Granger Causality

Contingency and Control in the Laboratory

The Comparative Psychology of Learning: the Selective Association Principle and Some Problems with "General" Laws of Learning. Bolles (ed) 1973.

"A rat on a treadmill learns i f it runs when it hears a beep it can avoid an electric shock. The rat can also learn to turn to avoid a shock. But rats cannot learn to rear up on their hind legs to avoid being shocked. The rat's brain cannot learn to avoid danger using a naturally exploratory behavior."

In the same vein, you also can't train animals to get a reward by moving away from a stimulus that predicts reward. Pavlovian conditioning trumps Skinnerian. (personal communication, Dr. Insel) Accepting the full import of this work entails abandoning general intelligence. Without general learning, we can question the adaptability of man to the modern social-technological milieu. It appears we can learn some things, but for others we will continue to make the same mistake over and over again.

...which reminds me of my current philosophy of science, expressed by E.O Wilson:

"Nature first, then theory. Or, better, Nature and theory closely intertwined while you throw all your intellectual capital at the subject. Love the organisms for themselves first, then strain for general explanations, and, with good fortune, discoveries will follow. If they don't the love and pleasure will have been enough."

The idiosyncrasies of evolutionary contingency make controlled experiments difficult to interpret, in the sense that it may be hard to extrapolate "logically" from one model (animal) or trait to another system. The general laws we attempt to find by working in simplified laboratory settings may not even exist, but if we don't "love the organism for itself" we may never know it. This is part of the reason I'm leaving laboratory science. Under this interpretation, contrary to current fashion (and dogma), the profligate wonders of Natural History become the supreme biological science.

Levels of Abstraction

Hong Lei's talk on 1/24/07 brought up the old issue of whether we're smart enough to understand our own minds, the self-servingly appellated "most complex object in the universe". All of his statistics are motivated to try to capture the a priori differences observed in the spike waveforms. But just because we can see a difference doesn't mean our mathematics can [accurately] capture it. For example, his algorithm for labelling bursts uses an arbitrary cutoff and binning, so that some information is lost going from the original analog to the digital output. Again, when he measures constancy of spike number in bursts, there is an arbitrary distinction between "same number" and "different number" [with no regard for spacing of spikes]. But information is lost in each analog-to-digital conversion: information is lost at each analytical step. Today in Genetics class Dr. Pierson cautioned that we can make theories about biological mechanisms, but inevitably the biochemistry is more complex and nuanced. Eventually you are just taking averages of averages of averages. This is the danger in statistics of, say, finding the standard deviation of standard deviations.

Orwellian Cognitive Science

The scariest thing about cognitive science is its discovery and quantization of human behavior -- raising the specter of controlling human behavior. Behaviorism is dormant, not dead, and at casual luncheons graduate students and their advisers wonder aloud if that wasn't the ghost of BF Skinner they saw over near the punch bowl. Advertisers already correlate our unconscious (evolutionarily-based?) color biases to make us think orange and blue detergent is cheap and powerful.

[insert more examples]

If you're not scared by biology, the science of understanding the secret underpinnings of life, you don't understand it. And if you're not scared of neuroscience, the science of understanding the secret foundations of the human mind, you don't understand it. Our only hope is that it may prove impossible to understand.

scientist ivory tower gods mortal authority

(The SCIENTIST is working late into the night, locked safe in his IVORY TOWER, but the GODS are angry with the puny MORTAL for challenging their AUTHORITY. )