Caution in science Caution in science Hypotheses- role in science Indirect perception, representationalism Indirect perception, representationalism Isomorphism Isomorphism Local recording, single-cell electrode Resonance in the brain
p. 125:
Why are the objects of the phenomenal world perceived as before us,
outside of ourselves, even though today everybody knows that they
depend upon processes inside of us, in the central nervous system?
... Many of the greatest physiologists, among them even Helmholtz,
have failed to achieve full clarity on this question. Mach and
Avenarius attempted to lead the scientific world away from the
errors already implicit in the formulation of the paradox. But
either their explanations remain little known, or they did not
sufficiently elucidate the problem. For only a few years ago a
well-known physician raised the question anew: "How is it that
consciousness, which is bound to an organism, relates the changes in
its sense organs to something located outside of itself?" All
attempts to explain this "compulsion to project" appeared useless to
him, for he felt that here is one of the eternal enigmas, related to
the mind-body problem. It seems clear that this contemporary
physician is not alone; rather he represents the majority of natural
scientists.
...
The physical processes between object and sense organ are followed
by further events which are propagated through nerves and nerve
cells as far as certain regions of the brain. Somewhere in these
regions processes take place which are tied to the occurrence of
perception ... Now it would obviously be meaningless to identify
with each other the starting point and such a late or distant phase
of this sequence of events ... If I shoot at a target, nobody will
claim that the hole in the target is the same thing as the revolver
from which the bullet came.
...
We might be tempted to say that parts of the phenomenal world should
not be thought of as localized in any place in the physical world as
a matter of principle, since phenomenal and physical localizations
are incommensurable. ... Let us assume that ... the total phenomenal
world of a person is simply not definitely localizable anywhere in
the physical world ... Then it follows that we may arbitrarily
think of [it] wherever in the physical world it would help our
thinking. ... Now, according to our basic assumption, the totality
of a person's perceptual world is strictly correlated with certain
processes in his central nervous system. It will then simplify our
discussion and our terminology if, in what follows, we ... think of
[it] as being mapped on those brain processes which certainly at
least correspond to them.
p. 91:
I do not believe that ... I need defend the strict distinction
between percepts and physical objects any further. But why is it so
difficult to convince people that this distinction is necessary?
[Perhaps because they] may not yet have been able to discard the
last remnants of naive realism from their philosophy of science. I
admit that this is a hard task for all of us.
p. 94:
It is actually simpler to find authors who commit this error than
people who have recognized it as an error. The mistake was first
corrected a hundred years ago, in 1862, by Ewald Hering - an
extrordinary achievement ... characteristically enough, in his
publication Hering made a pessimistic remark about the chances that
his explanation would be understood by his contemporaries. As a
matter of fact, few ever became acquainted with it during the past
hundred years, and not very many seem to know about it now.
p. 84:
What we call the self is just one more directly
accessible percept ... . When dealing with perception more
in detail we shall find it necessary to distinguish sharply between
the self as a percept and the physical organism in question.
p. 89:
Do we really see physical objects? I like to answer questions of this
kind because only when they are answered wil the conceptual confusions
... finally disappear. When we consider the long chain of events that
connects physical facts in our physical environment with directly
accessible percepts, our answer to this particular question can only
be a clear NO.
Originally published as...
p. :
The old belief in the primary importance of purely local facts is
still very much alive. In fact, it is now strengthened by the
invention of new devices, the micro-electrodes, which permit the
psychologist to take records from individual cells in the nervous
system. One cannot object to the use of such tools. Some questions
concerning the elements of the nervous system are now being answered
with their help. But they contribute little to our knowledge of
molar, macroscopic brain processes, which is far more important for
our understanding of psychological facts.
p. 64:
what physiological events occur in [the cortex] when human beings have
perceptual experiences ...?
...
Wilhelm Wundt ... gave this radical answer: "Brain processes and corresponding psychophysical facts differ entirely as to the nature of both their elements and of the connections among these elements".
p. 65:
Why should ... a similarity of behavior of perceptual and physical
facts become impossible when the physical facts in question happen to
physiological processes in the brain? ... To be sure, human perception
contains many facts the like of which never occur in the physical
world. Take the sensory qualities of vision, such as blue, gray,
yellow, green, and red. In the physical world, the physicists find
nothing that resembles these qualities, and nobody expects
physiological processes in the visual cortex of the brain to have such
characteristics. But we did not refer to sensory qualities when we
began to suspect tht certain properties of perceptual fields resemble
properties of cortical processes to which they are related. The
properties we had in mind were structural properties. For
instance, under certain conditions, perceptual processes tend to
assume regular and simple forms, and we suspect that under the
same conditions, corresponding processes in the brain show the same
tendency, then we refer to what I just called "structural"
characteristics. It is only such structural characteristics which,
not only in this case but in many others, perceptual facts and
corresponding brain events may have in common. In 1920 the Gestalt
psychologists transformed this assumption into the following general
hypothesis. Psychological facts and the underlying events in the brain
resemble each other in all their structural characteristics. Today,
we call this the hypothesis of Psychophysical Isomorphism.
p. 92:
...a further remark about what I called "structure" of physical events
seems indicated. Sometimes the term "structure" is used in a purely
geometrical sense. But when I use the term in our present connection,
it refers to a functional aspect of processes, to the distribution of
such processes, a distribution which they assume ... as a consequence
of the dynamic interrelations or interactions among their parts.
p. 2:
[Why are great discoveries not being made in psychology equivalent to
discoveries in physics, such as x-rays, radioactivity, quantum effects?]
The reason is not that such discoveries are more difficult in psychology than they are in physics; ... rather ... because man was acquainted with practically all territories of mental life a long time before the founding of scientific psychology. In other words psychologists could not make such startling discoveries as constitute the pride of physics, because at the very beginning of their work there were no entirely unknown mental facts left which they could have discovered.
[drives, habit, memory, moods, emotions, thinking, attention, sleep, dreams]
Why should we assume that any such facts are left? It seems quite possible that no discoveries in this sense will occur even in the future of our science.
p. 7:
I doubt whether it is advisable to regard caution and a critical
spirit as the virtues of a scientist, as though little else counted.
They are necessary in research, just as the brakes in our cars must be
kept in order and their windshields clean. But it is not because of
the brakes or of the windshields that we drive. Similarly, caution
and a critical spirit are like tools. They ought to be kept ready
during a scientific enterprise; however the main business of science
is gaining more and more new knowledge. ... Why are just psychologists
so inclined to greet the announcement of a new fact (or a new working
hypothesis) almost with scorn? This is caution that has gone sour and
has almost become negativism. ... Too many young psycholotists
... either work only against something done by others, or merely vary
slightly what others have done before; in other words, preoccupation
with method may tend to limit the range of our research.
p. 8:
Our wish to use only perfect methods and clear concepts has led to
methodological behaviorism. Human experience in the phenomenological
sense cannot yet be treated with our most reliable methods; and when
dealing with it, we may be forced to form new concepts which at first,
will often be a bit vague. Most experimentalists, therefore, refrain
from observing, or even from referring to, the phenomenal scene. And
yet, this is the scene on which, so far as the actors are concerned,
the drama of ordinary human living is being played all the time. If
we never study this scene, but insist onmethods and concepts developed
in research "from the outside", our results are likely to look strange
to those who intensely live "inside".
p. 9:
In new fields, not only quantitative data are relevant.
p. 64:
"Natural sciences continually advance explanatory hypotheses, which
cannot be verified by direct observation at the time when they are
formed nor for a long time thereafter. Of such a kind were
Ampere's theory of magnetism, the kinetic theory of gases, the
electronic theory, the hypothesis of atomic disintegration in the
theory of radioactivity. Some of these assumptions have since been
verified by direct observation, or have at least come close to such
direct verification; others re still far removed from it. But
physics and chemistry would have been condemned to a permanent
embryonic state had they abstained from such hypotheses; their
development seems rather like a continuous effort steadily to
shorten the rest of the way to the verification of hypotheses which
survive this process"
p. 193:
"Any actual consciousness is in every case not only blindly coupled to its corresponding physiological processes, but is akin to it in essential structural properties"
p. :
Thus, isomorphism, a term implying equality of form, makes the bold
assumption that the "motion of the atoms and molecules of the brain"
are not "fundamentally different from thoughts and feelings" but in
their molar aspectes, considered as processes in extension,
identical.
p. 5:
It is quite true that, in natural science, all observation of systems
is observation "from the outside." But does it follow that, when the
psychologist deals with human subjects, he must always use the same
procedure? Must he also restrict his observations to behavior as
watched from the outside? Why should he not be interested in mental
life as experienced by himself or others? If a certain scientific
enterprise which we admire has unfortunately only one kind of access
to its material, why should psychology, which has two, refuse to make
use of both?
p. 6:
In [the] methodological sense, most American psychologists now seem
to be behaviorists. Under the circumstances, not only details but
also most impressive aspects of the phenomenal scene are often
ignored in the psychologist's work. Their admiration of method, of
precision, prevents them from paying attention to phenomenological
evidence even when this evidence could hardly escape the very
simplest observation. Naturally, the psychologists' sin of omission
makes them incapable of contributing to the solution of the
mind-body problem in its most serious form, in which it refers to
the relation between the phenomenal scene and the characteristics of
events in nature. Once more, one cannot study the relation between
two groups of facts without knowing the facts in each group per se.