[From Bill Powers (961015.0800 MDT)]
Hans Blom, 961014 --]
[with general reference to posts by others as well}
I don't know whether McCulloch included behaviors that go together
with intense emotions. Intense emotions arise, however, when these
very normal behaviors are disallowed. Just observe that little boy
who isn't able to get to a bathroom ...
McCulloch was speaking about innate behaviors; I think that before we
declare any behavior (or aspect of a behavior) to be innate, we should first
make sure there isn't some simple explanation in terms of acquired behavior.
The little boy probably gets emotional about not being allowed to go to the
bathroom because of his experiences of what happens when he wets his pants.
The innate behavior is to urinate when pressure in the bladder reaches a
detectable level, as an infant or a horse does. Barring any learned systems
which conflict with this build-in process, that is what will happen. The
learned behavior involves controlling where and when one urinates, which
shows that the innate system comes under the control of the learned one.
It's too easy to take a behavior like grooming as innate simply because
animals uniformly come to show it. A more careful consideration can bring up
other possibilities. For example, suppose that rats inherit a dislike for
certain sensations (zero reference level) having to do with matting of the
fur or scaling and itching of the skin beneath. Considering the limited
tools available to rats for doing something about such sensations, would it
be too surprising to find that most rats learn to scratch with a hind foot
or lick at the affected area? And does this automatically make the
scratching or licking in that situation "innate?"
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Anyway, it might be that an emotion "forces" a context switch and is
somewhat like an (unconscious) analog of what we consciously do when
we focus our attention: it focusses our attention FOR us in such an
inescapable way that it may save our lives.
If emotions are of our own making, then the emotion would change _because
of_ the context switch. The idea that I'm trying to put out for
consideration is that emotion is not a cause of behavior, but a concomitant
part of behavior. The traditional view is that we contain mysterious
intelligences which monitor the world for us, and arouse us or alert us to
important events by triggering emotions; the emotions then direct our
behavior (somehow) appropriately. Such ideas may sound plausible as stories,
but when you start looking at them from the modeler's point of view I think
you run into all kinds of difficulties and implausibilities. Just what sort
of perceptual capabilities would such emotion systems have to have? How
would they (the reticular formation for example) know about events in the
world and give them the required high-level intepretations? And how can such
an arrangement be reconciled with the HPCT model, in which there are quite
different explanations for the relationships between high-level and
low-level systems?
The problem we are having with the introduction of all these old traditional
ideas into the discussion is that they are usually brought in in a very
narrow context, as if we are starting over again and ignoring the model that
has been built up so far. Most often the traditional explanations end up
conflicting with the PCT model; if they are true, the PCT model is wrong,
and vice versa. This is something like introducing arbitrary postulates into
a mathematical development, with no regard for the relationship between the
new postulates and the ones on which the development is already being based.
Most traditional explanations have been ad-hoc, intended to deal only with a
very circumcribed set of phenomena. They generally take the least-effort
route: if dopamine is low in a part of the brain that seems associated with
a strange pattern of behavior, then obviously it is a lack of dopamine that
causes the strange behavior and it is that part of the brain that produces
that kind of behavior. Nobody asks why the dopamine is low, or what other
brain systems regulate its concentration. This is what comes from seeing the
brain as a collection of centers of spontaneous causation rather than as a
large interconnected system.
A theory of behavior is a large interconnected system; you can't arbitrarily
change one part of it without seriously affecting the rest. I suspect that
many people on this net who toss out alternative explanations have less
intimate familiarity with the structure and possibilities of the HPCT type
of organization than I do, since I've been at this the longest. So when they
toss in old ideas or casual suggestions, they don't experience what I see as
reverberations throughout the model that would result from accepting them;
neither do they realize what explanatory problems they are creating. Simple
isolated propositions about causality simply don't work in a model where
causation is distributed over many subsystems.
I'm not trying to cut off debate about new (or even old) ideas. I'm just
asking that they be thought through in a broader context, the context of the
model that we are supposedly exploring here. Before any idea is brought up,
I think it's fair to ask the proponent how the PCT or HPCT model might
explain the same phenomenon WITHOUT adding anything new. The model of
emotions that I have proposed fits the structure of the HPCT model without
requiring the addition of an extensive new class of inherited control
systems which, when you think about it, will require adding a whole new
hierarchical model in parallel with the one we now have, complete with
perceptual functions, comparators, and output functions at every level.
Every question we have asked about the existing HPCT model now has to be
asked about the added features, including questions of experimental test. Is
this really necessary or desirable?
Best,
Bill P.