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Descartes: Discourse On Method Quotes

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On The External Control Of Our Environments:
I considered how one and the same man with the very same mind, were he brought up from infancy among the French or the Germans, would become different from what he would be had he always lived among the Chinese or the cannibals, and how, even down to the styles of our clothing, the same thing that pleased us ten years ago, and that perhaps will again please us ten years hence, now seems to us extravagant and ridiculous.  … Hence I [chose to be] constrained to try to guide myself on my own.
(Discourse On Method, Part II, page 9-10)

The Method:
[Just as law is best kept dramatically parsimonous and rigidly enforced, so these principles]:
1) The first [principle] was to never accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such; that is to say, carefully to avoid hasty judgment than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it in doubt.
2) The second [principle], to divide each of the difficulties I would examine into as many parts as possible, and as was required, in order better to resolve them.
3) The third [principle], to conduct my thoughts in an orderly fashion, by commencing with those objects that are simplest and easiest to know, in order to ascend little by little, as by degrees, to the knowledge of the most composite things…
4) And the last [principle], everywhere to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that I was assured of having omitted nothing.
(Discourse On Method, Part II, page 11)

On Deriving Context From Graphical Models:
I thought it would be more worthwhile for me to examine only these [mathematical concepts] in general, and to suppose them only in subject that would help me make the knowledge of them easier…. Then, having noted that, in order to know these [concepts], I would sometimes need to consider each of them individually, and sometimes only to keep them in mind, or to grasp many of them together, I thought that, in order better to consider them in particular, I ought to suppose them to be relations between lines, since I found nothing more simple, or nothing that I could represent more distinctly to my imagination and to my senses; but that, in order to keep them in mind or to grasp many of them together, I would have to explicate them by means of certain symbols, the briefest ones possible; and that by this means I would be borrowing all that is best in geometrical analysis and algebra, and correcting all the defects of the one by the other.
(Discourse On Method, Part III, page 12)

On The Distinction Between Reason And Empiricism:
Everything unimaginable [to the senses] seems to [many people] unintelligible.  Even philosophers take it as a maxim in the schools that there is nothing in the understanding that has not first been in the senses, where it is nevertheless certain that the ideas of God and the soul have never been.  And it seems to me that those who want to use their imagination to grasp these ideas are doing the very same thing as if, in order to hear sounds or to smell odors, they wanted to use their eyes.
(Discourse On Method, Part IV, page 21)

On The Certainty Of Metaphysics Over The Sciences:
Finally, if there still are men who have not been sufficiently persuaded of the existence of God and of their soul by means of the reasons I have brought forward, I very much want them to know that all the other things of which they think themselves perhaps more assured, such as having a body, that there are stars and an earth, and the like, are less certain.
(Discourse On Method, Part IV, page 21)

On Truth Originating From Divine Clarity:
It follows from [divine perfection] that our ideas or notions, being real things and coming from God, cannot, in all that is clear and distinct in them, be anything but true.  Thus, if we quite often have ideas that contain some falsity, this can only be the case with respect to things that have something confused or obscure about them, because in this respect they participate in nothing; that is, they are thus confused in us only because we are not perfect…. But if we did not know that all that is real and true in us comes from a perfect and infinite being – however clear and distinct our ideas were, we would have no reason that assured us that they had the perfection of being true.  
(Discourse On Method, Part IV, page 22)

On Philosophical Zombies:
I contented myself with supposing that God formed the body of a man exactly like one of ours, as much in the outward shape of its members as in the internal arrangement of its organs… without putting into it, at the start, any rational soul, or anything else to serve there as a vegetative or sensitive soul, but merely kindled in the man’s heart one of those fires without light….  For on examining the functions that could, as a consequence, be in this body, I found there precisely all those things that can be in us without our thinking about them, and hence, without our soul’s contributing to them….  And these are all the same features in which one can say that animals lacking reason resemble us.
(Discourse On Method, Part V, page 26)

[While this is not the case for animals], if there were any such machines that bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated our actions as far as this is practically feasible, we would always have two very certain means of recognizing that they were not at all true men.  The first is that they could never use words or other signs, or put them together as we do in order to declare our thoughts to others.  For one can well conceive of a machine that utters words, and even that utters words appropriate to the bodily actions that will cause some change in its organs….  But it could not arrange its words differently so as to respond to the sense of all that will be said in its presence, as even the dullest man can do.  The second means is that, although they might perform many tasks very well or perhaps better than any of us, such machines would invitably fail in other tasks; by this means one would discover that they were acting not through knowledge but only through the disposition of their organs.  For while reason is universal… these organs require some particular disposition for each particular action; consequently, it is for all practical purposes impossible for there to be enough different organs in a machine to make it act in all the contingencies of life in the same way as our reason makes us act.  
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 32)

On The Purpose Of The Lungs:
The true function of respiration is to bring enough fresh air into the lungs to cause the blood which comes there from the right cavity of the heart, where it has been rarified and, as it were, changed into vapors, immediately to be condensed and to be converted once again into blood before returning to the left cavity; without this process the blood could not properly aid in feeding the fire that is in the heart.
(Discourse On Method, Part V, page 30)
[Note: this was, of course, ultimately proved incorrect]

On Immortality Of The Soul:
When one knows how different [soul and body] are, one understands much better the arguments which prove that our soul is of a nature entirely independent of the body, and consequently that it is not subject to die with it.  Then, since we do not see any other causes at all for its destruction, we are naturally led to judge from this that it is immortal.  
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 33)

On The Inferiority Of A-T Philosophy Against Science:
It is possible to arrive at knowledge that would be very useful in life and that, in place of that speculative philosophy taught in the schools , it is possible to find a practical philosophy, by means of which, knowing the force and the actions of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, just as distinctly as we know the various skills of our craftsmen, we might be able, in the same way, to use them for all the purposes for which they are appropriate, and thus render ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature… perhaps even [rid oneself] of the frailty of old age…
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 35)
[Note: “philosophy taught in the schools” is likely directed at A-T scholasticism]

I am sure that that the most impassioned of those who now follow Aristotle would believe themselves fortunate, if they had as much knowledge of nature as he had, even if it were on the condition that they would never have any more.  They are like ivy, which never stretches any higher than the trees supporting it, and which often even descends again after if has reached their tops, for it seems to me that they are re-descending, that is, they are making themselves somehow less knowledgeable than if they abstained from studying; not content with knowing all that is intelligibly explained in their author, they want in addition to find the solutions there to many difficulties about which he says nothing and about which he has perhaps never thought.  Still, their manner of philosophizing is very convenient for those who have only very mediocre minds, for the obscurity of the distinctions and the principles they make use of is the reason why they can speak about all things as boldly as if they knew them, and why they can uphold everything they say against the most subtle and the most adroit, without anyone’s having the means of convincing them they are mistaken.  In this they seem to me like a blind man who, in order to fight without a disadvantage against someone who is sighted, had made his opponent go into the depths of some very dark cellar.  
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 40)

On His Aspirations For Inspiring Post-Mortem Audiences:
I [published] as much to have all the more occasion to examine [my judgments] well (since without doubt one always looks more carefully at what one believes must be seen by many, than at what one does only for oneself; and often the things that have seemed to me to be true when I began to conceive them have appeared false to me when I wanted to put them on paper), as in order not to lose any occasion to benefit the public, if I am able, and in order that, if my writings are worth anything, those who will have them after my death can thus use them as will be most fitting.
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 37)

On Reasons For Self-Censorship After Galileo:
I would have many opportunities to lose time, had I published the foundations of my physics.  For although they are nearly all so evident that it is necessary only to understand them in order to believe them, and although there has not been a single one for which I did not believe I could give demonstrations, nevertheless, because it is impossible for them to be in agreement with all the diverse opinions of other men, I foresee that I would often be distracted by the disputes they would engender.
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 38)

On The Disadvantages Of Social Learning:
In this way, if there were someone in the world whom one assuredly knows to be capable of finding the greatest things and the things as beneficial to the public as possible and whom, for this cause, other men were to exert themselves to help in every way to succeed in his plans, I do not see that they could do a thing for him except to make a donation toward the expenses of the experiments he would need and, for the rest, to prevent his leisure from being wasted by the importunity of anyone.
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 41)

On Experience Being The Groundwork Of Semantic Webs:
The reasonings [in my essay presenting a considerable number of scientific results] follow each other in such a way, just as the last are demonstrated by means of the first, which are their causes, so these first are reciprocally demonstrated by means of the last, which are their effects.  And one must not imagine that I am here committing the fallacy that logicians call a circle, for, experience rendering the majority of these effects very certain, the causes from which I deduce these effects serve not so much to prove them as to explain them; on the contrary, it is rather the case that the causes are what are proved by the effects.
(Discourse On Method, Part VI, page 43)

Descartes: Meditations On First Philosophy Quotes

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On Why He Couldn’t Assert Immortality Of The Soul Immediately:
But because some people will perhaps expect to see proofs for the immortality of the soul in this [second] Meditation, I think they should put on notice here that I have attempted to write only what I have carefully demonstrated…….
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Synopsis, page 54)
[Note: Descartes has to spend a lot of time placating the crazies]

On The Relation Between Philosophy And Theology:
I have always thought that two issues – namely, God and the soul – are chief among those that ought to be demonstrated with the aid of philosophy rather than theology.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Dedication, page 47)

On Atheism:
Granted, it is altogether true that we must believe in God’s existence because it is taught in the Holy scriptures, and, conversely, that we must believe the Holy Scriptures because they have come from God. This is because, of course, since faith is a gift from God, the very same one who gives the grace that is necessary for believing the rest can also give the grace to believe that he exists. Nonetheless, this reasoning cannot be proposed to unbelievers because they would judge it to be circular.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Dedication, page 47)

Moreover, I know that there are many irreligious people who refuse to believe that God exists and that the human mind is distinct from the body – for no other reason than their claim that up until now no one has been able to demonstrate these two things.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Dedication, page 48)

I have seen two rather lengthy treatises [that respond to Discourse On Method], but these works, utilizing as they do arguments drawn from atheist commonplaces, focused their attack not so much on my arguments regarding these issues, as on my conclusions. Moreover, arguments of this type exercise no influence over those who understand my arguments, and the judgments of many people are so preposterous and feeble that they are more likely to be persuaded by the first opinions to come along, however false and contrary to reason they may be, than by a true and firm refutation of them which they hear subsequently. Accordingly, I have no desire to respond here to these objections, lest I first have to state what they are. I will only say in general that all the objections typically bandied about by the atheists to assail the existence of God always depend either on ascribing human emotions to God, or on arrogantly claiming for our minds such power and wisdom that we attempt to determine and grasp fully what God can and ought to do. Hence these objections will cause us no difficulty, provided we but remember that our minds are to be regarded as finite, while God is to be regarded as incomprehensible and infinite.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Preface, page 52)

On The Certainty Of His Meditations And Their Potential For Misinterpretations:
Although the arguments I use here do, in my opinion, equal or even surpass those of geometry in certitude and obviousness, nevertheless I am fearful that many people will not be capable of adequately perceiving them, both because they are a bit lengthy, with some of them depending on still others, and also because… they demand a mind quite free from prejudices and that can easily withdraw itself from association of the senses. Certainly there are not to be found in the world more people with an aptitude for metaphysical studies than those with an aptitude for geometry.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Dedication, page 49)

On Teleology:
…the entire class of causes which people customarily derive from a thing’s “end,” I judge to be utterly useless in physics. It is not without rashness that I think myself capable of inquiring into the ends of God.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 4, page 82)

On Truth And Clarity And Certainty:
I am certain that I am a thinking thing. But do I not therefore also know what is required for me to be certain of anything? Surely in this first instance of knowledge, there is nothing but a certain clear and distinct perception of what I affirm. Yet this would hardly be enough to render me certain of the truth of a thing, if it could ever happen that something that I perceived so clearly and distinctly were false. And thus I now seem able to posit as a general rule that everything I very clearly and distinctly perceive is true.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 70)

[The idea of God discloses to me something real… it is] an idea that is utterly clear and distinct… for whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be real and true and to involve some perfection is wholly contained in that idea.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 77)

But once I perceived that there is a God, and also understood at the same time that everything else depends on him, and that he is not a deceiver, I then concluded that everything that I clearly and distinctly perceive to be true. Hence even if I no longer attend to the reasoning leading me to judge this to be true, so long as I merely recall that I did clearly and distinctly observe it, no counter-argument can be brought forward that might force me to doubt it. On the contrary, I have a true and certain knowledge of it. … For what objections can now be raised against me? That I have been made such that I am often mistaken? But I now know that I cannot be mistaken in matters I plainly understand. That I have taken many things to be true and certain which subsequently I recognized to be false? But none of these were things I clearly and distinctly perceived. But I was ignorant of this rule for determining the truth, and I believed these things perhaps for other reasons which I later discovered were less firm.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 5, page 92)
[Note: Notice how God’s existence ties in (precedes?) this understanding of truth as clarity.]

On God’s Existence:
In fact the idea I clearly have of the human mind – insofar as it is a thinking thing, not extended in length, breadth or depth, and having nothing else from the body – is far more distinct than the idea of any corporeal thing. And when I take note of the fact that I doubt, or that I am a thing that is incomplete and dependent, there comes to mind a clear and distinct idea of a being that is independent and complete, that is, an idea of God. And from the mere fact that such an idea is in me, or that I who have this idea exist, I draw the obvious conclusion that God also exists, and that my existence depends entirely upon him at each and every moment. This conclusion is so obvious that I am confident that the human mind can know nothing more evident or more certain.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 4, page 81)

However, as far as God is concerned, if I were not overwhelmed by prejudices and if the images of sensible things were not besieging my thought from all directions, I would certainly acknowledge nothing sooner or more easily than [God].
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 5, page 91).

For just as the objective mode of being belongs to ideas by their very nature, so the normal mode of being belongs to the causes of ideas, at least to the first and preeminent ones, by their very nature. And although one idea can perhaps issue from another, nevertheless no infinite regress is permitted here; eventually some first idea must be reached whose cause is a sort of archetype that contains formally all the reality that is in the idea merely objectively.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 74)

On Why One Can Invent Corporeal Ideas, But Not Divine Ideas:
As to the ideas of corporeal things, there is nothing in them that is so great that it seems incapable of having originated from me… There is another kind of falsity (called “material” falsity) which is found in ideas whenever they represent a non-thing as if it were a thing… Assuredly I need not assign to these ideas an author distinct from myself. For if they were false, that is, if they were to represent non-things, I know by the light of nature that they proceed from nothing; that is, they are in me for no other reason that something is lacking in my nature. If, on the other hand, these ideas are true, then because they exhibit so little reality to me that I cannot distinguish it from a non-thing, I see no reason why they cannot get their being from me.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 75

On “The Unicorn Defense”:
From the fact that I think of God as existing, it does not seem to follow that God exists, for my thought imposes no necessity on things. And just as one may image a winged horse, without there being a horse that has wings, in the same way perhaps I can attach existence to God, even though no God exists. But there is a sophism lurking here. From the fact that I am unable to think of a mountain without a valley, it does not follow that a mountain or a valley exists anywhere, but only that, whether they exist or not, a mountain and a valley are inseparable from one another. But from the fact that I cannot think of God except as existing, it follows that existence is inseparable from God, and that for this reason he really exists.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 5, page 89)

On The Unreliability Of The Senses:
Many experiences gradually weakened any faith that I had in the senses… [examples include phantom limb pain and flaws in visual recognition]… To these causes for doubt I recently added two quite general ones. The first was that everything I ever thought I sensed while awake I could believe I also sometimes sensed while asleep, and since I do not believe that what I seem to sense in my dreams comes to me from things external to me, I saw no reason why I should hold this belief about those things I seem to be sensing while awake. The second was that, since I was ignorant of the author of my origin (or at least pretended to be ignorant of it), I saw nothing to prevent my having been so constituted by nature that I should be mistaken even about what seemed to me most true.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 6, page 95)

Thus what I thought I had seen with my eyes, I actually grasped solely with the faculty of judgment, which is in my mind.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 2, page 68)

On Why “Everything That Begins To Exist Has A Cause” Includes The Non-Corporeal:
Now it is indeed evident by the light of nature that there must be at least as much [reality] in the efficient and total cause as there is in the effect of that same cause. For whence, I ask, could an effect get its reality, if not from a cause? And how could the cause give that reality to the effect, unless it also possessed that reality? Hence it follows that something cannot come into being out of nothing, and also that what is more perfect (that is, what contains in itself more reality) cannot come into being from what is less perfect. But this is manifestly true not merely for those effects whose reality is actual or formal, but also for ideas in which only objective reality is considered… As imperfect a mode of being as this is by which a thing exists in the intellect objectively through an idea, nevertheless it is plainly not nothing, hence it cannot get its being from nothing.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 73-74)

On Thought And Forms:
Rather, the very nature of an idea is such that of itself it needs no formal reality other than what it borrows from my thought, of which it is a mode.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 76)

I am a substance.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 76)

On Self-Knowledge Never Being Wrong:
Now as far as ideas are concerned, if they are considered alone and in their own right, without being referred to something else, they cannot, properly speaking, be false. For whether it is a she-goat or a chimera that I am imagining, it is no less true that I imagine the one than the other. Moreover, we need not fear that there is falsity in the will itself or in the affects, for although I can choose evil things or even things that are utterly non-existent, I cannot conclude that it is untrue that I do choose these things. Thus there remain only judgments in which I must take care not to be mistaken.
(Meditations On First Philosophy, Meditation 3, page 71)
[Note: Above passage seems to hint at an is-ought distinction.]

Sapolsky: Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers Quotes

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On Heart Disease Markers:
CRP [C-reactive protein] is turning out to be a much better predictor of cardiovascular disease risk than cholesterol, even years in advance of disease onset.  As a result, CRP has suddenly become quite trendy in medicine, and is fast becoming a standard endpoint to measure in general blood work on patients. 
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 3, Page 44)

On The First Gulf War:
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War fewer deaths in Israel were due to SCUD missile damage than to sudden cardiac death among frightened elderly people.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 3, Page 50)

On The Origins Of Peter Pan:
A son, age thirteen, the beloved favorite of the mother, is killed in an accident.  The mother, despairing and bereaved, takes to her bed in grief for years afterward, utterly ignoring her other, six-year-old son.  Horrible scenes ensue.  For example, the boy, on one occasion, enters her darkened room; the mother, in her delusional state, briefly believe it is the dead son – “David, is that you?  Could that be you?” – before realizing: “Oh, it is only you.”  Growing up, being “only you”.  On the rare instances when the mother interacts with the younger son, she repeatedly expresses the same obsessive thought: the only solace she feels is that David died when he was still perfect, still a boy, never to be ruined by growing up and growing away from his mother.
The younger boy, ignored (the stern, distant father seemed to have been irrelevant to the family dynamics), seizes upon this idea; by remaining a boy forever, by not growing up, he will at least have some chance of pleasing his mother, winner her love.  Although there is no evidence of disease or malnutrition in his well-to-do family, he ceases growing. As an adult, he is just barely five feet in height, and his marriage is unconsummated.  
And then the chapter informs us that the boy became the author of the much-beloved children’s class – Peter Pan.  J.M. Barrie’s writings are filled with children who didn’t grow up, who were fortunate enough to die in childhood, who came back as ghosts to visit their mothers.
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 6, Page 106)

On The Strangeness Of Sleep:
All things considered, sleeping is pretty creepy.  For a third of your life, you’re just not there, floating in this suspended state, everything slowing down.  Except, at points, your brain is more active than when you’re awake, making your eyelids all twitchy, and it’s consolidating memories from the day and solving problems for you.  Except when it’s dreaming, when it’s making no sense.  And then you sometimes walk or talk in your sleep.  Or drool.  And then there’s those mysterious penile or clitoral erections that occur intermittently during the night.  (And this isn’t even going into the subject of species that sleep with only half of their brain at a time, in order to keep one eye and half the brain open to look out for predators.   Mallards, for example, that are stuck on the edge of their group at night keep their outward facing eye, and the half of the brain that responds to it, preferentially awake.  As more oddities, dolphins can swim while sleeping and some birds can fly.)
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 11, Page 227)

On Teddy Roosevelt The Scientist:
A biography of Teddy Roosevelt, however, recently helped me to appreciate that the world lost one of its great potential zoologists when he lapsed into politics.  At age eighteen, he had already published professionally in ornithology; when he was half that age, he reacted to the news that his mother had thrown out his collection of field mice, stored in the family icebox, by moping around the house, proclaiming, “The loss to science!  The loss to science!”
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 13, Page 252)

On Personal Autonomy And Depression:
Humans can be provoked into at least transient cases of learned helplessness, and with surprising ease.  Naturally, there is tremendous individual variation in how readily this happens – some of us are  more vulnerable than others….  In the experiment involving inescapable noise, Hiroto had given the students a personality inventory beforehand.  Based on that, he was able to identify the students who came into the experiment with a strongly “internalized locus of control” – a belief that they were the masters of their own destiny and had a great deal of control in their lives – and, in contrast, the markedly “externalized” volunteers, who tended to attribute outcomes to chance and luck.  In the aftermath of an uncontrolled stressor, the externalized students were far more vulnerable to learned helplessness.  Transferring that to the real world, with the same external stressors, the more that someone has an internal locus of control, the less the likelihood of a depression.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 14, Page 303)

Having an illusory sense of control in a bad setting can be so pathogenic that one version of it gets a special name in the health psychology literature… As described by Sherman James of Duke University, it is called John Henryism.  The name refers to the American folk hero who, hammering a six-foot-long steel drill, tried to outrace a steam drill tunneling through a mountain.  John Henry beat the machine, only to fall dead from the superhuman effort.  As James defines it, John Henryism involves the belief that any and all demands can be vanquished, so long as you work hard enough.  On questionnaires, John Henry individuals strongly agree with statements such as “When things don’t go the way I want them, it just makes me work even harder,” or “Once I make up my mind to do something, I stay with it until the job is completely done.”  This is the epitome of individuals with an internal locus of control – they believe that, with enough effort and determination, they can regulate all outcomes.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 18, Page 404-5)

On Race And Anxiety:
Some recent studies that I find truly unsettling show that if you flash a picture of someone from a different race, the amygdala tends to light up.  Endless studies need to be done looking at what sort of face is flashed and what sort of person is observing it.  But in the meantime, just think about the implications of that finding.
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 15, Page 323)

On Dopamine Motivating Behavior:
The next key thing to learn is that the dopamine and its associated sense of pleasurable anticipation fuels the work needed to get that reward.  Peter Phillips from the University of North Carolina has used some immensely fancy techniques to measure millisecond bursts of dopamine in rats and has showed with the best time resolution to date that the burst comes just before the behavior.  Then, in the clincher, he artificially stimulated the dopamine release and, suddenly, the rat would start lever pressing.  The dopamine does indeed fuel the behavior.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 16, Page 339)

On Drug Addiction Rerouting Pleasure Pathways:
Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage [of needing the drug on account of low resting dopamine levels] show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 16, Page 345)

On Oscar Awards & Life Expectancy:
The issue of respect [and its relationship with life expectancy] may help explain the highly publicized finding that winning the Oscar at any point in your life extends your life expectancy about four years, relative to doctors who were nominated but didn’t win.
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 18, Page 390)

On Religion & Health:
Finally and most important in this area of science, you can’t randomly assign people to different study groups (“You folks become atheists, and you guys start deeply believing in God, and we’ll meet back here in ten years to check everyone’s blood pressure”). 
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 18, Page 408)

Consider two leading thinkers in this field, Richard Sloan and Carl Thoresen… 
[they] agree that there’s not a shred of evidence that praying for someone improves her health…. 
[they] agree that when you do see a legitimate link between religiosity and good health, you don’t know which came first.  Being religious may make you healthy, and being healthy may make you religious….
[they] also agree that when you do see a link, you still don’t know if it has anything to do with religiosity [there are many variable that] need to be controlled for…
[they] are also mostly in agreement that religiosity does predict good health to some extent in a few areas of medicine…
[they are both] made very nervous by the idea that findings in this field will lead to physicians advising their patients to become religious…
[they] both note that religiosity can make health, mental or otherwise, a lot worse.  
(Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Chapter 18, Page 409-11)

On Dysrationalia:
Standing fast on this issue requires a heartbreaking rejection of a tenet of liberal education that so many of us treasure.  It is the notion that being exposed to the Great Books and the Great Thoughts must lead to Great Morals.
(The Trouble With Testosterone, Beelzebub’s SAT Scores, Page 110)

Baddeley: Working Memory Quotes

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Representational Neglect
Of particular relevance to [the case for regarding the sketchpad as a workspace rather than a perceptual gateway] is the phenomenon of representational neglect. Bisiach and Luzzatti (1978) report the case of two patients who were asked to describe from memory the cathedral square in Milan, their native city. In both cases they gave a good description, except that the left side of the square was hardly mentioned. They were then told to imagine walking around the square, turning round, and again giving a description. This time the previously neglected part of the square was on their right, and was now described in detail; the side that was previously well-described was now ignored. Baddeley and Lieberman (1980) suggested that this might represent the impairment of a system for representing information within the visuospatial sketchpad.
(Baddeley, Working Memory, pp 93)

3D Image Rotation
Much of the research on imagery was initially stimulated by the classic demonstration by Shepard and Metzler (1971) who required subjects to judge whether two representations of three-dimensional object were identical or whether one was the mirror image of another. The two were presented in different relative orientations. Response time proved to be a linear function of the difference in orientation between the two, just as if the subjects were mentally rotating one of the objects until it lined up with the other, and then making the judgment…

[Description of Kosslyn’s (1978) computational model of the brain literally rotating a data structure.]

Intons-Peterson (1996) showed that the speed of ‘visual scanning’ varied depending on semantically relevant but non-visual factors such as whether the whether the the subject were imagining herself carrying a weight or not…

Equally problematic for Kosslyn’s interpretation was a study by Hinton and Parsons (1988) who asked their subjects to imagine a wire cube sitting on a shelf in front of them. They were then asked to take hold of the nearest lower right-hand corner, and the furthest [upper] left-hand corner, and then orient the cube such that their left hand was immediately above their right. The task then was to describe the location of the remaining corners. Almost everyone reports that they lay upon a horizontal line, like a cubic equator. In fact, they form a crown shape. Hinton and Parsons suggest that rather than actually manipulating the representation as Shepard or Kosslyn might suggest, subjects attempt to simulate it. When a problem is complex, they simply fail.
(Baddeley, Working Memory, pp 94-95)

Plato: Phaedo Quotes

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On The Virtues Of Asceticism:
The soul reasons best when none of the senses troubles it… when it is most by itself, taking leave of the body and as far as possible having no contact or association with it in its search for reality.
(Plato, Phaedo, pp 102)

The body keeps us busy in a thousand ways because of its need for nurture… It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense, so that, as it is said, in truth and in fact no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body. Only the body and its desires cause war, civil discord, and battles… all this makes us too busy to practice philosophy.
(Plato, Phaedo, pp 103)

Philosophy sees that the worst feature of this imprisonment [to the body] is that it is due to desires, so that the prisoner himself is contributing to his own incarceration most of all. As I say, the lovers of learning know that philosophy gets hold of their soul when it is in that state, then gently encourages it and tries to free it by showing them that investigation through the eyes is full of deceit…
(Plato, Phaedo, pp 121)

On Reasonable Discourse:
There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.
(Plato, Phaedo, pp 127)

You know how those in particular who spend their time studying contradiction in the end believe themselves to be very wise and that they alone have understood that there is no soundness or reliability in any object or in any argument.. it would be pitiable when a true and reliable argument, and one that can be understood, if a man who has dealt with such arguments as appear at one time true, and another time untrue, should not blame himself or his own lack of skill but, because of his distress, in the end gladly shift the blame away from himself to the arguments, and spend the rest of his life hating and reviling reasoned discussion and so be deprived of truth and knowledge of reality
(Plato, Phaedo, pp 128)

Against Induction:
Arguments of which the proof is based on probability are pretentious..
(Plato, Phaedo, pp 130)

On Death:
No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.
(Plato, Phaedo, pp 33)

On The Mediocrity Of Man:
The very good and the very wicked are both quite rare.. most men are between those extremes.
(Plato, Phaedo, pp 127)

Evans: In Two Minds

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in_two_minds

In Two Minds surveys state of the art dual-process theories that have become enormously influential within modern psychology.

Dual-process theory holds that our mental lives are the result of activity of, and interactions between, two separate minds. The first mind – System 1 – is the mind that drives your car when you daydream. It is fast, implicit, subconscious, associative, and evolutionary ancient. System 2, in contrast, is the mind that generates directions. It is cognitively taxing, language-oriented, conscious, abstract, and a relative newcomer on the ecological scene.

Numerous flavors of dual-process theory have emerged over the years. The theory has emerged, relatively independently, from among the following traditions: social psychology, cultural psychology, psychometrics, developmental psychology, behavioral economics, and artificial intelligence. While such creative independence suggests a common biological substrate, little effort had been made to synthesize these different perspectives until now. This anthology, itself written to complement an interdisciplinary academic conference, represents a significant step towards such a harmonization.

One of my few complaints is that the lack of a canonical vocabulary made comparative analysis between chapters difficult. That said, the breadth of subjects treated was astonishing, and the writing quality was generally excellent. I should mention that most chapters have been made publicly available via their originating universities. The following chapters struck me as especially significant:

Ch 2: Evans: How many dual process theories do we need?
Book editor, and leader of the dual-process synthesis movement, Jonathan Evans presents his vision for dual-process theory development. He begins by presenting the clusters of properties associated with either mind. Insights from a diverse set of traditions are collected, with a particular interest taken in mediating inter-system communications. The chapter closes with a hybrid model of mental architectures. An ideal one-shot introduction to the field.

Ch 3: Stanovich: Distinguishing the reflective, algorithmic, and autonomous minds: Is it time for a tri-process theory?
Psychometric legend Keith Stanovich rocks the boat by his proposal to bifurcate System 2 into reflective and algorithmic types. The algorithmic mind is what IQ tests measure, and is correlated with working memory. It is also thought to be a measure of cognitive decoupling, echoing Aristotle’s famous dictum: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” The reflective mind is, in contrast, driven by thinking dispositions. It is an explanation for how otherwise extremely intelligent people flounder – smarts need to be complemented by work ethic, mental resource-management, innovation, and other properties. The chapter closes with a stunning taxonomy of thinking errors, which explores in great detail how the heuristics and bias literature motivate the movement.

Ch 5: Carruthers: An architecture for dual reasoning
Philosopher of mind Peter Carruthers explores concepts developed in his acclaimed work, Architecture Of Mind. His argument, inspired by the massive modularity thesis of evolutionary psychology, moves at a brisk pace. Breathtaking structural diagrams are presented, and grounded in wide swathes of empirical data. Carruthers’ main thesis is that this architecture is shared between System 1 and System 2: when consciousness takes over, it disconnects the modules from the action production systems to simulate various outcomes.

Ch 8: Thompson: Dual-process theories: a metacognitive perspective
While theorists have much to say about the different roles of either system, little is known about how they interact. Thompson seeks to fill this gap with an account of the emotional payload people experience when, say, they solve a riddle. Such Feelings Of Rightness (FORs, also known as yedasentience) are transmitted from System 1 to System 2, which only decides whether to intervene when the FOR is insufficiently strong.

Ch 10: Buchtel, Norenzayan: Thinking across cultures: implications for dual processes
It is an unfortunate truth that many psychological studies generalize their conclusions even though their polled subjects consist entirely of American psychology undergraduates. In this important chapter, Buchtel and Norenzayan explain why such a scope conceals the true breadth of human cognitive diversity. Cross-cultural studies are analyzed, with the conclusion that the System 2 characteristics of East Asian peoples consistently diverge from Occidental students. Subjects immersed in East Asian culture tend to focus more attention at contextual features of problems. The implications of this difference – for theory modification, and an account of how culture shapes ontogeny of cognition – are explored.

Ch 11: Sun, Lane, Matthews: The two systems of learning: architectural perspective
Artificial intelligence research Ron Sun reviews his architectural innovation CLARION. Since this computational innovation is well-documented at length elsewhere (including Wikipedia), Sun zeroes in on its relationship with dual-process theorizing. Specifically, and in contrast with Carruthers above, his software posits two distinct computational entities, and is able to recreate human idiosyncrasies via an exploration of the systems’ interactions.

Ch 13: Lieberman: What zombies can’t do: a social cognitive neuroscience approach to the irreducibility of reflective consciousness
For centuries, academics have countenanced philosophical zombies: what would it mean if a human being could behave normally but lack conscious experience? Lieberman here harnesses dual-process theories and neuroimaging data to explore the more focused question on whether such a phenomenon is nomologically possible.

Ch 15: Saunders: Reason and intuition in the moral life: a dual-process account of moral justification
Saunders examines the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding, via one of its manifestations regarding incest. Most people, when asked whether a short story about incest represents something morally wrong, will answer affirmatively and provide their reasons. However, when the storyteller removes the offending reasons (both parties are psychologically unharmed, there is no risk of pregnancy, etc), subjects generally maintain that the behavior is wrong, yet they cannot explain why they think so. The author goes on to explain how such moral dumbfounding is the result of clashing moral conclusions between the still-outraged System 1 and the deprived-of-reasons System 2.

This is my favorite cognitive science text to date.

Jaworski: Philosophy Of Mind

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Part Of: Philosophy of Mind sequence
Content Summary: 500 words, 5 min reading time

Let me now review this textbook, which I recently had the pleasure of reading.

My Overall Impressions

A thorough survey of philosophy of mind. I enjoyed the author’s style, particularly his accessible vocabulary and propensity for explicitly communicating premises of the more involved bits of argumentation.

This textbook is unusual insofar as it presents novel content, as opposed to only synthesizing current knowledge. In a surprising move, Jaworski devotes two out of eleven chapters exploring an idiosyncratic version of hylomorphism. While regrettably diverting attention from other under-explored areas, I found Jaworski’s blend of Aristotelian and embodied cognition traditions to be worth reading.

High-Level Picture

The book opens with a taxonomic bang, sporting a graphical enumeration of different theories of mind, along with their interrelationships and metaphysical assumptions. Here are the ten leading theories, along with their key beliefs.

philmindbeliefs

We can organize these theories into the following taxonomy:

philmindtax

Chapters 1-2

Here Jaworski does the necessary work of painting the philosophical landscape within which all theories of mind reside. He begins by discussing three problems that theories of mind tend to gravitate towards:

  1. The Problem Of Psychophysical Emergence: “how did mental activity appear within the sparse, particulate sea of the universe?”
  2. The Problem Of Other Minds: “how do people infer facts about the private mental lives of others?”
  3. The Problem Of Mental Causation: “how do mental phenomena affect physical phenomena?”

While these problems motivate mental theories, they do not prepare the reader for the breadth of discussions within the literature. In this light, the mental-physical distinction is explored, as are questions of first-person authority, subjectivity, qualia, mental representation, intentionality, and other topics.

Chapter 3

Substance dualism is discussed. This chapter was unusually well structured, perhaps on account of the length of time that society has countenances its subject. Supporting arguments, grounded in modal conceivability-possibility links, proved inconclusive. Counter arguments (problems of other minds, of interaction, of explanatory impotence) extract the following concessions:

  1. Denying knowledge of the mental states of others.
  2. Discarding conservation of energy *or* mental-physical causation.
  3. Rejecting the need to explain mental-physical correlations.”

Chapter 4

The physicalist worldview is introduced, with some overlap with philosophy of science giants like Hempel. Only eleven pages are devoted to exploring theories of consciousness, including first-order-representation, higher-order-perception, higher-order-thought, and sensorimotor ideas.

Chapters 5-7

Reductive, non-reductive, and other specific physicalist theories are treated. The author was not shy about marshalling arguments against the current philosophic consensus that is realization physicalism. Multiple-Realizability arguments prominently featured in the discussion; I especially enjoyed the typology-based reductivist responses to the MRT.

Chapters 8-9

Dual-Attribute Theory, and other specific non-physicalist theories are treated. An interesting discussion of Dennett’s and Wittgenstein’s arguments against qualia spiced the presentation.

Chapters 10-11

Jaworski’s brand of hylomorphism is presented, along with a related hylomorphic theory of mind. While Aristotelean approaches are becoming more popular within philosophy – notably philosophy of biology – there exists an uncomfortable lack of exposition into its tenets which these chapters help to fill. I found the connections with Morleau-Ponty’s empirical phenomenology, and modern embodied cognition theorists like Noe and Regan, to be a helpful inspiration for future research.

Despite the few targeted criticisms above, I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to efficiently absorb philosophy of mind material.

Fodor: Modularity Of Mind

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Part Of: Cognitive Modularity sequence
Content Summary: 1100 words, 11 min reading time

Let me today review this text, which is widely held to be one of the most influential texts in the cognitive psychology tradition.

Motivations

A milestone within the cognitive psychology tradition. This extended argument for the modularity of input systems reoriented the field back when it was published in 1983, and responses continue to emerge to this day.

Modularity Of Mind is one of those rare books that combine a formidable vocabulary with a concise communicative style. Fodor’s dry humor and deep familiarity with relevant empirical results redeemed the occasionally abstruse discussion. The author’s penchant for polemics was not apparent in this essay. Five sections divide the work:

Part 1: Four Accounts Of Mental Structure

To Fodor, the four competing theories of mental structure are:

  1. Neo-Cartesianism
  2. horizontal faculties
  3. vertical faculties
  4. Associationism

While discussing Neo-Cartesianism, Fodor draws the distinction between innate faculties: propositional vs. architectural. Specifically, there are two kinds of reactions to the tabula rasa. The first is to propose that the mind does not begin life completely undifferentiated; rather, infants come into the world already possessing “cognitive furniture”, such as image rendering engines. The second kind of reaction is to claim that humans are born with a certain set of pre-installed knowledge (e.g., Chomskyan universal grammar).

After the discussion regarding innate faculties, Fodor treats the horizontal/vertical distinction within architectural theories of cognition. Horizontal modular theories are those that would have cognitive furniture be domain-general. Such ideas go back to ancient Greece; a good current exemplar is what modern psychology believes about long-term memory. Vertical modular theories hold cognitive furniture to be domain-specific. Rather than fractionating the mind into perception, memory, and motivational modules, vertical theorists such as Franz Gall (father of phrenology) would insist on different modules for mathematics, music, poetry, etc. Gall would go on to say that there is no such thing as domain-general memory. If there are similarities between musical memory and mathematical memory, that is merely a coincidental similarity across module implementations.

Finally, Associationism (incl. Behaviorism) is treated. Unsurprisingly, given the author’s functionalist credentials, arguments are presented that purport to demonstrate the inadequacy of the movement.

Part 2. A Functional Taxonomy Of Cognitive Mechanisms

Fodor outlines a three-tier mental architecture: transducers, input processing, and central systems. The brain is thought to transduce signals via sensory organs, and feed such raw data to input processing systems. These iteratively raise the level of abstraction, saving intermediate results into states known as interlayers. Finally, the final results of the input systems are presented to the central systems, which are responsible for binding them into coherent beliefs with the help of background knowledge. Interestingly, Fodor holds that language processing is its own sensory system, distinct from acoustic processing, and that this system encapsulates the entire lexicon. Organism output (behavior) was not considered.

Part 3. Input Systems As Modules

The most empirically rich and impactful section. I will briefly sketch each subsection.

  1. Domain specificity. There appear to be separate mechanisms to process distinct stimuli. While several systems may share select resources, they never share information.
  2. Mandatory operation. While human beings can ignore their phenomenological experiences, they cannot consciously repress them.
  3. Hidden interlevels. Introspection cannot unearth the intermediate states of visual stimuli transformation, only the finished product.
  4. Fast processing. Driven by evolutionary pressures, sensory processing is very rapid. For example, many people are able produce a mirrored language stream that trails the original by an astonishing one-quarter of a second.
  5. Informational encapsulation. In principle, input processing can never access the organism’s broader knowledge base. There are few to none feedback loops that inform sensory processing.
  6. Shallow outputs. Input systems do not issue beliefs, but rather non-conceptual (“shallow”) information. Other systems are responsible for subsequent conceptual fixation.
  7. Fixed neural architecture. In contrast with central processes, input systems appear to be localized to specific neural locations (e.g., Wernicke’s Area for language processing).
  8. Idiosyncratic breakdown patterns. Brain damage is associated with selective, severe failures of input processing, not general deficiency introduction.
  9. Shared ontogeny. Cognitive structural maturation occurs in an innately-specified way.

Informational encapsulation is singled out as the most important element of the thesis. This feature explains how an organism protects its raw percepts from contamination from its own biases. Constraining information flow is essential to human beings, and this feature goes a long way in motivating the existence of the others.

During his discussion of shallow outputs, Fodor makes an interesting observation about conceptual fixation. Human concepts are organized hierarchically: “a poodle is a dog is a mammal is a physical organism is a thing”. Central non-modular systems must locate their conclusions at a specific level within this hierarchy. Interestingly, beliefs tend to fixate at a particular level (e.g., “dog” in the above example).

What makes the “dog” level so special? It tends to be: (a) a high-frequency descriptor; (b) learned earliest within development; (c) the least abstract member that is monomorphemically lexicalized; (d) easiest to define without reference to other items in the hierarchy; (e) most informationally dense, in the sense of being the most productive item if one asks for the properties of each item in the hierarchy from most to least abstract; (f) used the most frequently in everyday descriptions; (g) used the most frequently in subvocal descriptions; (h) the most abstract members that give themselves to visual representation. These facts call out for explanation and further research.

Part 4: Central Systems

Fodor perceives little evidence to explicate central processes, so he reverts to analogy. Scientific confirmation is presented as an analogue of psychological belief fixation. An enthusiast of Quinean naturalized epistemology, Fodor is also sympathetic to Quinean holism: that any belief can in principle affect any other. But requiring unconstrained information transfer is a recipe for intractable computation. This is the deep trouble underlying the framing problem of artificial intelligence. According to Fodor, intractability is precisely why academic journals tend to avoid topics of general intelligence.

I found the previous section on input modules to be of greater import. Fodor’s arguments here are empirically impoverished, and his vague notions of networked learning leave much to be desired. If this section characterized the entirety of the text, the reader would be better advised to research modern probabilistic graphical models, and attempts within the AI community to approximate universal induction.

Part 5: Caveats and Conclusions

The essay concludes with a few comments regarding modularity and epistemic boundedness (“are there truths that we are not capable of grasping?”). After reviewing the historical discussion surrounded bounded cognition, Fodor ultimately has little to say on the matter, arguing that this conversation should proceed with little appeal to concepts of modularity. He closes with self-styled gloomy remarks about how our best thinkers have consistently evaluated local phenomena more effectively than global phenomena (c.f., deduction vs. confirmation theory), and that this sociological reality is unlikely to change in the near future.

An incisive, important text that helps to place modern cognitive science debates in sharper focus.

Glimcher: Neuroeconomic Analysis 2: Because vs. As-If

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The life blood of the theoretician is constraint.

To understand why, one must look to the size of conceptspace. The cardinality of conceptspace is formidable. For every fact, how can there be only a countable number of explanations for that fact? How many theories of physics have managed to explain what it means for an apple to fall from a tree? Putting on our Church-Turing goggles, we know that every event can be at least approximated by a string of binary code, that represents that data.
The number of programs that can be fed to a Turing Machine to generate that particular string is unbounded.

Constraint is how theoreticians slice away ambiguity, how they localize truth in conceptspace. To say “no”, to say “that is not possible”, is a creative and generative act. Constraint is a goal, not a limitation.

After summarizing each of the three fields he seeks to link, Glimcher spends an entire chapter responding to a particular claim of Milton Friedman, which permeates the economic climate of modernity. Friedman argued that it is enough for economics to model behavior *as if* it is congruent to some specified mathematical structure. In his words:

“Now of course businessmen do not actually solve the system of simultaneous equations in terms of which the mathematical economist finds it convenient to express this hypothesis… The billiard player, if asked how he decides where to hit the ball, may say that he “just figures it out” then also rubs a rabbit’s foot just to make sure… the one statement is about as helpful as the other, and neither is a relevant test of the associated hypothesis”.

This, Glimcher argues, is precisely the wrong way to go about economics, and scientific inquiry in general. Because human beings are embodied, there exist physical, causal mechanisms that generate their economic behavior. To turn attention away from causal models is to throw away an enormously useful source of constraint. It is time for economics to move towards a Because Model, a Hard model, that is willing to speak of the causal web.

Despite this strong critique of economic neo-classicism, Glimcher is unwilling to abandon its traditions in favor of the emerging school of behavioral economics. Glimcher insists that the logical starting place of neoclassicism – the concise set of axioms – retains its fecundity. Instead, he calls for a causal revolution within theories such as expected utility; from Soft-EU to Hard-EU.

According to Glimcher, “the central linking hypothesis” of neuroeconomics is that, when choice behavior conforms to the neoclassical axioms (GARP), then the new neurological natural kind of the Subjective Value must obey the constraints imposed by GARP. Restated, within its predictive domain, classical economics constrain neuroscience because utility IS a neural encoding known as a subjective value.

Glimcher then goes on to establish more linkages, which he uses to constrain the data deluge currently experienced within neuroscience. Simultaneously, he employs known impossibilities of the human nervous system to close the door on physically non-realizable economic models. It is to neuroscience that we turn next.

Glimcher: Neuroeconomic Analysis 1: Intertheoretic Reduction

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Neuroeconomic Integrative Research (1)

Can we describe the universe satisfactorily, armed with the language of physics alone? Such questions of inter-theoretic reduction lie at the heart of much scientific progress in the past decades. The field of quantum chemistry, for example, emerged as physicists recognized that quantum mechanics had much to say about the emerging shape of the periodic table.

Philosophical inquiry into the nature of inter-theoretic (literally, “between disciplines”) reduction has produced several results recently. In philosophy of mind, the question is the primary differentiator between reductive from non-reductive physicalism.

But what does it mean for a discipline to be linked, or reduced, to another? Well, philosophers imagine the discourse of a scientific field to leverage its own idiosyncratic vocabulary. For example, the natural kinds (the vocabulary) of biology includes concepts such as “species”, “gene”, and “ecosystem”. In order to meaningfully state that biology reduces to chemistry, we must locate equivalencies between the natural kinds of their respective disciplines. The chemical-biological identity between “deoxyribonucleic acid” and “gene” suggests that such a broader vision of reduction might be possible. The seeming absence of a chemical analogue to the biological kind of “ecosystem” would argue against such optimism.

Where does Glimcher stand in the midst of this conversation? The academic field that he gave birth to, neuroeconomics, attempts to forge connecting ties between neuroscience, psychology, and economics. Glimcher is careful to disavow reductionist ambitions towards a total reduction. Rather, he claims that failed inter-theoretic links are signals of disciplinary misdirection. For example, if the neuroscientific kind of “stochastic decision” doesn’t have an analogue in the economic kind of “utility”, this would suggest that economics should reform towards a more probabilistic vision. This above model of innovation-through-linking is, according to Glimcher, the core reason why neuroscience/psychology/economics: the act of reducing produces insight.

I sympathize with Glimcher’s vision. I would argue that the pull within the sciences towards specialization is well counter-balanced by interdisciplinary work of precisely the kind that he is championing.

That said, I would criticize Glimcher’s vision of intertheoretic reduction as being inflexible. His goal is, essentially, to chain the abstract field of economics to one particular piece of meat – the human brain. This seems too limited in scope: shouldn’t economics be able to say something about the decision-making capacities of non-mammalian species, or computing agents, or alien races? To shamelessly leverage a metaphor from computer science, reductive schemes should be refactored such that human cytoarchitecture is a function parameter, instead of a hard-coded constant.

An interesting link to David Marr’s work should underscore this point. One of the founders of neuroscience, Marr’s most salient idea from his most popular book (Vision), was that causal systems can be evaluated at three different levels. The top level is the level of abstract principle, the middle level is algorithmic, the third is implementation. Marr strove to demonstrate how, for certain areas of vision like stereopsis, these three “levels of explanation”, and their inter-connections, were already essentially solved. It is interesting to link his idea of explanatory level with the present neuroscientific proposal. Would Marr consider economics to be isomorphic to abstract principle, psychology to algorithm, to neuroscience as implementation? If so, this would add another voice of support to my proposal for the “parameterization” of low-level details: Marr was very willing to detail multiple algorithms that interchangeably satisfy the same abstract specification.