Sleep Deprivation and False Memories

Neurophilosophy, a psychology blog I’ve followed for some time, posted about recent research that ought to heighten concerns that our nations policy of torturing detainees doesn’t actually do anything to get us valuable information.  The research suggests that the production of false memories may become more common when subjects are sleep deprived.  Sleep deprivation is, of course, officially one of the least questionable aspects of our treatment of detainees–waterboarding and stress positions receive the greatest scrutiny.

I do admit, based on his summary, I’m not 100% convinced it would be relevant to the treatment of detainees.  The task in the experiment involved discriminating between words with similar meanings, some of which had been part of a presented stimulus, and some which hadn’t.  One wonders whether that sort of memory failure extends to contaminating the sort of information that we’d look for from terrorists.  Nonetheless, it’s not as if this effect couldn’t lead to false memories, and there’s already reason to worry about any information we do get.

David Brooks

I seriously hope to god that David Brooks is not writing a book about “the brain, neuroscience, sociology, politics, and the intersection thereof,” because the ensuing internet discussion will probably make me want to stab myself repeatedly. Let’s not even mention that the anecdotes about the unconscious mentioned in Ross’s post are only arguably instances of unconscious thought–they sound more like unrecognized habits of conscious thought.

Underexplored Research Topics

Jamelle’s post on Clinton running on an independent ticket raises some interesting questions:

Richard Thompson must be high on some potent chronic if he thinks Hillary Clinton could mount a successful third-party run:

Variations in Cannabis Induced Political Psychosis sounds like the sort of work that could win an Ignoble prize.  Who’s in?

Plastics Bleg

I’m in coffee tree, and a woman just came in and asked about whether their water bottles were blah-blah-blah free (the specific acronym she used didn’t register with my limited google-fu).  Anyway, I am reminded that I’ve never succeeded in tracking down authoritative information on all these various health risks that are attributed to plastic water bottles, plastic tupperware and plastic everything elses.

So, does anyone know any credible information about the subject? I’m not necessarily looking for peer-reviewed articles–I ain’t so good at readin’ the scientific ones anyway.  But something more convincing than a bunch of posts by some dude on a forum somewhere?

Against DDT Denialism

It’s rather scary what comes up if you do any number of google searches on DDT–you get denialism well before anything that looks like a defense of the environmental objections to DDT overuse on most searches (thankfully DDT denialism delivers some of the goods). That’s by way of noting that John Quiggin and Tim Lambert have published a prospect article defending Rachel Carson. They’ve also published a longer version of the same article at crookedtimber. Since the post is a pithy summary of the DDT legend (that Carson caused DDT to be banned is a “legend,” fueled by tobacco industry advocates, oddly enough) that links to both short and long explanations of the history, it would be nice if it (or any other nice summary you might suggest) were more prominent (that is, link to it!).

More Things I’m Unaware Of

In regards to the previous post, it’s cases like the Buraku that are precisely what I’m unaware of.  It certainly sounds like really good evidence–and unsurprising evidence.  In evaluating cross-ethnic group differences in IQ, controlling for the vast early life influences on cognitive development is going to be nearly impossible.  My understanding is that twin studies do that for heritability of IQ, but I’m unaware of cross-cultural studies that show the same thing (not that what I know tells you anything.  See the disclaimer).

Things I Don’t Know About

Will Saletan has kindled some blogospheric furor by writing an article in Slate about racial differences in IQ. The thesis of his article is that there’s a solid, genetically based difference in IQ between racial groups, one recognized by scientific consensus. The difference is mediated by head size, a claim which despite not being unambiguous bullshit, ought to raise a few red flags. My point is not to pillory Saletan, though many folks will be happy to do so. Rather, my reaction is to ask “why the fuck is Saletan talking about this?”

I don’t know a lot of details about Saletan’s life and credentials (except that he’s a major writer for Slate) but very little the article suggests that he’s an expert in psychology, biology, or even statistics. And certainly the people reacting to Saletan (Ross Douthat, the American Scene) don’t appear to be applying expert knowledge of those subjects either. The same is true of skeptics like Matthew Yglesias (whose post includes the self-same). Most of these people are paid to write about politics, not psychology. Even if they manage intelligent commentary, they’re mostly muddling around in the dark.

More importantly, it’s not clear why these people need to care. My impression is that there is real research on the genetic contribution to IQ, it’s not getting suppressed, but that there’s hardly a scientific consensus. There’s also few if any obvious political implications: suppose we found out tomorrow that there was an innate 5 point genetic difference in IQ between two races. How would we react? My best guess is that almost nothing would change politically–or at least that nothing should change (this is the exact opposite over the ‘debate’ concerning global warming). So there’s no reason political bloggers should be involved in the topic.

I have all sorts of opinions about the topic, but I’m well aware that they’re at best well-founded second-hand beliefs, and might be a lot worse than that. I think the annoying thing about blogs is that they copy a feature of the MSM where you get oracular figures holding forth on all sorts of topics, regardless of whether they know anything about anything. Blogs are a little more meritocratic: you usually have to know about some subject to attract readers. It just doesn’t have to be what you’re currently talking about.

Update: I can’t actually resist directly linking to this piece making fun of Saletan’s sources.

Update 2: Looks like Ross Douthat has withdrawn parts of his earlier post, though I wonder why he wrote what he did in the first place.

This Round Goes to the Philosophers

From Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene:

I remember attending a lecture given by Beatrice and Allen Gardner about their famous ‘talking’ chimpanzee Washoe (she uses American Sign Language, and her achievement is of great potential interest to students of language).  There were some philosophers in the audience, and in the discussion after the lecture they were much exercised by the question of whether Washoe could tell a lie.  I suspected that the Gardners thought there were more interesting things to talk about, and I agreed with them…They were interested in conscious intention to deceive.  I am talking simply about having an effect functionally equivalent to deception (68).

Perhaps the philosophers were being silly in terms of their questioning, but it’s clear in hindsight that the question of whether a Chimpanzee is capable of conscious deception is very important indeed.  The ability to consciously deceive is closely connected to the ability to understand other minds, and the study of mindreading has been a very important topic in cognitive science since the late 70s.

In general, Dawkins’ book is extremely interesting, and definitely worth reading, but also too strident and self-assured.

Ethical Reflection

One of the better ways I go about updating my knowledge is by making sweeping assertions and getting called on them. Yesterday, for instance:

Katherine: I’m not really sure if dogs have consciousness.

Me: What? Of course they have consciousness. It would be crazy to say otherwise!

Katherine: Well, why do we have to talk that way?

Me: Well, you see..*sputter*

I don’t have an answer to that one, but there’s another topic where I can usefully try to articulate some of my inchoate thoughts. Namely, I think that recent moral psychology has problematized our idea of ethical reflection. What I mean by ‘ethical reflection’ is our idea of ourselves as beings who think about what moral rules to follow, engage in a project of justification for those rules, and take the outcome of that project as a basis for action. In stating the idea that’s being undermined, I’m trying to be as neutral as possible between different ways we might conceive ethical reflection. I want to suggest that the natural moral psychologies of not just deontological ethics, but also utilitarianism and virtue ethics are affected by this train of thought. Explicitly acknowledging the relevant differences is beyond what I can do right now, so I’ll rely on the reader to give me the benefit of the doubt there.

I’ve encountered a lot of different philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists whose work is relevant to this issue. Not all of what they say is consistent, nor do they necessarily share the same theoretical goals. It’s not as if there’s a movement to undermine our ordinary moral thought. Nonetheless, I do perceive a trend. That trend suggests that we acquire our moral sense beginning at a very early age, that it is heavily tied to emotion, and that there is a limited and/or unclear role for the sort of ethical reflection which we typically attend to in philosophy.

Working within Piaget and Kohlberg’s theoretical framework, which emphasizes ethical reflection and the provision of reasoned foundations for moral judgment, Elliot Turiel nevertheless created what I see as a problem for that framework. His work indicated that children begin to understand a distinction between socially imposed rules and moral rules in early childhood. This is despite the fact that according to Kohlberg’s theory, these children should have been operating at a preconventional level in which they viewed right and wrong as determined by the sanctions of their parents and teachers. Indeed, when asked to explain why an action was wrong, the children mentioned the fact that they would be punished for it. This disconnect is a common thread in the work I’m interested in, and it points to a theoretical commitment. If the scientific story about how people understand morality and their self-description come into conflict, while that self-description is an important piece of data, the scientific attempt to understand moral experience is privileged.

Another work which I like is Shaun Nichol’s “Sentimental Rules.” Nichols’ goal is to explain core moral judgment, which is the special category of moral judgments pertaining to harm based injuries. Nichols thinks that the special status of core moral judgment arises from the fact that it is both sustained by cognitively represented rules about what is right and wrong (i.e. “it’s wrong to kill”) and emotional responses brought about by representations of human suffering (Nichols explicitly cites Hume as an influence).

Again, Nichols’ work relates because it presents a relatively simple picture of how the core portion of human moral motivation works. It does not purport to explain everything about morality, either in our culture or in any other, so it certainly doesn’t remove all logical possibility that ethical reflection plays an important role. In particular, perhaps it plays a role in the temporal change of rules. Nevertheless, as far as Nichols’ work indicates that a crucial portion of our ethics is subserved by relatively dumb mechanisms, which are not the mechanisms implicit in our ordinary moral discourse, it raises questions about the role that ethical reflection plays.

The two most radical pieces of work that I know of are Jonathan Haidt’s “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail” and Josh Knobe and Brian Leiter’s “The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology.” Haidt’s view has our moral reactions arising out of quick, emotion based intuitive responses with our moral reasoning appearing as almost completely post-hoc rationalizations. Knobe and Leiter posit ‘type-facts’ about peoples’ personalities, determined by genetics rather than socialization, which are the primary determinants of the sort of moral lives we live.

Another thing which is also clearly absent from these accounts is anything at all about the good life. Clearly, the materials discussed above are not sufficient to give an account of the good life, but they should give pause to anyone who wants to both tie the good life to considerations of morality, and assume that ethical reflection plays a crucial role.

My own personal oscillation

At the end of lecture 3 of Mind and World, McDowell does a nice job of articulating a division I’ve been thinking a lot about recently:

Now there is a temptation to think it must be possible to isolate what we have in common with [animals] by stripping off what is special about us, so as to arrive at a residue that we can recognize as what figures in the perceptual lives of mere animals. That is the role that is played Evans’s picture by informational states, with their non-conceptual content. But it is not compulsory to attempt to accommodate the combination of something in common and a striking difference in this factorizing way: to suppose our perceptual lives include a core that we can also recognize in the perceptual life of a mere animal, and an extra ingredient in addition.

This is representative of a way of thinking which extends all the way back to Frege’s context principle, which Wittgenstein quotes in the Tractatus, and seemingly continues to believe in his later philosophy. One difference is that the Frege/Wittgenstein thought concerns propositions and symbols, whereas McDowell is concerned with the relationship between experience and conceptual capacities. Dennett, and Stich (circa 1983) are interested in the attribution of propositional attitudes. What is common to all the cases is the idea that we can only understand the activity of the system as a whole–what is primary is the fully functional, primarily veridical, activities of a rational being.

In contrast, the method of cognitive science and neuroscience involves a process of decomposition. From the fact that an individual with a particular type of brain damage can give definitions for words, but not recognize the object that those word refer to (for instance) we conclude that the abilities are distinct. This approach is essential if your concern is to understand how the trick is performed–it shows that two distinct mechanisms are involved in performing the trick.

Someone like McDowell can come back with the response that while the mechanisms involved are separable, they don’t tell us the nature of mental abilities unless we consider their combined functions. Only by looking at normal case can we understand the role of these particular mechanisms. That is, the part of our cognitive capacities that we share with lower animals has an entirely different significance once it is combined with our distinctive rational faculties. This view may sound bizarre, at least in part because we (myself included) are inclined to defer to the expertise of cognitive science. It is made a little more compelling by consideration of cases like the one Stephen Stich poses in “From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science,” where an elderly lady will reliably tell you that “McKinley was assassinated” but cannot answer the question “is McKinley dead?” or “who was McKinley?” or even “are you dead?” The overwhelming temptation is to say that even if the physical structure which leads her to say “McKinley was assassinated” is the same as the structure that lead her to say it earlier in her life, it is not a belief in the former case.

For the time being, I will call it a draw.

Side-note: if that doesn’t sound like McDowell outside of the quotation, it’s because it’s not McDowell’s vocabulary, and it’s not necessarily how he thinks about the issue, it’s just me trying to springboard off of what he said in that passage from Mind and World (I did run Stich, McDowell and Dennett together…).   I do think I’m gesturing at a way of seeing the issue which (in some moods) I think McDowell could be right about.

Put Up or Shut Up

By way of language log, there’s a report of research indicating that irrelevant neuroscientific discussion enhances the perceived quality of psychological explanations. The authors suggest that the effect may occur in virtue of deeper failures to evaluate evidence such as the “seductive details” effect or a tendency to favor reductive explanations in general. Neither of these reasons for error would exclusively concern neuroscientific explanations.

Nevertheless, I’m particularly bothered by the report because a moderate portion of my reading includes neuroscientific evidence. I can hope the authors are responsible: one of the study’s findings is that neuroscientific evidence doesn’t bias readers’ judgments of antecedently good explanations. That’s only possible if the authors themselves have a strong grasp of the material. If they don’t, then they’ll be subject to the same effect, leading them to include irrelevant evidence. In that case, the question is whether I’d be fooled. The bad news is that of the three groups studied (naive subjects, students in college cognitive neuroscience courses, and experts) only the experts had an accurate response to the evidence. Ergo, much reading to do for me.

Pangloss

I’m less sour on evolutionary psychology than I used to be, largely because of mild increases in my familiarity with it, but I still often run into something where it simply hurts me to read it. The latest is a model which purports to explain suicide (look for “Evolutionary Explanations” and apply all necessary disclaimers since Wikipedia is my source). Is there any more obvious time to stand up and yell “pleiotropism” or “spandrel?” Seriously, suicide is very heavily linked to severe mood disorders. Is there an explanation of them in terms of evolutionary psychology which doesn’t treat them as spandrels?

Oh dear. They’ve done it. (No idea how reputable those folks are.)

Armchair Psychology

I retook a web version of the Jung personality test today, and was rather stunned by the following question:

17) I tend to pay more attention to my thoughts than my feelings.

Perhaps I’m just in some strange mood, but I don’t get the distinction. I don’t think I categorize mental states of mine into thoughts and feelings. I take it that both are supposed to be occurent mental states, roughly dateable events in an individual’s conscious experience, and I’m not sure I find two such things “when I introspect.”

That isn’t to say I don’t use feeling as either a verb or a noun, it just seems that the usages to which I put it don’t correspond to what the test-takers have in mind. First, I often refer to sensations as feelings: “I feel hot.” Second, I use feelings to refer to moods: “I feel elated” or “I feel down.” But, as Ryle did a good job of showing, moods are more or less patterns of dispositions to think certain thoughts and feel certain ways. Third, if I have a strong opinion which I cannot find good reasons for, yet which I can’t give up, I might say “well, I don’t know why, but I just feel like he’s bad news.” This seems like it’s the closest to what the test-makers had in mind, but I’m still not getting it. After all, it doesn’t seem like anyone could pay more attention to their feelings than they pay attention to their thoughts, if this is what a feeling is. This thing is just a thought “he’s bad news” that you’ve discovered that you don’t have a reason for. But you had to go through a logical process of reasoning, checking over the various possible rationales you might have to discover that you don’t have a good one. So it seems like this isn’t precisely an occurent mental state either.

I’m an extremely analytical and logical person, but I certainly haven’t gone through a process of reasoning for most of the things that I think. Most of my beliefs go unexamined until something comes up to call them into question, and most of my thoughts occur to me and I move on without ever thinking of a reason for them. In that, I’m in the same boat as everyone who has ever lived. What distinguishes the analytically minded person is her dogged persuit of a sound rationale for the thought once it has been called into question.

Most people don’t react this way when they take the Jung personality test (or its cousin the myers-briggs). They find that sort of question easy to answer. So, tell me what the utterly obvious thing I’m missing is. Really, I mean it. I demand that you comment and explain what a feeling is.

Also, in case you didn’t catch it:

INTP – “Architect”. Greatest precision in thought and language. Can readily discern contradictions and inconsistencies. The world exists primarily to be understood. 3.3% of total population.

Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs/MBTI)

For the moral psychologists

A few years ago we were all horrified to hear about a first person shooter ethnic cleansing game. We were not horrified to hear about Grand Theft Auto, a game in which you shot random pedestrians and beat hookers. The difference in our reaction was based on the natural assumption that the people who played the first game believed in what they were doing. Or at least, even if they didn’t believe in literally gunning down members of other ethnic groups, they thought something like the members of those ethnic groups were subhuman. We didn’t assume that the people playing Grand Theft Auto believed in beating hookers or shooting random pedestrians. At least, a lot of us didn’t. Hearing the media hysteria, it was clear that someone out there really did seem to think your average teenager believed in beating hookers and shooting pedestrians.

I’m pretty sure we were right. But what lead us to view the two cases differently in that way? I think that’s a surprisingly sophisticated judgment at the intersection of ethics and psychology and one that most of us perform quite naturally.