tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-76127755122493806282024-03-13T22:39:01.016-07:00Common CurrenciesA topic at the intersections of the philosophy of cognitive science, economics and biology.Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-76744392085837904962016-02-29T00:44:00.003-08:002016-03-02T00:13:59.750-08:00A Highly Desirable Symposium<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; tab-stops: 28.3pt 56.65pt 85.0pt 113.35pt 141.7pt 170.05pt 198.4pt 226.75pt 255.1pt 283.45pt 311.8pt 340.15pt; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> “You know that guy in your brain who warns
about bad decisions? He was getting a cup of coffee.”<br />
(Jerry, in <i>Seinfeld</i>, Season 2,
Episode 5.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The first </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Highly Desirable
Symposium</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> will be held in or near Durban, South Africa, between the 16 and 18
June of 2016.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The entire symposium will be held in plenary with slots at least an
hour long. The broad focus of the workshop is on action selection and
motivation. We are particularly keen on papers about the nature and roles of
states (including desires, preferences, hedonic states and utilities)
representing or standing for the values of options, actions, cues, accessible world-states,
etc.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">We welcome papers approaching these questions from a variety of
disciplines and perspectives, including philosophy of cognitive science,
philosophy of biology, psychology, economics, neuroscience and artificial
intelligence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Suggested topics and questions:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Is there an
evolutionary rationale for the development of preferences, and if so what is
it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">What is the right
naturalistic philosophical analysis of desire?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Are there
genuinely incommensurable preferences?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Can behaviour be
efficiently controlled without representations of value?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">How do the
concepts of desire and preference relate?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">What is the
relevance of neuroeconomics to philosophy?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">What is the
right representational analysis of desires, utilities, preferences?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">How do pleasure
and pain relate to desire and preference?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Do the demands
of efficient control require a </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">final common
path</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span><!--[endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Is motivational </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">‘</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">strength</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">’</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> best thought of
as scalar, or vector?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">If you wish to be considered
for inclusion in the programme, please send a title and </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">informal </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">abstract (between </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">25</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">0 and 500
words) to <a href="mailto:spurrett@ukzn.ac.za"><span style="color: blue;">spurrett@ukzn.ac.za</span></a>
on or before Wednesday 16 March 2016. Notifications of acceptance will be sent
out shortly after that date.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-26307492058850076362016-02-09T23:50:00.003-08:002016-02-09T23:50:34.132-08:00Early 2016 UpdateThe blog has been semi-stagnant, but the research project has not.<br />
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I'm pleased to report that <i>Biology and Philosophy</i> has accepted 'Does Intragenomic Conlflict Predict Intrapersonal Conflict?' subject to some minor revisions. I'll share a preprint here in due course.<br />
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Also, the text of 'Herbert goes to Monte Carlo' (written with Blaize Kaye) is taking shape nicely, and should also be ready to share within a few months. This is the paper in which we attempt to stage a battle between some of the arguments in favour of a common currency, and the case against both representationalism and centralisation found in Rodney Brooks' famous manifesto 'Intelligence without Representation'.<br />
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A by-product of working on the 'Herbert' paper is that I've got extensive notes about the final common path argument, and a few other arguments in favour of a common currency, which I hope to convert into pieces suitable for posting here.Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-51462944231668647792015-05-04T02:50:00.000-07:002015-05-04T02:50:17.165-07:00What you can't expect when you're expecting<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-L7jbiK2FeJA/VUcxu-LawoI/AAAAAAAAFfs/HFRAwZ8mDBo/s1600/angry_baby%2B(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-L7jbiK2FeJA/VUcxu-LawoI/AAAAAAAAFfs/HFRAwZ8mDBo/s320/angry_baby%2B(1).jpg" width="248" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://www.lapaul.org/" target="_blank">Laurie Ann </a></span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://www.lapaul.org/" target="_blank">Paul</a> has a <a href="http://www.resphilosophica.org/resphil.2015.92.2.1/" target="_blank">recent paper</a> on the question of whether it is possible to decide rationally whether to have a first child. She argues that it is not possible. When I heard about the paper I was very curious, because it seemed to me that it might have something useful to contribute to thinking about about the issue of choices between supposedly incommensurable alternatives.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Various philosophers and others have argued that at least some choices do exhibit incommensurability. (For a review see this entry in the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-incommensurable/" target="_blank">Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</a>.)</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"> If they’re correct, or if at least some versions of their views are correct, then it is not generally true that all choices involve alternatives represented in a single common value scale. I don’t have a hat in the right either way, although I suspect both that there are at least some kinds of choice that defeat commensurability, and that the choices in question are of quite restricted and special types.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Although I’m not actively working on the topic of incommensurability right now, I’m keeping an eye on it. So here is a quick overview of Paul’s paper. It wasn’t actually what I was expecting at all, and after outlining her argument I’ll say a little about why. I’ll discuss the paper under Paul’s own headings. (Any heading below with a number corresponds to a section of her paper. All quotations are from Paul’s paper.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 600;">1. Deciding Whether to Start a Family</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Paul sets the scene: the decision problem we are to focus on is a person, until this point childless, who is ‘personally, financially and physically able’ to have a child. The problem, that is, which we are to consider is a kind of ‘best case scenario’ for someone thinking about whether to have a child, except for the fact that person or couple considering the question have not done it before.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">And on a fairly commonly held view, what one should do is think about the consequences of either having a child or not having a child, and then choose what on balance seems the better of the two options in the particular circumstances, and for the particular possible parents. Not everybody decides in the same way. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 600;">2. Decision Theory: A Normative Model</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">In this section Paul introduces an informal version of decision theory considered as an account of rational decision making. Making a choice rationally involves determining (as far as we can) the outcomes that would follow each option, and then working out the expected values, for the deciding agent, of the various possible outcomes, so that we can determine which is best.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Paul claims that when choosing whether or not to have a child, one is partly choosing between options one or both of which are to a significant extent about ‘phenomenal outcomes’, or with </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">what it would be like</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"> to have a child.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">(Phenomenal outcomes aren’t the only relevant outcomes. Paul isn’t saying that, but rather that they are among the important outcomes.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 600;">3. What Experience Teaches</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Paul then endorses the view that phenomenal knowledge, that is knowledge of what something is like, ‘can (practically speaking) </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">only</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"> be had via experience.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">To bolster this view she describes the case of colour-deprived Mary, from Frank Jackson’s thought experiment. Mary supposedly knows everything there is to know about the physics of colour perception, but has been deprived of first hand colour experiences:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-indent: 28.3px;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">“As Jackson points out, when Mary leaves her cell for the first time, she has a radically new experience: she experiences redness for the first time, and from this experience, and this experience alone, she knows what it is like to see red.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Paul’s argument isn’t supposed to depend on whether Jackson’s imagined case is telling against physicalism. Rather, we are simply supposed to recognise that Mary is in an ‘epistemically impoverished position’. (I’m not sure that even this will work, because part of what is at issue over </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">that</span><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> Mary is indeed whether knowing all the physical facts puts her in a position to know what it would be like to see red.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Anyway, difficulties aside what Paul wants and asserts is the notion that seeing red for the first time is ‘epistemically transformative’. Not only that, when you don’t know what something is going to be like, you also don’t know how it is going to make you feel:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-indent: 28.3px;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">“This means that, when Mary chooses to leave her black-and-white cell, thus choosing to undergo an epistemically transformative experience, she faces a deep subjective unpredictability about the future. She doesn’t know, and she cannot know, the values of the relevant phenomenal outcomes of her choice.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 600;">4. The Transformative Experience of Having a Child</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Now we return to the question of choosing whether or not to have a child:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-indent: 28.3px;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">“A person who is choosing whether to become a parent, before she has a child, is in an epistemic situation just like that of black-and-white Mary before she leaves her cell. Just like Mary, she is epistemically impoverished, because she does not know what it is like to have a child of her very own.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Having a child, Paul argues, is a distinctive and intense experience, the phenomenal properties of which cannot be known in advance. She spends most of this section fleshing out and offering some defence of this claim. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 600;">5. Choosing the Ordinary Way is not Rational</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">The way the argument comes together at this point should be pretty clear given how the earlier stages are set up. The standard decision theoretic model assigns expected values to outcome states. But in at least some cases, including having a first child, the phenomenal outcomes aren’t knowable in advance, and so values cannot be assigned:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-indent: 28.3px;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">“When a decision involves an outcome that is epistemically transformative for the decision-maker, she cannot rationally assign a value to the outcome until she has experienced the outcome.” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">—oOo—</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Paul also has a section (6) in which she considers a number of objections.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">I said near the outset that this wasn’t really what I was expecting. That’s mostly because of how my own concerns and interests led me to interpret her title and abstract. I do think that there might well be ‘transformative experiences’ from the perspective of decision making. That is, that there might be experiences after which the decision maker is transformed </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">qua decision maker</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">. What I mean by this is transformed in the sense that after the experience the decision maker has different preferences, or at least a suitably substantial revision in the relative weighting of the preferences that she already had.</span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Having a child plausibly does this to at least some people. I think it might have done so to me, and in ways that surprised me at the time. (For example, thinking of myself as a parent seemed related to my suddenly becoming a much more conservative driver, even when I was driving alone. It just seemed more important to be </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">careful</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">.) If something like that does happen, then it does indeed present a kind of obstacle or challenge to some standard models of decision. </span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">But I don’t see that the obstacle depends very much, if at all, on </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">ignorance</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"> about what it will be like after the transformation. In fact some ways of understanding the notion of transformative experience, seem to be obstacles to standard models of decision-making even given full information. That’s because many standard decision and learning approaches focus on maximising something (goal achievement, subjective utility, reward in some reinforcement learning regime, etc.). And I’ve not — at least yet — seen one that tries to work out how to handle decisions where the options include actions that transform the maximisation target itself. (This could be ignorance on my part, but some superficial poking around in the reinforcement learning literature didn’t turn anything up. I’d welcome pointers to relevant literature in the comments below.)</span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Notice that it’s not obvious that all cases where options can change what a person wants will be difficult. It’s not hard, for example, to find people who would gladly sign up for an intervention that made them stop wanting to smoke but otherwise left them pretty much the same. But it does seem as though there’s something interesting and difficult about the problem of how, given a </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">current</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"> value function, to choose between options some of which include the consequence that ones future value function, and with it the consequences of future choices, will be different. Then, even if you do know what the differences will be, it isn’t obvious what counts as making that kind of decision well, or how one might go about trying to get a robot to do it efficiently.</span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">To be fair, Paul does </span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic;">mention</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"> the possibility of preference changing at one point in her paper, where she says that having a chid is not merely epistemically transformative but ‘personally transformative’ and that: “ A personally transformative experience radically changes what it is like to be you, perhaps by replacing your core preferences with very different ones.” But in this paper, at least, her main focus is on epistemically transformative experiences, focused specifically on phenomenal knowledge.</span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">I’m hoping to give more serious attention to the topic of possibly incommensurable options in a year or so. When I do that, I’ll follow up and look at Paul’s wider account of personally transformative experiences.</span><br />
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">Here’s the text of Paul’s <b>abstract</b>:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">It seems natural to choose whether to have a child by reflecting on what it would be like to actually have a child. I argue that this natural approach fails. If you choose to become a parent, and your choice is based on projections about what you think it would be like for you to have a child, your choice is not rational. If you choose to remain childless, and your choice is based upon projections about what you think it would be like for you to have a child, your choice is not rational. This suggests we should reject our ordinary conception of how to make this life-changing decision, and raises general questions about how to rationally approach important life choices.</span><br />
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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Res+Philosophica&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.11612%2Fresphil.2015.92.2.1&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=What+You+Can%27t+Expect+When+You%27re+Expecting&rft.issn=2168-9105&rft.date=2015&rft.volume=92&rft.issue=2&rft.spage=1&rft.epage=23&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.resphilosophica.org%2Fresphil.2015.92.2.1%2F&rft.au=Paul%2C+L.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Philosophy">Paul, L. (2015). What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting <span style="font-style: italic;">Res Philosophica, 92</span> (2), 1-23 DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.11612/resphil.2015.92.2.1" rev="review">10.11612/resphil.2015.92.2.1</a></span>
<span style="float: left; padding: 5px;"><a href="http://www.researchblogging.org/"><img alt="ResearchBlogging.org" src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0;" /></a></span>Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-17596245961754982262015-02-20T03:04:00.000-08:002015-02-20T03:04:14.507-08:00Intragenomic conflict and Intrapersonal Conflict<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Here is the abstract
of a working paper that is part of my Common Currency project. This one has
dragged on for some time. I’m not sure when I first gave a talk on the topic,
but it was probably late in 2012, and I’ve peddled this stuff at various venues
between now and then. Along the way I’ve read loads of interesting biology, and
learned a lot. I’ve also changed my mind a few times over the details, but seem
to have stabilized on a view that I think I can defend. I hope to have a full
draft paper that is fit to be posted on this site before the middle of 2015.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h3>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Intragenomic conflict
and Intrapersonal Conflict</span></h3>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"><i>David Spurrett (UKZN)<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<h4>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Abstract</span></h4>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">It is now recognised that different parts of the genome of a single
individual, especially autosomal genes inherited from a male parent and from a
female parent, can sometimes have conflicting interests. One mechanism allowing
these conflicts to be expressed in some species, including mammals, is genomic
imprinting, which modulates the level of expression of some genes depending on
parent of origin. Several leading biologists, including William Hamilton and
Robert Trivers, but particularly David Haig, have suggested that this
intragenomic conflict may explain, or predict, some kinds of intrapersonal
motivational conflict in humans. Here I seek to assess this suggestion,
especially as developed by Haig (2006).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">There are two (potentially) complementary ways in which genomic conflict
might be related to motivational conflict. One concerns pattern in behaviour,
and the other concerns the processes, or mechanisms, by which behaviours are
selected. (This corresponds roughly to the distinction between <i>ultimate</i>
and <i>proximal</i> explanation.) A conflicted pattern in behaviour won’t be
consistent with a single preference ordering, whereas a conflicted process of
behaviour selection will be in some way constitutionally disunified, or
fractious. In the first case I argue that the phenomenon of intragenomic
conflict has <i>at most</i> the consequence that pattern in behaviour won’t
correspond in any simple way to the collective interests of the genes as
understood from a perspective neglecting genomic conflict. This just isn’t the
same thing as being inconsistent with <i>some</i> preference ordering. The
failure of an inference from genomic conflict to individual behavioural
inconsistency, however, leaves open the possibility that genomic conflict is
expressed in the behaviour selection process.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">The case of mechanisms is more complicated because of the large variety
of available models of the behaviour selection process. I review a number of
leading proposals, and argue in each case that intragenomic conflict either
does not predict conflict over behaviour selection, or would at most modulate
the conflict already predicted by the model. Considered in relation to existing
psychological models, then, it seems as though genomic conflict does not
predict conflict. Finally, I develop a suggestion hinted at in Haig, and argue
that there are indeed coherent scenarios in which conflicting genes could
influence behaviour, on the model of mind-controlling parasites rather than by
inputs to an established behaviour selection system. Whether any conflicting
genes in fact operate in these ways is, of course, an empirical matter. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">References<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Haig, D. (2006) Intrapersonal conflict. Pages 8-22, in M.K. Jones and
Fabian (eds.) <i>Conflict</i>. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h4>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Table of contents</span></h4>
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<i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">1. Introduction</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">2. Intrapersonal
Conflict?</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">3. Intragenomic
conflict and genomic imprinting </span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">3.1. Intragenomic
conflict<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">3.2. Imprinting and PSGE.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">4. Haig on
intra-personal conflict</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">4.1. An adaptive
rationale for inconsistency?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">4.2. A mechanism for
sub-personal conflict?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">{4.3. Conditional
strategies and mind-controlling parasites}<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">{5. Objections and
clarifications}</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">5.1. What about
Badcock and Crespi?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">5.2. Behaviour isn’t
special, but consistency is.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">5.3. What about Haig’s
remarks on common currencies? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">5.4 Who cares?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">6. Conclusion</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">{Curly brackets denote a section that might
not make it into the final paper.}<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-63489856608532474352015-02-04T02:37:00.001-08:002015-02-04T02:40:58.297-08:00Draft: The Natural History of DesireI previously posted the <a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-natural-history-of-desire.html" target="_blank">abstract and conference slides</a> of this working paper, presented a few weeks ago at the annual conference of the Philosophical Society of Southern Africa, held in Port Elizabeth this year. What appears below is a working draft of the paper, edited down to the word limit for submission to the conference volume.<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 28.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">The</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 28.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">
Natural History of Desire</span></b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">David Spurrett – UKZN –
spurrett@ukzn.ac.za</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Abstract</span></b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">In <i>Thought
in a Hostile World</i> (2003) Kim Sterelny develops an idealised natural
history of folk-psychological kinds. He argues that under certain selection
pressures belief-like states are a natural elaboration of simpler control
systems which he calls detection systems, and which map directly from
environmental cue to response. Belief-like states are distinguished by the
properties of robust tracking (being occasioned by a wider range of
environmental states, including distal ones), and response breadth (being able
to feature in the triggering of a wider range of behaviours). A key driver,
according to Sterelny, of the development of robust tracking and
response-breadth, and hence belief-like states, are properties of the
informational environment. A <i>transparent</i> environment is one where the
functional relevance to an organism of states of the world is directly
detectable. In a <i>translucent</i> or <i>opaque</i> environment, on the other
hand, states significant to an organism map in less direct or simple ways onto
states that the organism can detect. A <i>hostile</i> environment, finally, is
one where the specific explanation of translucency or opacity is the design and
behaviour of competing organisms. Where the costs of implementing belief-like
states pay their way in more discriminating behaviour allocation under
conditions of opacity and hostility, Sterelny argues, selection can favour the
development of decoupled representations of the environment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">In the
case of desires, however, Sterelny maintains that the same arguments do not
generalise. One justification that he offers for this view reasons that unlike
the external environment, the internal processes of an organism are under
significant selection pressure for transparency. Parts of a single organism,
having coinciding interests, have nothing to gain from deceiving one another,
and much to gain from accurate signalling of their states and needs. Key
conditions favouring the development of belief-like states are therefore absent
in the case of desires. Here I argue that Sterelny’s reasons for saying that
his treatment of belief doesn’t generalise to motivation (desires, or
preferences) are insufficient. There are limits to the transparency that
internal environments can achieve. Even if there were not, tracking the
motivational salience of external states calls for pervasive attention to
valuation in any system in which selection has driven the production of
belief-like states.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">1</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">.
Introduction</span></b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">In his (2003)<i>Thought in a Hostile
World</i> Sterelny develops a detailed articulation of an approach suggested in
Godfrey-Smith (1996, 2002). Godfrey-Smith’s proposal, the Environmental
Complexity Hypothesis (ECH), maintains that “the function of cognition is to
enable the agent to deal with environmental complexity.” That is, as an <i>explanatory
hypothesis</i>, the ECH proposes that the capacity which cognition gives
organisms having it, and which is responsible for its success under natural
selection, is responding more effectively to heterogeneity in their
environments. For present purposes I simply accept the ECH. I happen to support
it as a fruitful research programme, but won’t offer a defence. (For broadly
supportive lines of critical comment on Sterelny 2003 see Papineau 2004, and
for criticism on points of detail see Christensen 2010.) My aim, rather, is to
develop a line of thinking <i>internal</i> to the ECH, and which concerns the
specific treatment of motivational states in Sterelny’s (2003) book.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Sterelny
describes his objective as combining two integrative projects that arise when
humans are studied from a naturalistic perspective. One ‘internal’ project
concerns the “wiring and connection facts” about human cognitive architecture,
and aims to assemble a “coherent theory of human agency and human evolutionary
history”. The other ‘external’ project attempts to relate the conclusions of
the first project to the ways some social sciences (including psychology,
anthropology, and economics) have produced “refined versions of our folk
self-conception”, where that self-conception is that we are <i>intentional </i>beings.
Complementing the “wiring and connection facts” these projects focused on
intentional action have produced the “interpretation facts” (Sterelny 2003,
3-5).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Sterelny
frames his own proposal against the backdrop of a position he calls the “Simple
Co-ordination Thesis” (SCT). According to adherents of the SCT, which comes in
various forms:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">“… (a) Our interpretative concepts constitute something like a theory
of human cognitive organization: they are a putative description of the
wiring-and-connection facts; (b) Our interpretative skills depend on this
theory, and our ability to deploy it on particular occasions; (c) We are often
able to successfully explain or anticipate behaviour because this theory is
largely true.” (Sterelny 2003, 6).</span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">In the first part of <i>Thought in a
Hostile World</i>, entitled ‘Assembling Intentionality’,<i> </i>Sterelny
argues, in effect, that the Simple Coordination Thesis is <i>approximately</i>
correct. He rejects the eliminativist view that belief and desire talk is
false, and also the Dennettian attributionist view that the interpretation
facts ‘do not have the function of describing the internal organization of
agents’ (Dennett 1987; Sterelny 2003, 7). There are, Sterelny argues, internal ‘belief-like’
states that have features approximately like those expected by the SCT. They
are elaborations of simpler systems, and it is unclear to what extent they are
found in animals other than humans, but some other primates plausibly have
them. In the case of preferences, Sterelny maintains that the SCT is less
approximately correct, and ‘desire-like’ states incompletely found even in
humans.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">My critical concern is specifically
with Sterelny’s treatment of desire. Sterelny argues that there are important
functional dis-analogies between belief-like states and desire-like states, so
that the considerations that explain why selection could in some cases favour
the kinds of cognitive elaboration culminating in belief-like states largely
don’t apply to motivation. In his view simpler control systems can achieve much
more there, and so there’s even less evidence that desire-like states are found
in non-human animals. I begin with Sterelny’s account of belief.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">2</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">.
Sterelny on the descent of belief<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Sterelny develops an evolutionary
history of beliefs starting with the ‘detection system,’ an idealised and very
simple control system that falls well short of belief. A detection system’
mediates “a <i>specific adaptive response </i>to some feature (or features) of
[an organism’s] environment by registering <i>a specific environmental signal</i>”
(Sterelny 2003, p14). One of Sterelny’s examples is the cockroach flight
response, which triggers running away from gusts of air, registered by hair
cells on their heads<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Sterelny 2003,
p14). The idea is that the creature has a specific behavioural response
(running away in this case) to a single environmental cue (the moving air caused
by a striking toad, or magazine-wielding human). It seems clear enough that it
could sometimes be a satisfactory solution to a control problem to have a
behaviour triggered by a single cue.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">It isn’t clear whether any specific
organism is actually supposed to <i>instantiate</i> a detection system strictly
understood. At least some of Sterelny’s examples are of animals whose
flexibility in either detection or response is greater than a detection system
as described would allow.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
He also suggests that detection systems can be acquired by simple associative
learning.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
For present purposes these worries can be set aside. The notion of a detection
system is a useful <i>idealisation</i> even if there are no confirmed pure
examples (Godfrey Smith 2014, Chapter 2). Sterelny puts the notion of a
detection system to work by thinking about the costs and benefits of such
simple mechanisms, and possible forms of incremental modification that might
lead to more discriminating control.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">The most obvious benefit of detection
systems is that they’re relatively simple, and so cheap to build and run. As
Sterelny points out, though, organisms with cue-driven behaviours can be
vulnerable to exploitation. Fireflies which approach species-typical flash
sequences to locate mates are lured by predators generating the same sequences
to attract meals (Sterelny 2003, p15). Ants using the <i>absence</i> of
chemical signals to distinguish (and attack) invaders are exploited by
parasitic beetles mimicking the signals, and food-eliciting gestures (Sterelny
2003, p15).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Sterelny refers to the general
condition in which environmental signals that an organism can detect are
reliably good occasions for specific responses it is capable of producing, that
is where cue-driven behaviour will be successful, as <i>informationally
transparent</i> (Sterelny 2003, p20)<i>.</i> A transparent environment is “characterized
by simple and reliable correspondences between sensory cues and functional
properties.” A key insight that he develops in his (2003) is that not all
environments have this property. than In cases where relevant features of the
environment “map in complex, one to many ways onto the cues [an organism] can
detect” then it occupies an <i>informationally translucent</i> environment
(Sterelny 2003, p21). In some cases the translucency is not the result of brute
heterogeneity in the surrounding world, but is produced by other living things
with an interest in misleading (for example by being camouflaged to fool
predators or prey) in which case Sterelny calls the environment <i>informationally
hostile</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">No general prediction follows from
either transparency or hostility. But we can, Sterelny argues, make the <i>conditional</i>
prediction that where the gains from more discriminating control outweigh the
cost, then selection will favour certain kinds of elaboration of detection
systems, if means are available. He discusses two particular kinds of
elaboration - robust tracking, and response breadth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Robust tracking</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"> is elaboration on the ‘input’ side. Where a detection system
triggers a behaviour in response to a single cue, robust tracking links response
to multiple, integrated cues. This can allow tracking of some environmental
states under conditions of translucency or hostility. Reed-warblers are
exploited by cuckoos, and face a serious problem distinguishing parasitic eggs
from their own. Sterelny suggests that the muti-modal discrimination they draw
on determining whether to reject an egg, including sensitivity to size, colour,
shape, timing of appearance, and whether a cuckoo has recently been sighted
near the nest, is an example of robust tracking (Sterelny 2003, p27-29).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Response breadth</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">, on the other hand, is elaboration on the ‘output’ side, and occurs
when more than one behaviour might be produced in response to the same
registered contingency. One of Sterelny’s illustrations concerns responses to
predators. Having registered the presence of a predator, an organism with
response breadth might make one of a variety of responses including immediate
flight, approach, or continuing with heightened vigilance, perhaps depending on
the state of the organism itself (Sterelny 2003, p33-40).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">When
robust tracking and response breadth are combined, we get what Sterelny calls
‘decoupled representation’. Now behaviour can be partly contingent on
relatively high level patterns of environmental information, perhaps integrated
over time scales reaching beyond the present and sensitive to the state of the
behaving organism. Decoupled representations are “internal states that track
aspects of our world, but which do not have the function of controlling
particular behaviors” (Sterelny 2003, p39). Such sophisticated states are, as
found in humans at least, worth calling ‘belief-like states’. These are genuine
cognitive states which, while they may not share all of the features associated
with any particular version of the Simple Co-ordination Thesis, are close
enough that Sterelny’s position regarding the interpretation facts in humans is
neither eliminativist nor Dennettian attributionist. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">3</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">.
Sterelny on the Descent of Preference</span></b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Sterelny devotes less attention to
desire, or preference, than to belief. Three chapters of his (2003) focus
mostly on the natural history of belief-like states, followed by a single
chapter on the descent of preference. Although there is some overlap, the
comparative brevity of the treatment of motivation is not because it is
continuous with the account of belief. In fact, a major order of business in
the motivation chapter is to argue that the account previously developed for
belief <i>cannot</i> be generalised to motivation. The conclusion Sterelny
eventually draws is, furthermore, more friendly to a kind of eliminativism.
Although he finds a plausible rationale for the evolutionary development of
belief-like states, he says that he does not “think that there is even a rough
mapping between preferences identified in our interpretive frameworks, and
states of the internal cognitive architecture that controls human action”
(Sterelny 2003, p87).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">This is the conclusion that I wish to
reject. I do so here by undermining Sterelny’s argument that the belief
treatment doesn’t generalise to motivation. I therefore need to lay out
Sterelny’s reasoning in more detail than in the belief case. The criticism I
offer here is rather restricted, and negative. I won’t develop other lines of
criticism of Sterelny’s account of motivation, and will only be able to hint at
an alternative positive view, sharing more than Sterelny envisages with his
account of belief.</span><span style="font-family: Times; font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">3.1</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">
Sterelny’s explanatory target<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">In the
case of beliefs, Sterelny’s explanatory target is relatively close to a
standard (teleosemantic) conception. Belief-like states, as described, have
representational content. They have satisfaction conditions and can be more or
less supported by, and responsive to, environmental information. It is less
clear that we are on such familiar ground regarding desires. Sterelny mostly
doesn’t refer to ‘desire like states’, and favours the term ‘preference’ for
the motivational component of folk-psychological explanation. He describes his
explanatory target as “motivation based on representations of the external
world” (2003, p79). He seems, furthermore, to endorse the distinction drawn by
Tony Dickinson between ‘habit based’ and ‘intentional’ agents, where intentional
agents are sensitive to the value of actions, including values not explicitly
cued by occurrent external information, <i>and</i> to the causal connections
between acts and their consequences (e.g. Dickinson and Balleine 2000; Sterelny
2003, p82).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Sterelny
thus associates ‘preferences’, with means-end reasoning, suggesting that the “most
incontrovertible cases” of the applicability of belief and preference
psychology are “in complex calculating games like bridge and chess” (Sterelny
2003, p95). Such very cognitive and deliberative motivational systems are, says
Sterelny, to be distinguished from motivation by drives, or feeling. Drives, in
his view, signal departures from homeostasis and in at least some cases
motivate directly by feeling (he does not say that <i>all</i> drive based
control involves feeling). He also maintains that drives can solve a wide range
of control problems, and consequently that it is less clear that there is a job
for preferences to do. As he poses the problem “… what selective payoff could
there be through routing action (say) through preferences about drinks rather
than through sensations of thirst?” (Sterelny 2003, p81).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Various
commentators have expressed dissatisfaction with how Sterelny opposes desire
and preference based motivation here (e.g. Schulz 2013, Papineau 2004). I’ll
return to some of the difficulties with it in due course. For now, we need to
be clear that Sterelny maintains that the motivational counterpart to beliefs
is motivation focussed on representations of goal states, involving means-end
reasoning, and that for preferences to be predicted, they need to do better
(given the costs of implementing them) than motivation by drives signalling
departures from homeostasis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">3.2</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">
Why the belief case won’t generalise<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">It might
seem as though the considerations favouring the development of belief-like
states would also explain the construction of motivational systems. Detection
systems are ‘pushmi-pullyu’ (Millikan 1995) control solutions that yoke an <i>indicative</i>
aspect (the environmental information to which each is sensitive) to an <i>imperative</i>
one (the activity that each triggers).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Decoupled representations replace these simple mappings with the more
discriminating responses to environmental information that Sterelny calls
robust tracking <i>and</i> replace single imperative output with response
breadth — behaviour drawn from a wider repertoire of possibly relevant
activities. The latter elaboration, specifically, might seem by itself to
create work for motivational states, to prioritise among the resulting
repertoire of activities. This is the very inference that Sterelny wishes to
block. The conditional argument from translucency or opacity to belief-like
states <i>cannot</i>, he says, be generalised to give an account of<i> </i>“motivation
based on representations of the external world.” (Sterelny 2003, p79.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">The main reason Sterelny offers for
this is that the departures from transparency that explain the existence of
belief-like-states, are <i>absent</i> from internal environments. This is not, furthermore,
<i>accidental</i>: Since internal environments have homogenous evolutionary
interests, in the sense that all parts of an organism are - so to speak - on
the same team, they both lack hostility, and will be under selection pressure
for transparency. This means that signals of biological needs will tend to be
trustworthy. “The natural physiological side-effects of departures from
homeostasis”, says Sterelny, “have the potential to be recruited as signals for
response mechanisms. Over time, we would expect these signals to be modified to
become cleaner and less noisy; and internal monitoring systems to become more
efficient in picking them up and using them to drive appropriate responses”
(Sterelny 2003, p80).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Drives might, of course, be
simultaneously triggered in incompatible ways, but Sterelny maintains that one
fairly robust solution to the control problem this poses is to have a “built in
motivational hierarchy” (2003, p81). He doesn’t really flesh this proposal out
very much, but the idea seems to be that a relatively fixed ranking of drives
can determine behavioural priorities in ways that depend neither on
representations of the values of outcomes, nor the connections between actions
and their consequences. He refers approvingly to Rodney Brooks (1991) here,
encouraging the suggestion that this fixed motivational hierarchy might depend
to a significant extent on low bandwidth trumping relationships between drives.
(In the early 1990s Brooks argued that ‘intelligent’ systems could be based on
‘subsumption architectures’ which were, roughly, hierarchies of detection
systems operating without significant representational resources.)<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">3.3</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">
Sterelny’s positive view<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">While
Sterelny holds that <i>many</i> organisms solve motivational problems without “representing
their needs”, relying instead on a “built-in motivational hierarchy” which
ranks various drives mostly based on transparent internal signals, sometimes
supplemented with a little external information, this is not true of <i>all</i>
of them. The advantages of preferences over drives, according to Sterelny,
include that they liberate motivation from ‘immediate affective reward’, that
they allow more efficient decision making in cases where the range of available
behaviours is large, that they allow a creature to have a smaller number of
motivational states, that they permit motivational conflict resolution by means
other than ‘winner take all’, and that preference based systems are able to
cope with changing needs, including needs that are phylogenetically novel
(Sterelny 2003, pp 92-95, See also Schulz 2013, p598). Preferences, as well as
representing goal states, can be ranked, and they can be learned.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Sterelny’s
exposition is fairly cryptic on these points, and some commentators have
expressed the view that the supposed advantages of preferences aren’t explained
clearly enough, or that the contrast with what drive-based motivation could
achieve is insufficiently motivated (again, see Papineau 2004). Certainly,
Sterelny says very little to <i>justify</i> the claims that the number of
motivational states would be smaller for drives than for preferences, or that
drive based motivation would <i>have</i> to resolve conflict on a winner take
all basis. Nonetheless he maintains that a small sub-set of species (hominids
definitely, and maybe some others) are capable of more richly intentional and
preference-based action, that is aimed at planning activities to achieve
desired states of the external world. This, he thinks, does require some
representation of value. But this transformation “is very unlikely to be
complete” (Sterelny 2003, p95). Sterelny maintains that much other behaviour
allocation is likely based on fairly quick and dirty procedures, and various
kinds of distributed and non-representational control processes (as noted
above, he explicitly and approvingly cites Brooks 1991).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">The view
that he reaches is, therefore, still clearly a version of the environmental
complexity hypothesis (ECH), insofar as the development of preferences is a response
to external complexity. But it is rather more friendly to eliminativism than
his position in the case of belief, because the (alleged) transparency of
internal environments means that there is much less complexity for cognition to
‘deal with’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">4</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">.
Criticisms of Sterelny<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Sterelny,
then, argues that internal environments will tend to be transparent, and that <i>because
of this</i>, the inference from informational complexity to belief-like states
does not generalise to the motivation. His argument identifies preferences with
means-end reasoning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">In what
follows I criticise all three of these commitments. First, I undermine Sterelny’s
claim regarding the transparency of internal environments. I argue, in section
(4.1) below, that his defence of the claim is insufficient, and consequently
that internal environments can also favour robust tracking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Second, I
argue that even if internal environments were transparent, it would not follow
that cue-based control processes would be generally sufficient. I call the
condition in which cue-based control is sufficient ‘motivational transparency’,
analogous to informational transparency. In section (4.2) I argue that
motivational transparency does not generally follow from internal
transparency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Finally I
maintain that Sterelny has made an unsatisfactory choice of explanatory target
in his discussion of preference. I argue in section (4.3) that rather than
focusing on means-end reasoning, or represented goal states, what is needed,
and prior to either, is a notion of incentive values, attached to occurrent
environmental information and possible actions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">The lines
of critical thinking offered here are not exhaustive, and the arguments I
provide are brief. I aim to highlight some difficulties with what Sterelny
himself identifies as ‘tentative’ moves in the area, with the aim of advancing
the same general project. I won’t have space to develop or defend a positive
view distinct from Sterelny’s, although some hints will emerge.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">4.1</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">
Limits on Internal Transparency<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">As explained above, Sterelny maintains
that internal environments, having homogenous interests, will be devoid of
hostility, and so be under pressure to develop accurate and transparent signals
of biological states and needs. The interests within an organism are presumably
homogenous (Sterelny does not spell this out explicitly) because all parts of a
single organism are in some sense equal shareholders in whatever reproductive
success the individual organism enjoys.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">This suggestion plausibly applies,
subject to cost constraints, to internal signals, to the extent that internal
interests coincide. This they <i>mostly</i> do.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
The relative absence of hostility does indeed imply the internal absence of one
source of pollution in the external informational environment.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">But hostility is not the <i>only</i>
source of departures from transparency. As Sterelny says, an environment is <i>informationally
translucent</i> when states that matter to it “map in complex, one to many ways
onto the cues they can detect” (Sterelny 2003, p21). These conditions can, and
do, arise in hostility-free internal environments, in a number of different
ways. Here I identify three considerations:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Limits on transduction</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">: Not all internal states have unique signatures that cost-effective
transducers can specialise in detecting. Here are a few examples in humans.
Non-nutritive sweeteners trigger transducers whose proper function is to
respond to sugars that <i>can</i> be digested. The responses of salt receptors,
depending on ion channels, are also sensitive to the ambient sodium
concentration in the organism, so the resulting neural signals can be highly
ambiguous (e.g. Bertino, Beauchamp & Engelman 1982) Thermoreceptors don’t
come in a single type detecting ‘objective temperature.’ Instead information
about temperature depends on combinations of receptors for cold and heat, as
well as additional nociceptive receptors for extremes of each (for a
philosophically rich discussion of peripheral thermoreception see Akins 1996). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Complex mappings</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">: Motivationally relevant states can also depend on multiple cues.
Information about temperature in humans, to continue with that example, is
drawn from multiple receptors of different types that are distributed non-uniformly
across the surface of the body. As Akins notes, even on the face the ratio of
cold to warm receptors varies from about 8:1 on the nose, 4:1 on the cheeks and
chin, while the lips have almost no cold receptors (Akins 1996, 346). Any ‘net’
signal that might drive behaviour will require these signals to be integrated
in some way. More generally, internal states can span multiple organs and
tissue types, with varying speeds of signalling, and latencies in responding to
actions that affect them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Cost versus accuracy
tradeoffs</span></i><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">: There are costs to improvements in
tracking, just as in the external case. Simply adding internal transducers
increases information load, along with metabolic and other costs building and
running the receptors. Psychophysical processes generally don’t try, but rather
compress transduced variation into a baseline-dependent encoding, where the
baseline itself is variable (Barlow, 1961). In addition, the further a body is
from being a dimensionless point, the more internal signals will tend,
sometimes, to be distal or delayed, and subject to the typical error types that
arise from distal signals (such as false positives from stimulation on any
‘labelled line’ channel between transducer and brain). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">We should conclude that even though
internal environments aren’t generally <i>hostile</i>, they can certainly be <i>translucent.</i>
And translucency favours robust tracking. So Sterelny’s premise is at least not
straightforwardly or generally true. What about the inference that he draws
from it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">4.2</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">
Internal transparency doesn’t imply Motivational Transparency<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">In the previous section I
argued that there could be benefits to robust tracking in internal environments
because (just as with external ones) there are limits to transparency. Since
Sterelny argues from internal transparency to the non-generalisability of his
treatment of belief, this is a problem for his position. But it is not the only
one. To see this, let us assume that internal environments <i>are</i> fully
transparent, in the sense that the precise level of deviation from homeostasis
of all relevant internal variables are signalled in a consistently high
fidelity way. Even then, cue-bound control can be inefficient.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">One reason for this is that
<i>needs can have multiple satisfiers</i>. A cold animal might be able to make
itself warmer, <i>inter alia</i>, by shivering, by huddling with conspecifics,
or relocating to a warmer spot. A dehydrated animal can drink, or it can eat,
since almost all food contains some water. And so forth. A hungry animal might
have<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>more than one foraging option.
Accurate information about needs does not always, then, suggest a unique ‘good
enough’ response which would favour cue-bound control.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">A further reason is that <i>actions
typically have multidimensional costs and benefits</i>. As noted most eating
rehydrates as well as nourishing. Different opportunities to eat, or drink,
have their own costs in energy, time, extent of competition for the same
resource, etc., and their own risks including predation <i>en route</i>, or at
the site itself, as well as payoffs in quality and quantity of the resource
itself. Costs and benefits can have sharply varying fitness implications -
being a little tired or hungry quite frequently is nowhere near as bad as being
eaten even once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if an animal had
accurate information about all of these contingencies, it would not generally
be obvious what course of action was appropriate or efficient. (We already know
that it can be difficult to work out what to do in games of perfect information
such as chess.) And animals mostly don’t have most of this information, which
favours - for at least some of them - being able to sample the environment and
be sensitive to the <i>returns</i> from various policies.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Sterelny is aware of these
considerations, but does not regard them as favouring the development of
preferences. An important part of the reason for this is his view that many
animals can deal with the problem of trading off different courses of action by
means of a “built-in motivational hierarchy” (2003, p81). This seems likely to
be correct, up to a point. But it is not a reason for thinking that the
arguments (conditionally) favouring decoupled representation don’t generalise
to motivational states. As with detection systems, and belief-like states, we
should consider the relative strengths and weaknesses of more or less quick and
dirty, or inflexible, procedures.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">A fixed hierarchy can probably produce
quick, and good enough, responses in a wide range of situations. But such
brittle solutions have the very problems of inefficiency under conditions of
informational translucency that Sterelny explained when focusing his attention
on beliefs including vulnerability to exploitation (See section 2 above). And
if the gains in efficiency from a less rigid approach outweigh the costs, then
something other than a fixed hierarchy might pay its way. What this something
else might be, I suggest, is relatively general (across actions and
environmental states) sensitivity to <i>reward</i>. Then the specific profile
of things found rewarding can be set by processes of natural selection, and the
organism’s behavioural dispositions partly shaped by experience of
action-reward relationships. If we combine the argument of the preceding
section and this one, we see a case for the robust tracking of motivationally
relevant states, <i>and</i> a role for motivation in prioritising actions given
response breadth. What motivation should do, what it is for, is prioritising on
the basis of the <i>returns</i> from actions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">What I’m describing, though, sounds
rather different from what Sterelny sets up as his explanatory target. This is
deliberate, and in the following sub-section I attempt to justify it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">4.3</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">
The wrong target<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">As noted
above (section 3.1) Sterelny takes the target for an account of the
motivational part of folk psychology to be representations of goal states, and
capacity for means end reasoning selecting actions that bring the goal states
closer. Recall, though, how he describes his overall project, as relating the “wiring
and connection facts” about human cognitive architecture to the “interpretation
facts” which are the elaborations of our folk self-conception as intentional
agents. This means relating wiring and connection facts to beliefs, on the one
hand, and desires on the other. Or, perhaps, desires as elaborated or
regimented by some science (or group of them) that takes the folk conception as
a starting point. So, we can ask, what is the approximate functional content of
the folk notion of desire, or an appropriate scientific regimentation of it,
for relating these two kinds of fact?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">I propose
that the core of the folk conception is a fairly general (and sometimes
imprecise) notion of motivational strength. An intentional agent desires
different goals, or to perform different actions, to varying degrees. When two
mutually exclusive actions are available, it does the one that it wants the
most.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Such a
general notion is compatible with some of the leading philosophical accounts of
desire, even though the field is contested.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
A leading contender is the view that desires are dispositions to action, given
beliefs (e.g. Smith 1987). Teleosemantic theories of desire are dispositional,
and also offer an analysis of the biological function of desires (e.g. Millikan
1984, Papineau 1987). One competing approach is provided by theories of desire
based on pleasure, for example Morillo (1990) which in addition identifies the
dopamine system in the brain as the basis of pleasure. Details of this view are
disputed by Schroeder (2004) who associates desire with learning, and
identifies the dopamine system with reinforcement learning, rather than
pleasure. (There are also theories of desire less obviously friendly to
naturalists, such as broadly Socratic ones connecting desire to judgements
about what is good.) Without joining those disputes, I note that the
disposition, pleasure and learning accounts all have weaker commitments than
Sterelny’s target (‘representations of the external world’, or means-end
reasoning).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
Where these theories require representations of the world, those are provided
by <i>beliefs</i>. What desires do is relate world-states, whether represented
or cued by occurrent experience, to tendencies to actions. As Papineau puts it,
beliefs should be thought of as having “no effects to call their own”, but then
which effects are produced depends on the motivational states (Papineau 2004,
494).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Matters do
not change substantially if we shift focus to consider scientific theories as
another source of what Sterelny calls “refined versions of our folk
self-conception”. In behavioural psychology and economics (which are among the
leading scientific regimentations of something that might be related to the
folk concept of desire) the key notions are reward or reinforcement or utility,
which are considered to provide an ordering of desirability for states and
actions (See Spurrett 2014). In addition, in behavioural neuroscience the drive
based theories that Sterelny seems to favour for organisms in which preferences
(as he understands them) have no developed have largely been displaced by incentive
based approaches.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
Here too, the theories have more modest commitments than Sterelny. What
preferences represent are rewards (or reward expectancies), not states of the
external world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">None of
this is to say that means-end reasoning is neither interesting nor important.
When it occurs it plausibly stands in need of an evolutionary rationale. From
the perspective suggested here, though, means-end reasoning is primarily a
representational achievement, consisting in the capacity to simulate
transitions between world-states, including transitions occasioned by actions,
and evaluate them using the same general sensitivity to incentives as apply in
‘on-line’ experience (see Shea <i>et al,</i> 2008). Sterelny is probably
correct, furthermore, that means-end reasoning is relatively incompletely
developed even in humans, and only found marginally in relatively few nonhuman
animals.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">5</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">.
Conclusion</span></b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">According to the Environmental
Complexity Hypothesis (ECH) “the function of cognition is to enable the agent
to deal with environmental complexity” Godfrey-Smith (1996, 2002). Sterelny
(2003) develops an account of folk psychology within the general terms of the
ECH. He argues that belief-like states can be explained as a response to
failures of environmental transparency, combining robust tracking (sensitivity
to multiple types of detectable information) and response breadth (the
relevance of registered states to more than one behaviour). But, he argues, in
the case of motivation internal environments will tend to be transparent, and
because of this the inference from translucency to (an approximation of) a
folk-psychological kind doesn’t apply. Preferences, understood as capacity for
means-end reasoning about representations of the external world, aren’t
predicted, at least for most organisms, because transparent signals of internal
state plus a built-in hierarchy of drives are a pretty good way of prioritising
actions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">I have accepted the Environmental
Complexity Hypothesis, and broadly support Sterelny’s treatment of belief-like
states, but argued against significant parts of his treatments of desire-like
states. Internal environments are not as transparent as he thinks, with the
result that there is work for robust tracking there too. Motivational
transparency does not follow from informational transparency either, and so
there is work for relatively generalised sensitivity to reward. The view of
preference that is predicted here is different from what Sterelny sets out to
find, but I’ve also argued that means-end reasoning isn’t the most important feature
of desire. Preferences are representations of a sort, but they represent the
returns (experienced or anticipated) from experienced states, or from possible
actions.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a>
Most of the burden of argument has been on the negative project of blocking
Sterelny’s ‘no generalisation’ argument. The fuller development of the positive
picture suggested here is a task for another occasion. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">References</span></b><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 120%; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
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<!--StartFragment-->
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">The same hair
cells in the cockroach, for example, also cue direction of fleeing while the
cockroach is in flight (Libersat 1994).</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">This seems to
be in tension with the suggestion that a detection system is a relatively
architectural channel (what is sometimes disagreeably called ‘hard-wired’),
because learning links between actions and environmental states needs a
(relatively) more generic cognitive mechanism. This point is made in Papineau
(2004).</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">I am passing
over worries that response breadth as described by Sterelny might not do the
work that he has in mind (e.g. Papineau 2004).</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Sterelny,
arguing that the evidence is inconclusive, disagrees with Dickson, who thinks
that rats count as intentional agents.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">The arch
anti-representationalist Brooks (1991) makes a curious choice of ally for
Sterelny who, at this point in his (2003), has just spent several chapters
explaining how decoupled representations arise, and are central to human
intelligence.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">As David Haig
has explained, imprinted gene activity may lead to internal deception and other
internal strategic interaction (Haig 2002). Other forms of within-organism
conflict may disrupt internal transparency in other ways (Burt & Trivers
2006). Although interesting, I set these phenomena aside here, and assume that
internal interests coincide entirely. See Spurrett (in preparation).</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">This quick
survey of theories of desire is indebted to Schroeder (2009).</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Learning based
theories <i>can</i> allow both world-modelling and planning, but do not require
it. See Sutton and Barto (1998).</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[9]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">For a review
see Berridge (2004).</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[10]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
<span style="font-family: Garamond; mso-bidi-font-family: Garamond;">Shea (2014)
argues persuasively that temporal difference learning, which seems to be
widespread in organisms with brains, actually involves some
meta-representation, in the sense that the content of reward prediction errors
are about other representational states.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-41573217369255388572015-01-08T23:49:00.001-08:002015-01-09T00:04:07.823-08:00Publons widgetThis is something of a deviation from the main focus of this blog, which is documenting my ongoing and somewhat sprawling research project on Common Currency claims in the cognitive and behavioural sciences. As a professional academic, though, one of the things that I both do and depend on is peer-review. Until now that work has mostly been based on individual relationships between journals and reviewers, and lacking a general system for tracking and verifying instances of peer-review. The recent launch of <a href="https://publons.com/" target="_blank">Publons</a> seeks to change that by logging, verifying and consolidating information about instances of peer-review (including, by the way, post-publication review).<br />
<br />
I've signed up. You can see <a href="https://publons.com/author/230537/david-spurrett" target="_blank">my reviewer page here</a>. (This includes those of my previous peer-reviews which have been verified. The ones from the paper-based days or yore may not make it there.) And there's an embedded widget below, which I'll also add to the sidebar of the blog when I remember how.<br />
<br />
<!-- start Publons.com widget --><iframe height="106" src="https://publons.com/author/230537/widget/embed/?width=320&height=106" style="border: solid 1px #ddd;" width="320"></iframe><!-- end Publons.com widget -->
Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-36140161093536362472015-01-07T22:42:00.000-08:002015-02-04T02:38:38.580-08:00The Natural History of DesireThis is the abstract of a talk I'm presenting soon, and the 2015 conference of the Philosophical Society of Southern Africa. I'll post a working version of the paper itself within a few weeks. (Added subsequently: <a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2015/02/draft-natural-history-of-desire.html" target="_blank">Here is that draft</a>.) I know that this blog has been really quiet for a while, but the project has not, and I'm hoping to find time to update and expand this site over the next few months.<br />
<br />
<h3>
The Natural History of Desire</h3>
David Spurrett – UKZN<br />
<h3>
Abstract</h3>
<br />
In <i>Thought in a Hostile World</i> (2003) Kim Sterelny develops an idealised natural history of folk-psychological kinds. He argues that under certain selection pressures belief-like states are a natural elaboration of simpler control systems which he calls detection systems, and which map directly from environmental cue to response. Belief-like states are distinguished by the properties of robust tracking (being occasioned by a wider range of environmental states, including distal ones), and response breadth (being able to feature in the triggering of a wider range of behaviours). A key driver, according to Sterelny, of the development of robust tracking and response-breath, and hence belief-like states, are properties of the informational environment. A transparent environment is one where the functional relevance to an organism of states of the world is directly detectable. In a translucent or opaque environment, on the other hand, states significant to an organism map in less direct or simple ways onto states that the organism can detect. A hostile environment, finally, is one where the specific explanation of translucency or opacity is the design and behaviour of competing organisms. Where the costs of implementing belief-like states pay their way in more discriminating behaviour allocation under conditions of opacity and hostility, Sterelny argues, selection can favour the development of belief-like representations of the environment.<br />
<br />
In the case of desires, however, Sterelny maintains that the same arguments do not generalise. One justification that he offers for this view reasons that unlike the external environment, the internal processes of an organism are under significant selection pressure favouring transparency. Parts of a single organism, having coinciding interests, have nothing to gain from deceiving one another, and much to gain from accurate signalling of their states and needs. Key conditions favouring the development of belief-like states are therefore absent in the case of desires. Here I argue that Sterelny’s reasons for saying that his treatment of belief doesn’t generalise to motivation (desires, or preferences) are insufficient. There are limits to the transparency that internal environments can achieve. Even if there were not, tracking the motivational salience of external states calls for pervasive attention to valuation in any system in which selection has driven the production of belief-like states.<br />
<br />
<h4>
Contents</h4>
1. Introduction<br />
2. Sterelny on the Descent of Belief<br />
3. Sterelny on the Descent of Preference<br />
3.1. Sterelny’s Explanatory Target<br />
3.2. Why the belief case won’t generalise<br />
3.3. Sterelny’s positive view<br />
4. Criticism of Sterelny<br />
4.1. Limits on Internal Transparency<br />
4.2. Internal Transparency doesn’t imply Motivational Transparency<br />
4.3. The Wrong Target<br />
5. Objections<br />
6. Conclusion
<br />
<br />
<h3>
Presentation slides</h3>
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="true" frameborder="0" height="389" mozallowfullscreen="true" src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fvnm-X4Gdsk0RDZiQy9TMXJKcMp1e_OfgGBHhOSOhzI/embed?start=false&loop=false&delayms=5000" webkitallowfullscreen="true" width="480"></iframe><br />Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-12198740269575997832014-07-11T05:24:00.000-07:002014-07-11T05:24:15.049-07:00Reward Prediction Error Signals are Meta-Representational<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Research on humans and other animals has produced an impressive body of converging evidence that midbrain dopamine neurons produce a reward prediction error signal (RPE) that is causally involved in choice behaviour […]. RPEs are found in humans, primates, rodents and perhaps even insects […]. This paper argues that RPEs carry metarepresentational contents.” (Shea 2014.)</span></blockquote>
<h3>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Introduction</span></h3>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Scientifically interesting questions about common currencies fall largely into three groups:</span></div>
<div class="p4">
</div>
<ol>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">About whether the behaviour of some type of agent (including people) is consistent with a single preference or value ordering? (Related questions here concern what kinds and degrees of order there are, and what theories - especially biological and economic ones - make sense of the order.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">About whether the processes that produce the behaviour of some type of agent (including people) consult or ‘consume’ a representation of values or preferences?</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">Finally, about the <i>relationships</i> between answers to the questions in groups (1) and (2).</span></li>
</ol>
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<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Questions in the second group are about the existence and nature of internal, cognitive, <i>representations of value</i>. If there are comprehensive internal value representations, then they are, in terms discussed elsewhere <a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/03/currencies-can-be-ultimate-or-proximal.html" target="_blank">on this blog</a>, instances of <i>proximal common currencies</i>. The point of a proximal common currency is that one way, at least, to produce behaviour that is <i>sensitive</i> to the values (whether understood as reward, utility, pleasure,…) of the results of actions, is to <i>represent</i> those values internally. Then the behaviour selection process can consult the value representation, and the sensitivity of behaviour to value is both made possible and explained.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I recently ran into an elegant and interesting paper by <a href="http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/philosophy/people/staff/academic/shea/index.aspx" target="_blank">Nicholas Shea</a>, at the time at Oxford but now back at King’s College, London. The paper, like it says on the box, argues that reward prediction error signals are meta-representational. On this blog so far, I’ve mostly left discussion of representation as a topic in a black box, and focused on the arguments about whether or not there is, or must be, a represented common currency in order to explain order in behaviour. But that’s not because of my thinking that representation - especially of values - wasn’t an interesting topic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Representation has, of course, an enduring fascination for the philosophy of cognitive science. Back in the olden days this fascination was partly expressed in big picture yelling about whether cognition <i>in general</i> was essentially representational, or was possible without representations (e.g. Rodney Brooks’ famous 1991 paper <i>Intelligence without Representation </i>[<a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/representation.pdf" target="_blank">PDF</a>]).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s also a tradition of more interesting - to my mind, anyway, - work focused on developing detailed theories of various kinds of representation, and working out how they might apply to far more specific cognitive phenomena and cognitive mechanisms. Shea’s paper is a fine example of that latter approach. It reminds me a bit of <a href="http://www.trincoll.edu/~dlloyd/" target="_blank">Dan Lloyd’s</a> wonderful book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Minds-Bradford-Books-Lloyd/dp/B001PGXLPE" target="_blank">Simple Minds</a></i> (1989), in focusing on simple systems that, because they can be exhaustively described, can explicitly be shown to instantiate representations by the lights of a specific theory.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The topic of value, or reward, representation cries out for serious philosophical treatment. Neuroscientists explicitly and regularly make claims about what this or that brain network, or brain activity, represents, but rarely develop or invoke specific theories of representation while they do so. Most of the work goes on experimental design and execution aimed at showing suitably determinate relationships between the brain network or activity and something else that can be independently measured. A theory of representation can help work out how to relate the discoveries from neuroscience - in this case including neuroeconomics - to theories from other relevant areas, and to theories at other scales of granularity including, perhaps and eventually, whole agent theories about the rational explanation of actions in terms of desires or preferences (and beliefs).</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">So here’s a sketch of the highlights - given my rather specific interests - of Shea’s argument for the thesis that reward prediction error signals (RPEs) are meta-representational. To turn this into something a bit more specific and comprehensible, we need to get clear on what some of those notions mean. (All quotations are, unless otherwise noted, from Shea’s paper.)</span></div>
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<h3>
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Metarepresentation</span></b></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A representation says something about something. For example, a price tag on some object says of it that it can be bought for some sum of money.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Sometimes what is represented is itself a representation. Only some of these representations are <i>meta</i>-representations, though. For example, I might point to a price tag and say of it that the tag is printed with a dot-matrix printer. Then I’m saying something about the <i>form</i> of a representation, but not the <i>content</i>. If, instead, I said of the very same price tag that “that’s more than I was planning on spending”, or “that’s less than it was last week”, I’d be saying saying something about the <i>content</i> of the representation. In this sort of case I’m metarepresenting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The kinds of representation, and metarepresentation, we’re concerned with here are <i>non-conceptual</i>. This means that they don’t require concept possession. If that sounds perplexing, cling to this: What’s important for present purposes about a non-conceptual representation is that it has correctness, or satisfaction, conditions. So we establish that something is a representation by specifying these conditions. In the case of metarepresentations, Shea adopts the following criterion. Consider a putative metarepresentation (‘M’):</span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“ […] M’s having a correctness condition or satisfaction condition that concerns the content of another representation is taken to be a sufficient condition for M to be a metarepresentation. That is a reasonably stringent test. It is not enough that M concerns another representation. A representational property must figure in M’s correctness condition or satisfaction condition.”</span></blockquote>
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<h3>
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Reward Prediction Errors (RPEs)</span></b></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Very generally and informally, a prediction error occurs in a class of ‘temporal difference’ learning algorithms. It is the difference between an expected or predicted and an actual value, and is used to modify the expectations in future cases. The expectations are averages, and the details of the modification vary from case to case, but the general idea is intuitively clear: If the expected value was too low, raise it a little; if too high, lower it a little. In the case of <i>reward</i> prediction error, or RPE, the specific thing predicted is reward. But the fact that it’s reward that is predicted isn’t an intrinsic property of the algorithm, it depends on how an implementation of the algorithm is hooked up (to the world, and other bits of an information processing system).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">As Shea notes, temporal difference learning and prediction errors came out of computer science, and to begin with weren’t intended to say much about <i>brains</i> or <i>animals</i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“But then Wolfram Schultz and colleagues discovered that midbrain dopamine neurons broadcast an RPE signal […]. Relative to a background tonic level of firing, there is a transitory phasic increase when a unpredicted reward is delivered, and a phasic decrease in firing when a predicted reward is not delivered. This finding brought the computational modelling rapidly back into contact with real psychology, galvanised the cognitive neuroscience of decision-making and launched the science of neuroeconomics.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">To get an idea of what Schultz and colleagues discovered, consider the figure below, adapted from Schultz, Dayan & Montague (1997). I think it’s fair now to call it <i>famous</i> - most people with anything more than passing knowledge of neuroeconomics will recognise it and be able to explain it. Apologies if you’re already familiar with it:</span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8WAdxRNEy50/U7_OJOCoacI/AAAAAAAABpg/sIdMpZb0YPE/s1600/Shea+figure+1+better.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Figure from Schultz, Dayan & Montague (1997)" border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8WAdxRNEy50/U7_OJOCoacI/AAAAAAAABpg/sIdMpZb0YPE/s1600/Shea+figure+1+better.png" height="400" title="" width="360" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In each of the three panels, time is represented horizontally, with earlier times to the left of later ones. The rest of the each panel represents the activity of some dopamine neurons, with dots representing spikes, aggregated into a bar graph along the top. ‘</span><i style="font-family: inherit;">CS</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">’ is a point in time at which a conditioned stimulus is presented to an awake monkey (bottom two plots only).</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">‘</span><i style="font-family: inherit;">R</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">’ is a point at which a reward (such as squirt of fruit juice into the mouth) is delivered to the monkey (top two plots only). The </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">CS</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> isn’t rewarding in itself (it’s typically a sound, or a flash of light). But </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">R</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is rewarding.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The data in all three plots is from a subject familiar with <i>CS</i> preceding <i>R</i> by around one second.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the top plot, there is no <i>CS</i>, but <i>R</i> is still delivered. In that case there is a flare up in neural activity shortly after <i>R.</i> In the middle plot the presentation of <i>CS</i> is followed by an increase in dopamine neuron activity, but those neurons show no response to the subsequent delivery of <i>R</i>. In the bottom image, CS is the same and receives the same neural response, but <i>R</i> is absent, and in that case there’s a <i>drop</i> in activity when <i>R</i> was expected.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">These experiments were decisive against the notion that dopamine is a ‘pleasure’ molecule, or otherwise primarily linked to experienced or occurrent reward. (That was a popular view in science for a while, and is still sometimes asserted in night clubs.) If dopamine was <i>simply</i> linked to reward, then it <i>wouldn’t</i> be associated with unexpected unrewarding <i>CS</i> events, and it <i>would</i> be associated with rewards, even if they were expected.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The point is not that dopamine is unrelated to reward, it’s rather that it’s involved in <i>reward prediction</i>. More specifically, the consensus is now, it is a reward prediction error, signalling when there’s more or less reward (or reward cue) than expected at any time. That’s why there’s <i>more</i> of it for unexpected <i>R</i> and unexpected <i>CS</i>, and <i>less</i> of it for unexpected absence of <i>R</i>.</span></div>
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<div class="p4">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s been much more detailed and specific research into the neural implementation of prediction errors and reward prediction errors since the work just described. There are also some outstanding questions and controversies over some issues of detail. Nonetheless, the general point that some brains (including human ones) implement temporal difference learning, and that reward learning involves RPEs is very widely accepted. As Shea puts it: “… the current state of the art is as strong a scientific consensus as a philosopher could possibly hope for.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Shea’s paper (sections 2 and 3) gives a really clear and useful account of reward prediction errors, and a detailed explanation of a simplified model in which reward prediction error is immediate (as opposed to delayed, for example if rewards come after a series of actions). In the model that Shea describes the predicted rewards are associated with <i>actions</i>. This is important. The monkey subjects in the experiment described above didn’t have to <i>do</i> anything. Not all rewards are contingent on action, and many important experiments about reward expectancy and learning don’t require subjects to make choices. The same class of learning algorithms can, though, be applied to action selection cases. Then the expected reward is contingent on the actually selected action, and any prediction error modifies the reward expectations <i>for that action</i>. </span></div>
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<h3>
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Putting the bits Together</span></b></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now that we have an idea of what metarepresentation is, and also what a reward prediction error is, it shouldn’t be difficult to see how they relate.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The reward prediction error is metarepresentational in the sense that it represents something about the <i>content </i>of one or more <i>other representations</i>. It says whether actual incoming reward is greater, or smaller, or equal to what was expected. Put slightly differently, it says whether <i>the expectation</i> was correct, or too low, or too high. Either way, the RPE is about a relationship between the content of some other representations (of expected reward, and actual reward).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here’s Shea:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“[…] RPEs have metarepresentational contents. They have both indicative and imperative contents (they are so-called pushmi-pullyus). The indicative content is that the content of another representation—the agent’s (first-order) representation of the reward that will be delivered on average for performing a given action—differs from the current feedback, and by how much. The imperative content instructs that it be revised upwards or downwards proportionately.”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">So RPEs non-conceptually metarepresent content about the content of other representations, and the RPEs are processed as instructions by other cognitive systems, in ways that lead to modifying the content of the basic representations that the RPEs are about.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This all seems spot on to me. In fact, once an appropriate account of metarepresentation, and a careful description of RPEs are laid out side by side, as Shea does in the first few sections of his paper, the conclusion he is urging seems very difficult to resist. (Later stages of Shea’s paper are partly devoted to considering alternative approaches and deflationary strategies. I’m not going to attempt an account of those sections here. The whole paper is, though, well worth careful attention.)</span></div>
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<h3>
<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">So what?</span></b></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I think anyone interested in making philosophical sense of neuroeconomics should read Shea’s paper. I’m going to close with a few specific remarks about how it’s relevant to my preoccupation with common currencies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">When scientists (and some philosophers) refer to a proximal common currency, they often focus on the structure of the common currency <i>as a scale</i>. For example, Levy and Glimcher (discussed <a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-root-of-all-value-neural-common.html" target="_blank">in an earlier posting</a> say, when discussing how the things we choose between vary along many different dimensions, and don’t always have the same dimensions in common:</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“What we need to do is to take into consideration many different attributes of each option (like color, size, taste, health benefits, our metabolic state, etc.), assess the value of each of the attributes, and combine all of these attributes into one coherent value representation that allows comparison with any other possible option. What we need, at least in principle, is a single common currency of valuation for comparing options of many different kinds” (Levy & Glimcher 2012: p1027).</span></blockquote>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">A fairly strong claim is being here: The brain must encode or represent options (including actions) that might differ in a wide range of modalities on a single unidimensional scale. And a lot of work goes into describing properties of the scale, such as whether in this or that brain process it represents expected, or <i>relative</i> expected utility, or what resolution it has.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">But we should also be thinking about the representational structure of the value scale itself. This is an interesting topic even if it doesn’t constitute a completely common, or completely consistent, currency. (Even weakened or approximate theses about proximal common currencies are theses about value representation.) The value representation can’t <i>just</i> be a scale, it has - somehow - to be indexed to representations of what it is about. Just as RPEs are indexed to specific expectations, so the values have to be indexed to actions, and perceptual cues, and other information. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Speaking very speculatively, it seems unlikely that a represented value scale would be anything like a simple ordered list. It might be tempting to envisage an image of a great big ruler with outcomes inscribed next to their corresponding number of ‘hedons’, or ‘utiles’. But such an image is hardly credible. The list would prohibitively large if it actually stored expected values for all discriminable quantities of all consumption types (one beer, two beers, three beers; one dollar, two dollars, three dollars, let alone the sips and cents). It’s more likely, then, for a value representation to be encoded in a mixture of procedural and model-like ways, that allow reward expectancies to be generated in response to specific option sets, including drawing on our capacities to simulate and imagine. But in that sort of case the details of credit assignment, and what to change in response to RPEs, would be more complicated. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s clearer that RPEs are metarepresentational than it is what the representational structure of the reward expectancies themselves are.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">(<b>ASIDE:</b> Some, including Andy Clark, have recently support the view that the <i>whole brain</i> is in the business of using prediction errors to refine expectations, ultimately aiming for a state where nothing is surprising. In that case many prediction errors would be about processes other than reward, including perception and motor control. The thought that reducing prediction error is in some sense the <i>aim </i>of cognition rather than a <i>means</i> leads to some rather odd worrying about why creatures with brains don’t just seek out and stay in dark rooms. (In dark rooms there are no surprises, and so no prediction errors.) I hope to write about the ‘dark room problem’ here in the future. For more, including commentaries, see ‘<a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8918803&fileId=S0140525X12000477" target="_blank">Whatever Next?</a>’ (may be behind a paywall). Commentaries continued at the Open Access <i><a href="http://www.frontiersin.org/Theoretical_and_Philosophical_Psychology/researchtopics/Forethought_as_an_evolutionary/1031" target="_blank">Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology</a></i> including <a href="http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00412/full" target="_blank">my own commentary</a>.)</span></blockquote>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">Related postings on this site:</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/03/currencies-can-be-ultimate-or-proximal.html">Common currencies can be 'Ultimate' or 'Proximal'</a> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/04/important-sources-rodney-brooks.html">Important sources: Rodney Brooks </a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-root-of-all-value-neural-common.html">Levy and Glimcher on 'The root of all value'</a> </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">References</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p4">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Brooks, R.A. (1991). Intelligence without representation, <i>Artificial Intelligence</i>, 47: 139–159.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Clark, A. (2013) Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. <i>Behavioral and Brain Sciences, </i>36(3), pp181-204.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Lloyd, D. (1989). <i>Simple Minds. </i>Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Shea, N. (2014). Reward Prediction Error Signals are Meta-Representational, <i>Noûs,</i> 48(2): 314-341. [<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2012.00863.x/abstract" target="_blank">LINK</a>]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Schultz, W., Dayan, P., and Montague, R. (1997), ‘A neural substrate of prediction and reward’, <i>Science</i>, 275 (5306), 1593.</span></div>
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<h4>
Research Blogging Citation:</h4>
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<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=No%C3%BBs&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1111%2Fj.1468-0068.2012.00863.x&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=Reward+Prediction+Error+Signals+are+Meta-Representational&rft.issn=00294624&rft.date=2014&rft.volume=48&rft.issue=2&rft.spage=314&rft.epage=341&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Fdoi.wiley.com%2F10.1111%2Fj.1468-0068.2012.00863.x&rft.au=Shea%2C+N.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Computer+Science+%2F+Engineering%2CPsychology%2CNeuroscience%2CNeuroeconomics">Shea, N. (2014). Reward Prediction Error Signals are Meta-Representational <span style="font-style: italic;">Noûs, 48</span> (2), 314-341 DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2012.00863.x" rev="review">10.1111/j.1468-0068.2012.00863.x</a></span>
<span style="float: left; padding: 5px;"><a href="http://www.researchblogging.org"><img alt="ResearchBlogging.org" src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border:0;"/></a></span>Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-75543285347025080932014-06-27T00:54:00.000-07:002014-06-27T00:54:18.710-07:00Stephen C. Stearns - Economic Decisions for the Foraging IndividualHere's another useful video lecture. It's from the Open Yale Course 'EB122: Principles of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior', taught by Stephen C. Stearns, Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.<br />
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Here is his overview of the lecture:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
There are several ways to examine the behaviors of organisms when they forage or hunt for food or mates. These behaviors become more complex in higher organisms, such as primates and whales, which can hunt in groups. Foragers and hunters have been shown to examine the marginal cost and marginal benefit of continuing an action and then adjust their behaviors accordingly. They are also able to handle risk by hoarding resources.</blockquote>
Here is the course home page on <a href="http://oyc.yale.edu/ecology-and-evolutionary-biology/eeb-122" target="_blank">Yale Open Courses</a>.<br />
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This material is of interest because of the importance of economic analyses of decisions by living animals, and foraging is an area where there's been considerable progress. Behavioural ecology is one of the areas in science where you'll regularly run into talk of common currencies. Behavioural ecologists are <i>sometimes </i>relatively agnostic about the mechanisms producing behaviour, but sometimes intensely interested in them. (The same course includes a useful session - number 10 - on genomic conflict.)<br />
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<br />Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-22869637499230751272014-06-24T04:36:00.000-07:002014-06-24T04:36:35.054-07:00Ultimate currencies can be subjective or evolutionary<div class="p1">
Ultimate currencies can be evolutionary or subjective</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Claims about common currencies are offered as explanations of one or both of two putative facts:</div>
<ul class="ul1">
<li class="li1">The currency represents the fundamental principle in some <i>pattern</i> in the choices made by some agent. These are <i>ultimate</i> currencies. <i>OR</i></li>
</ul>
<ul class="ul1">
<li class="li1">The currency is a psychologically real characteristic of the <i>processes</i> by which choice is produced. These are <i>proximal</i> currencies.</li>
</ul>
<div class="p2">
Any <i>single</i> ranking of options on a scale such that the behaviour of an agent can be described as – perhaps approximately – consistent with that ordering counts as an ‘ultimate’ common currency. An ultimate currency relates values to options, or to what selecting those options achieves or perhaps have the function of achieving. It is easy to imagine <i>possible</i> instantiations of an ultimate currency (‘all of Jim’s actions are efficiently ordered to contribute to the greater glory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’) but among the scientifically interesting forms of consistency, two families stand out. One of these relate to <i>fitness</i>, and the other to some of other form of <i>utility</i>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Here’s Don Ross describing Paul Samuelson’s work on what came to be called revealed preference theory:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Paul Samuelson (1938) […] set out to define utility in such a way that it becomes a purely technical concept. Since Samuelson's re-definition became standard in the 1950s, when we say that an agent acts so as to maximize her utility, we mean by ‘utility’ simply whatever it is that the agent's behavior suggests her to consistently act so as to make more probable.” (Ross, 2005)</blockquote>
<div class="p2">
It would be difficult to find a clearer statement of the basic idea of an ultimate common currency. As I said, the two main scientifically interesting variants of claims about ultimate currencies relate to <i>fitness</i>, or to <i>utility</i>.</div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I therefore say that an ultimate currency can be <i>evolutionary </i>or <i>subjective</i>. Here I’m knowingly, albeit slightly, departing from standard usage, insofar as the usual way of distinguishing proximal from ultimate has the latter taken to be synonymous with fitness promoting. (The standard sense is partly preserved here, because the values in an evolutionary ultimate currency are a function of contribution to fitness.) A guiding presumption of behavioural ecology is that behavioural dispositions make contributions to fitness, and that to the extent that the dispositions have a heritable basis, selection will tend to drive them towards making (constrained) optimal contributions. The following statement by McNamara and Houston is an exemplary (and frequently quoted) assertion about an evolutionary ultimate currency:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Any attempt to understand behavior in terms of the evolutionary advantage that it might confer has to find a "common currency" for comparing the costs and benefits of various alternative courses of action” (McNamara and Houston 1986: 358).</blockquote>
<div class="p4">
There are compelling reasons for thinking that natural selection will operate on at least some behavioural tendencies, and so a strong general justification for the project of behavioural ecology. Nonetheless, the question of whether the behaviour allocation of the individuals in any particular species does indeed tend to optimise fitness (or would have in historical selective environments) is an empirical one. Behavioural ecologists have studied many species and types of behaviour and achieved striking successes in restricted domains such as foraging and mate selection. These successes have often relied on focusing on a simplified and more empirically tractable currency such as net rate of calorie intake (in the case of foraging), or the health of the selected mate (in mate selection). These proxy currencies plausibly contribute to fitness. Even so, success relating behaviour patterns to the proxies falls short of establishing relationships between <i>all</i> behavioural dispositions and overall fitness in any species. Two of the most serious shortfalls are in the area of relative allocation between significantly different modalities (such as calorie intake versus pursuit of mating opportunities versus predator avoidance) and variation in allocation over extended periods of time, including the full life-history.</div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
(I note as an aside here that evolutionary psychologists tend to share the general theoretical orientation of behavioural ecologists, but not to make claims about common currencies. I’m not sure why this is. Perhaps they’re mostly more interested in attempting to establish the existence of biases or preferences that fit with their theoretical orientation, and being interested in their relative strengths is the sort of thing that comes later. Those evolutionary psychologists who are most committed to modularity and opposed to central systems, though, seem to be committed - if only by implication - to <i>denying</i> the possibility of a proximal common currency.)</div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Anyway, enough about ultimate common currencies.</div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
A <i>subjective</i> ultimate currency, in contrast, attributes values that are a function of the revealed preferences or inferred utilities of the individual agent, without requiring any relationship to fitness. Ross’s description of Samuelson, quoted above, states the key idea. The paradigmatic sciences of subjective ultimate currencies are microeconomics (with variously regimented notions of utility functions revealed through consumption) and behavioural psychology (where strength of reinforcement is defined in terms of effect on patterns of behaviour allocation). Evolutionary ultimate currencies, then, have stronger empirical conditions than subjective ones, because the latter require ‘mere’ consistency in behaviour, whereas the former require consistency in contributing to <i>fitness</i>.</div>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
The distinction between evolutionary and subjective ultimate currencies, as I’ve sketched it here, conceals considerable technical detail. There are different and competing fitness concepts, debates over the level (especially gene or individual) at which selection operates, and differing positions over the correct (if any) individuation principles for genes, genomes, species and other relevant categories. There are also competing utility concepts, offering different explanations of the same empirical data.</div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<h4>
Related postings:</h4>
<div class="p3">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
<a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/03/currencies-can-be-ultimate-or-proximal.html">Currencies can be 'ultimate' or 'proximal'</a>.</div>
<div class="p3">
<a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-very-basic-big-idea.html">The (very) basic big idea</a>.</div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<h4>
References:</h4>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
McNamara, J.M. and Houston, A.I. (1986) The Common Currency for Behavioral Decisions, <i>The American Naturalist</i>, 127(3), pp358-378.</div>
<br />
<div class="p5">
Ross, D. (2005). <i>Economic Theory and Cognitive Science, Volume One: Microexplanation. </i>Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.</div>
Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-26830280452773088402014-06-23T13:43:00.001-07:002014-06-23T13:43:39.511-07:00The Google Scholar ‘Common Currency Ratio’<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I’m a <i>big</i> fan of <a href="http://scholar.google.com/" target="_blank">Google Scholar</a> (and Google Scholar Citations). I use them both regularly to identify academic literature on a wide range of topics, and to trace, at least in outline, the responses to specific papers. I was fiddling about with it the other day, and wondered whether I could use it to try to develop a measure, even if a rough one, of the extent to which reference to common currencies occurs in a person’s published research.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">My first attempt is the following:</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
</div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">An author’s Common Currency Score (CCS) is the number of results on Google Scholar for the author’s name (in quotation marks), plus “common currency” (also in quotation marks).</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: inherit;">An author’s Common Currency Ratio (CCR) is their CCS divided by the number of results for their name alone.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is rougher than a warthog’s shins, and will be hugely unsatisfactory in cases of names corresponding to multiple authors. (It’s pretty bad for authors whose names are indexed in more than one way - for example “PW Glimcher” returns about 3 times as many correct results as “PW Glimcher”. But searching for “DJ McFarland” picks up irrelevant McFarlands including false positives.)</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Rough and ready though this is, it isn’t devoid of interest. George Ainslie has the highest CCS and CCR of anyone I thought to search for. I might update this in the future - as I apply it to other authors, or refine it in some way or other.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">George Ainslie (22 June):</span></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Common Currency Score (CCS) = 117</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“George Ainslie” = 1680</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/03/important-sources-george-ainslie.html" target="_blank">George Ainslie</a> CCR: 0.07</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">John McNamara (23 June)</span></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Common Currency Score (CCS) = 151</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“JM McNamara” = 3560</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">John McNamara CCR = 0.04</span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i></i><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Paul Glimcher (22 June)</span></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Common Currency Score (CCS) = 92</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“PW Glimcher” = 1510</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">CCR: 0.06</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">David McFarland (22 June)</span></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Common Currency Score (CCS) = 61 (for “DJ McFarland”)</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“David McFarland” = 1130</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">David McFarland CCR = 0.05</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">David Spurrett (22 June)</span></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Common Currency Score (CCS) = 25</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“David Spurrett” = 455</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">David Spurrett CCR = 0.05</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Peter Shizgal (23 June)</span></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Common Currency Score (CCS) = 36</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“P Shizgal” = 1070</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/05/shizgal-and-conovers-orderly-choice.html" target="_blank">Peter Shizgal</a> CCR = 0.03</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><span style="font-family: inherit;">Michel Cabanac (23 June)</span></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Common Currency Score (CCS) = 109</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">“M Cabanac” = 2320</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Michel Cabanac CCR = 0.04</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-83552679985554925312014-03-14T00:35:00.000-07:002014-03-14T00:35:28.039-07:00Paul Glimcher - Video LecturePostings here have been a bit thin and slow lately. I've been teaching a lot. Work continues when it can, though. I'm working on adding something about neuroeconomics. In the interim, here's a very fine talk by <a href="http://www.decisionsrus.com/" target="_blank">Paul Glimcher</a> of NYU, on the subject of "Neurobiological Foundations of Economic Choice". Glimcher has extraordinarily deep understanding of a variety of economic theories, and of brain science. This is a fairly accessible, and very clear and lucid, exposition of the outlines of his research programme. It's really well worth watching, and a useful introduction/companion to Glimcher's terrific 2011 book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Foundations-Neuroeconomic-Analysis-Paul-Glimcher/dp/0199744254" target="_blank">Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis</a>.<br />
<br />
Elsewhere on this blog you can find one discussion of a paper by Glimcher (and Levy) reviewing and extending some of the neural evidence for a common currency: <a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-root-of-all-value-neural-common.html" target="_blank">The Root of All Value</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/x8B8RB3YcS0" width="560"></iframe>Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-65483096045014743232014-02-25T12:48:00.003-08:002014-03-09T14:14:56.459-07:00The root of all value: a neural common currency for choice<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Current+Opinion+in+Neurobiology&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1016%2Fj.conb.2012.06.001&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=The+root+of+all+value%3A+a+neural+common+currency+for+choice&rft.issn=09594388&rft.date=2012&rft.volume=22&rft.issue=6&rft.spage=1027&rft.epage=1038&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0959438812001006&rft.au=Levy%2C+D.&rft.au=Glimcher%2C+P.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology">Levy, D., & Glimcher, P. (2012). The root of all value: a neural common currency for choice <span style="font-style: italic;">Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 22</span> (6), 1027-1038 DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2012.06.001" rev="review">10.1016/j.conb.2012.06.001</a></span><br />
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<h3>
<span style="text-align: right;">Introduction</span></h3>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Humans make enormous numbers of choices.
Some of them are – at least in principle – relatively easy, for example
choosing between one hundred, and ten thousand dollars or between one sip of
water and ten sips. But others are more tricky, for example choosing between
spending some free time watching a movie and playing tennis. In the latter case
the two options vary in more than one way. Consequently a simple ‘more is
better’ rule doesn’t determine what is best.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Given that we do, however, make large
numbers of choices, including these superficially tricky ones, often without
noticeable effort, we might wonder what it is that we do when we make them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">One idea, with a fairly long history, is
that we do it by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">converting</i> choices,
including tricky ones, into easy ones, by expressing the worth of the different
options in some abstract and general scale that is used for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all </i>choices. This more abstract scale
is, of course, often referred to as a ‘common currency’ but might also be
called ‘utility’ or ‘reward’, or ‘pleasure’ or just ‘value’. Once this
conversion has been done, the idea is that all choices are simple ones: now we can
take the one worth the most <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in the common
currency</i>.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">According to some, if our choices,
including the tricky ones, are consistent, then we <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">must</i> be converting the options into values in a common currency. As
discussed <a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/05/shizgal-and-conovers-orderly-choice.html">elsewhere on this blog</a>, Shizgal and Conover have argued that:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB">“In natural
settings, the goals competing for behavior are complex, multidimensional
objects and outcomes. Yet, for orderly choice to be possible, the utility of
all competing resources must be represented on a single, common dimension”
(Shizgal & Conover 1996).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-GB">This argument need not be decisive. That
is, it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">possible</i> that some other
mechanism which did not involve an internal common currency could explain
‘orderly choice’. So one question that arises here is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">theoretical </i>one, about what range of mechanisms could produce
orderly choice. Perhaps the only viable options are mechanisms involving common
currency. Independent of this theoretical question, is an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">empirical </i>one: How, in fact, do humans achieve orderly choice?<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>
Levy and Glimcher survey some evidence, supplemented by a new meta-analysis of
previous research, to defend the conclusion that whether or not they have to,
human brains do in fact implement a common currency.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<h3>
<span lang="EN-GB">Levy
and Glimcher’s review of existing evidence</span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Levy and Glimcher endorse the same
theoretical argument that convinces, among many others, Shizgal and Conover.
Here is how they gloss the argument:</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span lang="EN-GB">“</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What we need to do is to take into
consideration many different attributes of each option (like color, size,
taste, health benefits, our metabolic state, etc.), assess the value of each of
the attributes, and combine all of these attributes into one coherent value
representation that allows comparison with any other possible option. What we
need, at least in principle, is a single common currency of valuation for
comparing options of many different kinds” (Levy & Glimcher 2012: p1027).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">I emphasise that for Levy and Glimcher this
argument functions more as an encouragement to seek a certain kind of evidence,
rather than a proof that it will be found in advance of empirical
investigation. To repeat, the main point of their paper is to review the
evidence that there is in fact a common currency.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Speaking very generally, this is done by
relating aspects of patterns in choice activity to aspects of patterns of
neural activity. The word ‘aspects’ is not idle in either case: It is not every
feature of choice activity, or of the options offered, that is of interest, and
the same goes for neural activity during choice. Again speaking very generally,
it is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">economic</i> aspects of patterns
of choice that are of interest. Those are the ones that reveal strength of
relative preference between options – in both easy cases and tricky ones.
Sometimes it will take a large number of choices before a pattern – let us call
this a behavioural pattern – can be characterised in suitable detail. Similarly,
the neural activity that is of interest will be that fraction that is specific
to the ways in which choices vary economically, which involves removing from
consideration the parts which are involved with other aspects of the task (such
as sensory discrimination and motor control). Again, sometimes a large number
of neural measurements will be needed before a neural pattern is detectable.
But, with decent data of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">both</i> kinds,
it is possible to ask whether there is a neural pattern that corresponds
appropriately to a behavioural one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Prior neureconomic research in humans has
found that a number of brain regions are commonly engaged by tasks with an
economic aspect:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“Over the course of the past decade there have been a
wealth of studies suggesting that activity in small number of brain areas
encodes reward quantities during decision-making tasks. […] Indeed, there is
now broad consensus in the neuroscience of decision-making community that
reward magnitude is represented in a small number of well-identified areas”
(Levy & Glimcher 2012: p1027).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The focus of this review is specifically on
the claim that fMRI studies in humans support the view that the ventromedial
prefrontal cortext/orbital frontal cortex (vmPFC/OFC) represent the value of
many reward types on a common scale. (The claim is not that this region is
unique in this respect, merely that it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">one</i>
area that serves that function.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">The evidence for this claim comes, in the
first place, from studies of three broad kinds:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">In some, subjects were offered
purely monetary rewards (variously received, chosen, anticipated, lost, etc.),
and the relationship between behavioural and neural pattern encouraged the view
that vmPFC/OFC activity was correlated with strength of preference.</span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">In others, extending the first
category, complicate the monetary rewards by introducing delays as well as
probabilistic and ambiguous payments, or by varying the ways in which choice is
expressed or values communicated. Again, it was found repeatedly that
behavioural pattern was correlated with levels of vmPFC/OFC activity.</span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">In the third category, at least
one reward type is non-monetary. Levy and Glimcher survey the results of ten
studies, in which the non-monetary rewards included social rewards (including
reputation), gustatory rewards (food, drink), pain (avoided or suffered), and
aesthetic rewards (viewing attractive faces). In these studies too, behavioural
and neural patterns correlated in the vmPFC/OFC.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
This last category is the most encouraging
for the view that the vmPFC/OFC represents a common currency for all choices, because
it finds the same general kind of association for reward types other than
money. And we want a common currency to represent non-monetary rewards. It is
important to see, though, why the third category of empirical result above
falls short of being conclusive evidence:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“But in order to demonstrate that these
representations exist in a single common currency appropriate for computing the
trade-offs that guide choice one must also show that the activity-level in
these areas is equivalent whenever subjects report that offers of two different
kinds of rewards are equally desirable” (Levy & Glimcher 2012: p1032).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">What Levy and Glimcher are saying is that
evidence for a common currency requires a more demanding fit between
behavioural and neural patterns. Orderly choice between reward types should be
consistent with a determinate exchange rate. And if there is a neutrally represented
common currency, then it should be possible to find correlates of that exchange
rate in patterns of brain activity. According to Levy and Glimcher, two studies
(as of their 2012) provide evidence of the required kind. In both of them the
behavioural pattern allowed the exchange rate between two reward modalities to
be determined (in one case between money and time spent viewing images of
attractive faces, and in the other certain and risky choices over money and
food). In both cases appropriate correlations were found, which is very
encouraging news for defenders of a neural common currency in humans. Additional
methodologically similar studies may strengthen the case.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div>
<h3>
<span lang="EN-GB">Levy
and Glimcher’s meta-analysis</span></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Over and above the review of previous
studies, Levy and Glimcher include a novel meta-analysis in their paper. To do
this they extracted the ‘peak voxel’ – that is, the most active voxel – for
value-related activity from each of the thirteen studies in their review, and
marked them on a single brain template. The result shows considerable agreement
across designs and reward types:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dD86zd5oh-I/Uwz-MZsyhXI/AAAAAAAABno/RjZGsRRqg2M/s1600/Levy+and+Glimcher+Fig+5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dD86zd5oh-I/Uwz-MZsyhXI/AAAAAAAABno/RjZGsRRqg2M/s1600/Levy+and+Glimcher+Fig+5.jpg" height="300" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: start;">Peak (value related activity) voxels across the 13 studies in the meta-analysis. A 5mm cubed sphere has been drawn around each voxel to make the figure more legible. From page 1034 of paper. See also Table 1 on page 1031.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">This close association, across quite
divergent experimental designs (with different measures of preference) and with
a variety of different reward types, is impressive and interesting. Levy and
Glimcher express the upshot of all of this as follows:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">“From these data we think that a single conclusion
seems at this point relatively straightforward. There is indeed a small
subregion in the vmPFC/OFC that tracks subjective value on a common currency appropriate
for guiding choices between different kinds of rewards” (Levy & Glimcher
2012: p1035).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<h3>
<span lang="EN-GB">Conclusions</span></h3>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">Levy and Glimcher are clear that not all
questions here are settled. Even if all reward types are represented on a
common scale in the vmPFC/OFC, there are open questions about how this fits
into wider networks subserving choice, learning and action in the brain. One
possible view of the outlines of those networks is provided in the following
figure (from the paper):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eCH0zZQHoGo/Uwz-M7wfL6I/AAAAAAAABn0/L2FPKFuZQKA/s1600/Levy+and+Glimcher+Fig+6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eCH0zZQHoGo/Uwz-M7wfL6I/AAAAAAAABn0/L2FPKFuZQKA/s1600/Levy+and+Glimcher+Fig+6.jpg" height="320" width="288" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Figure 6 from Levy & Glimcher (2012).</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">At most, then, the evidence surveyed by
Levy and Glimcher <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">supports </i>the claim
that the region numbered (1) – which is the vmPFC/OFC – represents values of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all </i>options in a common currency.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">But even the evidence for that is, as they
note, not (yet) entirely conclusive. Not all reward modalities have been
examined, and the experiments surveyed all have money in common as at least one
modality. Future work, consolidating and extending the evidence, should widen
the range of reward types offered in choice situations, and also include
choices where neither option is monetary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">In this, it seems fair to say, that some
kinds of variation will be more interesting than others. The value of a study
with some new reward type that is for all that broadly similar to ones already
studied (for example by using access to social media instead of some other
social reward) will be lower than one which involves a more radical departure
from established results. From this perspective perhaps the most interesting
candidates for study are those that are the subject of explicit <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rejections </i>of common currency claims. Two
specific categories seem to me to be worth noting:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">Some people claim, for example,
that some of the things that humans value they do so ‘lexically’ so that any
amount of the one (no matter how small) is worth more than any amount of the
other (no matter how large). Such preferences, if anyone really has them, would
involve discontinuities in a common currency, and these discontinuities should
be empirically detectable – both behaviourally and neurally. One recent study
has claimed (in my view running far, far ahead of what the evidence it musters
can really support) to have found </span><a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-price-of-your-soul-neural-evidence.html" style="text-indent: -18pt;">neural evidence that some humans have‘sacred’ values</a><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">.</span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">In addition, some people claim
that some values are incommensurable, in the sense that for some combinations
of them, there is no fact of the matter about whether one or the other is
better, or the two are of equal value. (See '</span><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-incommensurable/" style="text-indent: -18pt;">Incommensurable values</a><span style="text-indent: -18pt;">' in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) This is a strong claim, and if true it should have both behavioural
consequences and neural consequences. As far as I know nobody has seriously
attempted to asses the incommensurable values claim in an approximately
neuroeconomic experiment.</span></li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB">It would not be trivial to investigate
either possibility. (I hope to write about both the difficulties and
possibilities in the future, on this blog.) But the results would certainly be very interesting.</span><br />
<br /></div>
<h4>
Full
Abstract (of Levy & Glimcher 2012):</h4>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
How do humans make choices between different types of
rewards? Economists have long argued on theoretical grounds that humans
typically make these choices as if the values of the options they consider have
been mapped to a single common scale for comparison. Neuroimaging studies in
humans have recently begun to suggest the existence of a small group of
specific brain sites that appear to encode the subjective values of different
types of rewards on a neural common scale, almost exactly as predicted by
theory. We have conducted a meta analysis using data from thirteen different
functional magnetic resonance imaging studies published in recent years and we
show that the principle brain area associated with this common representation
is a subregion of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC)/orbitofrontal
cortex (OFC). The data available today suggest that this common valuation path
is a core system that participates in day-to-day decision making suggesting
both a neurobiological foundation for standard economic theory and a tool for
measuring preferences neurobiologically.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Perhaps even more exciting is the possibility that our
emerging understanding of the neural mechanisms for valuation and choice may
provide fundamental insights into pathological choice behaviors like addiction,
obesity and gambling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><b>Reference</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Current+Opinion+in+Neurobiology&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1016%2Fj.conb.2012.06.001&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=The+root+of+all+value%3A+a+neural+common+currency+for+choice&rft.issn=09594388&rft.date=2012&rft.volume=22&rft.issue=6&rft.spage=1027&rft.epage=1038&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0959438812001006&rft.au=Levy%2C+D.&rft.au=Glimcher%2C+P.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology">Levy, D., & Glimcher, P. (2012). The root of all value: a neural common currency for choice <span style="font-style: italic;">Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 22</span> (6), 1027-1038 DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2012.06.001" rev="review">10.1016/j.conb.2012.06.001</a></span><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.decisionsrus.com/documents/current-opinion-in-neurobiology.pdf" target="_blank">Link to PDF on Glimcher Lab Website</a>.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.researchblogging.org/"><img alt="ResearchBlogging.org" src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0;" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #000066; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p> </o:p></span> </div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">There’s a possible
complication that I’m skipping over here. Even if we convert all choices into a
common scale, we might apply some decision rule other than ‘choose the best’.
We might, for example, allocate our actions (over time) between several options
in proportion to their values.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">There’s another
complication that I’m skipping here. There is room for disagreement over
whether human choices are orderly at all (they’re clearly partly orderly). And
among those who agree that there’s some kind of order, there’s disagreement
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Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-58845199518075906912014-02-03T22:55:00.000-08:002014-02-03T22:55:32.159-08:00Inner Conflict - TEDxUmhlangaBack on 7 September of last year, I did a talk at <a href="http://www.tedxumhlanga.com/" target="_blank">TEDxUmhlanga</a>, on the topic of 'Inner Conflict'. Some of what I spoke about is relevant to the common currency topic, in the sense that it concerns a reward-based explanation for inconsistency in choice patterns. (Inconsistency might otherwise be taken as an argument against a common currency.) The talk is embedded below.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/rkBVpqXPq5k" width="420"></iframe><br />
<br />
(If you've seen the video of my <span id="goog_1123669460"></span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEpL4_baB1s" target="_blank">talk</a><span id="goog_1123669461"></span> at '<a href="http://thinkingthingsthrough.co.za/" target="_blank">Thinking Things Through</a>' in December, you might be wondering whether I ever wear anything else. Yes. Yes, I do.) I've also been doing some more serious research work on this topic, and hope to have more things to post really soon.<br />
<br />
<br />Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-68922223110897824562014-02-03T09:15:00.001-08:002014-02-03T09:15:33.224-08:00Draft: Philosophers should be interested in ‘common currency’ claims in the cognitive and behavioural sciences[This is the working text of my paper from the Philosophical Society of Southern Africa (PSSA) conference in 2014. I've had to cut the paper down drastically to get the length into the ballpark required for consideration for the conference proceedings volume. So expect a much longer and slower version of this in the future and some point. Sorry that some of the formatting is a bit irregular. Many a slip twixt clipboard and the next application.]<br />
<br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 18.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Philosophers
should be interested in ‘common currency’ claims in the cognitive and
behavioural sciences.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">David Spurrett (UKZN) for PSSA 2014<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">spurrett@ukzn.ac.za<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB">Abstract<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">A recurring claim
made in a number of behavioural, cognitive and neuro-scientific literatures is
that there is, or must be, a unidimensional ‘common currency’ in which the
values of different available options are represented.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">There is striking
variety in the quantities or properties that have been proposed as determinants
of the ordering in motivational strength. Among those seriously suggested are
pain and pleasure, biological fitness, reward and reinforcement, and utility
among economists, who have regimented the notion of utility in a variety of
ways, some of them incompatible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">This topic
deserves philosophical attention for at least the following reasons: (1)
Repeated invocation of the ‘common currency’ idiom isn’t merely terminological
coincidence because most of the claims are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">competing
</i>explanations for one or the other of two putative kinds of fact. In one
case the currency represents a principle of manifest pattern in choices. In the
other, it is a functional part of the processes which produce choice. (2) We
can’t suppose that the different currency claims within each area are
compatible, because there are significant obstacles to identifying pairs of
members of either the ‘pattern’ or ‘process’ group. (3) There are, finally,
seriously opposed positions about the relationships (generally, and in specific
cases including that of humans) between the pattern facts and the process
facts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Philosophical positions both favouring and
opposing a common currency exist. Philosophers who incline to view their
positions as at least partly empirical, should be more interested in the issues
outlined here than they are.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br clear="all" style="mso-special-character: line-break; page-break-before: always;" />
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<b><span lang="EN-GB">1. Introduction</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">A recurring claim
made in a number of behavioural, cognitive and neuro-scientific literatures is
that there is in fact, or must be, a unidimensional ‘common currency’ in which
the values (actual, or expected) of different available options are
represented. These currency metaphors partly succeed older, less overtly
economic, yet similarly quantitative ways of speaking of decision-making as a
kind of ‘weighing’, or of options attracting with varying ‘force’. What these images
share is doing approximate justice to the pre-theoretical notion that the value
– to the choosing agent – of two options may be equal, or unequal, and when
unequal that the relative difference between them can differ in magnitude.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
When <i>all </i>options are taken to stand
in these relations, we are on the way to a <i>common
currency thesis</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The theses get
fleshed out in a variety of ways as the pre-theoretical notion is regimented in
specific scientific and philosophical contexts. Different kinds of argument and
evidence are appropriate to defending the more specific formulations. Here are
two fairly typical and widely cited examples:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">“In natural settings, the goals competing for behavior are complex,
multidimensional objects and outcomes. Yet, for orderly choice to be possible,
the utility of all competing resources must be represented on a single, common
dimension” (Shizgal & Conover 1996).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">“Any attempt to understand behavior in terms of the evolutionary
advantage that it might confer has to find a "common currency" for
comparing the costs and benefits of various alternative courses of action”
(McNamara and Houston 1986: 358).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">These arguments
are at least superficially similar enough that they might be taken as variants
of a single argument, or as complementary arguments for the same thesis. Both
seem to demand a <i>single</i> currency, encouraging
viewing them as complementary. Indeed, the prospect that they, or combinations
of similar seeming arguments, might collectively justify multiple and
fundamentally distinct currencies (as opposed to superficially distinct ones
that turned out to be equivalent) is <i>prima
facie</i> perplexing. At the very least, the claim of one currency to be
‘common’ would be undermined by the existence of others. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">One claim I defend
here is that this superficial appearance – that we have complementary arguments
for one claim – is misleading. Significantly different claims about common
currencies can and should be recognized. The remark by Shizgal and Conover
occurs in discussion of experiments demonstrating that behaviour allocation in rats
given choices between natural (gustatory)<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
rewards and brain stimulation reward is sensitive to opportunity cost in the
un-chosen reward, and that combination rewards with components in both
modalities are (approximately) valued as <i>sums</i>
of their components. The ‘common currency’ in question is reward magnitude for
the individual rat. And Shizgal and Conover claim that this kind of pattern in
allocation – the sensitivity to opportunity cost and disposition to value
combination rewards as sums of their components that they call ‘orderly choice’
– is empirically observable <i>and</i>
warrants an inference to a common currency that contributes to the choice
process.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">McNamara and
Houston, on the other hand, are describing the project of behavioural ecology.
They observe that this project presupposes that behaviours have determinate
fitness consequences, and seeks to determine what those consequences are. One
of their central claims is, furthermore, that the main successes of behavioural
ecology up to that time had focused on restricted currencies, such as net rate
of energy intake in optimal foraging models (e.g. Pyke et al 1977), and made
relatively little headway with interpreting more comprehensive behavioural
repertoires and life histories from the perspective of fitness. Such a
comprehensive mapping, though, would express the relative values of all
behaviours in an evolutionary common currency.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The two currency
theses (Shizgal and Conover’s on the one hand, and McNamara and Houston’s on
the other) are clearly not equivalent. Among the differences, one is centrally
concerned with <i>fitness</i>, the other with
something closer to <i>subjective (expected)
utility</i>. Only one of them seems concerned with the choice-making process.
Perhaps the repeated occurrence of ‘common currency’ talk is simply an
un-interesting coincidence of terminology: researchers talking about distinct
phenomena happen to use a superficially similar idiom. Perhaps, though, there
is a tangle worth trying to unravel. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">I favour the
latter view, and in this brief paper offer a compressed survey of the terrain
in which common currency theses occur, along with a preliminary defence of the
claims that there is a tangle at all, and that the tangle is philosophically
interesting. Identifying all of the interestingly distinct claims about common
currencies, and assessing the bodies of evidence relevant to each, is far too
large a project for a single paper. My aims here are therefore more modest. In
what follows I introduce a classification of common currency theses (section
2), and explain why some of the thus classified theses should be understood as
competitors (section 3). Not all currency theses conflict, but where
combinations of them are possibly complementary, we find additional disputes
and disagreements (section 4), and this set of issues is philosophically
interesting (section 5). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-GB">2.
Common currency claims distinguished<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Distinct claims
about common currencies or value scales occur in various scientific settings.
Generically, and perforce vaguely – to begin with – because different more
precise formulations pull in partly incompatible directions, a common currency
is a unidimensional quantity that different options have in varying amounts. A common
currency is a representation of what an agent maximises, or, more weakly, it is
some value ordering with which the agent’s behaviour is consistent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The two main ways
of clarifying currency claims are, first, to specify in greater detail the
characteristics of the value scale (whether ordinal, interval, etc.), and, second,
to describe groupings <i>within</i> the range
of currency theses and the types of explanations in which they feature. The latter
task commands priority because the specific regimentation of the notion of
scale that is appropriate depends on what purportedly is being measured or
described and how. Here I focus mostly on classification, making only passing
remarks about scale.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Claims about
common currencies are offered as explanations of one or both of two putative
facts:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The currency represents the fundamental principle in some pattern in
the choices made by some agent. <i>OR</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The currency is a characteristic of the processes by which choice is
produced.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Scientifically
interesting claims about common currencies, that is, can be divided into <i>two</i> groups. To mark this division I
follow, but slightly adapt, an established distinction, and refer to ‘ultimate’
and ‘proximal’ currencies. An <i>ultimate</i>
currency is a construct in a descriptive or explanatory theory of the behaviour
of some agent. A <i>proximal</i> currency,
on the other hand, is supposed to play some role in the processes by which
options are selected by an agent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Any <i>single</i> ranking of options on a scale such
that behaviour can be described as – perhaps approximately – consistent with
that ordering counts as an instance of what I will call an ‘ultimate’ common
currency. An ultimate currency relates values to options, or to what selecting
those options achieves or perhaps have the function of achieving. It is easy to
imagine <i>possible</i> instantiations of an
ultimate currency (‘all of Jim’s actions are efficiently ordered to contribute
to the greater glory of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’) but among the
scientifically interesting forms of consistency, two families stand out. One of
these relate to <i>fitness</i>, and the
other to some of other form of <i>utility</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">To mark this
distinction I say that an ultimate currency can be <i>evolutionary </i>or <i>subjective</i>.
Here I’m knowingly, albeit slightly, departing from standard usage, insofar as
the usual way of distinguishing proximal from ultimate has the latter taken to
be synonymous with fitness promoting. The standard sense is partly preserved
here, because what I call an evolutionary<span style="font-variant: small-caps;">
</span>ultimate currency attributes values that are a function of contribution
to fitness. A guiding presumption of behavioural ecology is that behavioural
dispositions make contributions to fitness, and that to the extent that the
dispositions have a heritable basis, selection will tend to drive them towards
making (constrained) optimal contributions. The statement by McNamara and
Houston briefly discussed above is an exemplary assertion about an evolutionary
ultimate currency.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">There are compelling
reasons for thinking that natural selection will operate on at least some behavioural
tendencies, and so a strong general justification for the project of
behavioural ecology. Nonetheless, the question of whether the behaviour
allocation of the individuals in any particular species does indeed tend to
optimise fitness (or would have in historical selective environments) is an
empirical one. Behavioural ecologists have studied many species and types of
behaviour and achieved striking successes in restricted domains such as
foraging and mate selection. These successes have often relied on focusing on a
simplified and more empirically tractable currency such as net rate of calorie
intake (in the case of foraging), or the health of the selected mate (in mate
selection). These proxy currencies plausibly contribute to fitness. Even so, success
relating behaviour patterns to the proxies falls short of establishing
relationships between all behavioural dispositions and overall fitness in any
species. Two of the most serious shortfalls are in the area of relative
allocation between significantly different modalities (such as calorie intake
versus pursuit of mating opportunities versus predator avoidance) and variation
in allocation over extended periods of time, including the full life-history.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">A subjective
ultimate currency, in contrast, attributes values that are a function of the
revealed preferences or inferred utilities of the individual agent, without
requiring any relationship to fitness. The paradigmatic sciences of subjective
ultimate currencies are microeconomics (with variously regimented notions of
utility functions revealed through consumption) and behavioural psychology (where
strength of reinforcement is defined in terms of effect on patterns of
behaviour allocation). Evolutionary ultimate currencies, then, have stronger empirical
conditions than subjective ones, because the latter require ‘mere’ consistency
in behaviour, whereas the former require consistency in contributing to <i>fitness</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">The distinction
between evolutionary and subjective ultimate currencies, as I’ve sketched it,
conceals important technical variation. There are different and competing
fitness concepts, debates over the level (especially gene or individual) at
which selection operates, and differing positions over the correct (if any)
individuation principles for genes, genomes, species and other relevant
categories. There are also different and competing utility concepts, offering
different explanations of the same empirical data. (For example, some make
randomness a feature of the utility representation itself, while others
hypothesise randomness in the form of ‘trembling hands’ in the process of
expressing the preferences.) Surveying this terrain is beyond the scope of this
brief paper, but one further complication must be noted. It concerns two
different ways of understanding ‘consistency’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB">Economists tend to
favour a strict notion of consistency because they recognise that predictable inconsistency
makes agents vulnerable to systematic exploitation, so such agents would lose
an influence on markets. Perhaps the best-known <i>specific</i> version of this worry is the argument that an agent with
cyclical preferences<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
could be used as a ‘money pump’ (See Ross 2005, Chapter 5). Such an agent would
freely pay for a series of trades that eventually left it with no effective money
or stock. This convinces most economists that viable agency requires acyclicity
(‘transitivity’), among other criteria for consistency. Behavioural
psychologists, on the other hand, seek phenomenological fits of functions to
empirical data, and have recognised patterns in behaviour objectionable to
micro-economists. The clearest example of this is their accepting that the
generalised Matching Law applies to delayed rewards (Chung and Herrnstein 1967).
This implies that rewards are valued in inverse proportion to delay (i.e. by a
hyperbolic function), and the relative desirability of incentives at different
times can change simply with the passage of time. Given appropriate repeated
choices, cyclical preferences follow.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
That should mean vulnerability to money pumping, and non-behavioural economists
have favoured delay discounting according to exponential functions largely for
this reason (again, see Ross 2005, Chapter 5). The hyperbolic delay discounter is
inconsistent insofar as she <i>temporarily </i>prefers
smaller rewards that are immanently available. But to the behavioural
psychologist her choices are all <i>consistently</i>
reward seeking, in the sense that once some empirical parameters have been
determined, relative rates of behaviour are predictable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">The other main
role for currency claims is to explain the <i>processes</i>
by which options are selected. Such theses assert the existence of a ‘proximal’
common currency. Here are some examples. A realist about desires who holds that
for any pair of desires there is a fact of the matter about whether they are of
equal strength or one is stronger, is committed to a common currency thesis.
Shizgal and Conover’s inference regarding a “single, common dimension” is a
scientifically motivated claim about the cognitive requirements of producing “orderly
choice”. A conventional chess-playing programme generating a tree of possible game-states,
then attaching values to them on the basis of some alogorithm, in order to
select a best move (among the options explored in the available time)
implements a common currency. Finally, the leading current scientific research
programme focused on a proximal common currency is neuroeconomics, which seeks to
determine how utilities are represented in brains, and how these
representations are processed in choosing and learning (e.g. Levy &
Glimcher 2012).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Not everyone who
thinks that behaviour is consistent, and that there is a mechanical process
explaining behaviour selection, is committed to a proximal common currency.
This is because not all views about how behaviour is caused involve
representations, including value representations. One reason is respect for
what is now sometimes known as ‘Morgan’s cannon’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-left: 36.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB">In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise
of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of one
which stands lower on the psychological scale. (Morgan, 1894)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Giant sea slugs (<i>Pleurobranchaea</i>), for example, are
carnivorous and typically eat any animal matter they run into, “including other
sea-slugs and their eggs” (Manning and Dawkins 1998: 226). They do not, however,
eat their own eggs during egg laying. This disposition is obviously fitness
enhancing: creatures that routinely consume their own offspring leave fewer viable
descendants. The mechanism which stops sea slugs from eating their own eggs,
though, while it could be regarded as in some very broad sense ‘cognitive’ is
not one in which values are represented (e.g. Godfrey-Smith 2002).<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
When sea slugs lay eggs, they release a hormone that inhibits movement of the
mouth (Davis <i>et al</i> 1977). This simple
override exemplifies the ‘subsumption’ relationship between control layers
championed by Rodney Brooks (e.g. 1991), who famously maintained that
‘intelligent’ behaviour could be achieved in the absence of representation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">A claim asserting
a <i>proximal </i>common currency, then, is
not <i>any </i>assertion about mechanisms
producing behaviour, even consistent behaviour. A proximal common currency is,
rather, a single, structured and integrated set of states that represents
values, in at least the weak sense that there is a supportable mapping between
the states and values in an ultimate currency.<i><o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">There are three
generic and complementary forms of argument in favour of a proximal currency.
The first attempts an inference to best explanation for observed order in
behaviour. The second considers abstract features of a control system, and argues
that the control bottlenecks make it more likely that some unified value
representation is playing a role. This is sometimes called the ‘final common
path’ argument (e.g. McFarland & Sibley 1975). Finally, there are cases
where it is claimed that a proximal currency has effectively been observed in
action, through study of the behaviour control system at work (e.g. in
neuroeconomics). All three are, furthermore, contested.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">I maintain that scientifically
interesting talk about common currencies can almost entirely be organised into
arguments (i) in favour of or against one kind of currency in this taxonomy,
and (ii) in favour of or against inferences from ultimate to proximal
currencies. I regard this as a significant payoff of the taxonomy just outlined.
Let me now argue briefly that the set of currency theses to be found in current
science warrant serious philosophical examination.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 14.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">3. Competitors, not complements<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">I discuss attempted
inferences <i>between</i> distinct currency
thesis types, especially from ultimate to proximal, in the next section. Here I
consider relationships between ultimate (pattern) and proximal (process) common
currency theses. The number of at least superficially distinct common currency theses
is striking. As we’ve seen, behavioural ecologists seek to relate patterns of
behaviour to their contribution to <i>fitness</i>.
Early utilitarians, and some contemporary theorists about pain and analgesia
claim that <i>pain </i>and <i>pleasure </i>provide a common scale (e.g.
Bentham 1789, Cabanac 1971, Leknes & Tracey 2010). Behaviourist
psychologists refer to <i>reward </i>or <i>reinforcement</i>, while contemporary
economists are more likely to advance a currency thesis about <i>utility</i>. In addition some of the central
concepts which characterise the scales have been theoretically elaborated in varied
ways. This is most striking in the case of utility, both within economics,
including behavioural economics, and in neighbouring areas such as decision
theory.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">This mere
proliferation is not <i>intrinsically</i> interesting,
of course. Perhaps the various theses are complementary. In the case of ultimate
currencies, there is, prima facie, a prospect of pluralistic harmony, because
such theses are claims about pattern. And, surely, more than one kind of
pattern can be discerned in the same data. It is, though, an observation that
is familiar to the point of banality that subjective preferences – for example
for sex with contraceptives – don’t always coincide with what is fitness
promoting. More generally, and not only in humans what is fitness promoting is
not always motivating, and what is motivating is not always fitness promoting.
The fact that animal subjects in behavioural experiments would work for
non-nutritive sweeteners, for example, was recognised decades ago as an obstacle
to identifying reward with evolutionary interest (see, e.g., Rachlin 1991,
Chapter 3).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">It is not unusual,
in fact, to find biologists expressing scepticism about the chances of a
currency thesis outside biology, even while being optimistic within it. Maynard-Smith,
for example, suggested that “it has turned out that game theory […] is more
readily applied to biology than to the field of economic behavior for which it
was originally designed”. And part of his justification for this is that he
finds utility to be a “a somewhat artificial and uncomfortable concept”,
whereas in biology “Darwinian fitness provides a natural and genuinely
one-dimensional scale” (Maynard Smith 1982, quoted in Glimcher 2002, p323).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Many economists
and behaviourists dispute this, on the grounds that the utility concept is in
much better shape than Maynard-Smith allows. My point is not to endorse either
view, but to observe that the lack of consensus suggests work for applied
philosophy of science. One impediment to taking sides is, in any event, that economists
disagree with each other. There are competing formulations of utility and
disputes over which do best justice to the evidence, or best suit what
theoretical purposes. I noted above that economists’ concern with consistency
leads them to favour exponential delay discount functions, while behavioural
psychologists are more inclined to hyperbola-like functions. This is just one
instance of a wider pattern. To give one more example, defenders of prospect
theory (e.g. Kahneman & Tversky 1979) claim that their model, built to
account for phenomena including apparent violations of the independence axiom, and
asymmetries of risk sensitivity in gains and losses, does better justice to
data about real human choices. Sceptics, though, express frustration that the sheer
number of free parameters in prospect theory undermines the empirical value of
such fits (see Glimcher 2011, Chapter 5).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">A further incompatibility
between the currency claims of behavioural ecologists and psychologists arises
because they seek to explain somewhat different things, even while both calling
it ‘behaviour’. We’ve noted the giant sea slug’s apparent restraint over eating
its own eggs. My point there was to explain why behavioural ecologists are often
carefully agnostic about proximal common currencies. Similar cases can also be
used to make a different point. For example, a textbook case in in behavioural
ecology is clutch sizes in oviparous species (on birds, see e.g. Lack 1966).
There’s substantial evidence that clutch sizes in many bird species are close
to what would maximise lifetime reproductive success of parent birds, whose
situation involves trade-offs between current and future clutches, and between
members of individual clutches, given that larger (better fed) young generally do
better.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Some of the
determinants of clutch size plausibly respond only to phylogenetic rewards,
where successful offspring are the payoffs in repeated games with genotypes as
the players or strategies. There is little reason to think, though, that clutch
size is modifiable by reward or punishment directed at the individual bird, any
more than one might bribe a giant sea slug into eating its own eggs. But
responsiveness to reinforcement is what would make it behaviour for a behavioural
psychologists or economist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">What about proximal
common currency theses? It seems that multiple <i>distinct</i> proximal theses raise the prospect of over-determination.
That is, if the mechanisms of choice include more than one structured and
integrated set of states representing values and involved in causing behaviour,
then we’d have more explanation than we needed. (‘I did it because it had to
most expected utility, <i>and</i> it was
pleasurable <i>and</i> I preferred it…’) This
worry could be dissolved if it turned out that the different proximal currency
theses expressed substantially the same claim, so that what some kind of agent
wanted (or desired) was also what it liked (or gave it pleasure) <i>and</i> what promoted its fitness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">The prospects for
such an outcome, though, are slim. Among other reasons, behavioural economists
have drawn attention to various examples of apparently motivated behaviour involving
considerable pain, for example mountaineering (e.g. Loewenstein 1999). Brain
scientists studying the learning, enjoying and choosing brain now mostly maintain
that ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’ (including enjoying and suffering) are neurally and
functionally dissociated and that only the former promises to provide a
perspective from which behaviour can be understood as consistent with some
value representation (e.g. Berridge 2004). These arguments conflict directly
with the claim defended by some researchers on hedonic experience that pain and
pleasure provide a common currency for behaviour selection (e.g. Leknes and
Tracey 2010). Whatever consensus eventually emerges, it seems clear that no
more than one of the current proximal common currency theses can be correct.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<b><span lang="EN-GB">4. Inferences from ultimate to proximal currency
theses<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Within categories
– ultimate and proximal – different common currency theses, then, are
competitors, but there are obvious ways that one thesis of each type could be complementary.
If the order in behaviour warrants attributing an ultimate common currency,
then this might justify hypothesising a proximal currency involved in producing
the pattern. Conversely, if we had grounds to suppose that some agent’s cognitive
processes implemented a proximal common currency, we might expect its behaviour
to exhibit pattern consistent with an ultimate currency. Versions of both
inferences have been defended, and contested.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">The range of
options for relations between proximal and ultimate currency theses is
approximately analogous with those regarding the status of folk psychological
kinds in in the philosophy of cognitive science. (Analogous might not be the
best term, because folk psychology <i>includes</i>
desires and beliefs. But most of the debates over folk psychology focused on epistemic
states – like belief, perception, and memory – to the relative neglect of motivation
states, like desires.) The major options are realism (beliefs are scientifically
respectable), eliminativism (cognitive processes include nothing sufficiently
like beliefs for belief talk to pass scientific muster) and attributionism, for
example Dennett’s intentional stance (the conditions for belief attribution exclusively
concern pattern in behaviour). Approximately corresponding to this, we find the
following positions regarding proximal common currencies:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">First there are
realists committed to the existence of cognitive states standing for the
motivational strength of different courses of action in humans, and at least
some other agents. Examples include typical realists such as Fodor (1983), some
scientists specialising in hedonic experience (e.g. Cabanac 1971) and
neuroeconomists identifying preferences with brain states. A paradigmatic
example of an inference from pattern to proximal representation is, of course,
the syllogism stated by Shizgal and Conover (1996) quoted above, linking
‘orderly choice’ with the requirement of ‘representation’ on a common scale.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Second, are
eliminativist positions, denying – to varying degrees – the reality or
necessity of cognitive states corresponding to desires. Brooks (1991), for
example, argues against the need for representations of any kind to produce
‘intelligence’. For him the world is ‘its own best representation’. Brooks
directs most of his fire against representations in the sense of models of the
external environment, but his arguments clearly imply rejection of
representations of values.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Brooks’ work remains an inspiration to some philosophers. Clark (e.g. 1997, chapter
9) claims that pattern in human economic choices depends heavily on highly
scaffolded choice environments. Sterelny (2003), on the other hand, suggests
that the cognitive implementation of preferences in humans is “incomplete”, and
that pattern in the behaviour of most non-humans can be explained without
hypothesising preference like states as parts of their cognitive architectures.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Finally, we find
attributionists, emphasising the view that the work of those who trade in
ultimate common currencies is independent from proximal considerations. The
exemplary contemporary attributionist about folk psychology is Dennett, and
scientific attributionists share behaviourist inspiration. Micro-economists
mostly regiment their notion of utility so that it makes no psychological or
hedonic commitments, in favour of specifying different degrees of consistency
that can be empirically manifest in behaviour (e.g. Samuelson 1938, see Ross
2005). Behaviourist psychologists are similarly suspicious of – or hostile to –
claims about hedonic experience, and favour more empirically tractable notions
such as reinforcement and reward (Thorndike 1927).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">The task of
assessing the strengths and weaknesses of realism, eliminativism and
attributionism in the case of the more epistemic aspects of folk psychology
(believing, perceiving, remembering, inferring…) attracted wide and deep
philosophical activity over several decades. Over this period considerably less
attention was paid to the motivational aspects of folk psychology (wanting,
desiring, choosing). In the final section of this brief survey I attempt to say
a little more about why these topics deserve more attention.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<b><span lang="EN-GB">5. This is philosophically interesting<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Suppose that I’ve
convinced a reader that there is a tangle of variously competing and (possibly)
complementary theses about common currencies across a number of cognitive and
behavioural sciences. Why think that this tangle is of any <i>philosophical</i> significance? Among the reasons I could offer, let me
single out three.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">First, there’s an
image of philosophers associated with Locke as a kind of conceptual janitor for
empirical science (Locke’s image, in the Epistle to the Reader of his <i>Essay concerning human understanding,</i>
was of an ‘under-labourer’). Such conceptual work is more clearly indicated,
perhaps, in cases where there is conflict within and between empirical
sciences. To illustrate this, consider the different situations of behaviourism
in psychology, and economics. Behaviourist psychologists thought of themselves,
to state the obvious, as being in the psychology business, although driven by a
distinctive vision of what it meant to do that business in a methodologically
serious way. Their rejection of introspection was methodological, motivated by
the consideration that scientific evidence should be inter-subjectively
available. Consistently with that commitment, some more recent behaviourists
have argued that reports of subjective experience can be a kind of data (e.g.
Dennett’s ‘heterophenomenology’ in his 1991). Furthermore, advances in
measuring devices have made previously unobservable brain processes amenable to
empirical study, and so allowed different kinds of data to pass muster by
behaviourist lights. Neuroeconomics now promises to provide an empirical basis
for a theory of reinforcement or reward<i> </i>that
explains observed pattern in what behaviour can be reinforced, and to what
degree. While some individual behaviourists might reject specific theoretical
suggestions in this area, the lack of <i>some</i>
theory commanding wide acceptance has long been recognised.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Given the noted
inspiration behaviourism provided for contemporary formulations of the concept
of utility in economics, one might expect similar enthusiasm for neuroeconomics
among working economists. Instead, one finds lively and sometimes intensely
polarised debate. This should not be especially surprising. Unlike
behaviourists, who had a distinctive view about how psychology should be done,
economists (who used to view their discipline as at least closely linked to
psychology – e.g. Jevons 1911) view their discipline as having made progress by
getting out of the psychology business entirely. While some behavioural
economists have more recently sought to move in the opposite direction, they by
no means dominate the profession.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">This helps explain
some of the response to an enthusiastic early manifesto for neuroeconomics (Camerer,
Loewenstein and Prelec 2005). Here, and in related publications around the
time, it was claimed that a new and importantly psychological research programme
held out the hope of providing new ‘foundations’ for microeconomics. While the
experimental techniques would have amazed Mill, Bentham, Jevons and their
colleagues, the generic view of the relationship between economics and
psychology probably would not. But 2005 is not the eighteenth century, and one
of the most spirited responses to neuroeconomics was called ‘The case for
mindless economics’, and argued forcefully (whether or not correctly) that
economics and psychology were separated by a ‘logical’ gulf, that they
addressed “</span>different questions”,
used “different abstractions” and relied on “different types of empirical
evidence”, with the consequence that neuroscience could have no bearing on
economics whatsoever<span lang="EN-GB"> (Gul & Pesendorfer 2005). It
should not need pointing out that this dispute is, among other things, a
special case of a wider and older debate about the status of folk-psychology.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a></span><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Second, the
specific issues relating to the status of folk-psychology that arise in the
case of motivation, and with respect to the credibility of this or that common
currency thesis, are not simply ‘more of the same’ in the sense of being mere
repetitions or generalisations of arguments about beliefs or representations.
Were that the case, there would still be philosophical work to do, because
applying whatever lessons emerged from the earlier debates would depend partly
on specific details that science has revealed in the domain of preference and
decision. Brooks’ general case against representation, for example, is widely
recognised as failing in the case of belief except for very simple control
systems, and may also fail in the case of preference, but perhaps not for the
same reasons.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">But there are also
important ways in which things are <i>different</i>
here. The ‘old’ debate over folk psychology was, as noted, disproportionately
focused on epistemic matters, and so unsurprisingly much of the traffic with
philosophy was in areas relating to epistemology and language. But those aren’t
the most obvious or promising sources of exchange in the case of desires.
There, in fact, the fruitful exchange is more likely to be in areas engaged
with thinking about practical reasoning and decision, and thinking about <i>value</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Third, and
finally, philosophers already defend, assume or deny common currency theses or
positions implying such commitments. A common opening move among decision
theorists, for example, is to assume that values – whatever their ‘content’ –
can be represented with the real numbers (e.g. Briggs 2010). More generally
what one might call ‘empiricist’ views of motivation suppose that there is a
central economy of desires competing on the basis of their strength, however
that strength is understood. On the other hand more ‘rationalist’ views favour
the view that in at least some cases motivation is not simply a matter of
relative strength of desires, but is rather rule-based, or otherwise based on
reason in opposition to desire.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">Whether or not
directly defending rationalism in this very loose sense, a number of lines of
philosophical thinking oppose, directly or by implication, the thought that all
options are valued on a single scale. Among the examples of this are: arguments
that some options or values might be incommensurable, in the sense that there
is no fact of the matter about which is more valuable, or whether they are
equal (e.g. Raz 1986, Williams 1981); positions maintaining that some values
are ranked ‘lexically’ in the sense that any amount of some – no matter how
small - is worth more than any amount of others – no matter how large (e.g.
Rawls 1971). In addition, in some recent empirical literature we find arguments
that some values are ‘protected’ or ‘sacred’ and somehow isolated from
trade-offs with others (e.g. Baron & Spranca 1997, Atran & Ginges 2012).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB">A number of
long-standing philosophical questions about desire, decision, preference and
practical reasoning, then, (and this survey is woefully short of comprehensive)
<i>are</i> partly questions about the degree
to which motivational systems are, or can be, unified, and about the kinds of
ranking and hierarchy systems of value or motivational strength can or should
have. Common currency theses – whether affirmed or denied – provide a useful
level of abstraction that permits comparison of otherwise mutually isolated
theses and theories, and a substantial and tangled scientific terrain is
debating aspects of these very questions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">References <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 6.0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText" style="margin-top: 6.0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Ainslie, G.
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Ainslie, G. (2001). <i>Breakdown of
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white; font-size: 11.0pt;">Atran, S. and Ginges, J. 2012. Religious and sacred imperatives
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white; font-size: 11.0pt;">Baron, J. and Spranca, M. 1997. Protected values.</span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white; color: #222222; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"> </span></span><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="background: white; font-size: 11.0pt;">Organizational behavior
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Ï^Â\0027C8ˇøË–";">Williams, B. (1981) “Conflicts of Values”, in <i>Moral Luck</i>, Cambridge: Cambridge
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Some
have an opposed hunch that there is no fact of the matter about the relative
ranking of at least some options, perhaps because they are incommensurable
(e.g. Williams 1981, Raz 1986).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
‘natural’ rewards were modified in various ways in order to manipulate their
similarities to and differences from brain stimulation reward (BSR). Shizgal
and Conover make further inferences about the neural representation of value on
the basis of how BSR and gustatory reinforcement respond differently to these
manipulations. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For
a classic discussion of the formal properties of some notions of preference see
Luce and Suppes (1965), and for more general remarks on scales and measurement
see Suppes and Zinnes (1963).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In the sense of preferring bundle <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a</i> to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">b</i>,
bundle <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">b</i> to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">c</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">also </i>bundle <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">c</i> to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Nobody
has done more than George Ainslie when it comes to thinking seriously about
what it would mean for humans if we value rewards approximately in inverse
proportion to their delay. See Ainslie (1992, 2001).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></span></a><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
follow Godfrey-Smith’s suggested policy regarding understanding ‘cognitive’ in
a broad way to embrace the processes controlling behaviour, even in systems
(e.g. some plants and fungi) that lack central nervous systems.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[7]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>See Kaye and Spurrett (in preparation).<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7612775512249380628#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">[8]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A striking feature of much of this
specific version is repeated invocation of the notion of a common currency
(e.g. Levy & Glimcher 2012).<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-69550321025957901922014-01-14T11:30:00.000-08:002014-01-14T22:42:21.532-08:00‘Sacred’ values, rule-based choice and the brain<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BPPxMnggBKk/UtKe_ujsEDI/AAAAAAAABlE/WSe63Cud8oA/s1600/pig+jesus+shining.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-BPPxMnggBKk/UtKe_ujsEDI/AAAAAAAABlE/WSe63Cud8oA/s1600/pig+jesus+shining.jpg" height="200" width="189" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Source: <a href="http://www.b3ta.com/" target="_blank">B3ta</a> (I forget which specific<br />
image challenge, so can't be more<br />
specific than that. Grovels & apologies.)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This working paper grew out of my encounters with a claim that seems to be currently fashionable, to the effect that some values are 'sacred'. Although different ways of filling in what 'sacred' amounts to are to be found, some of them involve denial of the claim that all values are represented on a common scale. In my view the evidence used to justify the sacred values claim is not currently up to the job that is being asked of it.<br />
<br />
The topic, and the recent scientific attention, are nonetheless of interest because they accompany empirical attention to old question about lexical preference orderings, and the possibility that some values might be 'incommensurable'.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The text below is the abstract I used for a recent presentation on this topic.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h3>
Abstract</h3>
<div>
<div>
A number of recent empirical papers claim to have found evidence that (some) people have so-called ‘sacred’ or ‘protected’ values. These are understood as values that cannot be traded off against non-sacred values, or values with respect to which such trade-offs are resisted, or (finally) values with respect to which even contemplating trade-offs provokes outrage. Different, and incompletely compatible, explanations for this putative data are offered. Sometimes it is claimed that sacred values are infinitely valuable compared to secular ones. Sometimes it is suggested that decisions concerning sacred values are made according to unconditional rules, rather than weighing expected consequences. Finally, it is also sometimes claimed that sacred values are incommensurable with secular ones, in the sense that comparison is strictly impossible.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Unsurprisingly, the claim to have found evidence of people having sacred values thus understood is regularly accompanied by claims to the effect that this presents a problem for models of people as ‘rational actors’ or as approximately economic agents.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I argue here that the variously proposed explanations for the empirical evidence that people have ‘sacred’ values are importantly distinct, rather than complementary, and that some are less plausible than others. If sacred values are infinitely valuable, then they are not incommensurable. If sacred values are incommensurable with non-sacred ones, then it might help to have a way of deciding by rule rather than comparison. But rule-based choice for some category of values requires neither incommensurability nor comparatively infinite value.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I also argue that the evidence in the recent empirical papers falls well short of defending the claim that anyone in fact has ‘sacred’ values in any of the relevant senses. The evidence for an opposed conclusion in the area of addiction – for example that choices concerning heroin by addicts are responsive to opportunity cost, and so economic rather than automatic – is more impressive than the evidence that choices about ‘sacred’ values are made in non-economic ways. And the experiments themselves are flawed. Among other things, the psychological constructs that inform the data analysis fail to draw the required contrasts, and the designs lack the incentive compatibility recognised as a requirement for eliciting expressions of genuine preferences. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I pay particular attention to a recent paper (Berns et al. 2012) claiming to have identified neural correlates of the representation of sacred values. The set of options used in the experiment shows severely limited construct validity, and so fails to support even a very tentative localisation claim regarding sacred values and the brain.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<h4>
References</h4>
<div>
<br />
Berns, G. S., Bell, E., Capra, C. M., Prietula, M. J., Moore, S., Anderson, B., Ginges, J and Atran, S. 2012. The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values. <i>Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences</i>, 367(1589): 754-762. [<a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-price-of-your-soul-neural-evidence.html" target="_blank">I've discussed the Berns et al article in a previous posting on this blog.</a>] <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0262" target="_blank">DOI:10.1098/rstb.2011.0262</a></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Tetlock, P. E. 2003. Thinking the unthinkable: Sacred values and taboo cognitions. <i>Trends in cognitive sciences</i>, 7(7): 320-324. <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00135-9" target="_blank">doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00135-9</a></div>
</div>
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<div>
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Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-56218949627257602242014-01-11T06:59:00.000-08:002014-01-11T06:59:00.879-08:00Subsumption Architectures and Common Currencies<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One motivation for asserting a common currency is in explanations of orderly behaviour. In this case the common currency is a 'proximal' currency, in the sense that it is part of the cognitive economy of whatever is doing the behaving. (For a note on the distinction between ultimate and proximal currencies see <a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/03/currencies-can-be-ultimate-or-proximal.html" target="_blank">this posting</a>.)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Shizgal and Conover provide a pithy statement of the inference to a proximal common currency here:</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In natural settings, the goals competing for behavior are complex, multidimensional objects and outcomes. Yet, for orderly choice to be possible, the utility of all competing resources must be represented on a single, common dimension (Shizgal & Conover 1996).</span></span></blockquote>
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(For a discussion of Shizgal and Conover's paper see <a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/05/shizgal-and-conovers-orderly-choice.html" target="_blank">this posting</a>.)</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">One challenge to this inference arises from those who think that it is an error to attempt to explain orderly or appropriate behaviour by reference to representations of any kind. If there aren't any representations, then there aren't any representations of value (or utility, or reward, etc.). And if there aren't any representations of values, there isn't a proximal common currency. A leading figure in the anti-representation tendency is Rodney Brooks, formerly of MIT, whose 1991 manifesto 'Intelligence without representation' is still regularly cited.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">The aim of the working paper 'Subsumption Architectures and Common Currencies' is to assess Brook's challenge in the specific area of motivation, or preference. This involves a slight change of emphasis from most discussion and debate over Brooks, because that debate focused largely on representations that were counterparts to <i>beliefs</i> (in the sense of representing facts about what the world was like) rather than representations which were counterparts to <i>desires</i> (in the sense of representing what actions were worth doing, or what goals had what current value).</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">The positions of Brooks on the one hand, and Shizgal and Conover on the other, seem clearly opposed. If orderly choice requires a common currency that is internally represented, then whatever subsumption architectures can do, they can't produce orderly choice. But if they can produce orderly choice without central representations of value, then Shizgal and Conover are incorrect about the necessity for such representations.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Assessing the challenge that Brooks' work poses involves getting clearer about what kinds of order behaviour can exhibit, and also what kinds of processing and internal working can produce what kinds of order. I've presented working talks on this at a few departmental colloquia, but not yet taken the topic to a conference or produced a written version.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">This paper is now being worked on collaboratively, by myself and Blaize Kaye. Our first conference presentation on the topic (by him) will take place in January 2014. And I hope that we'll be able to post a working draft within a few weeks. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<h4>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Related postings on this blog:</span></h4>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/04/important-sources-rodney-brooks.html" target="_blank">Important sources: Rodney Brooks</a></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #666666; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span>Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-74136728169255710772013-10-22T02:49:00.000-07:002014-01-11T06:28:39.383-08:00Philosophers should be interested in ‘common currency’ claims in the cognitive and behavioural sciencesI'm presenting on this topic at the 2014 conference of the PSSA (Philosophical Society of Southern Africa) to be held in Bloemfontein in January. (If all goes according to plan, my collaborator Blaize Kaye will be presenting something about subsumption architectures and common currencies - watch this space for updates.)<br />
<br />
The text below is my submitted abstract. I'll post a working text of the paper in due course. The aim of this paper is simply to document some of the variety in common currency claims, and argue that they are of specific philosophical interest. (That is, I'm not defending any more specific claims about whether any particular currency thesis is true or not.)<br />
<br />
<h4>
Abstract</h4>
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A recurring claim
made in a number of behavioural, cognitive and neuro-scientific literatures is
that there is, or must be, a unidimensional ‘common currency’ in which the
values of different available options are represented.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is striking
variety in the quantities or properties that have been proposed as determinants
of the ordering in motivational strength. Among those seriously suggested are
pain and pleasure, biological fitness, reward and reinforcement, and utility
among economists, who have regimented the notion of utility in a variety of
ways, some of them incompatible.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This topic
deserves philosophical attention for at least the following reasons: (1)
Repeated invocation of the ‘common currency’ idiom isn’t merely terminological
coincidence because most of the claims are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">competing
</i>explanations for one or the other of two putative kinds of fact. In one
case the currency represents a principle of manifest pattern in choices. In the
other, it is a functional part of the processes which produce choice. (2) We
can’t suppose that the different currency claims within each area are
compatible, because there are significant obstacles to identifying pairs of
members of either the ‘pattern’ or ‘process’ group. (3) There are, finally,
seriously opposed positions about the relationships (generally, and in specific
cases including that of humans) between the pattern facts and the process
facts.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Philosophical positions both favouring and
opposing a common currency exist. Philosophers who incline to view their
positions as at least partly empirical, should be more interested in the issues
outlined here than they are.</span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS 明朝"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: x-small;">This text was updated slightly on 11 January 2014.</span></div>
Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-49884205579667255692013-08-08T04:10:00.002-07:002013-08-08T04:10:16.943-07:00Aristotle!While following a trail of references relating to the notion of 'lexical' ordering for preferences or values, I came upon a reference to a passage in Aristotle's <i>Nichomachean Ethics</i> which makes an argument about the function of money that is relevant (in a somewhat distant and historical way) to my topic. The passage is the following:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"So money acts as a measure which, by making things commensurable, renders it possible to make them equal. Without exchange there could be no association, without equality there could be no exchange, without commensurability there could be no equality. Strictly speaking no doubt things so widely different can never become commensurable. Still in demand we have a common measure which will be found to work pretty well. Some one standard there must be, and it must be accepted by a general agreement or understanding. Such a standard has the effect of making all things commensurable, since they all can be measured by money." (Book five, Chapter Five, translated by J.A.K. Thomson.)</blockquote>
This passage follows reflections on the requirements for exchanges "according to the right proportion", where Aristotle points out, among other things, that there's no point in trading the same types of things for each other ("Two doctors cannot associate for the purpose of exchanging what they have to give, but a doctor and a farmer can..."). We trade precisely because means and wants <i>differ</i>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Where there is not an original equality between them it has to be created. This implies that all products exchanged must somehow be commensurable."</blockquote>
He reasons that money mediates this process, but that the "one standard by which all commodities are to be measured" is <i>demand</i>.<br />
<br />
Aristotle's point is, of course, not one about cognitive processing. That said, it's not hard to see how one could use his reflections as a template for an argument about the processes of choosing between different goods.<br />
<br />
If there's a historically older statement of an argument for a common currency I'd be very interested to hear about it.<br />
<br />
<br />Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-13277759451069531672013-08-08T03:42:00.001-07:002013-08-08T03:42:22.148-07:00Not dead, just workingI know this blog has been mighty quiet lately. But the project <i>hasn't</i>. In fact, I've been rather busy:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>I traveled to Australia in July to present an updated version of<a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/04/intragenomic-conflict-and-common.html" target="_blank"> Intragenomic Conflict and Common Currencies</a> at the AAP in Brisbane. I learned a lot at the conference, and received some useful comments and questions about the paper at the presentation itself. I'm busy reworking the presentation and the paper. I've also got hold of a collection of papers about intragenomic conflict by David Haig to work through. I'll be making additional presentations in August and September here in South Africa, and hope to have a draft that I can circulate by some time in October.</li>
<li>I've been developing a talk on 'Sacred' values and common currencies, that is occasioned by the recent wave of empirical research on the topic, including the Berns et al. paper '<a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-price-of-your-soul-neural-evidence.html" target="_blank">The Price of Your Soul</a>' which I posted a notice of back in May. I'm presenting talks on that topic a few times through August, and then once in September.</li>
<li>I've done some preliminary work on a paper engaging with Kim Sterelny's treatment of preference in his <i>Thought in a Hostile World</i>. If I make enough headway, I'll present that at a conference in South Africa near the end of September.</li>
</ul>
So before too long I'll be able to post some updated presentation slides, some new slides, and some brief comments on key research papers.Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-12018885693523223462013-05-31T00:16:00.001-07:002013-05-31T00:16:32.069-07:00Brief Notices 3<span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;">There's a fair-sized philosophical literature on the possibility of incommensurable values. According to some accounts of what it would mean for a value to be incommensurable, such values would represent a failure of a common currency.</span><br />
<span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;">Joseph Raz, for example, says two values (or bearers of value) are incommensurable if it is false that “either one is better than the other or they are of equal value” (Raz, 1986, <i>The Morality of Freedom</i>, p. 342).</span><br />
<span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;">I'm not - for now - taking a position on whether there are indeed incommensurable values. It's just useful, either way, to have some philosophical work clarifying what it might mean for values to be incommensurable at all, and considering some arguments against and in favour of the possibility. I'll say more about some of the arguments in the future.</span><br />
<span style="color: #444444; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you want to look at a clear overview of the issues, then<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><a href="http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/hsieh.cfm" style="line-height: 22px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none;" target="other">Nien-hê Hsieh</a> has wri</span>tten an entry on <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/value-incommensurable/">Incommensurable Values</a> for the <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</a>.</span>Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-14469951244018363632013-05-29T08:26:00.001-07:002013-05-29T09:10:18.826-07:00The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values<span style="float: left; padding: 5px;"><a href="http://www.researchblogging.org/"><img alt="ResearchBlogging.org" src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png" style="border: 0;" /></a></span>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One common way that people </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">reject</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> the claim that there is a common currency in which all
available options are represented is by raising the possibility that some
options are ‘incommensurable’. For two things to be incommensurable in general
means that there isn’t some standard of comparison which applies to both of
them. So the relevance of such claims to the common currency thesis is pretty
direct.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-GB">Barry Schwartz, for example, holds that
“some sets of commodities are simply incomparable or incommensurable” (Schwartz
1986, p154). Schwartz has in mind, among other things, comparisons of outcomes
we would regard as morally significant, such as charitable giving, and cases of
more ordinary consumption.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps the most common context in which people will
claim that some option (or type of option) is incommensurable in this way is
with reference to options that are moral, or purportedly sacred. (The two are
often supposed to coincide, so a moral view about the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">value </i>of life might well be expressed as a claim about the '<i>sanctity'</i> of life.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is clear enough what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">vague</i> idea is being expressed here. We might reasonably and calmly
suppose that there is some definite number of milkshakes that I would have to
be given in order to forgo a piece of cake. But most people actively resent the
suggestion that there is any answer to the question how many milkshakes you’d
need to give them before they sell one of their children. (And they resent both
the suggestion that there <i>is</i> a definite answer, as well as the attempt to get them to reveal their price.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The vague idea, then, is this: Some values are of different <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kinds</i>, and they don’t even
have ‘prices’ in more mundane things people might want. It is, furthermore,
somehow wrong - not merely <i>incorrect</i> - to suppose anything else.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If something like this is true, then there <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">isn’t a single common currency</i>. There
might be two currencies – one with conventional consumption goods on it, and another with
moral values. There’s reason to doubt that such a picture is actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">coherent</i>, or at least that it could be
worked out in detail coherently, which is why I say that the idea is vague,
even if it is clear what it is. (I’ll pick up this point in a future posting on
the generic ‘anti dualist’ argument.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One point to make here is, of course, that talk is
cheap. People routinely avow their commitment to standards of conduct of which
in practice they fall well short. (The majority of sworn undertakings of
fidelity in the course of marriage ceremonies are probably entirely sincere at the time.)
So the mere fact that many people (at least) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">assert</i> that they have values that are unconditional or have no pragmatic price does not
establish that anyone does.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That said, there are certainly many <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">prima facie </i>credible examples of people
who seem to place some value or other far beyond other considerations and
temptations, and upheld these values in the face of death, or under torture, etc. We <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">could</i> perhaps say
that these people were never offered a great enough temptation, and suppose that if they had
been then their allegedly unconditional values would have gone the way of many
marriage vows. But we'd be speculating, and it would be fairer to admit the behavioural evidence, in
at least many cases, just doesn’t settle the question either way.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It would be good to have some evidence of different
kinds, including evidence about what is going on ‘under the hood’, which is to say in the brains of people purportedly responsive to values of different kinds, including putatively 'sacred' ones.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A recent paper in <a href="http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/" target="_blank">Philosophical Transactions of TheRoyal Society B</a> offers just that. It’s by a set of collaborators headed by Gregory S. Berns,
and purports to show ‘neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of
sacred values’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Here’s
what they did</span></span></b></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Subjects (32 in scanner, and an additional 11 outside
the scanner) participated in an experiment separated into <b>four</b> phases, with neural (fMRI) data acquired in all stages:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In phase <b>one</b>, “participants were presented with value
statements phrased in the second person, one at a time.” In this stage participants
made no choices.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There were 62 pairs of statements including ones about
mundane preferences (‘You are a Coke drinker’) and ones about what Berns et al
call ‘sacred’ matters (‘You believe that all Jews should have been killed in
WWII’).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In phase <b>two</b> “complementary statements were presented
together, and for each pair, the participant had to choose one of the
statements.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In phase <b>three</b>, participants were asked hypothetically
if there was a dollar amount that they would accept in order to reverse their
choices from phase two.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The <b>fourth</b> phase was an auction about which subjects
had not been told in the briefing for the preceding phases. (So that expectations about the auction did not influence earlier choices.) Here subjects “were
given the opportunity to sell their answers from the active phase for real
money.” (The ‘active’ phase is phase <b>two</b>.) Selling an answer meant signing a
statement disavowing the original answer. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">This phase used a Becker–DeGroot–Marshak (BDM) auction
mechanism, with bids ranging from $1 to $100.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A <b>follow-up survey</b> between 6 and 14 months after the
experimental session (without scanning) attempted to assess the <i>stability</i> in people’s answers (in phase <b>two</b>), and
to ask for a rationale for each answer, where the three options were: “<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">(i) right and wrong; (ii) costs and benefits;
and (iii) neither.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In addition to this, an on-line survey with 334
subjects was used to validate aspects of the design, especially the classification of statements.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Here’s
what they found</span></span></b></h3>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">First, the ‘sacred’ values were put up for sale
(hypothetically and actually) far less frequently than the mundane ones. See
figure 1 (from the paper). The inset bar graph shows fraction of responses sold
as a function of being deontic (identified as based on ‘right/wrong’),
utilitarian (‘cost/benefit’) or neither, and shows that there was a much higher opt out (don't sell) rate for statements classified as 'deontic'.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-liGXOQWQQuI/UaYYYbXUbnI/AAAAAAAABMI/c3eYUXBp7o4/s1600/Berns+figure+1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-liGXOQWQQuI/UaYYYbXUbnI/AAAAAAAABMI/c3eYUXBp7o4/s1600/Berns+figure+1.png" height="270" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Figure 1 of the paper.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Second, there seems to be a different neural division
of labour for statements about right and wrong, and statements that about more
mundane preferences. In the paper this is expressed as a distinction between
‘deontic processing’ and ‘utilitarian processing’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The main evidence for this claim is a fairly rich set
of comparisons where the ways subjects <i>explained</i> their choices (right/wrong vs.
cost/benefit), their <i>actual</i> choices, as well as what they <i>hypothetically</i>
said they might disavow for money, and what they were <i>actually</i> prepared to
disavow for how much money, were all used in different ways to partition the neural data, which
was then examined for contrasts. A number of possible confounds were identified,
and attempts made to control for them. You should read the paper for the
details.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The simple bottom line from the neural analysis is, as
the authors put it in the first paragraph of their <b>discussion</b>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #444444;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“These results provide
strong evidence that when individuals naturally process statements about sacred
values, they use neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs
(TPJ) and semantic rule retrieval (VLPFC) but not systems associated with utility.
The involvement of the TPJ is consistent with the conjecture that moral
sentiments exist as context independent knowledge in temporal cortex. Both the
left and right TPJ have been associated with belief attribution during moral
judgements of third parties. Our results show that it is also involved in the
evaluation of personal sacred values without decision constraints. Thus, one
explanation for the reduction in morally prohibited judgements when the TPJ is
disrupted by transcranial magnetic stimulation is because disruption impairs
access to personal deontic knowledge.” [</span></span>TPJ = left temporoparietal junction; VLPFC = ventrolateral prefrontal cortex.]</span></blockquote>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Here’s
what I think</span></span></b></h3>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This post is a bit long already, so I’ll be brief for
now. (I plan to write about some related papers on the ‘sacred values’ topic in
the future.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(1) Before I say anything critical, let me say that I
think this is a good and valuable paper, that helps open up a really worthwhile line of
enquiry. One way to deal with a problem of underdetermination (in this case the
problem that we can’t tell from <i>behavior</i> whether people really have any
unconditional values) is to get different kinds of data, that can help
constrain how we interpret the data we do have.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">That general methodological principle informs many
design decisions in this paper, where a mixture of passive, active, and self-report
tasks are related with behavioural measures of varying kind (hypothetical
avowals, and real bids at auction) and all correlated with neural data. My
brief overview attempts to describe the gist, but the details are well worth
working through.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(2) That said, I find some of the ways claims are
expressed in the paper unfortunate. Utilitarianism is a theory – or a family of
theories – about right and wrong, and so supposing a dichotomy between
utilitarian and right/wrong <i>processing</i> seems confused. In addition,
deontological and consequentialist theories are not primarily <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">descriptive</i> theories about how people
think, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">normative</i> ones about how
they should behave. Both types of theory are clearly committed to some views
about how it might be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">possible</i> for
people to act in accordance with those theories, but they are not about
cognitive processes. Most of the formulations of claims about ‘deontic’ and
‘utilitarian’ processing in the paper can be taken as elliptical for more
careful statements that aren’t overtly problematic. But it’s still annoying to
see the terminology used so loosely, and also to see worked out and <i>appropriate</i> distinctions
(such as the notion of 'lexical preferences') not being deployed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">(3) Competing values need to … well … <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">compete</i>. It’s all very well suggesting
that some values are unconditional, but if they motivate action then it seems as though they need to show up in the same place other motivations do, and come with some motivational 'force' that is alike in <i>kind</i> even if different in <i>degree </i>from<i> </i>whatever temptations bring with them. Reason, Hume said, must be the slave of the passions. The sacred, we might analogously say, must do so too, if it wants to be motivating.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/03/important-sources-george-ainslie.html" target="_blank">George Ainslie</a> quotes the same claim about incommensurability from Barry Schwartz that I quote above, and goes on to say:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">But if behaviors are not selected according to a
single standard of choosability, the standard summarized by the term “reward”
[…], how are they selected? The organism’s means for expression are limited. A
single channel of attention, if not a single set of muscles, is needed for the
variety of behaviors that physically can be substituted for one another.
Assuming that the selection of these behaviors is determinate, there must be a
means of comparing them along a common dimension (Ainslie 1992, 31).</span></blockquote>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: inherit;">I'm not saying that there is a decisive and general argument in favour of a common currency that automatically applies to putatively sacred values. (I don't think there is a general argument in favour of a common currency, but - in case you were wondering - that it's a contingent fact that humans approximately have one some of the time.) My point is simply that there is an argument worth taking seriously here, and that it would be welcome to see those discussing sacred values taking it more seriously.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Cambria;">(As a last note on this point, there's growing evidence that choices across a wide range of different modalities have a common neural value representation in humans. For more, see immediately below.)</span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(4) Here are some experiments that I’d like to see in the future (and may well be in the
pipeline)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(a) What happens when ‘sacred’ values are in conflict
with each other? People manifestly do end up in this condition. On the one hand
it is the basis of some of our most compelling literature (consider Antigone’s
position, between sacred duty to her dead brother </span><span style="background: white; color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Polyneices</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> and similarly sacred duty to obey <span style="background: white; color: black;">Creon,</span> the king of Thebes</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">). On
the other, we have various kinds of trained specialist, such as triage nurses,
whose job requires trading off competing moral (maybe 'sacred') values.</span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(b) What neuroeconomic sense can be made of this data,
or the same phenomene in a more specifically neuroeconomic setting? </span></span>It would be very interesting to know more about how conflict between ‘sacred’ values is neurally represented. And also to know<span style="font-family: inherit;"> how (if at all) are values associated with ‘sacred’ options are represented in
relation to the long and growing list of rewards in various modalities that do
seem to have a common basis for representation. </span><span style="font-family: Cambria;">See this (soon to be expanded) </span><a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/03/neural-processing-of-rewards-in.html" style="font-family: Cambria;" target="_blank">evidence rack</a><span style="font-family: Cambria;">.</span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>That’s all I’ve got time for now.</i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Full text of the abstract of the paper:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sacred values, such as those associated with religious
or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in
life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade off their sacred values
in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred
values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespective of outcomes, while
utilitarian theory suggests that they are processed based on costs and benefits
of potential outcomes, but which mode of processing an individual naturally
uses is unknown. The study of decisions over sacred values is difficult because
outcomes cannot typically be realized in a laboratory, and hence little is
known about the neural representation and processing of sacred values. We used
an experimental paradigm that used integrity as a proxy for sacredness and
which paid real money to induce individuals to sell their personal values.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that values that people
refused to sell (sacred values) were associated with increased activity in the
left temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions
previously associated with semantic rule retrieval. This suggests that sacred
values affect behaviour through the retrieval and processing of deontic rules
and not through a utilitarian evaluation of costs and benefits.</span></span></blockquote>
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<h4>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Related posts (some forthcoming)</span></span></h4>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The generic ‘anti-dualist’ argument<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/03/important-sources-george-ainslie.html">Important sources: George Ainslie</a></span></o:p></span><br />
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></div>
<h4>
<span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">References</span></span></h4>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Ainslie, G. 1992. </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">Picoeconomics</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Schwartz, B. 1986. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "\}yı\0027C8ˇø»Øœ";">The Battle for Human Nature: Science, Morality and<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "\}yı\0027C8ˇø»Øœ";">Modern
Life</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "\}yı\0027C8ˇø»Øœ";">. </span></span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-family: inherit;">New York: Norton.</span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span class="Z3988" title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Ajournal&rft.jtitle=Philosophical+Transactions+of+the+Royal+Society+B%3A+Biological+Sciences&rft_id=info%3Adoi%2F10.1098%2Frstb.2011.0262&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fresearchblogging.org&rft.atitle=The+price+of+your+soul%3A+neural+evidence+for+the+non-utilitarian+representation+of+sacred+values&rft.issn=0962-8436&rft.date=2012&rft.volume=367&rft.issue=1589&rft.spage=754&rft.epage=762&rft.artnum=http%3A%2F%2Frstb.royalsocietypublishing.org%2Fcgi%2Fdoi%2F10.1098%2Frstb.2011.0262&rft.au=Berns%2C+G.&rft.au=Bell%2C+E.&rft.au=Capra%2C+C.&rft.au=Prietula%2C+M.&rft.au=Moore%2C+S.&rft.au=Anderson%2C+B.&rft.au=Ginges%2C+J.&rft.au=Atran%2C+S.&rfe_dat=bpr3.included=1;bpr3.tags=Psychology">Berns, G., Bell, E., Capra, C., Prietula, M., Moore, S., Anderson, B., Ginges, J., & Atran, S. (2012). The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values <span style="font-style: italic;">Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367</span> (1589), 754-762 DOI: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2011.0262" rev="review">10.1098/rstb.2011.0262</a></span>Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-13979280235486416322013-05-21T23:36:00.004-07:002013-05-27T12:28:51.427-07:00Brief Notices 2<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here are two passing mentions of a 'common currency' in slightly unusual settings:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<h3>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090213114154.htm" target="_blank">Carotenoids Are Cornerstone Of Bird's Vitality</a></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
This piece reports on research suggesting that carotenoids don't merely contribute to the bright pigments that play a role in sexual selection in some birds, but also play a role in colour perception, and have other nutritional benefits. One of the researchers describes the emerging view as follows:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />"We are proposing a positive fitness feedback loop for these 'self-loving molecules,' given how high carotenoid accumulation can improve one's state and one's interest in selecting carotenoid richness in mates and food. This provides a window into how major sexual selection models, such as sensory biases and assortative mating, may be explained by a common, nutritional and narcissistic currency".</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now this doesn't sound like a common currency in the full sense that I'm interested in it, but presumably the claim made is still </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">relevant</i><span style="font-family: inherit;">: the net benefit (nutritional and narcissistic) of carotenoids is suppose to be a component of the fitness value, which in turn is one of the things that many behavioural ecologists take to determine a common currency that it is part of the job of scientists to describe. So some parts of a full 'currency for fitness' might map onto the factors described here.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<h3>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;"><a href="http://trenchesofdiscovery.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/the-human-machine-probing-mechanics.html" target="_blank">The human machine: probing the mechanics</a></span></h3>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is a cool notice of some recent work on cellular energy metabolism, and in particular conversion of electron to proton currents. I don't know enough molecular biology to give much of a gloss of the content, but it's a lively and interesting read. It also refers to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_triphosphate" target="_blank">Adenosine triphosphate</a> (</span>ATP) as "the single energy currency of the cell".<br />
<br />
This might seem like an irrelevant use of the same term ('currency') but there's reason not to rush to this conclusion. But as I noted <a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/05/things-that-get-suggested-as-common.html">elsewhere on this blog</a>, "Since any behavior has some energy cost (or gain), and any allocation of metabolic resources has an opportunity cost (in actions rendered unavailable, or made possible) it’s plausible to think that in a highly aggregated way, ATP represents an important overall budgetary bottom line."<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;">You can get the actual article on the Nature website here (possibly behind a paywall): </span><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v494/n7438/full/nature11871.html" style="font-family: inherit;" target="_blank">Crystal structure of the entire respiratory complex I</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">.</span><br />
<br />Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-59398399211277092652013-05-20T06:19:00.000-07:002013-05-21T12:25:33.589-07:00What is to be done? Why reward is difficult to do without<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The text below is the un-edited preprint of a commentary I wrote on Andy Clark's 'Whatever Next? Predictive Brains, Situated Agents, and the Future of Cognitive Science' in <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=bbs" target="_blank">Behavioral and Brain Sciences</a>. The published version of Clark's paper, with commentaries and a response, is <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8918803" target="_blank">here</a> (probably behind a paywall.) Because behavioral and brain scientists were just falling over themselves to comment on Clark's target article, my commentary ended up appearing in <a href="http://www.frontiersin.org/Theoretical_and_Philosophical_Psychology" target="_blank">Frontiers in Philosophical and Theoretical Psychology</a>. That journal is open access, and so you can read the final version of my commentary at <a href="http://www.frontiersin.org/Theoretical_and_Philosophical_Psychology/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00412/full" target="_blank">this link</a>. You can read Clark's response to all of the commentaries at <a href="http://www.frontiersin.org/Theoretical_and_Philosophical_Psychology/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00270/abstract" target="_blank">this link</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I've included the preprint text on this blog because it's one of the recent pieces in which I've directly argued for a thesis that has something to do with common currencies.</span></div>
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<h3>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Commentary text</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Clark’s
synthesis of much recent work on sensory and motor systems in the brain is at
once radical and curiously traditional. It is radical, among other things, concerning
what representations are, how they are constructed, and what sensory and motor
representations have in common. But it is traditionally cognitivist in viewing
the main task of brains as being that of representing the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What this
traditional orientation tends to neglect is the role of the brain as a system
for selecting among available actions. This phenomenon has an ultimate aspect
regarding the external standards relevant to assessing actions. Various behavioral
ecological schemes for ranking actions in terms of their contribution to quantities
such as fitness, and economic models of revealed preference, are the leading
theoretical players here. The phenomenon also has a proximal aspect, which
concerns the specific biological mechanisms, including neural ones, by means of
which the values of different available actions might be represented, and
selections between them made. On this topic the recent explosion of neuroeconomic
research on decision processes in the brain is urgently relevant.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Natural agents
have limited means of action, and those means have alternative – sometimes
mutually exclusive – uses. That is to say the <i>predicament</i> of natural agents is fundamentally an economic one,
even if it is not necessary that selection converge on a system for responding
to the predicament in which economic variables are explicitly represented.
Furthermore there is considerable evidence from behavioural ecology and other
fields that many vertebrate behaviours in natural settings are economically
efficient.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Neither the
ultimate nor the proximal aspects of the problem of selecting between
behaviours play a significant role in Clark’s account. Natural selection,
fitness and biological descendents are not mentioned at all, and cognate
concepts like adaptiveness feature in diluted form. There’s similarly little
mention of decision and choice as theoretically understood in economics
including neuroeconomics, none of incentives, and reward and utility appear
only in the course of musing over whether it’s possible that cognitive
neuroscience could do without reference to either (section 5.1). Clark does
make some important points about action-centric <i>representations</i>, but even here does not consider the problem of
action <i>selection</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Of course, no
survey can cover anything that anyone thinks is relevant, and it’s very easy to
complain about things that are left out. Clark’s lack of engagement with
neuroeconomics means missing a specific opportunity to make his general case
even more compelling, because what is emerging in that field complements his
case about sensory and motor systems in deep ways. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In his section
(3.2) Clark apparently takes seriously the concern that an agent with the sort
of brain that he’s been describing would be expected to ‘seek a nice dark room
and stay in it’. Clark disposes of the worry by pointing out that creatures
with real biological needs should ‘expect’ to follow exploratory strategies,
and that these expectations themselves should recruit both perception and
action. This is part of a reasonable and interesting response, but action
selection under those conditions (as with most others) would still require some
way of dealing with specific questions, such as where and how to forage, and
how to trade off foraging with other expected behaviours such as predator
avoidance and reproduction.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A related move
appears later, in section (5.1) when he considers an austere vision of cognition
that does without reference to goals and rewards, in favour of comprehensive
analysis in terms of expectations. Clark correctly holds back from endorsing
this possibility, but for relatively generic reasons to the effect that even if
some description is in principle replaceable, it may be convenient to continue
using it. This misses the main chance. Recent work on the neural implementation
of decision in various vertebrates including humans has produced a body of
results highly congenial to the unifying vision Clark supports.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Consider
saccadic movements in rhesus monkeys. A key component in the neural
implementation of these movements is the lateral intraparietal area (LIP),
which comprises a topographic map integrating locations in the visual field and
aspects of the muscular plans that would effect the centering of gaze on those
locations. It, along with a network of other maps with varying topographies in
the frontal eye fields, superior colliculus and related areas, provides a
striking illustration of what Clark calls an ‘action-centric’ representation.
In addition, as studies including Platt & Glimcher (1999) and Dorris &
Glimcher (2004) have shown, some activity in LIP neurons of rhesus monkeys on <i>visually identical</i> trials varies in
precise ways with the relative expected rewards (or relative subjective value)
from saccades to the represented location. These representations are not merely
‘action-centric’ insofar as they combine answers to the questions ‘where is
it?’ with ‘how do I gaze at it?’ They also include identifiable activity
corresponding to the answer to ‘what’s it probably worth for me to look at it?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s more.
The expected relative reward values attached to saccadic and other movements
are not <i>sui generis</i>. They’re
predictions, and ones that get updated in the light of ongoing experience.
Among the key findings on this topic is that dopamine neurons do not – as
previously supposed – directly encode hedonic value (because if they did they
would respond in the same to expected and unexpected rewards of equivalent
hedonic worth). Rather it turns out that they encode some aspects of the <i>difference</i> between experienced and
expected reward (Montague et al 1997, see also Bayer & Glimcher 2005). While
many details about the operation of this system, and its interaction with other
neural systems, have yet to be determined, it is nonetheless clear that crucial
features of the neural systems for attaching values to sensory events and
actions operate by means of prediction error. In this respect they suggest a
way of expanding the scope of Clark’s claim about the importance of minimizing
prediction error as a general goal of neural systems.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: inherit;">References<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Bayer, H.M.
and Glimcher, P.W. (2005). Midbrain dopamine neurons encode a quantitative
reward prediction error signal. <i>Neuron</i>
47, 1 – 13.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Dorris, M.C. and Glimcher, P.W. (2004). Activity in posterior parietal cortex
is correlated with the subjective desirability of an action. <i>Neuron</i> 44, 365 – 378.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Montague , P.R., Dayan , P., and Sejnowski, T.J. (1997). A framework for
mesencephalic dopamine systems based on predictive Hebbian learning. <i>J. Neurosci</i>. 16, 1936 – 1947.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
Platt, M.L. and Glimcher, P.W. (1999). Neural correlates of decision variables
in parietal cortex. <i>Nature</i> 400, 233 –
238.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />
Version notes:<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">First posted May 20, 2013. Link to Clark's reply to commentaries added May 21, 2013.</span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7612775512249380628.post-9948616286493479002013-05-20T05:59:00.000-07:002013-05-20T07:51:58.616-07:00Things that get suggested as common currencies<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the
things that makes the common currency topic <i>interesting</i>, is the variety of
candidate currencies that get suggested.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here is a
list, that I’ll add to and flesh out periodically, of things that have been
proposed as currencies:</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<h3>
<b><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Utility</span></span></b></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In one of the
economists’ technical senses, utility is not a psychological notion, but refers
to whatever an agents behaviour tends to make more probable, as revealed in the
pattern of behaviour itself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">An ‘agent’
on this view is anything whose activity reveals a consistent set of
preferences, although additional assumptions can be introduced so that
apparently inconsistent entities still turn out to be agents.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A
consistent set of preferences revealed by an agent, represents the common
currency of that agent. (Any two options will stand in <i>some</i> relation of
relative preferability.)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are
other technical notions of utility (for example from behavioural economics) that I’ll list here in the future.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
<h3>
<b><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Reward/reinforcement</span></span></b></h3>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is reinforcement in the
behavioural psychologists' sense, where a reinforcer is something that changes
the rate at which a behaviour is emitted. (In proper terminology it is </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">behaviours </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">that are reinforced, while </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">agents </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">are rewarded.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So the
various reinforcement values of all things that are reinforcing will also
define a common currency, representing the effectiveness of all the incentives
to which an agent is responsive.</span></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>An exemplary statement of the argument for a common currency in this setting is the following:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"In natural settings, the goals competing for
behavior are complex, multidimensional objects and outcomes. Yet, for orderly
choice to be possible, the utility of all competing resources must be represented
on a single, common dimension" (Shizgal & Conover 1996).</blockquote>
<!--EndFragment--></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There's a discussion of Shizgal and Conover's paper <a href="http://commoncurrencies.blogspot.com/2013/05/shizgal-and-conovers-orderly-choice.html">here</a>.</span></span><span lang="EN-GB"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><!--StartFragment--></span><br />
<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<h3>
<span lang="EN-GB">Pain and Pleasure</span></h3>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><o:p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uh4P_bJAjrQ/UZob3hZBt0I/AAAAAAAABK8/93nNlfc7oz0/s1600/PainPleasure_300X454.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uh4P_bJAjrQ/UZob3hZBt0I/AAAAAAAABK8/93nNlfc7oz0/s1600/PainPleasure_300X454.jpg" height="320" width="211" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I have not read <a href="http://www.cobblestone-press.com/catalog/books/painandpleasure.htm" target="_blank">this book</a>.</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-GB">According to Bentham pain and pleasure were the “two
sovereign masters” which both explained human action, and enabled good and bad
consequences of actions to be identified. Contemporary economics and
behavioural psychology make considerably less reference to pleasure and pain
than a Benthamite might have expected. Instead they focus on largely
behavioural notions of utility and reward. Among those whose primary interest
is pleasure and pain, one still finds suggestions that these constitute a
‘common currency’:</span></div>
<span lang="EN-GB">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Consistent
with the idea that a common currency of emotion enables the comparison of pain
and pleasure in the brain, the evidence reviewed here points to there being
extensive overlap in the neural circuitry and chemistry of pain and pleasure
processing at the systems level.” (Leknes & Tracey, 2008, p314).</blockquote>
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<h3>
<b><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Fitness</span></span></b></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Fitness is
(roughly and informally) relative propensity to have descendants. It is
relative to competing variants in a population, and so typically defined by
reference to genotypes.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If we focus
specifically on the contribution to fitness of the behaviour of an individual,
then we might go on to think that the contribution of individual behaviours (or
behavioural dispositions) might be ordered with respect to how much the add or,
or undermine, total fitness. Something along these lines is one goals of at
least some behavioural ecologists:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“Any attempt to understand behavior in terms of the evolutionary
advantage that it might confer has to find a "common currency" for
comparing the costs and benefits of various alternative courses of action”
(McNamara and Houston 1986: 358).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h3>
<b><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">ATP</span></span></b></h3>
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ATP is the standard abbreviation for Adenosine triphosphate. It’s the molecule used to transport energy in cells. It might seem like an odd thing to have on this list, although it is common to hear it referred to as the ‘energy currency’ of intracellular processes. Since any behavior has some energy cost (or gain), and any allocation of metabolic resources has an opportunity cost (in actions rendered unavailable, or made possible) it’s plausible to think that in a highly aggregated way, ATP represents an important overall budgetary bottom line.</div>
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Quite how to relate this to some of the other proposed currencies is another matter.</div>
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<h4>
<b><span lang="EN-GB"><span style="font-family: inherit;">References</span></span></b></h4>
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<br />
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Leknes, S. and Tracey, I. (2008) A common neurobiology for pain and pleasure, <i>Nature reviews: Neuroscience</i>, 9, pp314-320. [<a href="http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v9/n4/abs/nrn2333.html" target="_blank">Publisher link</a>.] [<a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=A+common+neurobiology+for+pain+and+pleasure&rlz=1C5CHFA_enZA505ZA512&um=1&ie=UTF-8&lr=&cites=-3518246626318979439" target="_blank">Google scholar citations</a>.]</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">McNamara, J.M. and
Houston, A.I. (1986) The Common Currency for Behavioral Decisions, <i>The American Naturalist</i>, 127(3),
pp358-378. [<a href="http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2461405?uid=3739368&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102027151863" target="_blank">Publisher link</a>.] [<a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1891213710668609287&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en" target="_blank">Google scholar citations</a>.]</span><span lang="EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US">Shizgal, P. & Conover, K. 1998. </span><span lang="EN-US">On the neural computation of utility</span><span lang="EN-US">,<i> Current Directions in Psychological Science</i>, 5(2)<b>,</b> pp. 37-43. [<a href="http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/5/2/37.extract" target="_blank">Publisher’s site –may be behind a paywall</a>] [<a href="http://cogprints.org/58/1/CD_V51_eprint.htm" target="_blank">Preprint version at CogPrints</a>]</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"> [<a href="http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=776631822945482028&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&ei=AWo4UYb5IsGl0AXczoGQCA&ved=0CDAQzgIwAA" target="_blank">Google Scholar Citations</a>]</span></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Doctor Spurthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16403355179680558182noreply@blogger.com0