tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5841910768079015534.post626663075214568116..comments2024-03-29T08:40:11.883+00:00Comments on BishopBlog: Book Review: The Invisible Gorilladeevybeehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15118040887173718391noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5841910768079015534.post-46210831240792624922010-07-22T14:22:55.615+01:002010-07-22T14:22:55.615+01:00Many thanks for the thoughtful reply. Okay, let&#...Many thanks for the thoughtful reply. Okay, let's see where this goes.<br /><br />The best-known analogy is the computer. The hardware stuff you can kick is analogous to the brain; the stuff you see on the screen is, I suppose, the phenomenology; and then the software, all of which correlates with stuff you could detect in the hardware if you looked hard enough, some but not all of which affects the screen, is cognition.<br /><br />Is that the idea?<br /><br />From the engineering perspective, the point of the levels is clear. When you want, say, to get your computer to take draws from a Gaussian distribution, you probably don't want to be fiddling around directly with the physical memory chips in your PC. It's much less painful to rely on years of abstraction and just type a command in your favourite stats package. You intevene, via the keyboard, at the level of software, and care very little about what the hardware is doing.<br /><br />What is the point of the levels for understanding a system?<br /><br />We want to tell a story about people-level phenomena, like remembering things, reasoning about things, interpreting language, expressing emotions. Layers of abstraction are necessary to isolate the important points of this story. The effect of phonological similarity on memory processes would be lost if expressed in terms of neurotransmitters. Pragmatic language effects in reasoning tasks would be difficult to grasp if expressed in terms of gene expression.<br /><br />Now what I don't understand is when the neural becomes the cognitive. There already are many levels of neural, not all of which you can poke. Thinking here about the sorts of things you can do with EEG and MEG where the story is tremendously abstract, though dependent on stuff measurable from the brain.<br /><br />Maybe a clue comes from how you intervene on the system. Here, again, I'm not sure how the cognitive-level helps. You can intervene with TMS (or ECT, I suppose), you can intervene with drugs, or you can intervene with verbal instructions and other stimuli. You can also intervene socially and culturally.<br /><br />How do you intervene cognitively or mentally?<br /><br />Maybe this is the wrong way to think about it, but it bothers me a lot!<br /><br />I do accept that very abstract theories of neural representations are necessary. But I think they are still theories of something neural, even if they don't mention bits of brain.<br /><br />Finally, what is cognition? Here I collected some quotations which show how messy the concept is:<br /><br />http://figuraleffect.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/what-is-cognition/Andyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10208461201183085397noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5841910768079015534.post-17918319069242995182010-07-03T13:15:55.835+01:002010-07-03T13:15:55.835+01:00In reply to Andy:
Mental processes: definitely not...In reply to Andy:<br />Mental processes: definitely not neuro. Things like memory, perception, reasoning, comprehension, etc. You can call them 'cognitive' if you prefer, though 'mental' has a respectable tradition going back to William James. <br />I distinguish in my work between 4 levels of description, namely etiology (genes/environments), neurology, cognition and observed behaviour. Obviously all link to the other, and much of the research interest is in making the links. But this book illustrates just how the mental/cognitive level can be a valid topic of experimental study in its own right: I'd argue not a limbo, just another level of description.deevybeehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15118040887173718391noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5841910768079015534.post-2946168442301748362010-07-01T18:19:57.343+01:002010-07-01T18:19:57.343+01:00What is a mental process? The stuff we're con...What is a mental process? The stuff we're conscious of and can't quite put into data, or a limbo between real, wet, neural processes, and observable behaviour - sort of a structured version of the latent variables used by psychometricians (who often seem allergic to things cognitive and processy).<br /><br />It used to be considered bad form to refer to something as a neural process unless it referred to synapses, but is this still the case? There are various levels of "neural" from absence of neural due to lesions and BOLD activation patterns, down to vesicle kissing and gene expression. Maybe behavioural neuroscience is allowed up another level to more abstract representations currently called "mental", "cognitive", and the mental can be returned to refer to the what-it-feels-like magic.Andyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10208461201183085397noreply@blogger.com