An update and a look back.

Hello all,

I'm almost done with my bachelor degree, which will be a bachelors in science with a major in experimental psychology and minor in philosophy. I am hoping to move onto graduate school to get a doctorate in neuroscience. I'm in my last full semester of undergrad school, and only need two classes in the summer and I am done. I wanted to take the time to look back on all that I have learned. I want to look at the things which have shaped my opinions, and walk my readers through my journey. This will be lengthy, but if you read my blog, you likely are used to long posts by now.

When I first got into psychology, I spent some time exploring the major perspectives in the field. At first, I was very fond of behaviorism as a methodology and to an extent, even the radical behaviorism of B.F. Skinner. I also was rather fond of evolutionary psychology. To me, even though evolutionary psychology referred to innate and internal states, it could be reconciled with a behavioristic point of view in that an "instinct" could be thought of as merely a predisposition to respond to certain discriminative stimuli in a particular way. In retrospect, such thinking made me most similar to the ideas of Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence.

For those not in the know, behaviorism is both a methodology and a perspective in psychology. It started in the 1910s with John B. Watson (who by the way was born not far from where I live) when he published an article titled "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It". It set forth a strict and rigorous methodology for psychology that focused only on the relationship between an organism and the environment. Watson argued that we cannot ever be in contact with another person's internal mental states, but we can figure out how a person or animal behaves. This point of view was in stark contrast to the psychoanalytic point of view popularized by Freud and Jung which focused on the mind. The psychoanalytic point of view also was not a scientific theory. That is, it was not in the business of finding things out about the mind, but rather, Freud conceived of it based on his patients and introspection about himself. Critics of Freudian psychology such as philosopher of science Karl Popper rightly point out that it is untestable. So, unlike psychoanalysis and introspective schools of psychology, the behaviorsit methodology was very consistent, strong, and worked wonderfully. This was known as methodological behaviorism. B.F. Skinner later formulated a philosophy of psychology known as radical behaviorism. It is called radical because it makes the startling assertion that there are no internal mediating states between the organism and the environment. That is, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and so forth, play no role in behavior. They have been eliminated. This will figure in later when I discuss the views of certain philosophers of mind. This was summarized best when B.F. Skinner stated, "We don't say that the human subject gambles to punish himself as the Freudians might say or gambles because it feels exciting when he does so, nothing of the sort, people gamble because of the schedule of reinforcement that follows." (this can be heard around 2:28 of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acDLluyl3tE)

But back to my views. I wouldn't call myself a behaviorist anymore, although there are still psychologists in the field of applied behavioral analysis that would, but I owe a lot to my previous commitment to behaviorism. It equipped me with rigorous expectations for what a psychological theory should be, which keeps me from really preferring cognitivist models of thought. Behaviorism largely was overturned after the cognitive revolution in the 1950s and 60s, so that by the 80s and 90s cognitivism had become the dominant approach to experimental psychology. The revolution occurred due to the influence of information theory and linguistics on psychology. The linguist Noam Chomsky argued strongly against Skinner's theory of language (I won't go into detail, but you can read of it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Psychology). To the cognitivists, the mind was conceived of as information processing. It was software which ran on the hardware of the brain. As such, psychology as a whole shifted from focusing on the relation between the organism and environment to conceiving of models of information processing which accurately describe and predict behavior. It is worth noting two things. First of all, most behaviorists were not radical behaviorists, and most even did not perfectly abstain from incorporating internal drives, states, etc, into their explanations (such as Hull and Spence as well as Edward Tolman, who was a precursor thinker to cognitivist theories). Secondly, as one might expect, B.F. Skinner rejected cognitivism as nonsense, writing that "cognitive science is the creation science of psychology."

Why might I not care for cognitivism? First of all, while I agree that thought is information processing, I do not conceive of it as being information processing in the sense of symbolic operations in a computer. The brain is giant meta-network of neural networks, each running in parallel to each other. So, when it comes to modeling cognition, I prefer theoretical models that mirror the architecture of the brain on a neural level. For this, connectionist models, particularly parallel distributed processing, come in handy. These simply model thought and memory as being the activation of various model neurons in a network. While still theoretical, at least they resemble the brain. Detailed information can be found here and here.

I also rather like the theory of embodied simulation. Traditional Chomskyian linguistics and cognitive psychology based on the symbolic computational theory of mind have long struggled to integrate semantics. One solution has been to abandon this strict computational approach which posits a "language of thought" and instead look at what the brain is doing when it is comprehending a sentence. As discussed in the book Louder than Words: How the Mind Makes Meaning by Benjamin Bergen, it has been found that when the brain is comprehending language, it is simulating sentences. That is, if you were told "I was playing baseball", the brain would run a simulation of that person playing baseball. The theory has its limits since it likely cannot explain more abstract semantics such as the things being discussed here, but the evidence shows that "embodied simulation" is something that the brain does. Perhaps for more abstract semantics connectionist theories would be better able to explain it.

As I mentioned earlier, I want to go into the field of neuroscience. I want to understand how the brain carries out all those intermediate processes Skinner thought did not exist. The behaviorists conceived of the mind as a black box, but we now have wonderful technology such as fMRI and Diffusion Tensor Imaging that let us see exactly where certain mental processes are happening. There are also advanced mathematical techniques that allow EEG data to be localized to certain parts of the brain. But that begs the question, is the mind really the same thing as the brain? I've explored this issue in a previous post, although I do not necessarily commit myself to functionalism anymore (mainly due to the limited conception of mental states as being the intermediate between stimulus and response; not all thought is in response to a stimulus and not all thought results in a response).  So, I will henceforth presume that the mind and brain are identical. This is the metaphysical position known as physicalism or materialism, that matter is all that exists. I want to touch on a particular brand of materialism known as eliminative materialism, or eliminativism for short. This is the viewpoint, largely defended by Patricia and Paul Churchland but also by Richard Rorty and Paul Feyrabend, that intentional states such as beliefs and desires do not exist. The idea is that once we have a complete understanding of neuroscience we might find that our "folk psychology" concepts of beliefs and desires and things like that may have no role in our neuropsychological explanations. This means that they will not reduce neatly down to certain brain states, but will be eliminated entirely. Sound familiar? It's because it's a redux of radical behaviorism. This time, instead of focusing on the relationship between the organism and the environment (known as a stimulus response model) it focuses on the brain. This point of view has been most clearly and fully expressed in the book Neurophilosophy by Patricia Churchland. Another motivation for her advocating eliminativism is that she criticizes the symbolic computational theory of mind, which she calls functionalist psychology in the book, which would posit that a belief might be represented in the brain as a sentence in a symbolic language of thought. She and I both reject the language of thought hypothesis and the computational approach to psychology, and as it happens, she is a supporter of connectionism. Hence, if sentential representations of beliefs do not exist, perhaps they do not at all. However, I cannot really say that I am an eliminativist, even though she and I have much in common and she is one of my favorite philosophers of mind, mostly for the reason that she is actively involved in neuroscience. Just because we cannot explain how a belief or intention exists in the brain now doesn't mean we never will. We likely just do not have a clear definition compatible with modern neuroscience yet. Neuroscience is young, so making long term predictions like beliefs and intentional states will be eliminated, seems a bit presumptuous to me.

I also am rather interested in behavioral genetics and neuro-epigenetics. One thing outside of cognitive topics that I am immensely interested in is personality. In fact, I am currently doing research in the field of personality psychology. I'm interested in what it is that makes people unique. The old nature vs. nurture debate is settled, we know it's both. But how does the environment interact with the mind-brain? How does the way the body is innately wired up by genes determine how it interacts with the environment? These are questions fundamental to the study of personality, so understanding not just how the brain works and behavioral principles but the cellular mechanisms which enable all of this to happen is also important.

Since I am listing all the things I am interested in, I may as well add that I am a voracious reader on the topic of evolution. Some of my favorite books which tie in evolutionary biology to behavioral studies are Moral Origins by Christopher Boehm and Good Natured by Frans De Waal. I think it is important to place all of this neuroscience and psychology in the grander perspective of evolution, which is after all how all of this came about in the first place.

In summary, as I look back on the last few years of my life, I can see how much I have learned. I first entered psychology after leaving my computer technology major, and came to it with an open mind and a lot of interest. I latched onto behaviorism  but have since moved onto a more neuroscientific perspective. I've studied philosophy of mind intensely  and often think about the relationship between philosophy of mind and neuropsychology. I'm interested in big questions, such as what the mind is and what personality is, which are things I could not have begun to think about in any serious detail just a couple of years ago. There is much yet to be learned, and new findings happen every day. Psychology has become ever more intertwined with neuroscience, cellular biology, and evolutionary biology. I hope for a successful future, and while I have to credit myself for my dedication, I have had wonderful professors who have given me guidance and encouragement and a wonderful education. I'm forever in their debt.