Vehicularization & Ring-Form: Remarks on some issues raised at #HEX01

Edit 11.16.17: I've added some new material to the section on ontological mismatch. I've marked it by highlighting it.

I enjoyed presenting to HEX01: First Workshop on the History of Expressive Systems. I wish I’d had more time (don’t we all?), I wish I’d been there in person to talk with people and play with the exhibits. We do what we can.

I’ve been thinking about these issues for years. And will continue doing so. Indeed, between the time I submitted a draft paper (Abstract Patterns in Stories: From the intellectual legacy of David G. Hays)...

Paper at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/34975666/Abstract_Patterns_in_Stories_From_the_intellectual_legacy_of_David_G._Hays

And the time I put the last touches on the PowerPoint I used for the talk ...

PPT at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/35142428/Abstract_Patterns_in_Stories_From_the_intellectual_legacy_of_David_G._Hays

I had a few ideas that pushed the work forward here and there. I continue the push in these notes, which are rather informal. I’m just trying to get the ideas down on (virtual) paper.

Of course, the workshop was about history, so what was I doing presenting new ideas? Continuing the history. Oh yes, I presented some history, the computational ideas worked out by David Hays and his students in the mid-1970s, and how I, a student of literature, came to them. But streams of intellectual development don’t stop just because they’re always disappearing into the past.

More importantly, things change, deeply. I went into the 1970s with one set of ideas – call it paradigm in Kuhn’s sense, an épistème in Foucault’s – which I used to think about how language and literature work. I encountered a very specific issue (problematic?) within that paradigm, the structure of “Kubla Khan”, and my efforts to deal with that issue forced me to think in terms outside that paradigm, to start cobbling together a new paradigm (if I may). Am I there yet? Who knows?

That’s what I address in the first of these notes, about ontological mismatch in our thinking. Then I take a look at the triune model of the brain, as Hays and I recast it in terms of control hierarchy. I then use that recasting to think about ring-form in King Kong. I conclude with some remarks about Heart of Darkness.

A half-century of ontological mismatch (beyond the singularity)

I mean ontology in the sense it has come to have in computer and cognitive science, the organization of different types of objects in some domain. Prior to my work on “Kubla Khan” [1] I had internalized a certain ontology for dealing with literary phenomena. But the moment I decided to interpret line-end punctuation like parentheses, brackets, and braces in a mathematical expression (or like nested parentheses in a LISP expression) I moved out of that ontology and into a different one. It’s worth noting that, when I made that decision, I specifically thought about the computer programming course I had taken, and how, in THAT world, if you place a comma where a colon is expected, it won’t work.

The problem, then, is how to think about literary texts in a world where LISP expressions are ‘native’ objects.

Of course, we–me, my teachers, others–didn’t realize that that’s what had happened. (Of course, we didn’t think in terms of conceptual ontologies at all.) We just thought I was doing something strange and interesting within the existing (or perhaps emerging) ontology. The same with my 1976 paper on Sonnet 129 [2]. To be sure, it looked very different from every other article in the special issue of MLN. It had all those diagrams, while the other papers had no diagrams at all.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that, when I did that work on “Kubla Khan”, I had irreversibly left the conceptual world of academic literary criticism. “Irreversible” because I can’t go back, though I can do good imitations.

Contemporary work in computational criticism presents the same problem. The desire to call it “distant reading” reflects a commitment to the standard ontology, an ontology is which the text is only incidentally marks on paper. In the standard ontology the text is, well, that’s hard to say. It’s that thing that you read, it’s somehow tethered to those marks on the page, but it’s more than those marks.

Well of course its more than those marks, but I can’t think of a better way to characterize that “more” than to think of it as come kind of computational process. And that’s what computational critics are scrupulously avoiding. On the one hand thinking of the mind as somehow fundamentally computational is of little practical value in their computational work. But also, they need to deflect the criticism of their more traditional colleagues who are wont to think of the notion of the mind as computational as, you know, the work of the devil.

Yet, in their own work, computational critics are working within an ontology in which the text is just marks on paper. The (miraculous? not really, but very artful (rare device)) craft in computational criticism is to analyze massive collections of such (mere) marks in a way that reveals the traces of mind, thousands and tens of thousands of minds reading. Think of it, from mere marks to the mind. That’s what computational criticism allows.

THAT ontology is different from, incommensurate with, the ontology of ordinary lit crit. There’s a deep tension that that is being glossed over. On the one hand, computational critics call it “deep reading” and note that, no, it’s not in competition with “close reading”. They’re complementary activities, complementary perhaps, but not ontologically compatible. On the other hand, traditional critics see “computer” and give a shudder–“There be dragons! Weave a circle around them thrice, and then lock ‘em up and throw away the key!” It’s not that bad; really, it isn’t. 

But still, THAT conversation has no happy ending. But no one’s dealing with that ontological gap. It can’t be bridged. Rather, it signals a need to rethink the discipline from top to bottom.

Which brings us to The Singularity. I figure that dreams and/or nightmares of the day when computers will become super-intelligent, those fantasies are rooted in a 19th century worldview. As such there’s an ontological mismatch between them and computing technology.

More later.

Body and Spirit: A Story of Fathers and Sons

David Hays and I talked of many things, not all of them intellectually serious. But intellectual seriousness was at the heart of conversations between us. Discussing intellectual matters with Dave had been a part of my weekly routine since graduate school. I want to share with you an almost-idea I had wanted to discuss with Dave at about the time he went into surgery, the surgery from which he never recovered.

This idea originated in introspection, as did many of the ideas we discussed. I had wanted to discuss it with Dave, first on general principle, but second because it seemed to have some relevance to a question he had pondered for a decade or more:

How is it that seeing ballet well-performed can have such a favorable effect on a person?

One could, of course, abstract from this question a more general one about the psychological effects of aesthetic experience. It would not be unfair to say that it is this more general question that “really” interested us. However, neither of us could see any way of getting to that more general question without analyzing particular kinds of aesthetic experience. Dave was drawn to the ballet while I was more drawn to literature and music.

The line I wanted to take up with Dave was prompted by the experience I had in writing a piece called “Fore Play: A Lesson in Jivometric Drumology” (and republished at New Savanna) The piece was in the style of, say, John Barth meets Richard Pryor, or Jorge Borges meets Lord Buckley, and purported to be about how golf was created by the ancient Egyptians. It started out as a satire of then current Afrocentric scholarship demonstrating that the ancient Egyptians were black in skin and culture, that the ancient Greeks were heavily indebted to those Egyptians, and therefore that Civilization originated in Africa. I don't command the scholarly literature on this issue and don't much care about it one way or the other. But the thinkers advancing the case for a black Egypt have something more at stake than simply correcting the historical record.

And my response to that “something more at stake” was to create a historical fantasy in which black Egyptians are the creators of golf, a notion which is far afield from anything which is, so far as I know, being argued seriously. In this fantasy golf is the creation of one Pharaoh Ramses Golfotep MCXLVII of the `N Baa Dynasty. He was inspired in this endeavor by a trumpeter named Daniel Louis Satchotep II, also known as King Toot. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to ponder the implications of some autobiographical facts: my father was an excellent golfer; I never took up the game; but I’m a pretty good trumpet player.

Writing this piece on the Egyptian origins of golf had a very strong effect on me. It is a short piece which went through a series of revisions over the course of about a week. During that week I was often convulsed in laughter, even awakening in the middle of the night to think about this absurd story and to laugh.

That is not all.

Faculty Psychology: The Triple Soul

Theory of Mind 101: the triple soul

The ancient Greeks believed that humans had three souls, a rational soul, a sensitive soul, and a vegetative soul. Freud believed in Superego, Ego, and Id, also a trinity. We’ve got the Christian Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And, as I point out in an excerpt (below) from “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics”, other peoples have had similar triple conceptions of the mind.

Most recently Paul MacLean has given us a theory of the triune brain, in which a complex of neuro-functional structures of reptilian grade is embedded within one of paleomammalian grade which is in turn embedded within one of neomammalian grade [1]. MacLean’s account is about neurobiology while the others rest on somewhat different foundations. If MacLean is more or less correct – and this is by no means obvious, though I’m sympathetic to the idea – then one must ask: Are these other conceptions of mind rationalizations of the underlying neurobiology?

I don’t know.

A cognitive model of faculty psychology

It’s an issue I had to think about when, years ago, I developed a cognitive model for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. One of the things I had to do was develop a cognitive model of the Elizabethan account of the mind, which is derived from the ancient Greek version. Here’s that discussion, on pages 966 – 969 of “Cognitive Networks and Literary Semantics” [2]. It’ll be a bit obscure without the prior discussion, including some diagrams, but you should be able to get a feel for the argument. The complete discussion is online at [2].

* * * * *

The notion that man consists of three souls (or a single soul which is tripartite) and a body is deeply embedded in our own intellectual tradition. In Primitive Man the Philosopher (New York: Dover, 1957), Paul Radin has shown that the Oglala Sioux, the Masai, and the Batak of Sumatra also believe that man consists of three souls and a body (pp. 257-74). He goes on to suggest that such a belief may well be a cultural universal. It may or it may not be, but the fact that similar theories appear on four continents (North America, Europe, Africa, Asia) suggests that the task those theories perform, an account of human nature, is highly constrained.

I am presently entertaining the hypothesis that such a theory is an attempt by the cognitive network to explain the relationship between the SELF node and the rest of the nervous system. If one believes (and that is all it is, a matter of what one believes) the soul to be tripartite, then the SELF has two components, a body and a soul which is tripartite, with rational, sensitive, and vegetative sub- divisions. If one prefers to believe that one has three souls, then the SELF has three soul components and one body component, four components in sum.

The peripheral nervous system has two divisions, the somatic and the autonomic. The somatic system mediates voluntary control of the skeletal muscles and the activities of vision, hearing, touch, etc. The autonomic system regulates breathing, heart beat, digestion, the control of temperature, etc. Any episode which represents a transaction between the cognitive network and a sensorimotor schema whose intensities (first order input functions) are of soma- tic (perhaps just somatic motor) origin is cognized as being done by the body. The vegetative soul is cognized as the agent responsible for transactions between the network and sensorimotor schemas whose intensities are of autonomic origin. Episodes (which, you will recall, are conscious) in which one runs, jumps, spears hunks of meat, etc. are executed by the body. Episodes in which one feels hunger, lust, cold, thirst, etc. are cognized as being felt by the vegetative soul.

On the similarities between a kumquat and a MiG: ChatCPT chases analogies

We all know that not so long-ago Geoffrey “AI Godfather” Hinton went up on a mountain where he received a heavy granite tablet. As he was holding it a bolt of lightning struck the tablet, leaving the words “You Are Doomed” carved deeply into its surface. Hinton came down from the mountain, tablet in tow, quit his post at Google, and proceeded to warn the world about the dangers of Superintelligent AI.

In early October of last year he took part in a panel discussion about AI and creativity:

One of his reasons for believing in the impending superintelligence of AI has to do with reasoning by analogy. Starting at about 1:18:10:

GEOFFREY HINTON: Let me give you-- let me give you an example of something creative that GPT-4 can already do that most people can't do.

So we're still trapped in the idea of thinking that logical reasoning is the essence of intelligence when we know that being able to--

TOMASO POGGIO: --but some people.

GEOFFREY HINTON: Well--

TOMASO POGGIO: Yeah.

GEOFFREY HINTON: We know that being able to see analogies, especially remote analogies, is a very important aspect of intelligence. So I asked GPT-4, what has a compost heap got in common with an atom bomb? And GPT-4 nailed it, most people just say nothing.

DEMIS HASSABIS: What did it say? [LAUGHTER]

GEOFFREY HINTON: It started off by saying they're very different energy scales, so on the face of it, they look to be very different. But then it got into chain reactions and how the rate at which they're generating energy increases-- their energy increases the rate at which they generate energy. So it got the idea of a chain reaction. And the thing is, it knows about 10,000 times as much as a person, so it's going to be able to see all sorts of analogies that we can't see.

My initial reaction was: Very clever, very clever indeed! But then I thought, I’ll bet GPT-4 could explicate any analogy you ask it to. The cleverness is in picking the right analogy, not in justifying it. Justifying is easy; coming up with an analogy worth the effort of justification, that’s difficult. If GPT-4 knows 10,000 times as much as a person and it has all that compute, then maybe it can waste time far more extravagantly than any person can afford to. Whatever that is, it’s not intelligence.

So I decided to run a little experiment, not with GPT-4, but with plain old ChatGPT, aka the Chatster. I presented it with ten analogies I thought of rather quickly and asked it to explicate them. It did so, and rather impressively I might add. I then asked it to pick the best ones; it evaded the issue. Rather than trying to prompt it into submission I asked it to tell me which of those things was most like a kumquat. As the title of this post indicates, it choose the MiG, and offered an amusing bit of argumentation on the matter. Is that an example of intelligence creativity? How would GPT-4 respond to those prompts? With even more elaborate justifications? Would it have chosen the MiG as well.

And what about GPT-5? Even more extraneous extravagance? Or will it be clever enough to object, saying:

Those analogies are silly. Don’t waste my valuable time and your electricity. Come back when you have something more intelligent to offer.

That’s how I feel about Hinton’s ideas about creativity and human accomplishment. He may be a genius at coming up with neural network architectures, but his thinking about human creativity and intelligence seems to be the work of an overgrown college sophomore. And he’s not the only one.

You might not want to read the whole transcript. But you should at least look at the analogies I proposed, dip into some of Chatster’s explications, read his typically annoying evasion of my penultimate prompt and then, by all means, read his account of the similarities between a kumquat and a MiG. It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

ChatGPT explicates ten analogies

I am going to present you with a bunch of analogies and I want you to explain them. Some of them may same more plausible than others, but don’t let that bother. Just find analogous features.

Here’s the first one: A kitten and a bicycle.

Certainly! Let's explore the analogy between a kitten and a bicycle:

1. Learning Curve:
• Kitten: Like learning to ride a bicycle, a kitten goes through a learning curve as it develops coordination and balance skills. It starts by stumbling and gradually becomes more adept at moving around.
• Bicycle: When someone first learns to ride a bicycle, there is a learning curve in terms of balance and coordination. Over time, the rider becomes more skilled and comfortable.
2. Independence:
• Kitten: As a kitten grows, it becomes more independent, learning to explore its surroundings and perform activities on its own.
• Bicycle: Riding a bicycle grants a sense of independence, allowing the rider to travel to different places under their control.
3. Care and Maintenance:
• Kitten: Similar to a bicycle requiring maintenance, a kitten needs care, including feeding, grooming, and veterinary attention.
• Bicycle: Regular maintenance is essential for a bicycle to function smoothly. This involves checking and adjusting various components, such as the tires, brakes, and gears.
4. Playfulness:
• Kitten: Kittens are known for their playful nature, exploring their environment and engaging in playful activities.
• Bicycle: Riding a bicycle can be a form of recreation and play, especially for leisure rides or sports.
5. Adaptability:
• Kitten: Kittens can adapt to various environments and situations, showcasing their flexibility.
• Bicycle: Bicycles are versatile and can be adapted for different terrains or purposes, such as road cycling, mountain biking, or commuting.

While a kitten and a bicycle may seem quite different at first glance, there are interesting similarities when considering aspects like learning, independence, care, playfulness, and adaptability.

Zombie ideas alive and well in psychology

Lisa Feldman Barrett, Zombie Ideas, Observer,Ooctober 2019, (APS, Association for Psychological Science):

According to the economist Paul Krugman (2013), a zombie idea is a view that’s been thoroughly refuted by a mountain of empirical evidence but nonetheless refuses to die, being continually reanimated by our deeply held beliefs.

Zombie ideas abound in our culture, nibbling away at the brains of their victims. The mistaken belief that vaccinations cause autism — a celebrated zombie idea — is responsible for rising rates of vaccine-preventable diseases. The belief that a person’s personality type, assessed by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), predicts job performance is another zombie idea that continues to lure otherwise capable managers into making decisions that benefit neither employees nor their companies. [...]

For example, evolutionary psychologists have argued for years that waist-to-hip ratio is a phenotypic cue to reproductive success. [...] there is no evidence that healthy women with larger waist-to-hip ratios are less fecund or fertile than women with smaller ratios (Bovet, 2019). It’s a zombie idea. Ditto for the “body symmetry” hypothesis, which survives despite the empirical evidence (Jennions & Møller, 2002; for cogent analysis, see Prum, 2017). [...]

Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, nominated “the nature/nurture distinction” as an undead idea that will not expire. “It’s commonplace in both scientific and popular writing to talk about innate human traits, ‘hard-wired’ behaviors or ‘genes for’ everything from alcoholism to intelligence,” writes Gopnik, in an aspirational obituary (Gopnik, 2015). She points to growing evidence, including the research of neurologist Michael Meaney, for the many complex ways that environmental factors govern gene expression and protein construction (i.e., epigenetics). [...]

Joshua Buckholtz, a clinical neuroscientist, nominated the “hydraulic model of self-control,” the idea that within each of us lurks ancient brain circuits that, when triggered, cause us to do stuff that we later regret (more colorfully referred to as the four Fs — fighting, fleeing, feeding, and . . . sex). Our prodigious prefrontal cortex allegedly puts the brakes on our inner beast, protecting us from worst selves, and impaired self-control in psychological disorders is thought to result from a faulty brake. [...]

I believe that one can be traced back to Plato's metaphor of the charioteer trying to control his horses.

The hydraulic model of self-control is a close cousin to another zombie, the triune brain, the idea that evolution laid down brain circuitry like sedimentary rock, with reptilian, limbic, and neurocortical layers. It has been known since the 1970s in evolutionary and developmental neuroscience that this story is a myth (Striedter, 2005). Think about this the next time you read that emotions erupt from neurons in the amygdala and other parts of the fabled limbic system, or that rational thought emerges in the neocortex, with one struggling to regulate the other.

I'm rather fond of that one, though I've never thought of it as any more than a metaphor. I believe I was introduced to it in Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine. He, of course, got it from its originator Paul MacLean. Continuing one with our zombie parade:

Here’s a shocker from APS Fellow Sari van Anders, social neuroendocrinologist: It’s time to bury the idea that “male” and “female” are genetically fixed, nonoverlapping categories (i.e., natural kinds). Evidence from numerous disciplines fundamentally disconfirms this common-sense view (Hyde, Bigler, Joel, Tate, & van Anders, 2019). [...]

Our final example of a dead idea that continues to roam the psychological landscape is that people can read emotions in other people’s faces, because certain configurations of facial movements, commonly called “facial expressions,” reliably and specifically signal a specific emotional state. A team of five senior scientists (including myself) met weekly for over 2 years, reviewing more than 1,000 publications related to this topic. We began with starkly different priors, but nonetheless came to consensus over what the data show, and we published our conclusions in the July 2019 issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Barrett, Adolphs, Marsella, Martinez, & Pollak, 2019).

I've got a number of posts that mention Barrett's work.

H/t Mark Liberman @ Language Log.

Vehicularization: A Control Principle in a Complex Animal with several levels of Modal Organization (with note on King Kong)

Another bump to the top, this time on general principle. Think of vehicularization as a control mechanism of natural intelligence.

* * * * *

 

I'm bumping this to the top because it has direct bearing on my current ring-composition work. Consider the temporal horizons of actions undertaken in each segment of King Kong. It opens in New York. Denham dreams of getting rich by making a movie of King Kong on Skull Island. That's indefinitely in the future. Once on board the ship the temporal horizon moves closer; now action is directed toward getting to Skull Island. Once on Skull Island the goal is simply to get into Kong's territory. And once inside Kong's territory the goal becomes simple and very immediate, to survive.

Once Darrow is successfully rescued, Kong is captured, and they're back in New York. Now the goal is simply to get rich, which will happen real soon now, as soon as the money starts rolling in from exhibiting Kong. And, of course, Darrow and Driscoll plan to get married. Important, but it doesn't drive the action. What drives the action is Kong's escape. Now, once again, the goal is immediate survival. Once Kong is dead, the couple can get married and live happily ever after.

Well, vehicularization is about temporal horizons in the control of behavior. It's about the brain, but we can also map it onto the geography of the journey in King Kong, giving us a temporal myth-logic. A similar analysis can be done for Heart of Darkness, though that's going to be tricky because of the double narration, and Gojira.

* * * * *

The following post consists of a section that David Hays and I removed from our article, Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence (downloadable PDF). The final draft was long and the journal editors asked that we cut it. This is much of what we cut.

I’ve interpolated some comments in italics and appended a later note. While the passage is best read in the context of the whole article—which explains how we used the mathematical notion of diagonalization and has a full discussion of behavioral mode (downloadable PDF)—it can be read independently. The general idea is of one system being nested within another such that the deepest, the innermost system, leads to the most immediate satisfactions, but also has the most restricted behavioral scope. A system with greater scope, while not capable of satisfying a basic need (e.g. for food, water, sex, companionship) is able to move the animal to a place in the environment where the innermost system can exact satisfaction. The outer system is thus serving as a vehicle for the inner system.

Vehicularization

This story can be brought to closure with the concept of vehicularization. Neurophysiologically, the concept is a generalization of Paul MacLean's (1978) familiar concept of the triune brain. In McLean's conception the mammalian brain consists of a complex of reptilian grade embedded within one of paleomammalian grade which is in turn embedded within one of neomammalian grade. Restating this general idea in our terms, with the emergence of the diagonaliztion principle the modal system becomes embedded within the emergent sensorimotor system. As each new principle is implemented in new tissue the previous system becomes embedded within it.

Behaviorally, a higher order system serves as a vehicle for moving the organism to a place in the environment where control can safely be transferred to a lower order system. Conversely, when a lower order system is blocked without having satisfied the exit requirement of the current mode, transfer can be given over to a higher level system, which will then transport the organism to a location in the environment where satisfaction of the current exit condition is more likely. The overall effect of behavioral vehicularization can be stated in terms of a hill-climbing search strategy.

For example, you’ve been working hard and, all of a sudden, you notice that you’re ravenously hungry. Your lowest level system, the one that is actually capable of satisfying your hunger, wants to grab some food and start chewing. If a cheese burger or a head of lettuce is close at hand, you can see it and grab it, it does into action and your immediate hunger is sated. If no food is available, however, you turn control over to a higher-level system that then goes looking for food. If you are in your home, you’ll go to the kitchen or the pantry and see what’s available, now.

In hill-climbing a gradient is placed on the environment, the search space, such that locations most likely to satisfy the search, to fulfill the system's current need, are higher than unpromising locations. [Don't confuse the physically real environment and the abstract search space. The hill being climbed is abstract.] The organism then climbs to the top of the nearest hill and, if all is well, is satisfied. However, hill-climbing has a weakness; the local maximum may not be the global maximum for the search space. When this is the case the system is stuck at the local peak with no way of moving down it and then over to the global maximum.

So, you’re hungry. There’s nothing immediately to hand, but you smell something potentially delicious. You follow your nose and it leads you to a window. There’s no food on the window sill and the window’s filled by a screen you can’t break through. What do you do? If you insist on following your nose, you’re stuck. That’s a local maximum. So you’ve got to stop following your nose and do something else to take to a place in your environment where following your nose will be more successful.

In such a situation a modal organism can only exit the current mode. That being done, the gradient which trapped it is lifted and it is now moving along a different gradient, quite possibly one defined by an exploratory or search mode. That is budgeting. Vehicularized organisms can deal with the situation by transferring control to a higher order system which can then move the lower order system away from its local maximum to a position in the environment closer to the global maximum for that lower system. When that location is reached control is then transferred to the lower system, which climbs the hill to satisfaction.

In such a vehicularized organism the modal system is stratified. The reorganizing mode [learning] is one which permits the resetting of the conditional elements of on-blocks [simple control triggers: ON Condition X DO Action Y], thus changing the coupling of the organism to its environment. The higher level modes, play, imitation, and language, permit a great deal of exploration and activity before the conditions and actions of on-blocks are committed. These modes are probably particularly important in building very complex conditional and actional elements.

This is particularly important in ontogeny. It is known that the human nervous system matures roughly in the phylogenetic order of its components (Milner 1976); that is the innermost vehicles mature first. This suggests that the tissue which will be implementing the higher level principles matures under the guidance of the electro-chemical gradients generated by the activity of the lower vehicle, which is controlling the behavior (cf. Edelman 1978). Thus, we know one feature of the development of the nervous system is the early proliferation of synapses in a region followed by the elimination of many of these synapses (Cowan 1979, Purves and Lichtman 1980). That elimination might, for example, be the primary method of diagonalizing in cortical tissue. Once tissue had been diagonalized its critical period would be over. After that it could only learn patterns within the types specified by the diagonalization. Once the new tissue had been diagonalized it would be ready for the implementation of higher level control organized into higher level modes.

At this point it is clear we are once again firmly within the region governed by the biological principles of epigenesis. Any full understanding of the nervous system requires a deep understanding of how these biological principles shape neural tissue. But those principles are outside our purview. Out point is simply that vehicularization is a critical link between the action of the information principles and their implementation in neural tissue. It is our suspicion that a deeper understanding of vehicularization will lead to, or perhaps follow from, an understanding of the particular adjustments of developmental sequences which follow from the ontogenetic recapitulation of phylogeny (Gould 1977).

* * * * *

Note made on 8.29.2000:

I just read a bit on animal navigation that's relevant here. It's from David Gallistel's article in MIT's encyclopedia of cognitive science. Animal navigation is mostly dead reckoning. It's only beacon guided when the animal is close to the target. In Gallistel's words, “Beacon navigation is the following of sensory cues emanating from the goal itself or from its immediate vicinity until the source of the sensory beacon is reached. Widely diverse species of animals locate goals not by reference to the sensory characteristics of the goal of its immediate surroundings but rather by the goals’ position relative to the general framework provided by the mapped terrain.”

What this means is that beacon guidance is a different mode from long-range navigation. It’s a different mode and a different vehicle.

Stop calling it the lizard brain [it's a misleading characterization of neuroanatomy and function]

Cesario, J., Johnson, D. J., & Eisthen, H. L. (2020). Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 29(3), 255–260. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721420917687

Abstract:

A widespread misconception in much of psychology is that (a) as vertebrate animals evolved, “newer” brain structures were added over existing “older” brain structures, and (b) these newer, more complex structures endowed animals with newer and more complex psychological functions, behavioral flexibility, and language. This belief, although widely shared in introductory psychology textbooks, has long been discredited among neurobiologists and stands in contrast to the clear and unanimous agreement on these issues among those studying nervous-system evolution. We bring psychologists up to date on this issue by describing the more accurate model of neural evolution, and we provide examples of how this inaccurate view may have impeded progress in psychology. We urge psychologists to abandon this mistaken view of human brains.

From the article:

The final—and most important—problem with this mistaken view is the implication that anatomical evolution proceeds in the same fashion as geological strata, with new layers added over existing ones. Instead, much evolutionary change consists of transforming existing parts. Bats’ wings are not new appendages; their forelimbs were transformed into wings through several intermediate steps. In the same way, the cortex is not an evolutionary novelty unique to humans, primates, or mammals; all vertebrates possess structures evolutionarily related to our cortex (Fig. 1d). In fact, the cortex may even predate vertebrates (Dugas-Ford, Rowell, & Ragsdale, 2012; Tomer, Denes, Tessmar-Raible, & Arendt, 2010). Researchers studying the evolution of vertebrate brains do debate which parts of the forebrain correspond to which others across vertebrates, but all operate from the premise that all vertebrates possess the same basic brain—and forebrain—regions.

Neurobiologists do not debate whether any cortical regions are evolutionarily newer in some mammals than others. To be clear, even the prefrontal cortex, a region associated with reason and action planning, is not a uniquely human structure. Although there is debate concerning the relative size of the prefrontal cortex in humans compared with nonhuman animals (Passingham & Smaers, 2014; Sherwood, Bauernfeind, Bianchi, Raghanti, & Hof, 2012; Teffer & Semendeferi, 2012), all mammals have a prefrontal cortex.

The notion of layers added to existing structures across evolutionary time as species became more complex is simply incorrect. The misconception stems from the work of Paul MacLean, who in the 1940s began to study the brain region he called the limbic system (MacLean, 1949). MacLean later proposed that humans possess a triune brain consisting of three large divisions that evolved sequentially: The oldest, the “reptilian complex,” controls basic functions such as movement and breathing; next, the limbic system controls emotional responses; and finally, the cerebral cortex controls language and reasoning (MacLean, 1973). MacLean’s ideas were already understood to be incorrect by the time he published his 1990 book (see Reiner, 1990, for a critique of MacLean, 1990). Nevertheless, despite the mismatch with current understandings of vertebrate neurobiology, MacLean’s ideas remain popular in psychology.

Pedagogical Styles 1: Coaching and Midwifery

In thinking about online teaching I decided to do a bit of thinking about teaching in general. I want to start with the one-on-one format of learning musical performance, whether vocal or instrumental. I’ll take a look at lectures later on.

But why consider music lessons at all, since they are so very different from the kinds of subjects most people would be teaching online? That’s a reason right there, because it is different. That difference may force us to think a bit differently about teaching. That’s one reason. Second, by its nature it has to be student-centered. Third, the martial arts have come up as a topic in the Connected Courses forum. Though I have no direct experience with the martial arts, they are, like music, about educating one’s body. Which brings me to my fourth reason. Though I have little experience in teaching music, I’ve had a good bit of experience learning music and, in consequence, have become a fairly skilled musician. I know that this stuff works.

When the music's over we'll take a quick look at Plato's notions of learning as recollection and teaching as midwifery.

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Let’s start with a nine-minute video of vocal coaching:

I don’t really know the situation here. It feels a bit cultish to me – it’s under the auspices of something called Access Consciousness (yeah, I know, I could find out easily enough as Access Consciousness does have a website, but the video itself is adequate for my purposes) – and no doubt this particular segment was chosen for upload because it shows effective coaching.

We see a young girl, Aubrey, being coached by a middle-aged man, Gary Douglas. Even before he has her sing he repeats what sounds like a ‘mantra’ of formulaic encouragement he no doubt has used hundreds of times before with others. Then she sings – “I will survive” – and the coaching continues.

He asks her to think about what the song is about – sex and relationships. then he makes a suggestion that has to do with energy – BTW, watch his gestures throughout the session. What’s THAT, this energy? There is noticeable improvement when she sings again. Now he begins more focused work on her breath.

At one point he tells her to sing from her toes. What does that mean? Think about it for yourself. If you are going to sing from your toes, just what will you do that you didn’t already do? Whatever it is that she did – and we haven’t got a clue about it as no one asks her what that means – it worked. When she sang from her toes, her singing got better.