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Article 6198 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: roitblat@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Herbert Roitblat)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Transducers
Summary: Harnad's hypothesis has important utility
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Date: 10 Jun 92 20:34:12 GMT
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     I would like to contribute to the "I am transducer"
argument.

     Harnad seems to have a legitimate, and I think insightful,
argument in his conceptualization of mind as transduction.  It is
always the case that the behavior (R) of an organism can be
described as a function of the stimuli that impinge on it (S), R
= f(S).  A number of contributors to this discussion have alluded
to the fact that this is exactly the formulation behaviorists,
used in their accounts of behavior and Skinner (1935) used this
formula as the definition of a reflex.  Skinner (1974) also
argued that in explaining behavior we can go directly from the
prior physical causes to the behavior while bypassing feelings or
states of mind.  If all of the linkages are lawful, he said, then
nothing is lost by neglecting the internal processes.

     One might be justified, therefore, to claim that the
mind/transducer argument is nothing but behaviorism, but it seems
to me that there is more to be gained from such the argument than
behaviorism would allow.  Nevertheless there is something to be
gleaned from the consistency between the mind/transducer argument
and behaviorism.  Behaviorism grew in large part as a response to
dualistic mentalism.  They perhaps threw out the baby (mentalism)
with the bathwater (dualism), but it is clearly true that
behaviorism has no truck with dualism.  Therefore, on at least
one reading, the mind/transducer argument is inherently monistic.

     The behavioristic reading of mind/transducer requires that
all of the linkages between the stimulus situation and the
organism's behavior be lawfully regular.  It turns out (see e.g.,
Roitblat, 1987) that this is too strong a claim to be of any
scientific use.  In order for this functional relation to be
reliable, the S term in the equation, the stimuli impinging on
the organism, must be specified exhaustively, including the
history of all prior stimuli that impinged on the organism and
its response to them.  Lacking an exhaustive specification of the
stimuli and their history, the relation between behavior and
stimulus is no longer a proper function (i.e, one and only one
behavior for each stimulus) because the same situation can result
in a variety of different behaviors.  The behaviorist formula is
useful for describing, post hoc, situated behavior, but it is
very difficult to use in practice to predict or explain behavior.

     The use of mentalistic terms, such as "representation,"
"processing," and even "thought," seems inescapable because,
lacking these, it is very difficult to actually account for
behavior.  There is a great deal of brain activity that occurs
between stimulus and response, which can be ignored only at the
expense of pseudoexplanation.  We can readmit these mentalistic
terms to psychology, however, without readmitting dualism.  The
mind/transducer argument suggests a way to do this.
     An alternative to the mind/transducer argument suggests that
the mind is a central computational core surrounded by storage
and peripheral devices.  As contributors to this discussion have
pointed out, this alternative position is a version of the
Cartesian projection hypothesis.  The peripherals project their
images on the central core.  A dualist would argue that the
central core is inhabited by a soul, mind, or homunculus, which
reads the images.  A monist might argue that the stuff of the
core is just computing machinery, but still implicitly agree to
the projection interpretation.  Harnad points out that this
peripheral/core argument is at least anatomically incorrect for
biological brains.  The peripherals, retinae, cochleae, etc. are
part of the brain, not mere peripherals.  When one strips away
the parts of the brain that deal with sensory and motor
processing, what is left is not a central core of disembodied
intelligence, but the vegetative functions.  A major portion of
the brain is intimately involved in perception and motor control
and these are the same portions that seem to be required for
intelligence.  In support of such a claim that perception and
motor control are the seats of intelligence, psychological
research finds that intelligent performance is often the product
of pattern recognition rather than superior computational skill
(e.g., de Groot, 1966).

     The import of this position is that
sensation/perception/motor control cannot be divorced from
intelligence or mind.  The mind is a transducer in that it
translates the energy by which sensory information arrives into
the energy by which behavior occurs.  The relation between the
two need not be simple.  A great deal of internal representation
and computation occurs, but perception and action cannot be
separated from the computation.



                           References

de Groot, A. D. (1966) Perception and memory versus thought: Some
   ideas and some recent findings.  In B. Kleinmuntz (Ed.)
   Problem solving: Research, method, and theory.  New York:
   Wiley.

Roitblat, H. L. (1987) Introduction to comparative cognition. New
   York: W. H. Freeman.

Skinner, B. F. (1935) Two types of conditioned reflex and a
   pseudotype.  Journal of General Psychology, 12, 66-77.

Skinner, B. F. (1974) About behaviorism.  New York: Knopf.
--
Herbert Roitblat                    roitblat@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu
Department of Psychology            roitblat@uhunix.bitnet
University of Hawaii                (808) 956-6727  (808) 956-4700 fax
2430 Campus Road,                   Honolulu, HI 96822 USA


