IUBio

Place cells and addictive drugs

Glen M. Sizemore gmsizemore2 at yahoo.com
Sun Jun 20 07:07:34 EST 2004


GS: What you have just said IS the naïve philosophical view, and it is
> precisely what doesn't work. Progress is not the result of mindless
> application of some simplistic rules about testing hypotheses

B: It has been for 4000 years.

GS: Huh? If you are talking about some 4000 year old evolution of
science I'd be willing to hear it, but I'm fairly certain that any
exposition of it will not reveal the success of "mindless application
of some simplistic rules about testing hypotheses."

Human behavior is one of the most complex subject matters treated by
any science, and the behavior of scientists an extra subtle and
complex portion. The notion that a science could have haphazard,
uncritical conceptual structure and by some almost rote application
of: derive hypotheses from theory-> test-> reject/accept/alter theory,
arrive at "truth" is utterly ridiculous. This view, I think, has
infiltrated sciences that should know better from psychology.
Psychology began with a split from philosophy and that schism has
produced a promiscuous proliferation of metaphors for which there is
no hope of being anything else. The concepts of psychology are a
shambles but, of course, what does this matter? Experiment will solve
everything. No. Some questions simply are not empirical issues.

> B:[.]so in my mind, even if someone is experimenting on the brain 
> with completely a whack hypothesis, the results shouldn't care what he
> thinks.
> 
> GS: Obviously, I disagree.

B: I can't see how it is possible to disagree with that statment. 

GS: I don't disagree that facts themselves may stand alone. What I
disagree with is the larger implication that theory and data are all
there is to science. Mainstream psychology and the sciences that it
has infected construct their theories out of useless concepts, and
this is the primary reason that much of psychology and behavioral
neuroscience is so useless.

B: If I am 
experimenting about the nature of gravity, and I hypothesis that
things
always fall towards my feet, and I drop a rock, and it falls by my
feet,
then of course, these results support my hypothesis, even though we
now
know that hypothesis is wrong. It still doesn't detract from the
result
that the rock feel towards the mass.
 
GS: Again, facts may stand on their own, but science is more than
theory and fact; it is also careful, critical conceptual analysis and
most of psychology has none of this. In contrast, behaviorism and
behavior analysis has been preoccupied with conceptual analysis since
the publication of "On the Generic Nature of Stimulus and Response" in
the ‘30s.
 
> B: Meanwhile, whether or not "goal cells" make any sense, or whether
> we
> should be talking about "goal arrays" or "goal recursive neuronal 
> circuitry", if you find a correlation between two things (cell spiking
> and behavior) whether its causative or not, it is going to tell you 
> something.
> 
> GS: Only once it is placed in some particular context. And it is
> likely that when it is done, the meaning of the fact will not be the
> same as the original mentalistic meaning.

B: Exactly.

GS: Yes, exactly, it will reveal the notion to have been misguided,
and represented a cul-de-sac rather than thoroughfare to "truth."


BilZ0r <BilZ0r at TAKETHISOUThotmail.com> wrote in message news:<Xns950E96FC2CDA7BilZ0rhotmailcom at 202.20.93.13>...
> gmsizemore2 at yahoo.com (Glen M. Sizemore) wrote in



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