that really don't
make any difference. We are talking about whole "professions" here, not
a few posters to USENET.
>> From the time of Frege's 'Sinn und Bedeutung' at least, there has
>> been a lot of interest in the foundations of mathematical logic
>> and the concepts of 'identity', 'analyticity', 'synonymy' and
>> 'similarity'.
>> -
>> 'The Morning Star' and 'Venus', 'the victor at Jena' and 'the
>> vanquished at Waterloo', and even 'consciousness' and 'brain
>> processes' have all occupied philosophers concerned with the
>> relationship between Sense and Meaning, the 'is' of definition'
>> and the 'is' of composition, 'Use & Mention' over the past 100
>> years.
>> -
>> Oedipus believed that Jocasta was fair game, but not his mother.
>> Ryle's foreigner saw all the buildings and grounds of Oxford, but
>> hadn't 'seen' the university. Jenny accepts that James has seen a
>> good range of her behaviour but doesn't believe he knows the real
>> 'her'.
>> -
>> Ryle offered a solution to part of this problem in 1949 with his
>> example of the category mistake, ie that 'mind' like 'the
>> university' is a concept or category which includes a number of
>> members, distributed elements, or dispositions to behave. (In
>> Quine we see these being noted as observation sentences, or more
>> specifically, as occasion sentences, dated and timed).
>> -
>> But there are a few problems here. If we say that these elements
>> fall under a particular class, the elements of that class are
>> themselves not identical, nor even similar in sense. It may well
>> be that amongst Jenny's dispositions we include 'cake maker' and
>> 'garden tender' as well as 'teacher', but we would rarely say
>> that these are identical or even similar behaviours any more than
>> we would say that the library is the same as or similar to the
>> refectory. They are similar or associated only in that they are
>> elements of a class, either 'Jenny' or 'university' - just as
>> different people can be said to be similar in terms of a higher
>> type, such as female, or human, or position in an actuarial
>> table. However, we would acknowledge that 'rabbit', 'undetached
>> part of rabbit', and 'stage of a rabbits development' are
>> interchangeable in identifying the same referent, 'salve
>> veritate'. This is the thesis of indeterminacy of translation, a
>> thesis which leads into another Quinean thesis, that of
>> Ontological Relativity - which dispenses with the intensional.
>> -
>
>What Quine actually says (see below) was "each of us is free to
>internalize in his peculiar neural way" ... apparently this ends up in
>your mind as "dispenses with the intensional". I don't take "dispenses
>with" as being the same as "free to" ... for me there is a grand
>distinction.
>
You've missed the point, along with most folk here. This is a radical
failing on all of your part. It prevents you from grasping just how
profound the EAB revolution was. Skinner is up there with Darwin.
>
>> 'The view that I have come to, regarding intersubjective
>> likeness of stimulation, is rather that we can simply do
>> without it. The observation sentence 'Rabbit' has its
>> stimulus meaning for the linguist, and the observation
>> sentence 'Gavagai' has its stimulus meaning for the
>> informant. The linguist, observes natives assenting to
>> 'Gavagai' when he, in their position, would have
>> assented to 'Rabbit'. So he tries assigning HIS stimulus
>> meaning of 'Rabbit' to 'Gavagai' on subsequent occasions
>> for his informant's approval. Encouraged, he tentatively
>> adopts 'Rabbit' as translation.'.........
>> -
>> Discussion with Dreben helped me to clarify these
>> consequences of my new stance. In WORD AND OBJECT I had
>> already pointed out that communication presupposes no
>> similarity in nerve nets; verbal behavior is inculcated
>> on the strength only of surface stimulation. Such was my
>> parable of the trimmed bushes (p.8), alike in outward
>> form but wildly unlike in their inward twigs and
>> branches. Save the surface, in the paintmaker's words,
>> and you save all. But now, leaving the surface itself to
>> Sherwin-Williams' tender mercies, I give the individual
>> yet wider berth. His privacy widens apace.
>> -
>> Unlike Davidson, I leave the stimulations at the
>> subject's surface, and private stimulus meaning with
>> them. But they may be as idiosyncratic, for all I care,
>> as the subject's internal wiring itself. What floats in
>> the open air is our common language, which each of us is
>> free to internalize in his peculiar neural way. Language
>> is where intersubjectivity sets in. Communication is
>> well named.'
>> -
>> Quine (1990)
>> Three Indeterminacies
>> -
>
>In other words (see comment after Putman above) ... Meanings are not in
>the head; rather they are established by interpretive practice. The
>practice is public behavior which is not in the head.
>
Yes. I've covered this from a number of perspectives over the years.
>
>> There are pervasive problems with 'properties', 'essences', or
>> 'propositions' and their intensional kin. Nowhere is this more
>> apparent than with the 'propositional attitudes'. The linch-pin
>> is the resistance of these to the principle of 'substitutivity of
>> identity' 'salve veritate', and in anything scientific we are
>> exclusively interested in truth functions where the
>> substitutivity of identity is guaranteed. Failure to respect this
>> principle results in invalid reasoning through the fallacy of
>> equivocation.
>> -
>> In the case of propositional attitudes, we can not quote someone
>> indirectly without thereby uttering an untruth, and we can not
>> make statements about what someone believes, thinks, hopes,
>> fears, or understands except in the actual context in which the
>> propositional attitudes expressing such intensional idioms take
>> place (which amounts to quoting them directly and contextually).
>> If one reports to someone else 'what someone said', one has to
>> either directly quote (verbatim) or else acknowledge that one is
>> not making a report at all. Such paraphrase amounts to an
>> 'interpretation' which is an imputation or inference, a creative
>> act
>
>.. or the acknowledgment of a successful communication ...
>
>> . Propositional attitudes are not projectible outside the
>> immediate context of their utterance, so: -
>> -
>> 'Reports' are not 'bona fide' reports at all unless they
>> are reports verbatim (ie records of behaviour) - they
>> become interpretations through a process of imputation
>> at best, and in almost all cases, they are creative acts
>> which do not permit substitutivity of identity 'salve
>> veritate'. They are non-truth functional unless
>> expressed actuarially via relation to a population
>> distribution (normative psychometric measure).
>
>Incidentally i agree with Quine that for a journalistic report, direct
>quotes in context are strongly indicated.
That's not Quine, that's Longley. It's excerpted from another message of
the same era. This was an internal e-mail/newsgroup system which ran for
about 8 years from 87-96. You should look into what's happening in the
UK in that area. Look up "evidence based" practice and try to find out
what was done before the PROBE preoject.
> Paraphrase, however is useful as an acknowledgment of a successful
>communication and as a curative means to add additional interpretive
>practice. These become the very acts which create our language
>distinguishing it from bird calls! Emotionally i love it when someone
>*correctly* paraphrase me, for it is proof that i have communicated to
>them ... i no longer need to merely guess ... i have finally cast my
>bottle into the ocean of doubt and ambiguity and some other creature
>has discovered it :) When they can add a new idea not contained or
>imagined in my original, then i must leap for joy as the very purpose
>of my struggle with these multi-interpretive marks has finally become a
>step (however minor) in the cultural dance. So i must find Quine's
>judgmental comment, "at best they are creative acts", to be sourly
>lacking in insight.
You miss the point.
>
>
>Unfortunately i don't have time to guess what connects all of the above
>to what you say below.
>
>> -
>> This is, I argue, why interviews, exams and similar devices for
>> measuring behaviour (e.g. minute taking in meetings) are widely
>> subjected to the criticism that they are not reliable measures
>> of behaviour, particularly when such measures are supposed to
>> comprise important elements in a human regression process (review
>> board) which seeks to make inferences or projections about other
>> behaviour. It is also why continuous recording of what happens is
>> more promising, since such measures provide more representative
>> samples under naturalistic conditions (ie the settings are more
>> prone to generalise) - Such a record is a profile of behaviour.
>> -
>> These principles are observable in the processes of operant and
>> classical conditioning. In the latter paradigms, one is
>> interested in the basic processes of association ascertained
>> after the acquisition process through observation of behaviour
>> following the presentation of a CS (the whole process is
>> therefore one of recognition or recall). The touchstone of rival
>> models is the 'blocking effect' (Kamin 1968) which illustrates
>> that elements of a stimulus compound may come not to control
>> behaviour unless those elements have come to provide new
>> information, ie change the conditional probability of the event-
>> event relationship. In operant acquisition, one tends not to
>> focus on the response topography, but records the class of
>> behaviours comprising lever pressing as the operant. But when one
>> looks at the extinction of this class of behaviours why does it
>> take so long to reach criterion? May it not be that the
>> acquisition of the operant is in fact no different from the
>> configuring process in classical conditioning, ie the acquisition
>> process is the acquisition of multiple R-S contingencies, and
>> extinction involves a testing of all the elements:
>> -
>> In its most basic form each R-S* during acquisition differs, each
>> is a slightly different 'perspective'. This might comprise a
>> slight motor variation on a CRF task, such as a slightly
>> different pressure on the lever above threshold, or angle of the
>> body, in other cases it may be the ratio of presses on a FR or VR
>> schedule (which will increase resistance to extinction). Note
>> that the element of behaviour here is lever press (p or p*) and
>> the outcome is pellet delivery (q) ie
>> -
>> if 'p'ress then 'q'ualia.
>> -
>> Each CRF trial RECORDS either 'p then q', 'p* then q', 'p** then
>> q' and so on. In fact every supra-criterion R-S variation
>> possible, leads to a testing of almost all of the contingencies
>> during extinction :
>> -
>> not 'q'ualia then not 'p'ress
>> -
>> but...perhaps it will be p*.... or perhaps p**, so each has to
>> be tested/subjected to falsification (negation). After all, each
>> variation or 'perspective' was reinforced during acquisition. On
>> partial reinforcement schedules we interleave a little extinction
>> or impossible discrimination training.
>> -
>> Do each of these behaviours, dispositions, or properties, learned
>> only in their particular context, occupy their own location or
>> node in the operant repertoire, only becoming extensional through
>> the eyes of the observer? Or are they really configured into a
>> class of such behaviours?. Surely all trainers have had
>> experience of this process whereby the basic elements of a
>> complex skill may be taught but the trainee just fails to pull it
>> all together coherently, and surely all assessors have had the
>> problem of deciding whether the student 'really knows'.
>> -
>> The same processes seem to be operating in 'group work' of all
>> sorts. Here, as with performance on a test, the behaviour
>> occurring in such settings, (which is predominantly verbal), may
>> not generalise to other situations or be representative of
>> general performance (other than to other similar behaviour in
>> groups or interviews!). Such context effects have been central to
>> Cognitive Psychology for decades e.g. 'the encoding specificity
>> principle' of Tulving and Thompson. Such processes seem to be
>> quite basic to the very nature of habit formation (cf. notes on
>> novelty, opioids & habit formation). Similarly, if 'role plays'
>> had any substantial (generalisable) effects on behaviour, then
>> many of our oscar winning actors would surely be more likely to
>> be roaming cities killing and maiming, (or living in idyllic
>> relationships). Acting is no less real or true behaviour than is
>> any other.
>> David Longley
>> July 7, 1991
>
>Tentative regards.
>
>patty
>
>
-- David Longley http://www.longley.demon.co.uk
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