5HC : Skinner, Turing

Maru Dubshinki · 03 Feb 2005, 12:42 · from 2005-February.txt.gz

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From: marudubshinki at gmail.com (Maru Dubshinki)
Date: Thu Feb  3 12:42:09 2005
Subject: (urth) 5HC : Skinner, Turing
In-Reply-To: <BAY102-F9A20AF34F4F962FF90648B97F0 at phx.gbl>
References: <20050203150802.19305.qmail at web25707.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>
	<BAY102-F9A20AF34F4F962FF90648B97F0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <f5238c3050203124176c2d2de at mail.gmail.com>

I don't like the Copenhagen interpretation in the least bit: anything
which requires you get rid of elegance like unitary wave evolution,
accept things which are completely muddled and really, metaphysical,
and introduces a bunch of paradoxes like Von Neumann's Catastrophe, or
Wigener's Friend, is a bad thing in my book.
We need a better solution, in QM as well as psychology.  WIth QM
you've got multiverse models you can switch to, but what alternatives
do we have in psychology and philosophy?

~Maru
Microsoft delenda est.

On Thu, 03 Feb 2005 18:11:01 +0000, Iorwerth Thomas
<iorweththomas at hotmail.com> wrote:
....
> I'll elaborate on something I said earlier.  What seems to have happened
> with behaviourism is analagous to what seems to have happened with the
> Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.  You have a fairly well
> defined _operational_ definition of what you're looking for (behaviour in
> psychology, particle spin - for example - in QM) and a good idea of the
> basic philosophy behind what you're doing and its limits.  Your students,
> however, aren't so careful.  Neither are the popularisers of your ideas (who
> may or may not be identical with you), largely because they're writing what
> amounts to a polemic.  At some point, the operational definition becomes an
> _ontological_ one, and then you get crass behaviorism (version [2]) and bad
> pop-sci nonsense on state-vector reduction.
> 
> I tend to automatically assume (knee-jerk prejudice) that most behaviorists
> are crass, as opposed to thoughtful (type [1]) because I'm a massive
> intellectual snob.  Oh well.
> 
> >For what it is worth, I do find the apparent
> >references to these individuals in 5HC to be more than
> >coincidence.
> 
> It hadn't occured to me, but there might be something in that.  I do tend to
> think that he was more of the cold, rational and amoral scientist archetype
> [1] rather than a depiction of anyone in particular though.
> 
> [1]  I won't say steriotype as there may have been one or two of this kind
> lurking around the more unpleasant reaches of 20th century research, eg.
> those motherhood experiments with monkeys, etc.     And then there's Edward
> Teller for us physicists.
> 
> Iorwerth

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