Vector psychology
This post is probably nothing new probably contains lots of mistakes. I am not an expert on any of this stuff, I’ve just read about it online bit by bit every now and then. I tend to present my thoughts in a confident manner but in practice I don’t really know or understand any of this stuff very well or specifically. I’d still like to offer my thoughts in this thread, and I hope it at least will get you thinking, even if that was all.
Personally I think of the mind as a mathematical entity. And I think the manifestations of different personalities or behavior patterns are also of mathematical nature. Mostly for anyone who considers the world in general as mathematical, physical as opposed to mysterious and spiritual, it would naturally follow that the mind is also mathematical. Psychological patterns are described somewhat often with a mathematical approach, but in general scientific study around psychology everything is very mathematical, there are inventories which score traits and hypotheses are tested statistically and so forth. What I’m talking about here is that the internal structure of the brain produces a dynamic that is based on vectors of different strengths, and things should be modeled from that type of perspective, and they probably are, even if I dont know it.
For an example the amygdala seem to have some sort of a role in negative emotions as well as hijacking the hippocampus for encoding the memories with an association to a negative emotion. The function of the amygdala is therefore mostly to process negative emotion in one way or another as well as produce activities based on those negative emotions. And this is something that is of a quantifiable nature.
The limbic system, which of I certainly am not an expert on, has several subcomponents to it, and the way the limbic system in my opinion works is to produce multiple different vectors that work following an opponent-process theory -type logic. Continuing with the previous example a person with higher intensity for negative emotions and related amygdala functions, require stronger opposing vectors from the other parts of the brain to counteract them when that is necessary.
Neurotransmitters or some agents in CSF (Cerebospinal fluid) and/or the ventricular system produce vectors or a depletable and overtime-finite resource for those vectors.
Cognitive component and holism
These kinds of things are also related to what people believe and that has a complex effect on behavior. If you think some activity is socially inappropriate, then you would have a vector against socially inapprorpiate activity. But the strength of this vector could quantifiable and probably associatable with OFC. So in otherwords your knowledge’s impact on your behavior can be described in quantifiable way.
So what good does thinking like this do then?
Providing profiles for behavioral disorders in a mathematical way, or allowing their consideration as such on a personal level.
So in addition simply reading symptoms you would have a list of vectors with expected ranges. For an example you might describe aggressiveness as both a heightened and a lowered vector—modulatory role for amygdala activity or lowered vector for PFC(Prefrontal cortex) activity or vector for OFC(Orbitofrontal cortex), or lowered vector for serotonergic activity, or socially appropriate behavior which I think goes for OFC too.
It could be possible to establish a logical framework of activies for different brain areas and components. This framework could then be converted from a logical construct into a smoother quantifiable construct following the logical framework, with reliability that could be converted to probabilities. When a person does some kind of activity it could be mapped into a chain of events in the brain.You have some activity and it causes an arousal in a certain region, that is processed by another part etc. This could be considered as a visual representation and dissecting behavior into sequences.
There’s probably lots of mistakes here and probably there really isn’t anything ‘new’ either, though I might have written thinking that way. Please correct mistakes when you notice such :D
Any thoughts?
This reads like a stream of consciousness, I was unable to extract any salient point after scanning through the post twice, so downvoting on that basis. Consider a more standard and accessible writing style, like this.
Rephrased: Personally I’m not trying to write in a manner that would get me votes or avoid getting downvotes. It strikes me as rather odd that you can’t find a salient point from this post. Representing internal functions of the limbic system as quantifiable vectors? Represeting the functions of agents in CSF as vectors? Are these not points?
They maybe too obvious or things that for experts would be not worth mentioning. I’m not an expert, so I can’t really tell. But I have not seen specific notions of modeling things happening in the brain this way, despite doing some hobby-style reading on the matter.
Meanwhile the post not being accessible or well-structured seems to me too like a pretty good criticism.
No. There are a variety of different models proposed in computational neuroscience to model the behavior of the brain. Saying: Let’s use math, because math is cool is not a point with much substance.
How many papers or books on computational neuroscience did you read?
“No. There are a variety of different models proposed in computational neuroscience to model the behavior of the brain. Saying: Let’s use math, because math is cool is not a point with much substance.”
Well, I thought they were points, and using math certainly seems like a good idea, but perhaps it is a little too simple.
“How many papers or books on computational neuroscience did you read?”
I did not read any on that particular field. I’m not sure if I would get my answers if I did. But it certainly sounds like a good idea.
Personally I just sort of feel that this style of approach is not taken in psychology, but it might be just my ignorance, or probably is. It may be too obvious or simple.
I still think this post could work to stimulate thought for people without such expertise. It seems to me that the post is getting misunderstood, and it might be due to that people who read it are not very familiar with the brain, or perhaps it’s my own ignorance, that certainly seems like a good bet.
I did try to create a little bit more specific example in the comment above, here’s a link just incase: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/ked/vector_psychology/b1bn
You definitely should remove the first sentence
Why? I immediately closed the post upon reading it. I usually don’t react that strongly but it was the last on my reading list for today and I am kind of tired. But I noticed my strong reaction and thought: Something is wrong here. If I react that strong on that cue by being tired, then the same effect but weaker will be working on most readers and prime them negatively or turn a fraction away.
Score one for truth in advertising?
“You definitely should remove the first sentence”
If I was interested in controlling how people treat what I may be writing, or send certain kind of social signals then it would be useful to remove the first sentence. I know I am a layman, despite I do think that I understand this kind of stuff reasonably well, a lot better than the average people do, but still it would be inappropriate to represent this stuff as a person who has done extensive research on the matter or has some kind of qualification for it. I think it’s ok to represent things in an uncertain manner, especially when there are good reasons for that.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
The problem with that statement isn’t the substance. It’s the jarringly ungrammatical sentence structure.
Uninformed speculation, technobabble, trivially obvious concept with no interesting exposition (vector representation), unfamiliarity with current research or understanding. Reads like it was generated by an automatic research paper generator. Downvoting.
You’re a rather negative person, aren’t you?
You can say that the brain is mathematical in the sense that you can describe 100 billion very complex neurons with very complex formula. You haven’t provided any good reason why your proposed “vector” model that seems much more simple would describe the workings of the brain well.
Intelligence is complicated. There no reason to believe that the system that you propose that’s much more simply could also provide for the intelligence that a human brain is capable of providing.
If intelligence would as simple as you propose we already would have AGI.
“Intelligence is complicated. There no reason to believe that the system that you propose that’s much more simply could also provide for the intelligence that a human brain is capable of providing.”
I’d like to point out that this isn’t exactly about intelligence
I thought you wanted to talk about how humans make decisions. If that’s not what you wanted to point out, what do you wanted to say in your post?
You might look into all the work that’s been done with Functional MRI analysis of the brain—your post reminds me of that. The general technique of “watch the brain and see which regions have activity correlated with various mental states” is a well known technique, and well enough known that all sorts of limitations and statistical difficulties have been pointed out (see wikipedia for citations.)
I suppose I should be looking more into the matter, so I would be less ignorant. And I probably will too, and I already have, in a very limited manner.
There are some ingenious people working on the field, who’ve spent their lives studying this stuff. Would it make sense for me to study this extensively and try and confirm my speculations—when even as it is someone who actually is qualified on the field could probably tell in a few seconds if what I wrote here makes sense or whether it’s just wrong. Like someone who is familiar with the neurology related to diagnoses for autism, psycopathy, adhd etc. and knows how they relate to these brainareas.
Meanwhile for other people who are like me, vaguely familiar with some specific functions of the limbic system, it’s more like a thought experiment, try to envision these things as quantifiable phenomenom. And in addition I think it’s good to avoid misleading people by bringing up that these things are speculative and vague opinions.
That’s even the wrong set of people. For the question that you are asking people doing computational neuroscience might be the best address.
Well, it seems you’re missing the point… But I’m not really an expert on this stuff. In anycase..
I’m not suggesting a way of mathematically calculating what a person is thinking when they’re feeling some way, as you seem to be interpreting this. This isn’t about studying the internal structure of neurons, either, or trying to figure out how each neuron is connected to all other neurons.
It is rather about emotional impulses and areas of the brain which are involved.
For an example, let’s say you get hungry. You start thinking about how to get food. When you start thinking about how to get food or what food is, that is very complicated and it involves neurons all over the brain, recalling places where you used to eat food, what was the last food you perhaps ate, whatever you happen imagine about them, their taste, the way it looks, the way it smells, how much it costs.… It’s very complicated. You’d have to look inside a neuron, try and understand how it works in tandem with the other neurons, how it calls some remote neuron somewhere else, and how these together produce the thoughts having.
But that’s not what this is about.
Instead it’s rather about simpler more abstract human level phenomenom. A person who would go to extreme lengths to feed themselves while modesty hungry would have something with them. This could could be explained simply by having a more intense sensation of hunger, which comes the hypothalamus I believe, there’s something there that measures I think it’s the content of the blood, I don’t nor can’t remember what exactly, probably sugar or perhaps it’s some sort intracellular levels instead of blood.. In anycase there’s an area which creates a signal when you’re hungry. This can be described as a vector relative to the intensity of your hunger.
Behavior that can be explained by extreme hunger would be explained by this particular vector. However that’s not really the entire point, instead it’s figuring out which parts are involved in restraint, decision making and so forth. Then we can notice that there’s an opponent-process style relationship with let’s say the orbitofrontal cortex, which is involved in decision making. Or perhaps ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
The potential restraint then also functions as a vector, which potentially counters the vector from being hungry. So we can also say that perhaps the person is not feeling extreme hunger but instead has a problem with holding back improper behavior.
So this isn’t really about trying to model intelligence or cognition, instead it’s to produce maps of this style of interaction in different kinds of psychological behavior models, which mostly have to do with impulses, impulse modulation, self-restraint and impulse control.
Given that you didn’t take at all about emotions, feeling or emotional impulses in the first paragraph about mathematical modelling, it’s wasn’t clear from your text that you want to investigate them.
Basically you want a model of hunger that ignores what all those neurons in the gut are doing and want to determine hunger only by looking at what neurons in the brain are doing.
We live in a world where people in computational neuroscience try to use all sorts of statistics to get knowledge about mental states from fMRI information. Sometimes they even write papers that suggest that they can forecast the result of some personality tests better than the personality test themselves with is logically impossible. They frequently overfit their data.
If that community didn’t publish results that you can get the kind of information that you are seeking that because they didn’t manage to get results and not because they didn’t try and tortured their data to tell them something like you want to hear.
“Given that you didn’t take at all about emotions, feeling or emotional impulses in the first paragraph about mathematical modelling, it’s wasn’t clear from your text that you want to investigate them.”
Well, yeah, it wasn’t clear for you.