Re: consciousness, was Re: etc.

Michael Olea says...

I have spent many hours quantifying predictive information, identifying
maximally informative stimulus dimensions. So what? How does the
observation that some summaries have more predictive power than others
support your contention that "Dennett's description is much better",

I'm saying that the intentional description of human behavior has
enormous predictive power in a wide variety of circumstances.

or that "Behaviorism seems to throw out the most interesting thing
about human behavior, which is that mentalistic predictions seem to work"?

Because stimulus/response doesn't have that kind of predictive
power.

There is no mystery here about the efficacy of mentalisms - past behavior
predicts future behavior.

The question is why are some summaries of past behavior more
informative about future behavior? Why, in particular, are
mentalistic summaries so successful?

Those features of past behavior that pack the most predictive power.
The use of these terms gets reinforced, both because
they distill predictive information, and because they have effects within a
verbal community - not because there are or are not love circuits and
cheater detctor modules in your temporal lobes. In fact, in singling out
"love of blue roses", you are identifying, empiricaly, a relationship
between a stimulus (class) and a response (class). In particular, you are
doing fearture selection on aspects of past behavior that predict future
behavior. You have identified a reinforcer. You did not do this in any
principled way, you did not explain *why* she loves blue roses, you just
noted that she responds to blue roses in ways favorable to Joe, and went
from there.

You are just confirming the impotence of behaviorism. The best
it can do is to recast the folk psychological explanation in
behaviorist terms. That's just an after-the-fact rationalization.

The problem with the mental terms comes when they are treated as
explanations rather than descriptions.

It depends on what you consider to be an "explanation", but I
will agree that there is a lot left to explain after demonstrating
that predictions based on mental terms are successful. In particular,
you need to explain *why* they are successful.

No, I don't.

That reinforces the learned response on my part that behaviorists
never have anything interesting to say about behavior.

In any case, I already pointed out that when you assert that Joe's
babe loves blue roses, and then go on to make predictions on the
basis of that "love", you are doing nothing more than saying Joe's
babe is likely (or "very likely") to respond to roses in the future
the way she has responded to them in the past. Love is simply a
surrogate in the prediction.

That shows that using mentalistic reasoning allows us to do
behaviorism better than the behaviorists.

Not a thing, not a force, not a phenomenon, not a point supporting
Dennet over Skinner.

It certainly is.

--
Daryl McCullough
Ithaca, NY

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Damn you, FEDEX! or Nikon D40 lost in Springfield, MO blackhole.
    ... the 2 mp Mavica he had been using with a Nikon D40. ... After shopping around, he got me to order one for him. ... The shipper had it insured, but from what I have read it could take weeks to sort this crap out. ... You may get your insurance from FedEx and a couple weeks later they find it and deliver it. ...
    (alt.photography)
  • Re: Dennett / Ruse Tiff Continues
    ... for their explanatory success and predictive power. ... You can't test a hypothesis of a divine designer empirically, ... That is reducing God to a force of nature that can be reliably ... Either the "God hypothesis" cannot make falsifiable predictions, ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Good News for Big Bang theory
    ... quintessence were retrodictions after the fact of an astronomically ... observed failure to decelerate in accordance with the predictions of ... claimed as a great success of the predictive power of GR with a CC, ... predictions made involving prior assumptions about a CC. ...
    (sci.astro)
  • Re: Message from Thomas Milton Tinney, Sr. to Roy Stockdill and others
    ... future event described. ... There are no such valid predictions - so don't complain about them being ... predictive power are considered at best "conjectures", ... upon for salvation or daily living, noting scientific reasoning. ...
    (soc.genealogy.britain)
  • Re: ID Revisited
    ... much better than EB can make predictions ... you've just poked at my specific physics examples without taking down the general point, and reiterated why EB lacks the same kind of predictive power. ... I just said that this isn't as strong as being able to predict both the past and the future, which many physics theories can. ... "what if Saddam fails to comply, ...
    (rec.sport.football.college)