SAMSA: Pigeons, humans, and learning

[mistermack]

Too late to edit...

Just to add to that, in evolution the selection mechanism is death from environmental interaction. What's the selection mechanism in the mind for behaviours? It doesn't seem too different to memetics, which you discount.

Probably death of the behaviour. If the animal behaves in a certain way, and doesn't experience a favourable result, it might have a mechanism for discarding that behaviour, after a few failures.
It could be that behaviours are pretty randomly generated by the brain, and then discarded after a while, if there is no positive result, or a negative one.
Basically, a learning journey, that lasts till you die.

[pErvinalia]

Yeah, but what is the *mechanism*?? What actually causes a behaviour to become extinct? A pigeon not pressing the red button isn't going to die, so there is no existential selection mechanism. And in any case, such a selection mechanism wouldn't work, as we are talking within individual behaviour, not within population behaviour.

[pErvinalia]

I'd probably speculate that it's more related to past evolutionary selection on the brain. That is, we have broad behaviours that we favour more than others because they have been evolutionarily successful in the past. So, for example, sex, eating (and more specifically eating fatty and/or sugary foods), flight/freeze/fight behaviours, etc.
So it's not a case of eating or not eating being selected for in real time in the brain; it's more a case of eating being more likely due to evolved neural pathways in evolutionary time.

[mistermack]

Yeah, but what is the *mechanism*?? What actually causes a behaviour to become extinct? A pigeon not pressing the red button isn't going to die, so there is no existential selection mechanism. And in any case, such a selection mechanism wouldn't work, as we are talking within individual behaviour, not within population behaviour.

Well, the behaviour becomes extinct when the animal learns not to do it. Like we all learned not to cry when we want something as children, or not to touch something that's hot.
So even though you still know how to put your finger in a flame, the behaviour is deceased.

If you know not to do something, that behaviour is extinct for practical purposes.
So our brain selects behaviours that give us favourable outcomes, and rejects those that don't.

[pErvinalia]

Yeah, you're just repeating what Samsa said. But you're still not answering what the selection *mechanism* is? How is an unwanted behaviour actually selected against. Nothing is dying a la natural selection, so what exactly is the mechanism? If no one can explain what the actual selection mechanism is, then it's no better at describing behaviour than saying "my inner homunculus did it".

[mistermack]

Yeah, you're just repeating what Samsa said. But you're still not answering what the selection *mechanism* is? How is an unwanted behaviour actually selected against. Nothing is dying a la natural selection, so what exactly is the mechanism? If no one can explain what the actual selection mechanism is, then it's no better at describing behaviour than saying "my inner homunculus did it".

It's in my answer, but you're not getting it.
You seem to be insisting that, for something to be selected, what has been rejected has to physically die.
That is the case in evolution of plants and animals, but there's no actual requirement for actual death of something, for evolution to take place.
Take the example of the motor car. Most people would say that the cars that we see have evolved over the years. But defunct designs don't have to physically die. They just stop being used, in favour of new and better ideas.
It's much the same with behaviours. You don't need death. You just need some to be selected by the animal for repeating, and some rejected as "I won't be doing that again".
Evolution just needs selection and rejection of random traits. It doesn't need physical death. That's just one special kind of evolution.
Don't you think your own behaviour and opinions have evolved over the years? But you're still here.

I think we may be talking at cross purposes. There is the evolution of the behaviour of the species, and also evolution of the behaviour of an individual animal.

When it comes to species evolution of behaviour, it's very complicated. It can involve evolutionary changes in the brain, and also of the body, and how the animal interacts with it's particular environment. And also, you can have social phenomena, where behaviour catches on, from one animal to another, and you get an actual culture of behaviour in some areas.
Like the crows dropping snails on pedestrian crossings in Japan, and waiting till the lights go red, to safely peck up the bits. Or chaffinches singing a different song in Scotland, to what they do in London.

[pErvinalia]

Well Samsa did talk about unwanted behaviours being selected against to "extinction".

[JimC]

I'm not really joining in this discussion, I'm just sharing something that I've just seen.

Where I live backs onto a school. Gloucester has a big population of Seagulls.
Every day, at 11 am and 1pm, the gulls arrive and start circling overhead. Crows too.
Then, when the kids come out with their packed lunches, the birds fight over the scraps that the kids throw away. (messy little gits).

Today is Sunday, and it's 1pm. They are there, as usual, circling overhead, looking for the kids to come out.
They obviously have a daytime clock, to tell them when it's time that food will be available, but can't cope with our five-days-on two-days-off week.

I don't think that it's likely that they THINK about the availability of the food at certain times. They just have a feeling that if they go to this place, they will be able to feed. I think that they probably get that feeling at certain times, without having to work it out mentally.

It's very similar at the school I teach. We have a large resident population of Australian Ravens (probably much larger than the normal carrying capacity of a similar sized patch of bush, due to our kids also being messy little gits...). They too congregate expectantly at the end of recess and lunch, ready to feast. Haven't been out there at weekends, so can't comment on what they do then. Poor little feathered buggers are in strife now, as we're a week into a 7 week summer holiday; I would guess they will disperse a fair bit, and have lean pickings.

I agree that it would be drawing a long bow to say they think about the availability of food; at certain times of the day, they may experience an increased hunger stimulus, and have learned that a certain pattern of behaviour will usually satisfy that urge. The word "think" is too strongly associated with our experience of human thinking, which typically involves some form of language-based internal dialogue. That is not to say that such organisms as crows etc. do not have highly complex cognitive processing.

[Mr.Samsa]

It's not really the choice that is the problem, it's the use of "selection" in a self reinforcing context (that is "evolutionary", but in the context of individuals and within single lifetimes). You have no way of knowing that there is even a selection mechanism of this sort. That's why it seems like a just-so story. There's all sorts of mechanisms one could invent to explain how behaviours persist.

I'm not sure if there's some semantic issue here which is causing disagreement but I'm still not quite clear on what the issue is. We know that there's a selection mechanism because some behaviors are selected for and others aren't, that is, some behaviors persist and others do not. This is just an observation. To be clear, this isn't theoretical, or abstract arguments, I'm saying that we literally measure the probabilities of behaviors in response to specific consequences and observe the probabilities of different behaviors increase or decrease as we predict.

So let's say we have three coloured lights: red, blue and green. With the red light, pressing the button gives us a reward, but pressing the blue and green doesn't. When the experiment starts, we respond pretty much equally to all of them. Over time, when the blue and green lights give us nothing, these behaviors disappear and the responding to the red light increases. This is what we call a selection process - some behaviors persist in the presence of a particular stimulus and others do not.

You can try to come up with other mechanisms to account for the same behavior if you like, but if it doesn't include the fact that some behaviors decrease in probability and others increase in probability (i.e. a selection mechanism) then I can't see how you're explaining the observation (i.e. that some behaviors decrease in probability and others increase in probability).

Too late to edit...

Just to add to that, in evolution the selection mechanism is death from environmental interaction. What's the selection mechanism in the mind for behaviours? It doesn't seem too different to memetics, which you discount.

The selection mechanism will depend on what level you're looking at, but at the behavioral level it's operant conditioning or the law of effect. At the neurological level, it's the fact that reinforcement strengthens and increases connections and expands neural networks, whereas extinction or punishment prunes and culls those connections.

They obviously have a daytime clock, to tell them when it's time that food will be available, but can't cope with our five-days-on two-days-off week.

You'd be right. They can do basic "counting" but they struggle when it comes to more complicated patterns like "5 on, 2 off".

I don't think that it's likely that they THINK about the availability of the food at certain times. They just have a feeling that if they go to this place, they will be able to feed. I think that they probably get that feeling at certain times, without having to work it out mentally.

I imagine they likely do both, like us. I tend not to consciously realise that I feel like a burger when I see a McDonalds ad, I just think, "hmm.. I suddenly feel like a burger". But I'm also capable of contemplating it and thinking, "It's getting close to lunch, I think I feel like a burger today". It's difficult to gather direct evidence of this kind of process in animals but we do know that it's not a kind of automatic reflex, and that there is voluntary action involved, just the exact nature of it gets a little difficult.

Yeah, but what is the *mechanism*?? What actually causes a behaviour to become extinct? A pigeon not pressing the red button isn't going to die, so there is no existential selection mechanism. And in any case, such a selection mechanism wouldn't work, as we are talking within individual behaviour, not within population behaviour.

The pigeon doesn't die, the behavior does. Behaviors are phenomena that are caused and generated by physical stimuli and cues. If the behaviors aren't maintained or freshly generated by some process, then they don't stick around. There are physical constraints and limitations on the generation of behavior, so we can't just perform all behaviors at all times to see what works - the behaviors need to be shaped in order to be efficient and generate the best returns.

I'd probably speculate that it's more related to past evolutionary selection on the brain. That is, we have broad behaviours that we favour more than others because they have been evolutionarily successful in the past. So, for example, sex, eating (and more specifically eating fatty and/or sugary foods), flight/freeze/fight behaviours, etc.
So it's not a case of eating or not eating being selected for in real time in the brain; it's more a case of eating being more likely due to evolved neural pathways in evolutionary time.

Depending on exactly what you mean here, you're kind of right except for the last part. It's not debatable that there are broad classes or predispositions of behavior that generally guide us, but even evolutionarily selected behaviors (like eating) are subject to selection in real time - if we're eating a burger and something sharp pokes us in the mouth, we change our eating behavior. We slow down, we look at it closely. The next time we eat a burger we won't eat it the way we always have, and instead we'll likely open it up and check there's nothing sharp there that shouldn't be.

Yeah, you're just repeating what Samsa said. But you're still not answering what the selection *mechanism* is? How is an unwanted behaviour actually selected against. Nothing is dying a la natural selection, so what exactly is the mechanism? If no one can explain what the actual selection mechanism is, then it's no better at describing behaviour than saying "my inner homunculus did it".

Nothing needs to physically die for natural seleciton, the point is just that a line no longer continues (whether because it didn't have sex, or because it did actually get killed). It's the same for behaviors, but if you need something to physically die for it to work then that's literally what's happening in the brain when the law of effect comes into play - connections in the brain die. (EDIT: I see mistermack has made these points already but oh well).

[pErvinalia]

It's not really the choice that is the problem, it's the use of "selection" in a self reinforcing context (that is "evolutionary", but in the context of individuals and within single lifetimes). You have no way of knowing that there is even a selection mechanism of this sort. That's why it seems like a just-so story. There's all sorts of mechanisms one could invent to explain how behaviours persist.

I'm not sure if there's some semantic issue here which is causing disagreement but I'm still not quite clear on what the issue is. We know that there's a selection mechanism because some behaviors are selected for and others aren't, that is, some behaviors persist and others do not. This is just an observation. To be clear, this isn't theoretical, or abstract arguments, I'm saying that we literally measure the probabilities of behaviors in response to specific consequences and observe the probabilities of different behaviors increase or decrease as we predict.

Obviously there is a selection mechanism of some sort. The problem is that you are specifying exactly what that selection method is (i.e. Darwinian-like) without being able to show that (because it's an internal immaterial process). The only way you could show that it is a Darwinian natural selection type process is if you could show the neural correlates, which I'm assuming can't be done yet.

So let's say we have three coloured lights: red, blue and green. With the red light, pressing the button gives us a reward, but pressing the blue and green doesn't. When the experiment starts, we respond pretty much equally to all of them. Over time, when the blue and green lights give us nothing, these behaviors disappear and the responding to the red light increases. This is what we call a selection process - some behaviors persist in the presence of a particular stimulus and others do not.

You can try to come up with other mechanisms to account for the same behavior if you like, but if it doesn't include the fact that some behaviors decrease in probability and others increase in probability (i.e. a selection mechanism) then I can't see how you're explaining the observation (i.e. that some behaviors decrease in probability and others increase in probability).

As I said, it's not that there is a selection going on that is the problem. It's that you specify exactly what the mechanism is without being able to actually see or test that mechanism. That's why it is a just-so story. I can explain how the inner homunculus wants food, so selects for food. Nothing to do with Darwinian selection there.

Too late to edit...

Just to add to that, in evolution the selection mechanism is death from environmental interaction. What's the selection mechanism in the mind for behaviours? It doesn't seem too different to memetics, which you discount.

The selection mechanism will depend on what level you're looking at, but at the behavioral level it's operant conditioning or the law of effect.

This is circular reasoning. You explain operant conditioning by call to a Darwinian-like selection method, and then explain that selection method by call to operant conditioning.

At the neurological level, it's the fact that reinforcement strengthens and increases connections and expands neural networks, whereas extinction or punishment prunes and culls those connections.

yeah, this makes the most sense to me. There's a proper physical correlate to what's going on. But we do wind up at my original series of questions about the role of consciousness in the whole process. Is consciousness really adding anything to the process (it would seem to add to accuracy and speed), or is it a bit of a post hoc explanation for something that's going on without the aid of consciousness at all? As a gross materialist, I have a lot of sympathy with Dennett's (and other's) idea that consciousness is an illusion of sorts, and plenty of data shows that physiologically the brain is taking action before the conscious mind even decides to act. There's also plenty of data showing that the conscious mind simply bullshits it's way through an event, literally making up stories to explain an event that consciously one feels in control of. But then, it's hard to deny that higher order cognition can provide complex inputs to behaviour. I can sit down before making a decision and think through all the past info I have on the subject - stuff I've googled, books I've read, convos I've had with Samsa etc. It's hard to deny that thoughtful analytical thinking CAN affect decision making. It's a dichotomy that I find myself having a hard time explaining and contending with. That's why I continue to obsess over psychology and consciousness and neurology etc..

Yeah, but what is the *mechanism*?? What actually causes a behaviour to become extinct? A pigeon not pressing the red button isn't going to die, so there is no existential selection mechanism. And in any case, such a selection mechanism wouldn't work, as we are talking within individual behaviour, not within population behaviour.

The pigeon doesn't die, the behavior does. Behaviors are phenomena that are caused and generated by physical stimuli and cues. If the behaviors aren't maintained or freshly generated by some process, then they don't stick around.

Yeah, but you are just repeating the obvious outwardly observed behaviour. This says nothing about an internal Darwinian-like selection process. In natural selection, traits literally go extinct. You've claimed the same for internal behaviour selection. Where's your proof for this? You used an example earlier where you said (if I remember correctly) that preening will go to extinction in the food button experiment. Let's look at that. For a start, it's not going to extinction, as the bird will still know how to preen outside of the food experiment. So it hasn't gone to "extinction". That should be enough to put down this idea, but I expect you'll say it goes to extinction in the context of the food experiment. Even if I granted that as an analogue to natural selection (which I don't), it's easy to see a situation where the pigeon is simply full and doesn't want to eat anymore. What's it going to do? Just sit there till it falls asleep? Unlikely. It will preen (which most birds do before resting at night). So the behaviour hasn't literally become "extinct". It's just taken a back seat for some other behaviour.

I'd probably speculate that it's more related to past evolutionary selection on the brain. That is, we have broad behaviours that we favour more than others because they have been evolutionarily successful in the past. So, for example, sex, eating (and more specifically eating fatty and/or sugary foods), flight/freeze/fight behaviours, etc.
So it's not a case of eating or not eating being selected for in real time in the brain; it's more a case of eating being more likely due to evolved neural pathways in evolutionary time.

Depending on exactly what you mean here, you're kind of right except for the last part. It's not debatable that there are broad classes or predispositions of behavior that generally guide us, but even evolutionarily selected behaviors (like eating) are subject to selection in real time - if we're eating a burger and something sharp pokes us in the mouth, we change our eating behavior. We slow down, we look at it closely. The next time we eat a burger we won't eat it the way we always have, and instead we'll likely open it up and check there's nothing sharp there that shouldn't be.

Sure, but once again, this doesn't imply a Darwinian-like selection process. My homunculus might have decided it didn't like being poked in its body's mouth.

Yeah, you're just repeating what Samsa said. But you're still not answering what the selection *mechanism* is? How is an unwanted behaviour actually selected against. Nothing is dying a la natural selection, so what exactly is the mechanism? If no one can explain what the actual selection mechanism is, then it's no better at describing behaviour than saying "my inner homunculus did it".

Nothing needs to physically die for natural seleciton, the point is just that a line no longer continues (whether because it didn't have sex, or because it did actually get killed).

Yeah, I know that. I didn't expand for the sake of brevity. The point is that there are clear environmental selection pressures (death, inability to reproduce, etc) that are the selection mechanism. It's just not clear what the mechanism is in the mind (since we are talking about conscious beings) that plays a similar part. It's not clear how behaviours are "replicated" either. If you disavow the concept of the meme as a unit of replication (which I'm assuming you do, but you could be just disavowing the use of memetics as a scientific field) then behaviours in a conscious being (which are the same concept as a meme - that is a replicating idea) being units of selection makes no sense either.

It's the same for behaviors, but if you need something to physically die for it to work then that's literally what's happening in the brain when the law of effect comes into play - connections in the brain die.

Yeah, I like it when we deal in physical stuff, as we can hold it in our hands and make sense of it. The problem is that we are talking about conscious beings - i.e. ineffable stuff like ideas and qualia etc. Although,, on this point, do connections literally cease to exist, or do they just become so weak as to become unused?

[Mr.Samsa]

Obviously there is a selection mechanism of some sort. The problem is that you are specifying exactly what that selection method is (i.e. Darwinian-like) without being able to show that (because it's an internal immaterial process). The only way you could show that it is a Darwinian natural selection type process is if you could show the neural correlates, which I'm assuming can't be done yet.

I don't get why you'd think this. A Darwinian selection process is simply one where the selection criteria is the consequences, and that's what happens with behavior. There's no internal immaterial process, we're just talking about external observable behaviors at this point.

As I said, it's not that there is a selection going on that is the problem. It's that you specify exactly what the mechanism is without being able to actually see or test that mechanism. That's why it is a just-so story. I can explain how the inner homunculus wants food, so selects for food. Nothing to do with Darwinian selection there.

You could try that but you'd need to specify how exactly the homunculus selects for food, and to be consistent with the observable data you'd need to state that it selects for food by the consequences, and when you say that you'd be asserting that an homunculus behaves according to a Darwinian selection process - we'd then question what evidence we have for the homunculus bit.

This is circular reasoning. You explain operant conditioning by call to a Darwinian-like selection method, and then explain that selection method by call to operant conditioning.

Not quite, operant conditioning is a specific selection process, and how operant conditioning works (rather than simply how it's described) is more detailed that the simple law of effect - the details are what I outlined in the end section of my first post.

yeah, this makes the most sense to me. There's a proper physical correlate to what's going on.

This is a standard problem of "neuro"-evidence blinding people. The neuro-evidence I mention there tells you absolutely nothing new that isn't contained by the behavioral explanations I gave you, it's the same process just at a deeper level. Yet people view the neuro as more "real" or convincing, even though it can be practically meaningless at the most relevant levels.

But we do wind up at my original series of questions about the role of consciousness in the whole process. Is consciousness really adding anything to the process (it would seem to add to accuracy and speed), or is it a bit of a post hoc explanation for something that's going on without the aid of consciousness at all?

Like I touch on above, I don't think the process is possible without consciousness (depending on how you're defining that). Without the ability to experience, voluntarily behave, and plan for future events, operant conditioning simply wouldn't work.

As a gross materialist, I have a lot of sympathy with Dennett's (and other's) idea that consciousness is an illusion of sorts, and plenty of data shows that physiologically the brain is taking action before the conscious mind even decides to act. There's also plenty of data showing that the conscious mind simply bullshits it's way through an event, literally making up stories to explain an event that consciously one feels in control of. But then, it's hard to deny that higher order cognition can provide complex inputs to behaviour. I can sit down before making a decision and think through all the past info I have on the subject - stuff I've googled, books I've read, convos I've had with Samsa etc. It's hard to deny that thoughtful analytical thinking CAN affect decision making. It's a dichotomy that I find myself having a hard time explaining and contending with. That's why I continue to obsess over psychology and consciousness and neurology etc..

One thing I'd add is that I'm not sure how it makes sense to talk of consciousness as an "illusion". It's a common criticism of Dennett's work but to say something is an illusion is to talk about an experience being misleading or different from how you viewed it, but for that to occur you need to experience the misleading experience, so consciousness is still occurring. Questioning the extent of the role that higher order cognitive processes play is definitely a worthwhile endeavour, but ruling it out completely as a factor in decision making seems misguided to me.

Yeah, but you are just repeating the obvious outwardly observed behaviour. This says nothing about an internal Darwinian-like selection process.

What internal process are you talking about? We're talking about behavior, that's what operant conditioning is operating on.

In natural selection, traits literally go extinct. You've claimed the same for internal behaviour selection. Where's your proof for this?

Behaviors literally go extinct.

You used an example earlier where you said (if I remember correctly) that preening will go to extinction in the food button experiment. Let's look at that. For a start, it's not going to extinction, as the bird will still know how to preen outside of the food experiment. So it hasn't gone to "extinction". That should be enough to put down this idea, but I expect you'll say it goes to extinction in the context of the food experiment.

Yes, when we talk about extinction we're talking about the behavior under the control of a specific discriminative stimulus. As a comparison, it's like saying that a particular bird has gone extinct in one particular environment, like Earth. But that's also just an issue with that specific example - when used correctly, extinction and punishment procedures will completely eliminate the behavior in all instances unless explicitly retrained again (comparable to a Jurassic Park genetic program recreating the extinct behaviors).

Even if I granted that as an analogue to natural selection (which I don't), it's easy to see a situation where the pigeon is simply full and doesn't want to eat anymore. What's it going to do? Just sit there till it falls asleep? Unlikely. It will preen (which most birds do before resting at night). So the behaviour hasn't literally become "extinct". It's just taken a back seat for some other behaviour.

Sure, but that wouldn't be extinction - that situation is where they are being reinforced for cleaning themselves, so the behavior increases and grows.

Sure, but once again, this doesn't imply a Darwinian-like selection process. My homunculus might have decided it didn't like being poked in its body's mouth.

Again, you can posit that explanation if you like, but you'll still need to explain the fact that behaviors are shaped by their consequences (i.e. a Darwinian selection process).

Yeah, I know that. I didn't expand for the sake of brevity. The point is that there are clear environmental selection pressures (death, inability to reproduce, etc) that are the selection mechanism. It's just not clear what the mechanism is in the mind (since we are talking about conscious beings) that plays a similar part. It's not clear how behaviours are "replicated" either. If you disavow the concept of the meme as a unit of replication (which I'm assuming you do, but you could be just disavowing the use of memetics as a scientific field) then behaviours in a conscious being (which are the same concept as a meme - that is a replicating idea) being units of selection makes no sense either.

I don't follow your reasoning here. The problem with memes wasn't that it posited a selection process for behaviors and ideas, but that it had no concrete observable evidence for this, no mathematical laws to graph this process, and it didn't explain how it did this better than all the models we currently had doing the same thing.

With things like operant conditioning, we have a clear idea of what the mechanism is. We know that pressures affect the rate of behavioral classes (reinforcement, punishment, discriminative stimuli, etc) and we observe them occurring exactly as we predict each time.

Yeah, I like it when we deal in physical stuff, as we can hold it in our hands and make sense of it. The problem is that we are talking about conscious beings - i.e. ineffable stuff like ideas and qualia etc. Although,, on this point, do connections literally cease to exist, or do they just become so weak as to become unused?

Well we've always been talking about physical things, I'm just saying that we don't need a biological death for it to make sense. Behaviors are physical and we observe them dying off.

As for the neurological side of things, they can both die off and/or become weak and unused. They're just representations of the behaviors, so what happen to the behavior also happens in the brain. Some behaviors die off completely and so the neurons correlating to them die off completely as well, whereas others die off to a point where they don't affect our daily lives and so the neurons correlating to them die off to a similar degree.

But it's not like the neurons are "more real" than the behaviors they represent.

[pErvinalia]

I'm going to have to have more of a think about this. Seeing the kids for Chrissie so might not be for a while.

But just a point about behaviours being physical. What I'm getting at is that if we are talking about conscious beings (which we are) then we need to deal with the internal aspect of choice. That is the ineffible. I'm of course not suggesting there is more than the physical, but we need to deal with the link between ideation and physical manifestation. Remember, you have made the link between consciousness and learning.

[Mr.Samsa]

I'm going to have to have more of a think about this. Seeing the kids for Chrissie so might not be for a while.

No problem. I'll be busy over the next couple of days as well and I'd like to say that means I might not be able to reply as much, but realistically I'll still reply, just with angry people telling me to get off the laptop.

But just a point about behaviours being physical. What I'm getting at is that if we are talking about conscious beings (which we are) then we need to deal with the internal aspect of choice. That is the ineffible. I'm of course not suggesting there is more than the physical, but we need to deal with the link between ideation and physical manifestation. Remember, you have made the link between consciousness and learning.

Sure, but what you're arguing against there then isn't the selection mechanism (as you seem to agree that some behaviors increase and some decrease in response to different consequences), and instead it's the question of what we can know about internal events. And it's a difficult topic, what we can know is arguably limited in many ways.

But there's still obviously a lot that we can know, or at least infer from the evidence, like with the research I mentioned on mental time travel - what *exactly* goes on in their heads is not certain, but we have good evidence and reason to think it involves some kind of memory recall and future planning.

[JimC]

Mr.Samsa wrote:

...The neuro-evidence I mention there tells you absolutely nothing new that isn't contained by the behavioral explanations I gave you, it's the same process just at a deeper level. Yet people view the neuro as more "real" or convincing, even though it can be practically meaningless at the most relevant levels...

It rather depends on what you mean by "at the most relevant levels"; it depends on how you are going to use the behavioral explanations. If you only want a better, more complex and more predictive model of an organism's behaviour, then sure. However, the virtue of looking for neurophysiological evidence in parallel with the behavioural observations is that it could provide solid supporting evidence for the model, if it shows a mechanism that generates the behaviour you have predicted. If it doesn't, then it opens up further questions, which is always useful.

Horses for courses...

[Mr.Samsa]

It rather depends on what you mean by "at the most relevant levels"; it depends on how you are going to use the behavioral explanations. If you only want a better, more complex and more predictive model of an organism's behaviour, then sure. However, the virtue of looking for neurophysiological evidence in parallel with the behavioural observations is that it could provide solid supporting evidence for the model, if it shows a mechanism that generates the behaviour you have predicted. If it doesn't, then it opens up further questions, which is always useful.

Horses for courses...

Yeah, I'm not saying don't bother with the neurophysiological evidence at all but the problem with rejecting scientific explanations based on some form of extreme reductionism is that it's a shorthand for saying no explanation will do. Because I can point Rev to long-term potentiation in the brain, which is pretty much the neurophysiological process of reinforcement, but why stop there? If we had a chemical understanding of that physiological process then it would be solid supporting evidence for that model. And then why stop there? The chemical process should be underpinned by some mechanism from physics, which is underpinned by maths, which is underpinned by surely something else, etc.

That's why I'm asking what level he's interested in. It's not like any of those levels are more "real" than the other, especially with the brain/behavior stuff where there is so much back and forth interaction that it become difficult to tell what differences in the brain are causing the behavior or what behavior is physically shaping the brain in response to that behavior.

I just don't think there's any need to go further down the levels of explanation for this discussion. If we were talking about the natural selection of species, I wouldn't let someone ignore the process of natural selection at the level of species or organism to push for a complete and comprehensive mechanism that operates on the level of molecular biology.