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

[Eric Charles]

Glen,
I offered the dead-duck vs the live-duck and Weekend at Bernie's as
examples of movement that is not behavior. We can also talk about
avalanches, the babbling brook, the explosion of the tree struck by
lightening, the clouds blowing through the sky. The vast, vast, vast, vast,
vast majority of movement that occurs in the universe in not behavior.

Also, I am exactly not talking about hidden states. We could talk about
that at some point, for sure, but I wasn't talking about it before. I'm not
sure what I might have said that lead you to think anything "hidden" was at
issue. Certainly there are physically-internal states when we discuss
organisms, but my exact point is that the phenomenon in question do not
exist at that level of analysis. Back to Holt:

We are prone, even the ' behaviorists ' among us, to think of behavior as
somehow consisting of reflex activities. Quite true, so far as it goes. So,
too, coral reefs in the last analysis consist of positive and negative
ions, but the biologist, geographer, or sea-captain would miss his point if
he conceived them in any such terms. Yet we are doing the very same thing
when we conceive the behavior of a man or animal in the unintegrated terms
of neural process; which means, agreeably to the bead theory, the impinging
of stimulus on sense-organ, the propagation of ionization waves along a
fiber, their spread among various other fibers, their combining with other
similar waves, and eventually causing the lowered or heightened tonus of
muscle. AII this is happening. But our account has overlooked the most
essential thing of all—the *organization *of these processes.

If now we pitch the misleading bead theory straight overboard, and put our
microscope back into its case, we shall be free to look at our behaving
organism (man, animal, or plant), and to propound the only pertinent,
scientific question— *What *is this organism *doing?* All agree that
empirical study will elicit the answer to this question, and in the end the
complete answer.

What, then, *is *it doing? Well, the plant is being hit by the sun's rays
and is turning its leaves until they all lie exactly at right angles to the
direction of these rays: the stentor, having swum into a region of CO2, is
backing off, turning on its axis, and striking out in a new direction: the
hen has got a retinal image of a hawk and she is clucking to her
brood—shoot the hawk or remove the brood and she stops clucking, for she is
reacting to neither one nor the other, but to a situation in which both are
involve... (Holt, 1915, p. 160-161)


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


On Sun, May 10, 2020 at 10:34 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Ha! Well, by ignoring the poignant example, you've ignored my entire
> point. And it's that point by which I can't agree with the unmoored
> distinction you're making. The celery example isn't about being alive.
> Sorry for injecting that into it. The celery example is about *scale*.
> Celery's movement *is* movement. An antenna's behavior *is* its movement. I
> introduced antennas' behavior in order to help demonstrate that behavior is
> orthogonal to life.
>
> Now, the distinction you're making by saying that behavior is a proper
> subset of movement, would be fine *if* you identify some movement that is
> *not* behavior. I didn't see that in the Old Dead Guy text you quoted ...
> maybe I missed it?  Anyway, that's the important category and celery and
> antennas fit right in.
>
> But the behavior/movement discussion (including observer-ascribed
> intention) is a bit of a distraction. What we're actually talking about is
> *hidden* states (a.k.a. "thinking", maybe extrapolated to "consciousness").
> So, the examples of light-following or higher order objective targeting is
> like trying to run before you can walk. Why do that? Why not talk about,
> say, the hidden states of an antenna? If we could characterize purely
> *passive* behavior/movement, we might be able to characterize *reactive*
> movement. And if we do that, then we can talk about the complicatedness (or
> complexity) of more general *transformations* from input to output. And
> then we might be able to talk about I⇔O maps whose internal state can (or
> can't) be estimated solely from their I&O.
>
> We don't need all this philosophical rigmarole to talk about the
> complexity of I⇔O maps.
>
> On 5/9/20 6:17 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
> > Ok, so it sounds like we agree there is a distinction can be made
> between behavior and "mere movement". So what is that difference? I would
> argue, following E. B. Holt, that it is the presence of intentionality.
> Note crucially that the directedness of the behavior described below is
> descriptive, /not /explanatory. The intention is not a force behind the
> behavior, it is a property of the behavior-to-circumstance mapping that can
> be demonstrated by varying conditions appropriately.
> > [...]
> > P.S. I'm going to try to ignore the celery challenge, because while we
> recognize plants as living, we do not typically talk about them as
> behaving. And I think the broad issue of living vs. not-living is a
> different issue. We probably should talk about plants behaving a bit more
> than we normally do, but I think it is worth getting a handle on what we
> mean in the more normal seeming cases before we try to look for
> implications like those.
>
>
> --
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
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