Psychology: I'm not an expert on the subject, but something's wrong

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Researchers are totally starting to study how people really work. It's just a relatively new field of study because it involved relatively new technology like magnetic imaging.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Researchers are totally starting to study how people really work. It's just a relatively new field of study because it involved relatively new technology like magnetic imaging.

I think this is the right approach:  Learn the mechanics behind the thinking, THEN study the thinking itself.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I'm not sure if that really is the way to go. Imagine trying to learn C# or PHP by watching chips under a microscope. We're trying to reverse engineer the most complex operating system ever written. It's orders of magnitude more complex than windows. We need an interface. Some way of capturing the data streaming down the ports. Decrypting the packets of information. We need live brains, in jars with wires sticking out of them. Nothing else will cut it.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I'm not sure if that really is the way to go. Imagine trying to learn C# or PHP by watching chips under a microscope. We're trying to reverse engineer the most complex operating system ever written. It's orders of magnitude more complex than windows. We need an interface. Some way of capturing the data streaming down the ports. Decrypting the packets of information. We need live brains, in jars with wires sticking out of them. Nothing else will cut it.

That's why we have MAD SCIENTISTS, P3nt.  The regular kind will have to muddle along with passive sensors.

[P3nT4gR4m]

All they'll ever see is the neurological equivalent of transistors opening and shutting

Useful if they develop the capability to repair damaged stuff or even upgrade bits with more capacity, better bandwidth, etc but it's the app store where the real money is going to be.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

All they'll ever see is the neurological equivalent of transistors opening and shutting

Useful if they develop the capability to repair damaged stuff or even upgrade bits with more capacity, better bandwidth, etc but it's the app store where the real money is going to be.

Hardware first.  Software second...Because the latter can only operate within the constraints of the former.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Researchers are totally starting to study how people really work. It's just a relatively new field of study because it involved relatively new technology like magnetic imaging.

I think this is the right approach:  Learn the mechanics behind the thinking, THEN study the thinking itself.

It's both, really. They have to go together or the whole thing doesn't work. So you have neurophysicists doing the research and working with psychologists to understand the results. Psychologists are increasingly looking to neuroscience to help them understand behavior, and how to treat their clients.

[Kai]

Researchers are totally starting to study how people really work. It's just a relatively new field of study because it involved relatively new technology like magnetic imaging.

I think this is the right approach:  Learn the mechanics behind the thinking, THEN study the thinking itself.

One of the problems is that we have to kill all these darling ideas about how the human brain works along the way. All these cherished notions are deeply ingrained in study of mind. All these classical terms like" consciousness" are pretty much meaningless in the actual physical framework. Hanging onto most of psychology as it stands is hindering progress, because it is metaphor rather than pure description of physical reality. Just like the quantum world doesn't make sense when we imagine atoms and other "particles" as billiard balls bouncing around.

[Jasper]

There is no "brain software".  It's a pure hardware system with software-like behaviors because it changes as it goes.  The metaphor is unfitting.

I think the real interesting way to go would be to research from behavioral and neuroscience approaches, and try to meet in the middle, because the real mysteries are how the small stuff translates into big stuff (micro/macro, complexity etc)

[P3nT4gR4m]

There is no "brain software".  It's a pure hardware system with software-like behaviors because it changes as it goes.  The metaphor is unfitting.

I think the real interesting way to go would be to research from behavioral and neuroscience approaches, and try to meet in the middle, because the real mysteries are how the small stuff translates into big stuff (micro/macro, complexity etc)

No offence intended but you're wrong. Most of the personality is "software" in the sense that it's an emergent property of the hardware. A level of abstract that a purely physical description cannot adequately convey.

[Jasper]

Saying that the potentiation of each neurotransmitter in the brain is the software is a big mistake.  It's an abuse of a metaphor that was shaky to begin with.  Brains are un-computerlike.  They do not work on algorithms in the same sense.  It is true that there are algorithms for neuronal behavior but they are approximations of biological behavior.  They are not the rules that create brains, but a description.

Computers are mechanistic, so are brains.  Computers take data from hardware into "working memory" and perform operations on it.  That is what software is.   Brains are the working memory.  They do not have hard drives or working memory.  Brains are therefore more circuit-like than computer like.  Circuits don't have programs, they embody them.

[Eater of Clowns]

If my brain were simple enough to understand, I wouldn't be smart enough to do it.

I don't know how frequently this happens, but one thing that I learned in getting my degree is that the field is largely bullshit.  The problem is that there's so much we don't know that literally any idea about the brain is entertained, if only for a lark.  I took a class on the psychology of good and evil.  It was entirely meaningless.

Studies are also compartmentalized to understand one aspect at a time.  The brain doesn't work like that, too many factors influence every little thing to isolate one.  So while I don't think the field is a pseudoscience, I think it's a limited science.  A lot of studies done in the field are legitimate, well thought out, and cleverly done.  And we've learned a fuck ton from them, because it's a very young field.

So we have an entire field dedicated to the study of the mind, but the mind is such a massive topic that it gets broken up into every ridiculous subfield you can think of.  There's a fucking whole branch dedicated to getting productivity out of office drones by influencing their environment.

ETA sp

[The Good Reverend Roger]

If my brian were simple enough to understand, I wouldn't be smart enough to do it.

No physical phenomenon is beyond comprehension.  We simply lack the accumulated knowledge.

Thing is, people in the middle ages were smarter than you or I.  They had to be.  Yet they'd be utterly incapable of understanding how computer works, for example, because they lack the accumulated knowledge that you and I have access to.

[Richter]

I was browsing through some links based on Holist's weird assertions concerning personal identity, and I've come to notice something interesting.  We have, as a species, had 12,000 years of technology, with almost all of it happening from 1500 AD forward (Hell, most of it from 1985 forward)...But the study of humans themselves is still at the level of alchemy (vs chemistry).

Sociology is a little better off:  There's money to be made by understanding how large groups of people will behave.  But as far as the study of the behavior of individual people, the best we've managed is to hammer them flat with pharmaceuticals when they can't stay in line.

There seems to have been some interesting work done by Timothy Leary (as endlessly harped on by RAW) before he went bonkers, most of which was based on Earlier work done by Freud.  Leary essentially removed Freud's weirdness concerning his mom, and made the information useful.  That information is now extensively used by marketing and government agencies, though they never reference it (not that they reference anything), but it isn't taught in high school, etc...The best I ever go in a psych class was a history of failed ideas.

Now, I am more than willing to be corrected on this idea that psychology is basically stalled in its infant stages...Again, I am not an expert.  If anyone with a proper education or just an insight into the subject has any comments, I'd be glad to hear them.

It is.  IT still borrows heavily from philosophy, which had it's beginnings, and is still so obscure that you can lob near mystical shit a la Freud, and have it make SOME sense SOME of the time. 

Not even the "Doctors" understand it.  Some of them do (A jerk from Cranston, a Fitness nut, and a violent diabetic who had a keen grasp on the way of the world were the best.)  Other doctoral folks who otherwise had every advantage in life handled it more like a gloss, with a  similarly deep understanding.  Like the diabetic said, it's more an inuitive grasp, a flavor, not a check list of symptoms.

It is also tricky to apply hard science too.  You can do research, sure, but you're often dealing with topics and concepts that you have to be very clever to accurately test for.  Understanding and applying the scientific method objectively is more than necessary for both testing and interpreting results.  I've met few academics or researchers who can be properly objective.  Most want to publish books, sell out seminars, or otherwise make money first.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Saying that the potentiation of each neurotransmitter in the brain is the software is a big mistake.  It's an abuse of a metaphor that was shaky to begin with.  Brains are un-computerlike.  They do not work on algorithms in the same sense.  It is true that there are algorithms for neuronal behavior but they are approximations of biological behavior.  They are not the rules that create brains, but a description.

Computers are mechanistic, so are brains.  Computers take data from hardware into "working memory" and perform operations on it.  That is what software is.   Brains are the working memory.  They do not have hard drives or working memory.  Brains are therefore more circuit-like than computer like.  Circuits don't have programs, they embody them.

No - that's what chips are. Software is an intangible abstract phenomenon created by the different states which the chips can be in. Neurons, on the other hand are much more complex than chips. A single transistor on a chip can be one of two states. A single neuron on a brain can be a fuckload of states but the principle is essentially the same - the consciousness is not the little blobby neurons, or the biochemical signals we can measure, shooting around in there, it's a meta property of the same.

If you look inside a brain you cannot see the actual thoughts, just like if you look inside a computer you can't see windows. They're both software.