I think that 'with neuroscience' explanations, and brain scan images in particular, are more satisfying because they remind us we're physicalists.
I don't see how you're justified in thinking that. It's too detailed a hypothesis to locate using that data.
An accusation of privileging a hypothesis will be more persuasive if you also point out other families of hypotheses that together still deserve the majority of the probability mass.
The wording you used doesn't reflect the extremely low probability. The hypothesis could be the best specific guess (which is still no good, just the best we have), and work as raw material for hypotheses that have more chance of actually capturing the situation (constructed by similarity to the first guess), but that can also be expressed by something like "my best guess is that something roughly like X might be happening", instead of "I think X is happening". If my best guess X is no good, I don't think that X is happening.
Also, there probably should be a new standard fallacy on LW, "appeal to Eliezer".
I think you're reading too much speculative detail into this. Is it any different from persuading people to buy your drugs by showing men in white coats and saying "studies have shown"?
The McCabe & Castel study found that brain scan images were more persuasive than bar graphs. So it's not just 'studies have shown', but brain scan images in particular.
It's not "brain scan images in particular", it's "brain scan images are more persuasive than bar graphs". Do you know the effect of images of cute kittens or people in lab coats? You can't draw a hypothesis this detailed around one data point.
Upvotes indicate that this is a natural nitpick to make that is mostly Vladimir's-attitude-independent.
Vladimir, I really do appreciate corrections. As you've seen, I update posts in response to them.
It's just that if you say 100 negative things to me in a row without saying a single positive thing, I start to get the impression that you think everything I write is bad, and I should stop writing. (If you doubt my impression, scroll through your last 100 comments that were replies to me.)
That's why I hope to gain an accurate impression of people's reaction to my work - so I can decide whether to keep writing.
If I get nothing but negative feedback from people or from a particular person, then I have to take guesses as to whether this is because (1) the vocalized feedback presents an accurate picture of their assessment of my work, or whether it's because (2) their vocalized feedback does not present an accurate impression of their assessment of my work (that is, they generally appreciate my writing), but they decide to only vocalize negative comments and never (or rarely) vocalize positive comments.
Does that make sense?
One angle here (which you seem to implicitly advocate?) is that including pictures of brains and talking about brain components causes people to change their minds about cognitive/philosophical matters in specific directions. If the results of that exposure are positive then it seems like it might be a good PR strategy, with interesting pedagogical applications if you were trying teach certain lessons from psychology in a vivid and convincing way.
On the other hand it also seems that the effects could be explained by certain kinds of priming mixed with the representativeness heuristic rather than detailed evidence in support of the precise claims that are being made. That is to say: its not clear to me that this phenomena might not be a good way to explain things so much as a "physical brain fallacy" (roughly: just because the brain is physical, doesn't mean a particular claim about cognitive processes is true).
Imagine a control group who get a sales pitch (for a bad product) telling them that they should rationally calculate that it would fulfill their desires and make them happier to buy and use. The experimental group could get roughly the same pitch (for the same ba...
A simple explanation is that using phrases like "brain scans indicate" and including brain scan images signals scientific eliteness, and halo effect/ordinary reasoning causes them to increase their estimate of the quality of the reasoning they see.
I've decided to upvote your article for presenting a concise summary of this topic and also, very importantly, including links to the full pdfs of the academic articles Weisberg et al. (2008) and McCabe & Castel (2008) which you used to support your argument. This is not always possible, but I think is always to be commended when it is.
However, having now read both of these articles in their entirety, I would like to point out what I believe to be an important omission in your summary of the Weisberg et al. (2008) article.
First, you state:
And yet, Yale cognitive science students rated the 'with neuroscience' explanations as more satisfying than the regular explanations.
You also state:
Somehow I suspect people who chose to study cognition as information processing are less likely than average to believe the mind runs on magic.
You conclude with:
Sometimes even physicalists need to be reminded — with concrete reductionistic details — that they are physicalists.
However, I obtain an entirely different conclusion from this article. First, I shall summarize what I believe to be the salient points of Weisberg et al. (2008):
But these are Yale cognitive science students. Surely they don't think the mind runs on magic, right?
Wow. I had no idea Yale cognitive science students had reached the astronomical level of competence where we ought to be surprised when they make simple mistakes. I assume that none of them are religious, either?
I have another possible explanation, which I think deserves a far greater "probability mass'': images make scientific articles seem more plausible for (some of) the same reasons they make advertising or magazine articles seem more plausible -- i.e., precognitive reasons which may have little to do with the articles' content being scientific. McCabe and Castel don't control for this, but it is somewhat supported by their comparison of their study with Weisberg's:
...The simple addition of cognitive neuroscience explanations may affect people’s conscious
Is it a fair restatement to note that people (physicalists included) get quite different priming effects from 'mind' and 'brain'? The first makes us think of our subjective experience, the second makes us think of a physical object.
I've certainly noticed that reductionist arguments are more convincing to others when I use 'brain' in place of 'mind'.
Here's a piece of supporting evidence for your theory: http://www.economist.com/node/21526321
In particular, the second study. There were four statements of a patient's condition after a traumatic injury: 1) David is healthy and fully recovered. 2) David passed away. 3) David died, was embalmed at the morgue, and is now in the cemetery, in a coffin, underground. 4) David is in a persistent vegetative state.
Group A rated the cognitive function on options 1, 2, and 4. Group B rated the cognitive function on options 1, 3, and 4. Non-religious folks - i.e., mat...
Of course not all libertarianism is "contra causal",and of course complete physical determinism isn't a fact
On the subject of acausal free will, I wonder if it is simply a misinterpretation of the benefits that we can gain through our choices. While we don't have free will in the sense of our choices being uncaused, we do have more choices available to us, than say, a cow or a spider. So we have the freedom to choose better, even if not the freedom to choose whatever. So here I am hypothesizing that people interpret greater intelligence as greater acausal free will.
Cognitive scientists share a number of basic assumptions... the most fundamental driving assumption of cognitive science is that minds are information processors... Almost all cognitive scientists are convinced that in some fundamental sense the mind just is the brain.... Few, if any, cognitive scientists are dualists, who think that the mind and the brain are two separate and distinct things.
Bermudez, Cognitive Science, page 6.
Thank you for the button-pressing report. I've been looking for something like that for a while. (Well, by "looking" I probably mean "sort of wishing I'd accidentally stumble upon it.")
Nice, modulo Christina's comment below. But, I wouldn't place any stock in time-delay button-pressing experiments. They are only suprising if you both a) believe in free will, AND b) believe that the freely-willed action, and the conscious experience of making that decision, must be simultaneous.
There is no reason to expect this, and many reasons to expect it not to be the case, even if you believe in free will. I don't know if it's even meaningful to ask "when" a perception occurred - your brain may present you with a percept, and backdate it or forward-date it.
It's just that physicalists take the controlled and repeated findings of physics and neuroscience as being stronger evidence than their own subjective experience is.
This is not a straightforward matter. There are people who deny the existence of colors, of time, of any sort of will, or any sort of subjective experience, on the basis of "physicalism" or "science". Physics and neuroscience actually contain no such thing as "subjective experience". Do you therefore conclude that there is no such thing at all? No, you believe ...
I don't understand what single thing, if any, disqualifies them. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think you would agree they have unique issues, just as "being an empty label" is something that won't be wrong with, say, denying subjective experience.
You made a good point about the inexhaustibility of wrong explanations, which I suppose is true for everything. So I certainly don't ask for anything like a complete list of bad explanations and their problems! But of the other three you mentioned, do they share a problem, or what are their unique problems, or is it too complicated to explain in a comment? Can you explain why the other three are hopeless as well as you did for the first?
I feel a bit like I'm Eliezer expaining the instant failure modes of most AGI research (but not as smart), and that there could be a whole sequence of postings on the instant failure modes of explanations of consciousness.
Well, I don't think I can write those postings, or at least, devote the many days it would take me. Just some brief notes here amplifying the fallacies with examples.
...What evidence is there about whether people are working on something correctly, aside from a complete and finis
Weisberg et al. (2008) presented subjects with two explanations for psychological phenomena (e.g. attentional blink). Some subjects got the regular explanation, and other subjects got the 'with neuroscience' explanation that included purposely irrelevant verbiage saying that "brain scans indicate" some part of the brain already known to be involved in that psychological process caused the process to occur.
And yet, Yale cognitive science students rated the 'with neuroscience' explanations as more satisfying than the regular explanations.
Why? The purposely irrelevant neuroscience verbiage could only be important to the explanation if somebody thought that perhaps it's not the brain that was producing certain psychological phenomena. But these are Yale cognitive science students. Somehow I suspect people who chose to study cognition as information processing are less likely than average to believe the mind runs on magic. But then, why would they be additionally persuaded by information suggesting only that the brain causes psychological phenomena?
In another study, McCabe & Castel (2008) showed subjects fictional articles summarizing scientific results and including either no image, a brain scan image, or a bar graph. Subjects were asked to rate the soundness of scientific reasoning in the article, and they gave the highest ratings when the article included a brain scan image. But why should this be?
I remember talking to a friend about free will. She was a long-time physicalist who liked reading about physics and neuroscience for fun, but she didn't read Less Wrong and she thought she had contra-causal (libertarian) free will.
"Okay," I said. "So the brain is made of atoms, and atoms move according to deterministic physical law, right?"
"Right," she said.
"Okay. Now, think about the physical state of the entire universe one moment before you decided to say "Right" instead of something else, or instead of just nodding your head. If all those atoms, including the atoms in your brain, have to move to their next spot according to physical law, then could you have said anything else than what you did say in the next moment?" (Neither of us understood many-worlds yet, so you can assume we're talking about a single Everett branch.)
She paused. "Huh. I'll have to think about that."
"Also, have you heard about those studies where brain scans told researchers what the subjects were going to do before the subjects consciously decided what they were going to do?"
"No! Are you serious?"
"Yup. Sometimes they could predict the subject's choice 10 seconds before the subject consciously 'made' the choice."
"10 seconds? Wow. I didn't know that."
I think that maybe the 'with neuroscience' explanations and brain scan images are more satisfying partly because they remind us we're physicalists. They remind us that reductionism marches on, that psychology is produced by physical neurons we can take pictures of.
Just like most people, physicalists walk around all day with the subjective experience of a 'unity of consciousness' and contra-causal free will and so on. If a physicalist isn't a researcher who studies all the latest successful reductions in neuroscience or biology or physics all week long, and doesn't read Less Wrong every day, then it's possible to get lost in the feel of everyday experience and thus be surprised by a headline like 'Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them.'
Sometimes even physicalists need to be reminded — with concrete reductionistic details — that they are physicalists. Otherwise their normal human anti-reductionistic intuitions may creep back in of their own accord. That's one reason it helps to study many sciences, so you have many successful reductions in your head, and see (at some resolution) the entire picture, from psychology to atoms. As Eliezer wrote:
Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you consume makes you larger. If you swallow enough sciences the gaps between them will diminish and your knowledge will become a unified whole.
To her credit, my friend no longer believes in contra-causal free will.