[FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[Eric Charles]

Glen said:

In principle, if EricC's principle is taken seriously, the inner world of a
black box device will be *completely* represented on its surface. Any
information not exhibited by a black box's *behavior* will be lost/random.


David said:

Machine "behavior" is either a metaphor or an error of anthropomorphism.
This is true, I believe, whether one speaks of a computer's UI (the
computer is but a lump and sans any behavior) or a robot.


Both questions point out that as a field, psychology has never properly
settled upon a definition of "behavior".

We can all agree that behavior refers to something *more *than mere
movement, right? The dead body in Weekend at Bernie's is not behaving,
despite tons of movement. A dead duck thrown out of a window isn't behaving
as it falls to the ground, a live duck thrown out a window and flying away
is behaving. A marionette under the control of a skillful artist might look
like it is behaving, but as we widen the lens we see that the
marionette is *just
*moving, while the artist is behaving. Etc.

We can also agree that the difference between behavior and mere movement *not
*a mere matter of constituent parts, right? The dead duck and the live duck
are basically the same physically (so sayeth Dr. Manhattan). We can also
all imagine that there might be other planets in which life looks very
different, perhaps having silicon as its core atomic characteristic instead
of carbon, for example, or using a physiological system without neurons.

So, we have a box. For some questions we might care what is inside the box.
For other questions we don't. For the questions where we don't, we can
treat it as a philosophical "black box" if we want. For *those *questions,
we aren't asserting that the surface of the black box tells us what's
inside it, we are merely asserting that for the purposes of those questions
everything we want to know can be known from the surface.

Opening such a box can help you get a certain type of explanation for what
was on the surface, but that is a different matter altogether. Any
"inner-world of the black box" that creates the same surface has created
the same surface. Dynamic systems are messy things, even when producing
stable outcomes.

The characteristics that distinguish movement from behavior are visible
without opening the box. We readily distinguish the dead duck from the live
one without looking inside them; we distinguish the marionette from the
artist by looking at more of the situation, not by cutting the marionette
open. We certainly could come up with questions that lead us to look inside
the marionette, but they wouldn't be questions about its behavior.








-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>
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