From: lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady)
Subject: Re molecules, cats, thoughts, emotions, and other unobservables.
Followup-To: sci.psychology
Summary: Sensory based data as the atoms of subjective experience.  
Keywords: NLP   NeuroLinguistic Programming
Organization: University of Hawaii (Mathematics Dept)
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1992 09:03:31 GMT

[Cross-posted from sci.psychology]

There are still psychologists (namely some behaviorists) who question
whether thoughts, emotions, and other components of internal subjective
experience should play a role in the scientific study of psychology,
inasmuch as these are not observable phenomena.  There was Skinner's
parting shot to the world of psychology, for instance, in which he
compared cognitive psychology to creation science.

Unfortunately, this position would mean that precisely those aspects of 
"psychology" which are of greatest interest to most people are 
inaccessible to scientific study.  Useful as behavioral psychology may be 
in many ways, what people really want to know about is emotions and how 
people think.  


In article <MCCLA_D.92Aug11161829@osric.cs.odu.edu> mccla_d@osric.cs.odu.edu (dennis mcclain-furmanski) writes:
>Lee Lady says:
>
>> We don't even know for sure that there are such things as molecules --
>> nobody has ever seen one.
>
>Not so, I'm afraid. People have not only viewed molecules regularly, but
>even individual atoms.
>
>A big news story this years was the spelling of IBM out of individual
>xenon (?) atoms. Not only did they take the picture, they manipulated
>the atoms into this arrangement.

And in article <1992Aug11.072323.27407@pony.Ingres.COM> 
                       jpk@Ingres.COM (Jon Krueger) writes:
>
>No one has ever seen a cat.  We do have some interesting records of
>light that bounced off what we chose to call a cat.  And nicer still,
>the images taken by different observers resemble each other pretty
>well.  But unfortunately, the records and images aren't direct
>evidence, they have to be collected by eyes and cameras and such.

Still, there's no logically iron-clad argument refuting the devil's
advocate's position that there are no such thing as molecules.  The
devil's advocate point of view is logically tenable but not very useful, 
whereas the belief in molecules is not only logically consistent but enables 
one to reliably predict observable phenomena.  

My reason for asserting that "Nobody has ever actually seen a molecule" 
(and thank you very much, Dennis, for letting me know that that's less
true than I had thought!) was to point out that it is sometimes useful to
believe in things that are not directly observable.  

Observing internal subjective phenomena -- thoughts, memories, beliefs, 
emotions, and the like -- requires a different methodology than observing 
molecules.  To observe internal subjective phenomena one can use behavioral 
manifestations and self-reports.  Unfortunately, both these observational 
approaches present serious problems.  

Behavioral manifestations differ from person to person.  For one person, 
a frown may indicate displeasure whereas for someone else it may merely 
indicate concentration.  If one wants to make any but the most crude 
inferences about a person's internal subjective experience based on 
their behavior, then one needs to get to know that person.  (In NLP 
-- NeuroLinguistic Programming -- this process is called "calibration.")  

(NLP uses the term "hallucination" for the illusion that one can
perceive another person's emotion or thoughts.  I cannot see your
anger, I can only see behavior which I interpret as a manifestation of
anger.  NLPers sometimes say things like "My hallucination about you is
that you're very angry."  This sort of quirky language is one of the
things that gives NLP its rather cultish flavor when one first starts
to learn about it.)

The problem with self-reports as a methodology for observing people's 
internal experience is -- aside from the fact that people lie -- that 
one can't be sure that different people mean the same thing by their words.  
You and I both know the word "frustration."  Somehow someone managed to 
teach us this word, despite the fact that frustration is something that 
can neither be seen, heard, nor smelled.  Since we both use the same word, 
we assume that we mean the same thing by it.  And yet I think that most 
of us have had the experience of talking to a friend and finally discovering 
that one's friend's meaning for a word like this was very different from 
one's own.  

This is the problem with not having any concrete, tangible referrent for a 
word.  If I need to pin down the meaning for "cat" -- for instance if 
I'm trying to communicate with someone whose language I don't know -- I 
can ultimately resort to pointing at a cat.  But what do I point at in 
order to clarify the meaning of the word for an internal subjective 
experience like frustration?  

If you talk about having a "thought," how do I know that what you mean by 
that is anything like what I mean by having a "thought."  If I have a 
feeling in my gut that I translated into the need to go get a candy bar, 
for instance, does that qualify as a "thought?"  

How can one scientifically study internal subjective phenomena if one can't 
even pin down denotations for the words used to describe these phenomena?   

I believe that the NLP idea of representational systems offers the best 
path out of this quandry.  

When you tell me "I just had a thought," I don't have any referrent for 
that word, except for a somewhat suspect assumption that what you mean by 
a "thought" is the same thing as what I mean.  But when you say "I have 
a picture in my mind of a cat.  The cat is black and when I look at my 
picture I see it in three dimensions and it is about three feet in
front of me and it's a little bit to my right and above center" then I
know what you're talking about.  I don't know if your way of seeing a
picture in your mind is anything at all like mine.  I don't even know
if your experience of "black" is anything like mine.  But the point is
that even though our two experiences may be very different, we now have
a common referrent.  We both know what a cat is, and we both know what
it's like to see something.  I believe that when one gets information
communicated in this sort of sensory based language, then one has the
hope of doing scientific study of subjective experience.

(In designing an artificial intelligence, it might seem rather strange to
explain what it would mean for an AI to have a "thought."  On the other
hand, it would seem quite reasonable to talk about it accessing a
stored or created image.)

I believe that if one looks at NLP from the point of view of a
scientific psychologist (which of course I am not) then NLP can be
regarded as a massive experiment testing the usefulness of the *point
of view* (for it is only a point of view, not something that can be
called "true" or "false") that all subjective phenomena -- whether in
the form of perception of the external world or of internally generated
ideas, emotions, memories and the like -- can ultimately be reduced to
sensory data -- to images, sounds, feelings (whether emotional or
visceral or proprioceptive or tactile or whatever) -- plus language.


In article <00713509737@elgamy.sccsi.com> elg@elgamy.sccsi.com (Eric Lee Green) writes:
>>   ..... 
>You are assuming that there exists such a thing as a "mind". I prefer to
>think of what we call "mind" to be a series of internal covert behaviors
>related to verbalization, perception, and reperception. "Cognitive
>behaviors" if you will. Or as Mr. Skinner said in _Beyond Freedom and
>Dignity_, "Intelligence appears to be a product of a verbal society."
>
>I have been unable to confirm the existence of something called "mind" by
>any scientific method, but I have been able to confirm the existence of
>behaviors by the scientific method. This is where empirical behavioral
>psychology stops -- at behavioral observations verifiable via the
>scientific method. Since I'm not a "pure" behaviorist (someone once called
>me a "cognitive gestalt behaviorist", which is as good a description as
>anything), I go further, but I do try to base my theorizing on what can be
>easily observed and verified.

I believe that what we call mind is simply the functioning of the nervous 
system, most especially including the brain.  If we want to completely 
understand psychology, then we need to understand how this nervous system 
works.  

At present, we simply don't have the instruments to accomplish this.  We 
are unable to observe the firing of neurons and impulses being carried 
across synapses.  And if we could observe it, we wouldn't know how to 
make any sense of it.  

Therefore we are reduced to making use of a more imperfect instrument
-- the subject's awareness, or consciousness.  Unfortunately, a lot of
what is happening in the nervous system is never picked up
consciously.  But a lot of other events in the nervous system leave
traces in our awareness in the form of sensory impressions -- images,
feelings, sounds -- and words.  I think that by asking people questions
about their internal subjective experience and phrasing the questions
in terms of these basic sensory units, scientific psychologists can
begin to develop a real structure of the human mind.  (The theoretical
framework they develop will not be NLP.  The contribution of NLP has
been simply to supply the original idea, and to give some informal
demonstrations that it can be a useful idea.)

--

Imagination is greater than knowledge.  -- Einstein 

lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu         lady@uhunix.bitnet