If you're going to talk about the brain, you need to pause slightly
before you say it,
then turn your head a degree or two, lift your chin slightly, look nobly
into the distance,
and say it in quotes. "the brain". Suddenly someone stands, we
all raise our glasses,
and they say, "Gentlemen, The Brain!", and we all go "The Brain!"
,"here, here!".
So, there's a lot of reverence for, "the brain" in terms of
talking about behavior.
As I chug along and think about things like learning and making music,
there's some
concern that many of the things I care about these days happen as
"the brain" outsources
to other plexi, and how those plexi outsource on out from, say
the brachial plexus to (say) the wrists. I don't think we really have
a good handle on how
this happens, whether it's a developmental thing or whether it is
something that it is reasonable to
think that "the brain" 'does'.
On 5/30/12 4:24 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
Hi Nick,
I went to the library today and picked up a standard textbook
about psychology (Drew Westen, "Psychology", Wiley, 2002).
Then I selected the most interesting questions from
all the central questions I found. Which are already
answered and which are largely unsolved?
A) (neuroscience) The brain-behavior relationship
To what extend can we understand psychological
processes by events in the brain? To what extend
can we understand them without references to events
in the brain?
B) (social psychology) The individual-group relationship
To what extend does behavior depend on the groups
of which people are a part? To what extend can we
understand it in isolation?
C) (philosophy) The mind-body relationship
If thought and matter are fundamentally different,
how can they have anything to do with one another,
and how can they interact at all?
D) (biology) The nature-nature relationship
To what extend are perceptual processes born or
learned? Is our knowledge of the world stamped into
us or woven together by us? How does emotion
guide behavior in adaptive ways?
There is also the famous hard problem - can we
understand subjective experience - and the
other basic psychology questions like
"what are the basic elements of personality"
(how do we define personality, to what extend
is it stable over time and across situations, etc.).
What do you think is the most interesting
unsolved problem or question? Which is
perhaps best suited for new forms of
modeling (say ABM or NKS models) ?
Jochen
Am 17.05.2012 02:37, schrieb Nicholas Thompson:
Here's a game we could play for a while, and see where we get: You
state a problem in psychology, and I will try to tell you whether it
has been solved or not.
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
