The Neurobehavioral Paradigm

Much of the way we understand the present-day world can be understood in numerous competing ways. Neurobehavioral thinking is a pervasive choice that integrates many elements of separately developed systems.

I wrote this to get down a couple thoughts I'd had for a while after finally taking the time to listen to podcasts again.

9/7/09 11:00 am

Just listened to Zack Lynch on Tech Nation talking about the Neuro revolution, brain science and technologies we are looking at to change our near future world. Mind-reading scanners, Cognitive Enhancers, superhuman soldier-athletes, and much more. Kind of fascinating, kind of brave-new-world-ish. I want to read it.

He mentioned Paul Zak's research into trust and the brain chemical oxytocin that can be harnessed to mess it up... I mean understand it. All the powerful potential technological applications aside, I'll bet the mechanisms he's come up with t0 study the problem are worth a look.

Before hearing this presentation I'd been thinking that Neurobehaviorism is responsible for much of how we picture ourselves as creatures in the world, implicit definitions of humanity we carry around, and so forth. Hearing Lynch talk about it makes me want to read his book, a sign that I think he is on to something. He stated that part of his aim is to encourage further dialog about the greater implications of the technologies and knowledge. It's encouraging me to watch my brain/world interactions and reactions more attentively.

So what do I know and how does this work anyway? Trying to look neurobehaviorally at it, I guess we partly go back to the functional model and Turing's question, "can machines think?" If we define thinking by means of the classic structural-functionalist reduction, we can make it so. That is, if we declare thinking to be 'the processing of sensory inputs leading to behavioral outputs" then we've put thinking into a framework where machines can do it, and it only remains to invent more sophisticated machines to process sensory data.

That's not necessarily what thinking is though, and now that the processor technology is pretty robust and mature, one of the new areas of development is around different sensors, both human-like and not, that can substitute for, augment, and maybe improve upon the ordinary human abilities such as sight, smell, touch, hearing, and extra-sensory perception. Organizing the information is another area demanding new attention and new approaches. In both cases, much of this work is only about the technology but it nevertheless requires us to ask what it means to sense something. What does it mean to see? What is an intuitive and intelligible way to integrate infra-red or ultra-violet light into the ordinary light spectrum in a video display?

There's no doubt that trying to solve these problems is interesting and very useful in the right setting. Thinking about how to make a cell phone understand a voice command inevitably leads to a philosophical consideration of what constitutes understanding among any abstracted entities, which need not be human but which certainly need to work as if human. So error messages with a voice saying "I'm sorry I didnot understand" is better than a loud beeping sound, at least if the person using the phone understands English. And the phone may be able to determine by recent interaction what language the speaker will understand and relocalize its alert messages for better results.

Human problem-solving scenarios like this are one way to design machine behaviors to appear human-intelligible, if not completely human. Whether or not the psychological effect should be to fool or simply amaze others that motive has been something humans have felt and acted on for a long time. Consider the cast-iron gypsy-fortune-teller from the amusement arcades of the industrial age, for one example, or the prosthetic limbs and glass eyes invented long ago for the same purposes we now contrive and marvel at robot receptionists, brain-controlled prosthetic servo-driven fingers and similar miracles.

The mechanics that make this all conceivable are today's ascendant neurobehavioral paradigm:

Some characteristics of neurobehaviorism, in no particular order:

An entity under consideration can be either a system or an individual. An individual is conceived as part of a system, but also as one or more systems unto itself that may or may not participate in external systems as well.

A human individual, in view of the above, is in essence nothing special. It has no inherent rights or value that is not part of a greater system.

Systems and all other ways of seeing the world are not inherent in the individual. They are shared information, part of a greater system.

Systems are in large part comprised of shared information. This can be anything from genetic information to chemical information to knowledge, beliefs, values, to tv trivia.

So to a neurobehavioral thinker, there is no reason a corporation is not as worthwhile as a corporeal human being.

Systems cooperate internally and compete externally with other systems. Predators prey on weaker tastier entities. Contestants exercise skills while spectators watch, profiteers try to profit and others work in other ways to create infrastructure and support for the system. In both cases there is a larger system in which the entities play out their behaviors. The larger system confers social meaning and partly guides the outcome of the contests.

Laws and rules are a kind of system for guiding and interpreting social behaviors. Developing laws and rules is an interesting kind of behavior among some groups.

Game theory is a kind of system for guiding and interpreting social behaviors. Behavioral psychology is a kind of system for guiding and interpreting social behaviors. Chaos theory is a kind of system for guiding and interpreting social behaviors. The neurobehavioral paradigm is thus diverse.

This neurobehavioral model externalizes sentimental attachment to individual participants, or may propose a subfield of study to understand the particular emotional response, but individual phenomena are generally considered anomalous to the model as a whole. If a lot of people feel the same way about something as you do then there will be external (behavioral) evidence to support the expression of your feeling, for example other people articulating the same thing, warnings in the media, or perhaps a new medical treatment emerging to control it.