![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Do Internal States Cause Behavior?
Here’s a fun chicken-and-egg argument for this lovely Tuesday evening: do we cry because we’re sad, or are we sad because we cry?
Just stumbled across an interesting bit of speculation about the relationship between external behavior and internal states, by way of a Stanford University web page on what’s referred to as folk psychology. I really only have a primitive grasp on the concepts at this point, and that’s precisely why I’m writing about them - in the hopes that it will help me process what they are talking about. Closely related to something called eliminative materialism, folk psychology seems to be a term by scientific types used to denigrate the everyday theories of the mind and behavior that regular people use. It’s both chilling and weirdly intriguing:
Eliminativism maintains that our common-sense understanding of the mind is radically mistaken, and that neuroscience will one day reveal that the mental states we talk about in every day discourse using words such as intend, believe, desire, and love do not refer to anything real. They maintain that it is only due to the inadequacy of our language that people mistakenly think that they have beliefs and desires. Some eliminativists therefore believe that consciousness does not exist except as an epiphenomenon of brain function and some believe that the concept will eventually be eliminated as neuroscience progresses.
If this isn’t a miserable way of looking at the world, then I don’t know what is. Or maybe I really don’t “know” anything at all. Tough call, really. In any event, there are some bits of all this that really interest me though. Such as this guy Wilfred Sellers, who in 1956:
… presented an alternative myth in which our ancestors, initially limited to a purely behavioristic understanding of action, learned a new theory of action that posits inner episodes as the causes of overt behavior. At first our ancestors only applied the new theory to others, but then they learned to “read” their own mental states off their behavior. In the final stages of the myth they became adept at mental state self-attribution without theorizing from their behavior; nevertheless the self-attributed states remain the posits of an introduced theory of mind.
So in other words, in this hypothetical origin story, you would suddenly find yourself bludgeoning an enemy to death, stop for a second and be like “Hm, I’m beating the piss out of this guy. Based on that exterior observation, I must be feeling extreme rage.” In one sense it sounds kinda crazy. But in another sense, how often have you found yourself doing something almost automatically, and been like, “Whoa, what the heck was I thinking?”
I find this philosophical area to be pretty intellectually daunting, and I’m not sure why philosophers would spend time arguing it. I guess the thing that I find intriguing about this little hypothetical origin of internal consciousness is that it calls into question the cause and effect relationships we usually take for granted. We do x because we feel y. Maybe it’s reversed. Maybe they’re not causally linked, but simply clustered together, like friends at a party.
The other thing that intrigues me/creeps me out about this line of thinking - that we have no desires or beliefs, or that love is meaningless - is how useful of a philosophy that would be to abide in if you were some kind of large scale social engineer, trying to apply scientific principles to governing a society. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately when it comes to the games of conspiracy and power politics. Those of us on the bottom spend our time speculating about the “elites” lording it over us at the top. Within that speculation, we tend to project our own methods and habits of thinking and feeling (folk psychology, as it were) into this other nebulous group of people. What if they don’t operate according to that system at all? What if they don’t just not see the utility of love or belief, but actually don’t even acknowledge the sheer existence of such things in the human mind or the universe at large? It’s sort of a terrifying thought, but seems to explain a lot of their behavior in a much simpler and more fictionally satisfying way.
For a good example of what such a person might look like, sound like or act like, I recommend (once again) checking out Part 1 of the BBC documentary, Century of the Self, and keep your eye on Edward Bernays, the invention of the modern day public relations industry. Is that guy just an anomaly or is he a glimpse into how people in high places really go about things once they’ve shed the shackles of our folk psychology?
- “Irrational” Behavior
- Terence McKenna on Glossolalia
- What Leaders Do
- Interior monologues
- Behavior, Belief & Experience
- Prev: The Demise of the White Race
- Next: Creative Limitation
May 9th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
This is an interesting bit from Wikipedia about BF Skinner’s radical behaviorism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_behaviorism
I’m not really sure what all these pieces point towards, but they were triggered by JP’s and my recent posts relate to Alan Watts and the mind:
http://www.snant.com/fp/archives/consc...as-the-collapse-of-the-wave-function/
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006...05/05/you-are-reading-this-blog-post/
Maybe somebody reading this will be able to fill in the blanks a little for me…
May 9th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
I see this another way. Maybe what we define right now as “intend” is misguided by our current language because we often say we “intend” to do something, which ends up being the opposite of what we actually do. Therefore, it isn’t real, but something in an state of ever-changing, as is what we “believe” ever-changing, and our “desires” ever-changing and our “loves” ever-changing. These are words that are natually elusive and thereby not easily pinned down, or defined. “..not refer to anything real” meaning that they are not easily definable because of the shifting sands of our thoughts and feelings based on millions of influences we process every day.
Or not. It’s just another way to look at it.
May 10th, 2006 at 12:39 am
In a way, Eliminativism reminds me of a badly mutated form of Buddhism. In a sense, they are right: there is just the eternal now, and mind is an illusion. However, as you suggest, the way they frame things sets the stage for some pretty frightening political ideologies.
But their position is doomed:
If people don’t have beliefs and thoughts, how can they think they do?
What appears to be the case is that even though they may be right in the strictest philosophical sense, the philosophy is completely useless unless/until they succeed in turning us all into remote-controlled zombies. In the meantime, it is still easier to get through the world believing in thoughts and desires. And while you’re projecting these internal states onto yourself, your neighbor, and your dog, you might as well project these states onto the wind, the rain, the sun, countries, energy fields, and your dead ancestors. Who cares if none of it is “real” if it turns out to be a more useful way to relate to the world?
May 10th, 2006 at 3:08 am
I’ve pondered things like thing a lot lately, trying to understand why more people in developed & undeveloped countries alike, aren’t awake enough to be outraged to action, by whatever injustice they might encounter in their respective lives, or at least be compelled to look deeper. Certainly many in the world are struck numb by the sobering weight of daily existence, to ever try to reach for the stars … but hopefully they dream.
I wish I could find this info again to reference it, but I read in interesting anthropological look into the common themes that seem universal among cultures: Live has a value, including that of the individual (ego) and one’s family. This seems a likely place to start.
May 10th, 2006 at 4:18 am
This here be the road unto nihilism. Not to be avoided necessarily, but not to be taken lightly either.
When the idea-makers trained within the “century of the self” refer to the “blank slate upon which an entirely new identity can be built” they’re talking about managed nihilism. Treatment of bipolar disorder has often, lo these last few decades, been treated with nearly poisonous, regularly administered doses of lithium. Manic depressiveness therefore, is managed by not quite poisoning one to death, but rather keeping one so near to death inducing toxicity that the mania subsides and low intensity depression thus sets in. Sure there’s so much more to it, but possibly not. It’s still managed depression.
Perhaps it has been possible to bring an entire society’s collective sense of self so close to the point of destruction, simply by feeding its individual nodes/consumers/citizens so much nonstop information, much of it garbage (poison), that it has been able to completely “lap” the actual senses meted out in beautiful but antiquated forms of expression? It layers within it the bonafide, “primitive” needs of civilized humankind and then “recivilizes” it, subsuming it into its whole making it modern and more up to date.
While at the same time, the contexts in which we need to “prove” to others, those with more of a state of blankness than we, that we actually know what we’re talking about, become less and less believable. The subsumation of reality has become the summation of the norm. Normal is now a plummeting hole of nothingness — as new entertaining images are flashed your way to make you feel the plummeting feeling in your stomach is natural. Contexts become images and images, contexts. All freely manipulable by anyone with the access to the grand presentation.
In a world of google, smart homes, smart cars, RFID, GPS, TiVO, blogs, podcasts and myriad everything else, we are all welcome to feel free to think we have access codes in building this brave new *virtual* (which is more real than real anymore) world. Nevertheless, we’ve only been given access.
What is it that grants the access? Where is it? Who is it? Does it even matter?
This to me is like saying hi to nihilism as though his name was Bruce. He’s chillin’ with us now. Yeah, Bruce sucks to be around. But he never ever goes away. Buy Bruce a drink.
May 10th, 2006 at 11:00 am
Aha, it’s been awhile since I’ve logged on here, but it’s time to take a lunch break.
I was actually thinking about this the other day regarding some of my habits, including that I have a tendency to be a workaholic and that I’m probably addicted to coffee… The other day I must’ve been having a coffee-crash in the evening and I realized halfway through yelling at someone that I was doing it. I stopped mid-argument and went “Wait. Wait a second. Forget everything I just said. I have no idea why I’m yelling at you or why I’m grumpy. In fact, I feel like I should be in a really relaxed, good mood right now, but for some reason I’m really grumpy.” With that feeling fresh in my mind, it seems like the excerpt from the article you posted is only half-there in presuming its own theory. I find it amusing that these theorists can even begin to believe a theory that somewhat negates itself. It’s very Zen to believe a theory that proposes that true belief is futile…
It’s really hard for me to say that the chemical reactions and presuppositions in my brain are fully responsible for everything I do… So, I accept half of the theory and reject the other half that makes it seem like there’s no way to expand upon it. I think that’s the problem with philosophy, because for some reason we like to make it into a story or a research paper and have some sort of conclusion to it. Do (real) things in life have a natural conclusion? Not really. There always seem to be exceptions to the rules, or ways to break them, or sidebars and tangents and cyclical events that transcend the original beliefs…
Philosophy is really depressing sometimes, but I think it’s because we get afraid halfway through about our own sanity and start negating our experiences and discounting them as mistakes in our flawed perception. But then when we stop philosophizing, experiences hold more weight. So, I think they really have to play hand in hand. I can read a bunch of materials about how the afterlife doesn’t exist (and why) and negate everything people have ever told me, but it’s really hard to stack a theory up against experience, particularly when that experience is fresh.
May 10th, 2006 at 11:16 am
The direction I meant to go with this, before I lost steam, was something like: maybe the “elites” apply this sort of nihilistic eliminative philosophy to the masses - almost as a tool or means of suppressing their own guilt or humanity for the crazy stuff they do to manage us. But when it comes to their personal lives, they seem to operate under very different principles. They don’t deny the reality of their own inner impulses, but they indulge in them in ways which promote their own power and further cement their distance from actual humanity. I wonder if Jeff Well’s fascination with ritual abuse among elites points towards this philosophy/religion in action and the consequences of its intersection with ordinary people.
May 10th, 2006 at 11:29 am
So does this create our archetypal guilt-ridden elite member who eventually brings down the elite-organization in a moment of humanity and self-sacrifice?
May 10th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
That would be pretty sweet if it did, but I think this guilt-ridden elite would most likely be assassinated.
May 10th, 2006 at 12:10 pm
Argh! I’ve been dying to watch the Century of the Self, but it’s not out on dvd yet. . and I’m quite frustrated that I won’t get to see it before I leave Friday for England. (Where I may or may not be coming back from, and yes. . .i’m sure they have dvd’s over there, but i won’t have a computer or a player, so it really won’t matter).
At any rate, I think you’re touching upon something that the group over there at Cassiopaea.org refers to as “organic portals”. Humans among us that have no consciousness and therefore see the “other” only as something to manipulate, subvert, or oppress. Apparently they believe these psychopaths are a new kind of anomaly in the human gene pool and that, invariably, they rise to levels of power throughout society that directly influences everyone surrounding them. I kind of find it cheap to just lump a section of society into a neatly defined group (such being soul-less). . specifically if I’m doing this just because I have a personal problem with these people. However, if there were those of us who AREN’T sentient on this planet. . .that would certainly explain a great deal.
But then, how would that tie in with the fact that “we’re all one”. . .something that, cliche though it may sound. . . I still ultimately agree with? Your thoughts?
May 10th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Yeah I’m pretty skeptical of the Cassiopeans both in general and in regard to the whole organic portal issue. I’ve written about it elsewhere, that this whole notion of certain people not having souls being a slippery slope:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005...do-you-decide-who-doesnt-have-a-soul/
And I also have been thinking a lot about the theory that people aren’t actually born with souls at all, but you must acquire one through a lot of hard work:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/08/26/working-for-a-soul/
That said, what’s the difference between saying that people don’t have souls and don’t have minds? Where does each one lead?
In the hypothetical view I’m exploring above, it’s not that SOME people don’t have minds, but that there really is no such thing as “mind” at all. It alleviates *some* of the problems posed by the “who doesn’t have a soul” question. Of course in order to *think* about not having a mind, we tend to believe that we’re using our minds to think about it. Maybe we’re not though. If we’re not using our minds to think, then what are we using? Are we using anything at all? Are we even thinking? How do we know?
May 10th, 2006 at 12:17 pm
PS. Pete, you can watch Century of the Self at any number of locations online if you have the patience to download it. Just google it! Or use the link in the body of the post.
May 10th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Yeah, I recognized that train-of-thought in your post although I got sidetracked in my thinking. Nihilism, especially the positivist/materialist kind, is a very effective tool for elites. But don’t you think that’s the way we operate with nonhuman animals? Western civ has been denying mind/soul to (nonhuman) animals for centuries, yet much research shows that these beings behave in ways that are startlingly similar to the ways humans behave.
It is interesting to note that the emerging police state is quite brutal to animal rights activists. There is almost certainly a connection, at a deep subconcious level if not at the level of the superficial/overt.
May 10th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
The thing I find startling when I explore this line of research is how widespread and popular these ideas once were (and by that, I guess I mean out in the open). Take for example B.F. Skinner:
I don’t believe these ideas just vanished into the aether without leaving any trace or morphing into subtler, more advanced and more effective forms.
May 10th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Sort of. If you believe strictly in the “impartial observer” component of the scientific method, I think Skinner may have a point. But the “impartial observer” only exists in a Newtonian world. Its existence is approximately (and therefore practically) true in a wide variety of situations studied by science, but in absolute terms is false, as quantum mechanics basically posits. Observer and observed are inextricably linked in a QM world (which is the one we really live in).
This is not very useful framework for most scientific thought, especially biology and medicine. However, it is certainly indispensible in magick (or whatever else you want to call it), and also (in my view) probably indispensible in psychology.
Yeah, I’m surrounded by it every day: systems biology, genomics/proteomics/metabolomics are all very deterministic, and when combined with neuroscience (which is not an area I work in) lead to a very subtle form of behaviorist nihilism. (Thanks JK, I like that characterization of Skinneresque behavorism).
May 10th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
[quote]If this isn’t a miserable way of looking at the world, then I don’t know what is.[/quote]
It depends… the notion that mind is cerebral epiphenomena only undermines the belief in a personal ’spirit’ or consciousness separate from the body. But it does not negate the possibility of bigger scenarios, e.g. the world existing within consciousness instead of vice versa. In fact, as Jeff from RI has been hinting at, if you perceive the brain as more of a terminal than a mainframe, this whole eliminativism thing may be on a fruitful course… nihilism is just one step away from nirvana.
Beware that old mind/body duality illusion.
May 10th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
I meant that not believing in love is miserable.
May 10th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
[…] But turn things around and apply that idea in the context of social planning. Take an idea like eliminative materialism which says something roughly like desires, beliefs, love, consciousness don’t exist at all as real things, that advances in neuroscience will show us that they are nothing more than superstition. Start applying that sort of nihilistic behavioralism as a philosophy of governance, and the whole thing takes on a decidedly creepy air. A little clip about B.F. Skinner’s book Beyond Freedom and Dignity from Wikipedia I think does a nice job of highlighting that creepiness: Beyond Freedom and Dignity advanced the thesis that social concepts such as free will and human dignity (by which Skinner meant belief in individual autonomy) were obsolete, and stood in the way of greater human happiness and productivity. Skinner was opposed to inhumane treatment and bad government, but he argued that the champions of freedom went so far as to deny causality in human action so they could champion the “free person.” In a sense, the champions of freedom were enemies of a scientific way of knowing. […]
May 12th, 2006 at 5:46 am
there are entities on the planet that display behaviours that are recognisable as survival related. these entities display other behaviours such as playfulness, hostility, etc. they are called animals. do they have thoughts like we do? they condition to behaviour, they are sesitive to pain, and can be loyal, which gives the sense that they are cognisant but we are told that is merely a romantic and sentimental projection on our part.
i watched a squirrel playing with a cat one time. he would race off and the cat would follow until the squirrel got far enough ahead and then he would stop and wait for the cat to catch up, then he would bolt off again.
my farmer friend told me that it was the the squirrel`s threat boundary that was emulating “play”. when the squirrel was far enough ahead he wasn`t threatened any longer so he stopped. whan the cat camecloser the threat boundary was invaded and the squirrel ran away again. it was me who projected the play idea onto the behaviour…..apparently.