That's fine: you're just using the word in a way that wrong-foots non-behaviourists. I think that's why you and Ken are talking past each other a little.

I'd love to get a committed behaviourist into a PET scanner.
Do they have the same distribution of activity as the rest of use when invited to introspect, or do they look like patients who complain of depersonalization? If the latter, did they always look like that, or did they acquire that neural architecture through the rigid application of behaviourist principles?

Grant Hutchison

Let me recommend the book The Mind's I, by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennet. It's a collection of essays, stories, and commentary that touches on a lot of these issues. And it's a pretty fun book to read.

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That's not true. Your posts have described complaints of pain, lack of concentration, trips to the hospital, and successful treatment. We are not always completely in the dark about others' pain. I just may niggle a bit over the notion of “internal state.” Your uncle was in pain, not something inside him. Pain language just often takes the form of a description of an internal state, as if you were describing the contents of a room only you had access to.

And this nicely illustrates my point about treating the patient and not some internal state. The mirror and the procedure is not internal. Any notion of alleviating an internal state would simply be something tacked on that does not really add any new information. The patient got better.

I agree. The report of altered selves is useful and can lead to successful treatment. However—and you new that was coming—what you describe here are “different activity in their association cortices and frontal lobes,” and tacking on a reference them as “altered selves.” Ken has been talking about sensing the self and as far as I can tell, he means something entirely different than neural activity, although he may very well agree that there may be a relation.

Keep in mind that my view is that when someone says they don't feel themselves anymore, that they are referring to a change in their life, which includes both them and how they go about life. Physiology has a role here, of course, and you have provided excellent examples of how doctors study that physiology to bring about improvements to the patients lives.

He described an arm that had no external existence, and ascribed his pain to a state of that arm which only he could describe. We were entirely reliant on these unconventional qualia in order to start appropriate treatment.

And when we use such language, we nevertheless understand the difference between qualia and objects. As far as I can see it's only behaviourists who claim that there's any confusion.

This is simply not so. The patient's report of his internal state was what guided effective treatment. One occasionally needs to manipulate the mirror, or even use CGI technology to generate an arm that matches the patient's description of his phantom arm (which can often be quite distorted). The patient sits next to a programmer who tweaks the arm according to the patient's description. Only once the invisible internal state is adequately reproduced in the real world is the treatment effective.

I suspect it's quite clear to most of us what Ken means: the detection, by introspection (in the non-behaviourist sense), of that same "sense of self" which is perceived as missing by patients who experience depersonalization.

And I would suggest that is a rather patronizing default position, which doesn't take into account the epidemiology of depersonalization experiences.

Grant Hutchison

I second the recommendation, although it's a long time since I've read it.

Grant Hutchison

If this discussion gets any further from the original topic, we'll need the LBT to find it!

j/k

Carry on!

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T. Anderson

It's been a long time for me, too. That was the first or second year of college. Where does the time go?

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Conserve energy. Commute with the Hamiltonian.

Yes, the issue is very much if introspection counts as a form of "detection" by itself, or if it just some illusory or dressed-up version of a previously established "valid detection mode", perhaps requiring consideration of behaviors or social contexts, etc. You and I appear to agree on the former view, regardless of whether or not it is possible to connect that detection to something that shows up in a PET scan, or perhaps more to the point, regardless of what is the footprint of that detection that shows up on a PET scan. I think of scientific learning as a process of taking projections, projections of every kind we can think of. The ancient Greeks were suspicious of some projections, only they couldn't agree on which projections were spurious (abstract ideals or empirical data). Modern science apparently recognizes that one uses a combination of these, because it's not the projection you're using that counts, it is the methodology you apply to the process of making that projection. Science is thus a set of functions, that map from "reality" (which we have no direct access to) onto various "image spaces" that we choose via these projections (this is what we have direct access to). When we apply scientific methodology to find the functions that explain the results of those projections, we are doing science-- there is no need to argue "which projection is the valid one" because scientific methodology doesn't include that question. The question we ask, as apparently understood by Ramachandran, is, "what projections are effective?" The choice of the projection is often the crucial step in scientific discovery, and adjudicating which types of projections are philosophically unacceptable is counterproductive.

Yeah, Watson was able to sell behaviourism because it addressed stuff you could measure in a lab, which was a breath of fresh air through psychology at a time when "cognitive science" involved a lot of people introspecting furiously and then disagreeing about what the results of their introspection were, let alone what they implied.
So it was worth doing: as a way of getting good data about all sorts of human activities, it was (largely) A Good Thing. It's (at least potentially) more rigorous to observe someone behaving in response to their brain activity, rather than asking them to introspect their brain activity and describe it to you.
However, I am only half-joking about getting a behaviourist into a PET scanner, because their emphasis on externalities occasionally seems to lead them to deny the existence of internalities that "the rest of us" find intuitive. I seem to remember Dan Dennett denying he experienced qualia, for instance, but I may be misrepresenting him, or he may just have been having a bit of tendentious fun.

Grant Hutchison

Behaviorists are a good illustration of the problem with a philosophy of science that demands that all scientific knowledge be expressed in terms of physical evidence or predictions about it.

If you insist on going down that road, then you must throw away all that introspection might suggest to you, because thoughts and feelings cannot be studied objectively. (We each have our own, and nobody else's.) For a strict behaviorist, the mind, with its thoughts and feelings, is beyond the scope of psychology; only behaviour can be studied.

This kind of empiricism can be philosophically interesting in its radical devotion to the scientific method but, as Grant has been hinting, it's awfully sterile for scientists, who need to speculate beyond what they can see. But I agree that the behaviorist school was probably a breath of fresh air when it came about.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

You folks may prefer the introspective approach, and there is nothing wrong with what you glean from that, but consider how you handled the subject of "sense of self." The quotes I gathered below from this thread all set the concept of sense of self squarely in the middle of human action in trying conditions. It is only in such contexts where the self comes alive, so to speak, or temporarily steps down as needed. If I have anything of value to add to this thread, it is that it is OK to look past the backs of your eyeballs once in a while on these types of subjects. There are more insights to be gained in observing what takes place before you.

What is empathy?

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Arthur C. Clarke

The Brain Science Podcast

I believe that's an artefact arising from my particular example, which I selected because it was the only personal experience I have of relevance to the question you asked: better, I thought, to offer a direct report than to offer a report of someone else's report. That then triggered a discussion about the relevance of "self" to stressful situations, which accounts for the selected nature of the text available.
But I could have offered the story of a man who lost "himself" whenever he looked in the mirror or heard someone address him by name. The trigger there seems to have been the momentary mental event "That's me!" And there are others who describe simply sliding out of self at random moments during the day.

Grant Hutchison

What does empathy have to do with this discussion?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

It has the makings of a behaviourism joke:

"What is empathy?"
"I don't know. Let's set up a lab experiment."

(Needs work, I know.)

Grant Hutchison

Perhaps behaviorism thought that way back in early 1900s, but, heck, even Skinner avowed introspection.

Now that Grant has branded me with the label behaviorist, my views will be summarily dismissed. I don't know all that behaviorism entails. I'm just a computer programmer who was sparked by JJ Gibson's The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Who would have thought that the environment (and the organism actively exploring that environment) has something to do with perception?

Here is another group of fellows I like. Just read the abstract and see if it is the sort of behaviorism that sours your stomach:

A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness (PDF)

I was not trying to dismiss behaviorism altogether. I think it gave an important contribution to psychology. I'm just a little skeptical that psychologists can afford to reduce everything about the mind to observable behaviours. (The word "psychology" does mean, in its origin, the science of the mind.)

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire