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Syamsu  Suspended Member (Idle past 5590 days) Posts: 1914 From: amsterdam Joined: |
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Author | Topic: The third rampage of evolutionism: evolutionary pscyhology | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
contracycle Inactive Member |
Evolutionary Psychology is more likely to replace the Ayn Rand fans than new age religion. I think it has some fundamental (ideological) flaws; as Oliver James remarked in the observer "This is pure speculation and a politically correct fig leaf for a theory that nearly always ends up supporting right-wing politics (that the poor are poorer, stupider and madder than the rich because of their genes is a corollary of evolutionary reasoning that is rarely mentioned)."
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Sure. But so what - that is not how this line of research is being actually deployed in contemporary debate. As Psychology Today remarks:
quote: It may be ther case that EvoPsych reserachers, at least in your department, do not share this view, but just recently the president of Harvard triggered much criticism by arguing for innate biological differences explaining the absence of women in positions of power. Whether a valid use of the reserach or otherwise, it is being used to advance conservative arguments.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: So life is hard and then you die; many things are sad. This response is not unreasonable, however, because of the frequency with which it actually appears. I'm quite surprised to hear the claim that these research departments contain lefties because I have only ever encountered this argument in public in the service on a conservative agenda. You are quite correct to mention eugenics as comparator; eugenics is/was not inherently bad science, but the political uses to which it was put were certainly distasteful. In that case as in this, and echoing Parasomnium's point, just because something can be claimed to be natural does not lend it any normative validity - but that is not how it is likely to be used in the political domain. Like Eugenics, EvoPsych seems set to become a pet right-wing theory, mostly expounded by those with a conservative political agenda, regardless of the quality of the actual science. And ironically, it actually does look like pretty bad science to me becuase, as I remarked on another thread, there doesn't seem to be a model about what the brain is and does such that speculation as to evolutionary impact on the brain and its functions can produce meaningful conclusions. This message has been edited by contracycle, 01-21-2005 06:57 AM
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Sure - you can record, categorise, collect, enumerate, list - lots of things. But you cannot interpret without some sort of understanding of what the brain is actually doing. So as soon as they enter the realm of "because" it starts to sound to me like an appeal to one of the various philosophies, rather than the sciences. Steven Pinker writes: "For ninety-nine percent of human existence, people lived as foragers in small nomadic herds. Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life, not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilisations. They are not wired to cope with anonymous crowds, schooling, written language, government, police, courts, armies, modern medicine, formal social institutions, high technology, and other newcomers to the human experience" Now, thats a fair enough observation as far as it goes, but it presumes the brain is firmly hardwired. Is that true? Is it even *likely*? I think not; the largely undifferentiated mass of the brain suggests to me something more like a memory array that can be situationally configured. I've read some stuff (such as the book on PTSD I mentioned the other day) that suggests that there have been several observed cases of brain functions shifting physical location, something that would not be possible in a hardwired machine. IMO, information science is a going to be as fundamental to biology as genetics, at the end of the day. Ultimately, genes themselves are just data.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Sure. As I said I am not claiming it is bad science - all I have remarked is that the the moment the only people deploying it in political arguments are the right. I consider this more-or-less unrelated to the content of the actual work; in much the way that Rand is only compelling to people who have only read Rand. The relationship between hardware and software is difficult to talk about; I imagine its going to be much worse trying to distinguish hardware that might have been layered down as a response to certain software, as it were. And I do think that the serach for functional modes is pretty much correct. But that said, the actual behaviour of the object as a whole can be be counterintuitive looking at the hardware alone. So I too will be watching with interest.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Eh? Why not? In fact I would say that the majority of bespoke commercial programmes do these things. Not to the same degree, of course.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
I was hoping to see a response to Holmes post above.
-- Syamsu, on the off chance that you have been misunderstood, there is an observation in quantum physics of a "wave function collapse". Because the object is inderterminate until measured, when it is measured the probability that it occupies one possible slot or another will "collapse" into a certainty, here and now. While I am not actually familiar with the term "probability collpase" in statisticis, I think the same idea holds, and that stistics will also refer to probabilistic functions. The same concept of "collapse" would then apply.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Actually, good point there. If a routine’s algorithm is stored in location A, but location A is not accessible, the routine cannot be called. Now, the breakdown could be in the storage medium, or in the communication lines, but the system calling the routine would probably not be able to determine which. IOW, showing that a loss of function accords directly with destruction of the brain part does not tell us why that happens. It could be because the routine is hard-WIRED at that point, but it might also be because the system is hard-CODED to look for the routine at that address.
quote: Actually no, IMO. That is, the question why is symmetry easier/better remains unanswered. If asymmetric things were inherently discomforting, then we would never be happy around trees, and yet most people find them comforting. This is actually exactly the kind of thing that I would hope such a discipline as EP would address. In regards of a notional adaptation for fear of snakes, for example how does the brain detect and determine snake-ness in the first place? It seems dubious to me to speculate on what a given feature is FOR before you know how that feature works.
quote: Indeed, and hence some audiences detect a reactionary subtext.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
I think the above post shows exactly why the question of hardware versus software must be addressed. If you say that the brain may contain old adaptations to circumstances that no longer apply, this appears to assume that the initial adaptation was a physical change, and that this is irreversible. But as I tried to point out by raising the distinctionn between something being hard WIRED and something being hard CODED, this need not be true.
Actually contemplating this has just made me wonder something about junk DNA - could it be compressed data? Compression and encryption are nearly the same thing; I could imagine the brain of a young child "unpacking" data from the junk DNA and compiling it in one part of the brain and then implementing it as a routine in another. Interesting. Another concern arises from WHR scenario. I think its valid to say that the WHR is a marker of attractiveness, but is that the whole story? That is, for example, do the hormonal changes that occur in later life change the significance of this observation? One of the first attacks on EvoPsych I came across was titled something like "EP is just an excuse for old men in macs to lust after young hotties". This arose from seeing arguments surrounding the WHR as being universal normative claims. But one would think, if pair-bonding is a human strategy, that there must also be some evolutionary mechanism to make this stick; surely there should be some mechanism to mitigate the attractiveness of a young hottie in favour of the mother of your children, whom you are both still raising. I do think the top down approach has the same danger that it always has, starting with a conclusion and searching for evidence to support it. And the danger, as always, is that if the assumptions underlying the conclusion are mistaken, the observations will still be interpreted in that light. It does seem to me as if the "agenda" of this discipline is to contradict ideas of cultural relativity and instead to essentially validate the status quo as normal and natural and inevitable. I'm a little unclear as to what findings Razor is referring to when arguing the utility of the research - I though those were the very findings that Holmes was attacking as not really findings at all. What exactly are the successes of EP to date?
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Well as they say "conventional wisdom is always conventional and never wise." The statement above is totally absurd.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Thats nonsense - it is math that showed us the essential similarity of machines and living creatures. They obey the same rules of engineering, and apparently do not obey any supernatural rules differentially.
quote: Cerationists are liars confusing what they wish would be true with what is actually obsservably true. your very statement shows this as it purposefully does not accept that the view espoused is that such freedom is meaningless.
quote: Nonsense. A localised decision is called a "switch", and it will necessarily be physical.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Nonsesne - its been competently addressed many times - the problem is YOU don't even understand your "point", becuase you don't have one.
quote: You don't even seem to know what "turning points" are in your own argument. Being familiar with bath statistics and information science, I can assure you that the concepts of decision and "turning point" are alive and well, and used all the time. The fact is you are sucking your argument out of your thumb.
quote: Not only is this complete gibberish, but it then becomes gibberish squared by somehow constructing a link with "predeterminist" ideologies, and its unlikely that Syamsu is able to explain what he means by "determinist" or why these should apply.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: What? Why? If that were true, how can we build computers?
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: Neither do people IMO. I don't think you can make this distinction - the hardware is itself code. The hardware specifically is comprised of logical arithmetic expressed as circuit diagrams; and a programme is just a set of logical arithmetic expressed in terms of procedural switches and logical gates. The difference between the two is similar to the translation of matter and energy - same thing in different phases or forms.
quote: According to whom?
quote: I suggest that this is an illusion - work with CAT scanners has shown the decisions is made first, and rationalised post facto. That is, the REASON a person gives for their action is always a justification of a non-conscious decision. I'm prepared to allow for some modification in that position, and say that there are some decisions that are really made by the part of you that thinks of itself as you. But still, I maintain your sense of purposefuleness and free will is mostly illusion.
quote: No thats not a valid comparison. For example, your copmputer has a rule that tells it display large fonts or small fonts, and the computer cannot change that by itself. But you can click in a certain place and change the rule, and the next time the box boots the new rule will apply. Now, that means that some rules can be hard-CODED rather than being hard-WIRED (I did not get the impression you really followed this when it came up before). And even a hard WIRED rule can be changed with the appropriate hardware - its actual just the logical extension of changing a hard CODED rule. If I attach a device for writing circuit boards, and a robotic arm, to a sufficiently sophisticated computer, then yes indeed I could get it to write, compile, carve, and install the circuit board, and then reboot itself so the new hard-WIRED rules take effect.
quote: To quote myself, "questions of free will are the vermiform appendix of philosophy". Free Will is only a meaningful concept in theistic terms, and I cannot see what value any non-theist sees in contemplating the topic. The only reason the free will discussion exists at all is to explain how god can be all powerful;, and yet we remain responsible for our sins. If you and I are materialists discussing life as it is known to be, we have no need to touch any of those topics. And I can provide a perfectly valid machanistic model that explains the variability in human decision-making: monocultures are prone to catastrophe. It's better to produce individual systems that are variations on a theme to maximise resilience to single pint of failure.
quote: Well, OK - that point I concede. I just don't understand why any materialist wants to speculate about immaterial notions - it kinda defeats the purpose of being a materialiust, I would have thought. I'm not sure someone interested in such topics can be said to be a materialist.
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contracycle Inactive Member |
quote: True, but as far as information is concerned, thats an unimportant question.
quote: ... no, all those things are other bits of information - noughts and ones - linked together. Thats my whole point - neither in computers nor humans can there be any "true content" - there can only be information. Bits. Your position is a bit like saying a picture of a mountain is not a picture of a mountain -0 becu7ase displayed on screen "its just noghts and ones". No, the noughts and ones are codes that produce action, such as "draw pixel 158 x 137 colour "royal blue"" - and it is those results that we see as the picture. Or the associations attached to the word "tree".
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