So, I debated my professor and now I'm confused.

parlor_tricks · 4 months

TLDR: You assume that knowing the base facts will predict behavior. Behavior involves more than just the internal brain. Knowing the insides will not predict the reactions. Also: even if you know all the basic parts, those parts can create complexity which you can't fathom.

tldr tldr:

1) Given all knowledge of the parts, does not imply ALL knowledge of the system and its outputs.

2) Complex systems can (and do) create unpredictable/non deterministic outputs and outcomes (climate vs weather for example)

Therefore, Given 2), the professor is correct in stating that we will not know everything about the brain and behavior. Given 1) and 2) we will know an awful lot about behavior and the underlying systems, but our knowledge is upper limited by our inability to predict the outcomes of complex systems.

Your professor is likely right - basically you are arguing the reductionist standpoint (iirc that is the correct ism). Well that is wishful thinking. Even if we know everything at a fundamental level, that does not mean we will understand how the systems they generate interact.

Further in your chain (quarks->.....-> behavior...)

The leaps between fields of science is so major, the impact of each layer on the next so varied, that you may as well be accused of scientific mysticism.

For example, the effect of quarks on the formation of particles is fascinating, but its impact on neurobiology; oblique. While there will be the edge cases where quantum physics is important, the larger body of NB would be involved with the reactions and chemicals it comes up with on its own.

Further just understanding NB won't make you understand how thoughts are created or how they interact or how that effects behavior. To do that you would also have to tack on several other branches giving you:

thoughts->behavior<-economics<-sociology, just as an example.

In the end, even if you tacked on every branch of science to finally help you predict behavior you would kick yourself because:

1) if you only want to focus on behavior you could have your answer without neurobio, 2) Some things would have random outcomes

hot4belgians · 4 months

Initially I though you'd answered your own question. If you know everything about the brain's function then you, by definition of knowing everything, know how behaviour works. Of course this would only be true if all that 'behaved' was the brain. As stupid as this may sound, your arms move and your gut digests food, they'll do different things in response to different stimuli which may be governed by the brain, but if you only knew everything about the brain that wouldn't be enough to know about that.

Say you have Myasthenia gravis and your brain is just like anyone else's (It probably wouldn't be but i don't know enough about that). You can't behave in the same way as someone who is shocked. If you have multiple sclerosis, you wont feel a very hot plate. Again i probably sound pedantic because that's to do with the spinal cord and not the brain, I assume you meant central nervous system? Even so that isn't enough.

what you should really say is that if you knew everything about how the human body works, then you'd understand how behaviour works. Though in saying that you would be saying you know how behaviour works...

Dangger · 4 months

Check out this idea on emergence:

emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems.

In other words, the sum of the parts is more than the whole. A lot of people have elaborated much better in this thread on why the basic answer is not really, you wouldn't be able to predict behavior, but no one mentioned emergence, which is a concept that I rather like.

shadyturnip · 4 months

I think you're assuming that there's a straight connection between each level and the level above it. You may want to look into some philosophy of science in reductionism and the relation of the special sciences between levels.

The simple answer is that it may not at all - emergent properties from complex systems aren't necessarily understood by appeal to the underlying rules. On top of this, the granularity of the explanation may not fit - let us assume for the moment that there is a perfect match between levels; this might allow us to describe economics through physics, but would you want to? Would you gain any knowledge from that? Would you understand it any better by being able to explain it in a more basic sense?

And this relies on the assumption that there's a perfect correlation between each level, which does not appear to be the case. I recommend reading Jerry Fodor's excellent paper Special sciences (or: The disunity of science as a working hypothesis), and reading the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (SEP) pages.

Though this might be off-base and not answering your actual intended question, I hope this helps.

cbogart · 4 months

I think behavior is tricky to understand because it's not just governed by neurobiology, but also by continuous input and feedback from the environment. We live in a world with a lot of patterns to it, and our brains both influence, and adapt to, those patterns. So to understand a person's behavior, you'd have to understand not just their neurobiology, but also the kinds of patterns in their environment that they've learned to adapt to. And a lot of those environmental influences are feedback from the person's own prior behaviors. For example you'd have to understand sociology to know what influences there are a person's future behavior, but you can't build sociology from the ground up without understanding psychology. So trying to predict a person's behavior with a neurobiological model is unrealistic.

I'd go slightly farther than that, and say it's not even possible in principle: it's faster to just wait and see what an organism does than it would be possible to simulate it with the fastest physically possible computer. Therefore we have to study behavior directly; we'll never be able to derive everything useful we want to know from neurobiology.

So in any meaningful sense, knowing everything about the brain can't tell us how behavior works.

Paul-ish · 4 months

As a computer scientist sometime I think about the human body vs a computer. If someone gave one of the brilliant thinkers of the past, say descartes, complete knowledge of the physical workings of a computer (electrons, magnetism, mechanics of a hard drive spindle, etc...) would or could he completely understand that computer?

I would argue not really. He would find things like "Oh, when plug this peripheral (mouse) in the I can get things on the display to flash, and I can clearly see movement of electrons!" For the most part though, the computer would remain a mystery. There is simply too much data. This is because a computer is built on abstractions. Few people actually code binary 1s and 0s anymore, and few people still code assembly. Most people use modern programming languages along with common and useful idioms to achieve their goals. It is to be understood from a macroscopic level, from a distance, and not from the electrons moving through the computer. The abstraction that high level languages provides allows for more flexible thinking.

In a similar way, understanding the biophysics of the human brain doesn't necessarily mean we will understand everything about the brain, although may be a necessary (but not sufficient) criteria. It just doesn't explain some phenomena as cleanly as a more abstract and macroscopic cognitive approach might. "Why do I get anxious around this one pretty girl?" is a question that you might be able to answer with physics, but would make more sense to think about the abstractions of cognitive and behavioral psychology. Just as an engineer doesn't use particle physics to build a bridge, I do not think psychologists will need particle physics to understand the human brain.

Even if we assume the work is deterministic, it is useful to take a more approximate approach in most cases. What you view as mysticism can be useful abstraction in my opinion.

squeevey · 4 months

I agree with what i THINK you are saying.

Assume the universe is composed of a finite set of 'elementary' (non-reducable) particles

and

You know how each particle interacts with other particles

And you exist OUTSIDE of the universe of these particles.

Then you can determine at time T what that universe would look like.

However, this requires you to NOT be part of the 'universe'. It is necessary to be omnipotent.

Theodore_Brosevelt · 4 months

This actually relates to two of my favorite sayings:

"Can't see the forest for the trees", and "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts"

Essentially, just knowing all the factors doesn't mean you can fully understand the end result. Because to understand particles, you have to know how quarks interact. To know how molecules interact, you have to know how particles interact, and so on. It stands to reason that in order to truly understand behavior, you'd have to understand how thoughts interact. I'm not saying it's impossible to understand, just that we don't understand it yet.

fwaht · 4 months

Yes, if you know everything about the physical reality for something, you will know how everything, subsumed by your knowledge, behaves unless it's somehow indeterministic. And even then you can likely know with great likelihood what will happen--although, it depends on how significant the indeterministic effects are. The reason being is that we live in a physical universe such that we find physicalism is the only likely explanation for the nature of reality.

So, are there neurobiological models that predict behavior? Yes. The obvious example is if a region of your brain is destroyed you will behave differently, and neurobiology and related fields (e.g., comparative neuropsychology) could predict the changed behavior and tell you why.

It seems no one in here has heard of transcranial magnetic stimulation research, affective neuroscience, neuroeconomics, or quantative genetics. We predict if a fetus is likely to display symptoms in adulthood associated with ASPD if it has a gene called MAO-A. I.e., we know it's more likely to display aggressive behavior.

Your professor sounds like a crank Cartesian dualist.

(And none of this is to discount the large role environment plays. E.g., you can know how a simple toy boat that you made behaves in the idealistic system you dreamt it up in your head, but you need a perfect understanding of the environment to predict that it's going to be destroyed by a meteor instead of reaching the other side of the pond. But you still know how the boat behaves ceteris paribus, and you even know how the boat behaves given X. You just don't know what X necessarily is going to be unless you also understand what underlies X.)

displacingtime · 4 months

You'd be surprised how many people who are generally very scientific have some dualism leanings.

I agree with you, but I suppose we can't prove it until we know everything about how the brain works. Until we get the science to back it it's about philosophical differences.

TheBrohemian · 4 months

IN THEORY, I think the answer is yes. But because the firing of every neuron in your brain is dependent on the excitatory and inhibitory signals it's getting from neurons around it, the application of this knowledge just isn't practical. If somebody asks you about a certain behavior, you would have to think about every signal every neuron is getting.

If I'm wrong, someone please correct me.

unampho · 4 months

There isn't much comfort in hard science. Unfortunately, people tend toward mysticism because it is comfortable. I would say that the computation for behavior analysis from the bottom up would be horrible. However, that's merely a technological problem. For now, though, keep in mind that one could still pull out meaningful "Thermodynamic-like" variables with which to analyze behavior, and still eradicate mysticism. Imagine a temperature-like variable by which you could study impulsive tendancies.

Edit: To respond simply: You'd probably be able to predict behavior, given adequate starting condition knowledge, but it might not be necessary if you looked at the data in a different way. Some behaviors, however, might be chaotic and have too great a sensitivity to small changes in initial conditions.

drent89 · 4 months

You might find this article interesting, it is probably the most famous refutation of reductionist thinking to explain neuroscience. It is by Thomas Nagel and asks the question what is it like to be a bat? Even if we knew all the science behind what makes a bat brain a bat brain would we really know what it is like to be a bat? No, there are phenomenological experiences that we can never understand from a purely reductionist view point, therefore it can never give a complete description of the mid. http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

petejonze · 4 months

The reducing of behaviour to biology is what Gilbert Ryle - one of, if not the greatest 20th century British philosophers - termed a Category Mistake.

His example, as I recall, concerned a dignitary visiting Oxford and asking to see the University. After being shown all the libraries, colleges and sports fields he says "That was all very nice, but I wanted to see the university". Such a question expresses a fundamental misunderstanding about what the university is. (Namely a collections of libraries, colleges, sports fields, etc.).

My crude interpretation of this point is that some things can only be sensibly discussed - only have meaning - at a certain level of description. Behaviour is an emergent property of biology, and the way that it emerges is an interesting research question. But the behaviour is not identical with the underlying biology any more than the stockmarket is identical with a host of offices, traders, cars, workshops, staff, desks, computers etc.

Ryle articulates all this much more clearly than I can in his book, The concept of mind.

tl;dr Your professor is correct. (According to Oxford 'ordinary language' philosophers)

EDIT: spelling

EDIT2: a bit more content: Of course, if you want to define, for example, memory as 'that collection of neural responses that occur in situation x' (i.e. in the operational way that is often necessary to form hypotheses) then you can straightforwardly reduce the 'behaviour' of remembering to the biology (well, the physiology technically, but hey ho). But then that isn't what most people mean when they talk about the behaviour associated with remembering. Thus, by redefining the concept of memory you have begged the original question.

specialkake · 4 months

If you had never seen or used a PC, and I taught you electronics, micro and miniature circuit design, binary code, etc. Would you be able to figure out how to navigate the web?

danxmason · 4 months

Knowing how a horse race works isn't enough to know the winner. You may guess the winner a lot of the time, but you will never know for sure.

Risin · 4 months

Philosophically speaking, the mind/brain dualism theory says that the physical traits in the brain don't necessarily define, or relate directly to, the mental (and possibly behavioral) traits in the "mind" (spirit, soul, etc. whatever you want to cal it).

Bearjazz · 4 months

You kind of have to assume that behavior is deterministic in order to declare experimental analysis of behavior to be a valid science. Otherwise what the hell are you even studying?

I look at it like this; our actions are governed by our nervous system. Our actions change depending on our previous experiences (example: I push a button and get food. I'm more likely to push the button in the future). Either something about experiencing this cause and effect chain changes our brain in some way, through establishing new connections, pruning old ones, strengthening existing ones, or some combination thereof or there is some mechanism independent of our physical brains that does not affect our physical brains but does effect our behavior dependent upon our prior learning. The former requires FAR fewer assumptions and actually has evidence to back it up, while the latter has no evidence.

If behavior weren't deterministic, we wouldn't be able to predict or study it.

deedlyt · 4 months

Check out Candice Pert's book Molecules of Emotion. She discusses the biological basis of emotions coming from the interaction of neuropeptides with receptor sites that are located in both the brain and body.

Homotopic · 4 months

There is a vast difference between behavior -- which is by definition the physical outcome of a system -- and mind and consciousness. Some people have argued that the mind and consciousness can be reduced to purely physical facts, but this position isn't necessarily the most tenable.

For example, suppose Mary, a brilliant human being, is trapped in a black-and-white room with all the physical information she can want about the world, right down to the quarks in a person's head. Now, given these facts, can she know what it is like to see red? Obviously, she can know how a person will behave upon seeing red, but that is not the question; seeing red is a phenomenal experience, like feeling pain. It seems as if after she steps out into the world, and sees a red stop sign, she might say, ``Oh, I could predict beforehand how I would behave upon seeing that stop sign, but I've finally learned what it is like to see the color red, which I something I did not know before.'' If this statement is true, it means that certain aspects of consciousness cannot be reduced to purely physical facts.

Lynzh · 4 months

You can only study human reactions to its environment, that is human behavior. Human behavior is, how we react to our environment.

This guys explains it a lot better than me link.

DrClem · 4 months

This is indeed a very interesting conversation. I think this marks the essence of the whole field of psychology. Psychology is in part a study of behaviors and thus your question is right on point.

There are so many different arguments here I wish we have a more organized and mediated debate. Mods should consider having debate events.

Nonetheless, I would like to contribute to the discuss by challenging the OP to revise the question a bit from

If you know everything about how the brain works, to If you know everything about how everything works

Would this revision challenge some of the arguments thus far against the proposition??

kris_lace · 4 months

I'm a computer scientist, but my narrow knowledge of physics persists that only old classical models allowed:

'Understanding of the current state of particles leads to predictions into the future'.

New quantum mechanics disprove this as we can't currently know where all particles (and their respective subatomic sub-parts) are in one time as well as their momentum.

Though it is put forward by quantum theorists that we can know the past from predictions.

TL:DR We can't ever know the present to a strong enough degree to even base a prediction unto the future.

[deleted] · 4 months

Isn't this just mathematical complexity? That quantified and static systems can output unpredictable results?

EDIT: Chaos theory might be what I am thinking of. Basically, even if you can completely quantify a system (the brain) you can't predict the output for a given input because the system might be extremely sensitive to particular inputs.

Your prof may have added in particles because quantum fluctuations are a source of randomness (slight variations in input) at the electron level. This could every so slight affect how each neuron works, no?

I'm not a shrink or physicists. I am just speculating. The above could be complete bullshit. Just throwing it out there.

Behavioral · 4 months

The analogy one of my professors told me about the brain:behavior dyad is that of chemistry. Take all the characteristics of Hydrogen and all the characteristics of Oxygen, and tell me how those predict the characteristics of Water. Knowing the parts doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the whole. Knowing a brain's physiology and thought process won't predict a person's behavior because motivation/action selection mediates it.

quackenbush · 4 months

Bottom line is that we don't know everything about how the brain works. We're. I

eablokker · 4 months

It's like saying you can predict the weather if you know how all the physics of gases, air pressure, etc. works. Yeah we can predict the weather a few days in advance, but not more than that, and we can predict climate years in advance, but not specific weather events years from now. Is that mysticism to say we can't predict long term weather events? Unpredictability and chaos is an inherent part of any complex organic system, just as well as order also comes into play.

YourCogPsyProf · 4 months

quarks -> particles -> molecules -> brain chemistry -> neurobiology -> thoughts -> behavior

The way in which different modular neural mechanisms are developed and organized plays a bigger role in thought than pure neurobiology.

Use the "computer analogy"; as an IT professional, knowing what all the parts are to build a computer is one thing, knowing the firmware for them to work properly and knowing how they are supposed to be connected together is another thing entirely.

nashstar · 4 months

research in psychology suggests that

quarks <-> particles <-> molecules <-> brain chemistry <-> neurobiology <-> thoughts <-> behavior.

among other things

Jose_Monteverde · 4 months

Conciousness, is untouchable. You can only feel it, in this way conciousness is like faith. However, think about the fact that you are made of the universe and are capable of experience yourself. Psychology major here, I'm also the President of my Psych club at school. I have question, where do u go to school?, check out r/neurophilosophy

deejayposton · 4 months

How do we even know that memories are "stored"?

mrsamsa · 4 months

This progression isn't perfect but that's the idea. This made perfect sense to me but the professor seems to think that simply knowing how everything works isn't enough to understand behavior. This seems to introduce an amount of mysticism into what is, otherwise, strict science. It was like he thought the mind, consciousness, and other such things are untouchable.

It's hard to say exactly what his argument was given the information you've provided, but these were my thoughts.

1) Understanding everything about neurobiology (and all of its underlying processes) obviously isn't enough to understand behavior and cognitive processes. This is because there is an interaction between organism and environment, so (for example) a memory is not "stored" in the brain, instead it is the product of a pattern of environmental, neurobiological and psychological variables.

2) Your system requires that we accept determinism is true, which seems to be unlikely. In other words, behavior is not difficult to predict using deterministic laws because we don't have enough information, but rather that it is indeterministic by its very nature. This is why we use probabilistic laws to describe, explain and predict behavior in experiments. So even if we knew everything we needed to know, it still does not make it possible to predict "X" from knowing "A", "B", and "C".

3) Issues like the "hard problem of consciousness" and "qualia" are things which can only be investigated using first person subjective methods, and science obviously has no way to access these things. Such a field is beyond the remit of science; not in a "mystical" or "spiritual" way, just in a realisation that science is a tool with particular assumptions, axioms and limitations. For example, you wouldn't try to use science to determine what is moral or what is beautiful.

Apologies for doing a little stalking, but if the professor you're talking about is Marr, then as far as I know he certainly isn't a dualist or a woo-head. My best guess is that his argument is [1], and maybe a bit of [2] mentioned above. I'm pretty sure he's argued in the past that issues like consciousness and the mind not only can be investigated and explained by behavior analysis, but that we should actively be doing so.

notdiogenes · 4 months

Determinism holds that behavior is predictable, in the same idea of the chain you posit.

A hard determinist would say that if you had a sufficiently advanced computer and enough knowledge of the universe's laws and current state, you could predict all outcomes - including those of human behavior. Just as you posit in the chain from quarks to behavior.

However, currently Science does not know enough of the brain's workings to create formulas that predict thoughts, or even much more basic questions!

Free will advocates state that when we do get such advanced knowledge, we will find that there is an interaction from the mind to the brain. That knowing all the rules and starting chemistry won't be enough, there will be room for free will.

Science isn't at a point to test this yet, so its pretty much a theoretical exercise. Personally, I have many friends who are determinists, and I believe in free will (which is the optimal belief anyway hohohoho).

matholio · 4 months

I think this is similar to expecting to fully grok weather and fluid dynamics, because you understand water and energy. You can build better and better models which work at certain levels, but there always another level of resolution which the model doesn't cater for.

The following probably applies to some degree. "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagen

merebrillante · 4 months

It's not mysticism, it really is science why your progression won't lead to a complete understanding of behavior. Simply stated, humans (and thus their behaviors) are open-system organisms.

marrymetaylor · 4 months

It's not really turning to mysticism. It's more that it's nearly impossible for us to take EVERY aspect of/cause for a behavior. Also there are still fuckloads of things we don't know about nearly everything.

CharAznable · 4 months

You're the one assuming we know everything.

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