Archive for October, 2010

As we learned in class James seems to have downplayed the role of the intellect quite significantly. I’m not going to out and out disagree with him because I think there are definitely areas of life in which we lose quite a bit when we rely solely on the intellect. However, his message scares me more than a little. The specific part I am referring to is “To preach skepticism…is tantamount therefore to telling us that yielding to our fear of error is wiser and better than yielding to our hope that it may be true.” This quote refers directly to religion, but he doesn’t seem to mean for it to be irrelevant to life in general. Is that true? Should we really vest more in hope than our intellects? Obviously, I don’t think he believes the intellect to be worthless, but I still think we should think heavily before we emphasize hope over intellect.

It is necessary for every person to construct a worldview, if they don’t they probably won’t function. Constructing a worldview centered around hope can be dangerous. I’ve done a lot of things with hope as the primary motivator and I regret nearly all of them. Had I thought through my decisions I would have found that certain failures were the most likely outcome. Almost all of those potential failures have turned out to be the reality. Had I “yieled to error” I can see where my life would be today, and it would be better. Situations in which an individual has a lot at stake aren’t to be taken lightly and if people don’t take into account the likely outcomes then a great percentage of the time they become wasteful and unsatisfied. I don’t want to downplay that hope is a powerful force and a great way to be, I just want to challenge the notion that it is a great mistake to yield to error.

Many people in our class are posting on artificial intelligence (AI). Technology is quickly advancing, and the human race is becoming more and more reliant on it. Personally, it is exciting but makes me a little nervous as the human race becomes more and more dependent on it. It is cool what we are able to create, such as the self driving car. Eventually AI products may seem as humanistic as possible. However, what makes me nervous is the reliance we may soon have on AI. I guess it kind of lines up with the movie I, Robot when the robot picks Will Smith over the child to save in the car accident due to a calculated survival rate. I don’t want to reach a point when I’m faced with a critical, life changing situation and the only thing in control is an AI device that only has calculated responses and no emotional or complex (logic and emotion) response possibilities. Another movie is Disney Channel’s Smart House. I always wanted a house growing up just like that. It could make whatever I wanted and do all my chores. It knew what the characters wanted before they did. However, it soon calculated how dangerous the outside world can be and trapped them all in the house. Smart House said it could give the characters all they wanted until the characters realized it could never physically love, care, or protect them. It was a cool house but the technology ended up out smarting its creator and began reeking havoc on the family. That seems more and more realistic to me as different AI products are developed, like that self driving car. I’m all for the advancement of technology and making life a little easier, but I doubt I will ever be able to complete give up any control to a machine whether its just driving down the street or its running my house hold.

Perhaps this topic might be a compilation of impertinent observations, but it interests me nonetheless. As I was reading chapters 12 and 13 to prepare for the quiz, I was struck by an interesting thought. Let me first give you the context and perhaps you will see where I am coming from.

Although the subject matter is always interesting, some of my favorite parts of Hergenhahn’s textbook are the biographical portions. As I was reading about J.B. Watson who I only knew on the surface as an adulterer (thanks to that quiz question), I was gradually amazed.

J.B. Watson earned his masters degree at the age of 21. He then went on to the University of Chicago where he would suffer a nervous breakdown in 1902. Despite that fact, he managed to finish his doctoral thesis and had it published in 1903. The thesis was accepted and Watson graduate magna cum laude as the youngest person ever to obtain a doctorate at the University of Chicago at the age of 25. He then went on to get married and become an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. By 1907, Watson accepted a teaching position at Johns Hopkins University. It was at Johns Hopkins that Watson met Rosalie Rayner and began the affair that essentially ended his career as a psychological researcher and teacher. The end of Watson’s professional esteem did not leave him crushed or devastated. Instead he looked for work at an advertising company called J. Walter Thompson. After a successful and highly influential career as a psychologist, Watson was back at the bottom. Four years after Watson was hired at the advertising company, he was considered one of the leading people in advertising and eventually became vice president of William Esty Advertising in 1935. Watson used psychological principles to conduct market research (which was an almost unknown concept at the time) to influence sales.

As I read about the influential “parents” and “grandparents” of psychology, I notice a continual trend. If one is brilliant is it absolutely necessary for them to suffer some sort of debilitating nervous breakdown? Do they also need to be the recipients of unrequited love? How many times have I read that this person was crazy or depressed for a few years and then came out of it to make monumental strides in their field? Why is a life altering heartbreak a part of so many of these stories?

When someone has reached some of the highest intellectual capacities, do they HAVE to become a “sick soul?” Is there a general formula for being brilliant?

As has been discussed in class, behaviorism is a school of psychology that involves the observation, study, and manipulation of behavior.  Pooling from previous classes, behaviorism has proven itself to be one of the more successful therapies in treating clients, with plenty of scientific research to back up its findings.  I was very curious about this latter portion, that treating people in gradually escalating therapy could be so successful, despite the concept coming off as more “reprogramming” than it is any real treatment method. But the results speak for themselves; there is something inherent about behavioralistic therapy that makes it very effective on clients within a range of disorders.

The more controversial application of behavioralistic therapy, however, was in its application to convicted criminals and child molesters. While most see no problem with the idea of “correcting” the deviant behavior of such depraved patients, the issue does fall under scrutiny on ethical grounds. I suppose the question is something along the lines of whether such radical treatment is permissible? Should psychology be allowed to be applied in this radical dimension, despite the duress the patient may experience? It does not help that the effectiveness of these therapies does fall under some scrutiny.

A similar issue arose in a previous class; should behavioralistic therapy be applied to sexual orientation? The Psychological Association is strongly against the radical application due to inconclusive results surrounding the therapy, but if the possibility existed to aid a patient seeking to alter his/her sexual orientation, is it right to deny it on the principles established by the governing association? Or does the principle appeal to something higher, some ethical standard that delineates such behaviorist application as immoral? Supposing some practicing clinician was confronted with a patient desperately unhappy because of their orientation, seeking some form of treatment to alleviate their discomfort, is it wrong to attempt to help them? Right to refuse, and insist that they best become comfortable with this “way of life?”  I suppose on reflection, this may be just another gray area that the field of psychology will have to further develop to arrive at any definite answer.

I always thought religion was a personal choice and I still do. But I find it interesting that odds are that we will believe similar concepts as our family does. When we talked about genetics playing a role in religion it made me wonder how close my families' beliefs are to mine. I stray off a bit from what I was raised to believe, but if you look at my family a lot of us stray off from what we are originally taught and we all question what our parents tell us to believe. I didn't think about it a whole lot until this class but now I am curious as to what made them decide to start questioning religious teachings. 

In Chapter 20, there is a section that discusses artificial intelligence: “a special branch of computer science that investigates the extent to which the mental powers of human beings can be captured by means of machines” (628-29).  There are those that argue relative degrees of how “intelligent” a computer can be.  The stance I agreed with the most was by John Searle.  Searle understood that computers only process symbols that humans give to them; therefore, if computers merely manipulate symbolic formulas, then true understanding and cognitive learning can never take place.  Computers do not have the ability to reason, because to reason means to involve an emotional aspect to the equation that a computer can never register. There is a study that shows that our brains do work extremely similarly to computers in that we too take symbols, recode them, and store then give symbolic output of our own.  However, computers will never be on the same reasoning spectrum as a human.  Isaac Asimov, an extremely popular science fiction writer, loved the idea of machines making it to the realm of humanity.  This is seen especially in works such as I, Robot and The Bicentennial Man and I highly recommend his works if you are interested in the realm of mechanism or artificial intelligence.

During the last few classes we have really hit on some interesting concepts.  Are we simply reactive organisms based on our genetic and biological makeup, are we simply remodeling the behaviors that we have witnessed all of our lives by reacting to our environments, or are we by products of the way we think and categorize cognitively?  Or are we the sum of all of these parts, is our biology a re-enforcer to our faith or an inhibitor?  I would like to take a second and look at a couple of interesting thoughts.

Josh Hamilton

I have to take a second and explain my overall joy and enthusiasm for our very own Texas Rangers, I grew up in and around Baseball and have always loved it.  I played when I was younger and I always collected the cards.  When we are looking at what makes a champion some people would argue that its sheer performance, others would say that attitude and their public persona defines how the world looks at them.  Take a look at Josh Hamilton, he finished the 2010 regular season as the American League batting champion and had the highest ERA of any other baseball player this year in Major League baseball.  A biological viewpoint of what has made him a champion may be due to a above average reaction time.  When an average major league pitcher throws the ball from the pitchers mound it is usually thrown at around 95 miles an hour.  This means that from the time the ball leaves the pitchers hand it takes it about four tenths of a second to travel the sixty feet to the catcher glove.  This leaves the average baseball player about two tenths of a second to react and swing the bat.  The batter must take several things into account, where the ball is going, how fast, is it curving, is it dropping, or most important it hittable and is it going to be a strike. All of this must be accessed in a flash, that is why it is sometimes said that baseball is actually played on the outside edge of human perception.

Click Here to see if you could hit a Major League Fastball

Hamilton however operates even faster than average, so did he ultimately become a All-Star MLB player due to his biological responses, in other words, could he have ever been anything else other than at athlete?  Hamilton is well known for his nearly career ending lapse into drug and alcoholic abuse that completely consumed him.  His rehabilitation and recovery all started by a confrontation from his grandmother who sought to intervene on his behalf.  Now clean, Hamilton travels the county telling his story and trying to encourage all forms of drug and alcohol avoidance.  He explains his rehabilitation as a “God thing”, which would suggest that somewhere something more than biology plays a role in our decision making.  The sum of what makes him who he is is the characteristics that make him a champion. GO RANGERS!!

There is a great deal to be learned from Bandura’s experiment about social learning. Comments such as “children are sponges” come to mind. The truth is that if children learn from all that they are exposed to, and are not provided with the appropriate guidance to productively process the information, children will be left with nothing but to act directly as they have seen, right or wrong. When initially exposed to something, even for adults, mimicry is the best way to get adjusted. For children however, almost everyhting is new. There is not any prior knowledge to be drawn from to determine how to react in a new situation. Also, I believe that there is something to be said for the concept of children being taught to respect adn listen to adults, shich admitedly would not factor in until a later age, but it should still be considered a potential factor in why children default to mimicking adults without question. It is also interesting to note that the children mimicked the complete stranger in the video. What does that then imply for a child who grows up in a home where he hears foul language all the time, or witnesses domestic violece regularly; it is no longer a stranger who is demonstrating activities. It has become the child’s very own parent to whom he or she has a much stronger connection. That is just a thought of possible rammifications implied by the existence fo thsi principle.

I remember as a kid always wanting to watch the cartoon TV show The Jetsons. The flying cars that drove themselves, the closets that dressed whoever stepped inside, and the moving sidewalks always fascinated me and could keep my attention for hours. I remember wishing that the world the Jetson family lived in was real life, seeing as it was a lot more interesting than my parents’ Chevy Suburban and plain brick house. Well, it seems thanks to artificial intelligence, the world the Jetsons lived in could be right around the corner, at least when it comes to cars.

According to our book, artificial intelligence (AI) is defined as a “special branch of computer science that investigates the extent to which the mental powers of human beings can be captured by means of machines.” People who only believe in weak AI believe that a computer will only ever be able to simulate the human mind. On the other hand, believers of strong AI believe that a computer could actually duplicate the mind. This idea of artificial intelligence was first tested by Turing with an experiment where a computer and an actual human response were alternatively given to an interrogator. If the interrogator was unable to consistently determine the human response, the computer, according to the test, could be said to think. Nowadays, studying the idea of artificial intelligence has been taken over by Google, and what an interesting experiement it has been. Copy and paste the link below to read an article from only a few days ago about how Google has created a car that can drive itself. Yes its been tested, and yes it works.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html

How crazy is that? The idea of strong artificial intelligence is closer than we think. How do you feel about the idea of cars driving themselves? Do you think a machine will make less mistakes than a human?

Two years ago I took cognition and learning and in that class we watched the bobo experiments video. When we did so our professor asked us how the learning described here was different and even contradictory to the ideas found in other theories. I ventured a guess and I was right. I love being right and when I’m right about something I remember it for along time which also has the effect of making me think a lot about the subject that was at hand at the time, so in this case social learning theory. The right answer was because there was no necessarily designated reinforcement. That idea has been a sem-frequent subject of my thoughts ever since.

Is that true? In social learning is there no reinforcement? I have never been able to get away from the idea that there might be, which I know is just ridiculous because I’m just not about to know better than Bandura. Still though, I think about it often. It seems like there is reinforcement and the only difference is that it is internal. When I see something done that I like and I recreate it then I usually like the way I feel when I do it. I feel cool. Is this not a reinforcement? I have no idea, but I think there’s at least minimal debate over this that takes place that I’m not a part of so I don’t feel too ridiculous for wondering this.