Psychological Realism and Poker

During my post-doctoral years I played poker very seriously. For a while, my poker library grew much faster than my psychology library, and I became a profitable mid-level player. I have played very little since my post-doc ended, but I think the experience was valuable. For one thing, the mathematics of poker is fascinating, and I still nurture a hope of one day teaching a "Statistics of Poker" seminar. For another thing, I think poker provides an excellent context for thinking through theories of psychology. On the surface, poker seems like it is a game about cards, and on the surface it is. However, you don't need to get much below surface-level to see that poker is primarily a game about the behavior of the other players. The player on your right just put in a big bet: Does he have a big hand? Is he bluffing? What does he think you have, and how does he think you will respond? Given what he might have and what he thinks you might have, if you put in a huge re-reraise, how will he respond? The layers of analysis that can be applied to these situations is fun, but not really on topic for this post (though I talked a little about it here). Instead, I want to delve into a very typical poker situation from the point of view of a psychological realist vs. a dualist.

Note that this is a preliminary analysis that I hope to develop further, and I would love any feedback. 

What do we know for sure about the brain

If I was going to list everything we knew for sure about the brain, it would be a very, very long list. Instead of trying to do that, I am going to focus on things we know relevant to my last post, which was quite negative about the new "brain mapping" initiative, and which generated a lot of criticism
(http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201304/why-brain-mapping-is-stupid-idea). The title of the post then, should maybe be less “What do we know about the brain?” and more “What are some first principles we can use to understand how the brain operates?”

Why the Brain Mapping project is a Stupid Idea

It was just announced that President Obama wants to start spending one hundred million dollars to "map the brain", and that his oft-times rival Eric Cantor thinks it’s a great idea. But it is a terrible idea, because I can tell you, right now, about half of the big lessons they will learn. For a million more, I could probably gather a group of experts together to tell you about half of what remains. I'm not sure what, exactly, would be left after that, but I'm sure it would be comparatively cheap to figure it out. 

Eugene Taylor and E. B. Holt

Eugene Taylor recently passed away. For those who do not know, he was one of the world's leading experts on the works of William James, a champion of Humanistic Psychology, and a leader in integrating "Eastern" and "Western" psychology. He held positions at the Saybook Institute and Harvard Medical School. He had encyclopedic knowledge in his areas of expertise, but was also a bit of a jerk about it, insisting upon both his knowledge of the facts and his unique ability to interpret the facts correctly.  In Eugene's opinion, no more than six or seven people in history had every truly understood James's work, and the others were dead. He spoke of James's work for example, with the zeal of someone who had not only familiarized themselves with all records regarding James, but also double checked all the interpretations with James himself at an appropriate seance. Given Eugene's understanding of James's work, he might well have.

Could Affordances Structure Light?

This post should have a subtitle. It should read: Could Affordances Structure Light? Ken Aizawa gets a 10-month-delayed response

Last April I started blogging about my (now-submitted) attempt to update Cutting's paper distinguishing between Gibson's approach on ecological psychology and the emerging Connecticut approach. The first post generated many comments, and I promised to follow up on some of them soon. Well... in publishing time this is still "soon", even though in blogging time it is ages. In particular Ken Aizawa hit me with a few hard questions including the perennial stickler, "Can affordances structure light?"

I think it is important for ecological psychology that they do, and I think they do. However, my position (which I associate with Gibson's thinking) is less extreme that that promoted by the Connecticut approach (e.g., Turvey, Shaw, Mace, and the young Reed). I also think it is pretty darn simple to support:

Pragmatism and Behaviorism: "Hypotheses"

Below is a quote from psychologist E. C. Tolman. It shows the clear influence of Pragmatist thinking on Radical Behaviorism. (Personally, I think it could be done better without reference to something "within the organism", but that is a minor point.)

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(2) But let us turn, now, to a brief consideration of the second main subtype of cognitive behavior-readiness, what I called hypotheses; or intentions, expectations and attainments as to relations. Suppose a rat be run in a successive discrimination box. Such a box is an apparatus in which the animal has to choose one of two doors at each of four successive choice points. One of the two doors at each such point is lighted and one is dark. The lighted door may be either the one on the left or the one on the right in chance order. Thus at each such point the animal has the possibility of responding either on the basis of light-darkness or on that of right-leftness. Suppose, now further, that it be arranged by the experimenter that the correct choices shall in a day's series of 10 trials, or 40 choices in all, fall an equal number of times to the left and an equal number of times to the right, and suppose it also be arranged that the correct door be an equal number of times a dark door and an equal number of times a lighted door. Under these conditions it was found by Krechevsky, whose experiments it is I am reporting, that the rat will pick up one systematic way of behaving after another. In the first two or three days he may pick up, say, the propensity of choosing always the right hand doors. But then he will shift sooner or later to some new propensity, to that say, of choosing only the left hand doors; and then still later to that of choosing alternate right and left doors; or he may shift to choosing all the lighted doors, irrespective of side, or all the dark doors, or to choosing alternately light and dark; and so on. Each such systematic propensity will be adopted for a time and then dropped in favor of some other. And, following Krechevsky, we may now define each such intervening condition (or "I") in the organism, behind any one such systematic way of behaving, as an hypothesis. An hypothesis, behavioristically, in other words, is to be defined as nothing more nor less than a condition in the organism which, while it lasts, produces just such a systematic selectivity in behavior. Further, it appears that such an hypothesis or selectivity is equivalent to an intention or assertion of a specific relation as obtaining in the environment. In the above case these assertions are to the effect that it is such and such types of door which lead on and such and such other types which are closed. The rats assert-hypothesize-that it is the right hand doors, or the left hand doors, or alternate right and left doors or dark doors, or whatever, which, as such, lead on. And when any one such assertion proves incorrect, an animal sooner or later drops it for a new one.

In the experiment as thus far described, the problem given to the animals was actually insoluble. The correct doors were, that is, determined by chance. And no hypotheses--none of the systematic selectivities in the behaviors of the animals-could prove successful. This meant that during the entire duration of the experiment the rats kept shifting from one hypothesis to another. In other experiments, however, the situation was different. Thus in one case it was arranged that after a rat had once adopted some hypothesis with a given degree of consistency the experimenter then made that hypothesis correct. Under these conditions the animals persisted in their now correct hypothesis throughout the entire remainder of the investigation. Or, again in still another set-up, a certain hypothesis was made correct from the very beginning. In such a case the rats might begin with various wrong hypotheses. But they always ended sooner or later with the single correct one. So much for rats, let us turn now to human beings….

Why it is important that we see the things we see

A little bit ago there was a nice post over on Gary William's blog about "Panpsychism vs. Inogranicism" - usually taken as two extremes at which either everything is said to have mental properties to some degree (panpsychism) or the existence of mental things is denied across the board (inorganicism). This grew out of a book review from a few months ago, in which Gary claimed the author endorsed panpsychism, for the slightly less extreme position of claiming at least some inorganic things should be considered to have mental properties. At any rate, the comments on the post got interesting, and I was posed a question that would take too long to answer in there... so I'll try to answer it here... The answer requires a bit of discussion about radical empiricism and realism, in particular regarding color perception. These are crucial issues for creating a psychological science with any chance of making sense.