I have several issues with the ideas you present here. Of course, it’s likely that it’s just another communication error given our last conversation..
Here “involuntary” needs to be distinguished from “hard-to-resist”. Most people do not define smoking as an involuntary behavior, because, although people may smoke even when they wish they wouldn’t, they have the feeling that they could have chosen not to smoke, they just didn’t.
For smoking, sure. I have a habit of twirling my hair which can be damn annoying and sometimes hard to resist. I can choose to keep myself from doing it by paying attention to what my hands are doing and forcing it to stop. If I’m concentrating on other things, it happens without me realizing it. It seems out of touch with the normal meaning of the word “voluntary” to include this.
But when our masked gunman tells me to increase my body temperature by two degrees or he’ll shoot, he is out of luck.
Well, I just tried it. I got 0.6 degrees increase. If I were to put blankets on like feverish people normally do, I’m sure I could do better. If there was a real gunman, I’d start doing squat jumps. Marathon runners can get their core up to 105.
Does that mean that the process of regulating core temp both is and is not “voluntary”, depending on the size of the temperature change?
If you’re not willing to do the work of trying to model the hierarchical structure of the brain and the interconnections, what can this theory say about why my locus of voluntary control is bigger than it used to be? Can your black box theory advise people on how to increase their locus of control? What can you even use it for?
But an explanation in the spirit of reinforcement learning would have to start by insisting on treating thoughts and emotions as effects rather than causes. Instead of explaining my choice of restaurant by saying I thought about it and decided McDonalds was best, it would be more accurate to say that previous experiences with McDonalds caused both the thought “I should go to McDonalds” and the behavior of going to McDonalds.
What’s the evolutionary purpose of thoughts if they don’t do anything? Where do thoughts like “I just thought about going to McDonalds” come from? What distinguishes this from philosophical zombies?
I know that I can’t currently change my temperature by willing it as I’ve tried a few times, but you may just be better at it. Certainly people can train themselves to do so with eg biofeedback. So if you in fact were able to raise your temperature .6 degrees just by willing it, I’m willing to admit that temperature change is partly voluntary (partly because I’m guessing even if you wanted to you couldn’t do 10 degrees).
But doing things like wearing a blanket or doing squat jumps are “cheating”. Sleepwalking is also “voluntary”, if you mean that if you didn’t want to do it, you could tie yourself to your bed, and humans can fly if they’re allowed to use airplanes. But that seems to be a case of blanket-wearing being voluntary, and temperature rising automatically in that condition. Even something like visualizing yourself in the Arctic so your temperature rises to compensate is “cheating” of a sort—we all agree that visualizing things is a voluntary behavior.
What’s the evolutionary purpose of thoughts if they don’t do anything? Where do thoughts like “I just thought about going to McDonalds” come from? What distinguishes this from philosophical zombies?
we all agree that visualizing things is a voluntary behavior.
Do you actually mean that? I’d thought there were plenty of situations in which visualizations were involuntary… PTSD comes to mind. If that’s wrong, I’ll be very interested to know it.
This is peripheral to your main point, though. Yes, if I voluntarily visualize being in the Arctic, and that entails my temperature rising, that is in some sense different from voluntarily raising my temperature.
That said, this is a very fuzzy line, and I’m not sure if it’s a useful one. When I was regaining motor control and speech after my stroke, there were lots of functions that I could only access at first via indirect and circumlocuitous pathways, but which I would not want to describe as “involuntary”. For example, there was a long period where I could only move my knee by moving my foot around. (Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous; it seemed ridiculous to me at the time, but there it was. As far as my experience of my body was concerned, i could not voluntarily move my leg, but I could voluntarily move my foot. It felt rather like i imagine telekinesis would.)
And in many cases it’s really not clear to me that I ever changed the pathway that accessed the function after that, it’s just that I stopped attending to the path, much as I don’t attend to the specific muscle movements associated with typing the letter I. (Well, OK, I just did, then. But I usually don’t.)
I think English is deficient in regards to words like “can”—it doesn’t distinguish between what one can usually do, what one can do under particular circumstances, and what one could do with sufficient preparation.
I don’t think that’s a separate meaning. It’s used as “may” because whether you are capable of doing something usually depends on whether you have the permission of the person you’re asking, which is why that usage is rediscovered over and over and over by speakers young and old. (Same phenomenon when you ask for food, “but” also want a container for it, and various other circumlocutions.)
“Can I have some cake?” --> “if I try to have cake, will you act in a way that prevents this?”
You coukd just as well be cheeky to the child that says, “May I have some cake?” by replying, “Yes, you are permitted to, but I will not get it off the shelf for you [and neither will anyone else and you can’t reach it].”
Where does it end? What word’s usage can you not narrowly interpret and criticize on that basis?
“Self-handicapping is a performance-debilitating characteristic, which in student populations has been consistently associated with negative outcomes such as academic underachievement and poor psychological adjustment. Perfectionism, locus of control, and self-efficacy have been linked with self-handicapping but have not been previously examined within one cohesive framework. This study, therefore, examined a model linking maladaptive perfectionism and external locus of control to self-handicapping, both directly and indirectly through their mediated effect on self-efficacy. Participants were 79 university students who completed an online survey comprising measures of perfectionism, locus of control, general self-efficacy, and self-handicapping. It was found that perfectionism and locus of control predicted self-handicapping; and perfectionism, but not external locus of control, predicted low self-efficacy. The mediation analyses found no support for self-efficacy as a mediator of the relationship between perfectionism, locus of control, and self-handicapping. These findings suggest that the interaction of maladaptive social cognitive constructs associated with self-handicapping requires further investigation.”″
Locus of control is something that you earn. You can’t artificially manipulate because its not a physical variable—just a concept in your head.
I have several issues with the ideas you present here. Of course, it’s likely that it’s just another communication error given our last conversation..
For smoking, sure. I have a habit of twirling my hair which can be damn annoying and sometimes hard to resist. I can choose to keep myself from doing it by paying attention to what my hands are doing and forcing it to stop. If I’m concentrating on other things, it happens without me realizing it. It seems out of touch with the normal meaning of the word “voluntary” to include this.
Well, I just tried it. I got 0.6 degrees increase. If I were to put blankets on like feverish people normally do, I’m sure I could do better. If there was a real gunman, I’d start doing squat jumps. Marathon runners can get their core up to 105.
Does that mean that the process of regulating core temp both is and is not “voluntary”, depending on the size of the temperature change?
If you’re not willing to do the work of trying to model the hierarchical structure of the brain and the interconnections, what can this theory say about why my locus of voluntary control is bigger than it used to be? Can your black box theory advise people on how to increase their locus of control? What can you even use it for?
What’s the evolutionary purpose of thoughts if they don’t do anything? Where do thoughts like “I just thought about going to McDonalds” come from? What distinguishes this from philosophical zombies?
I know that I can’t currently change my temperature by willing it as I’ve tried a few times, but you may just be better at it. Certainly people can train themselves to do so with eg biofeedback. So if you in fact were able to raise your temperature .6 degrees just by willing it, I’m willing to admit that temperature change is partly voluntary (partly because I’m guessing even if you wanted to you couldn’t do 10 degrees).
But doing things like wearing a blanket or doing squat jumps are “cheating”. Sleepwalking is also “voluntary”, if you mean that if you didn’t want to do it, you could tie yourself to your bed, and humans can fly if they’re allowed to use airplanes. But that seems to be a case of blanket-wearing being voluntary, and temperature rising automatically in that condition. Even something like visualizing yourself in the Arctic so your temperature rises to compensate is “cheating” of a sort—we all agree that visualizing things is a voluntary behavior.
Tomorrow’s post.
Do you actually mean that? I’d thought there were plenty of situations in which visualizations were involuntary… PTSD comes to mind. If that’s wrong, I’ll be very interested to know it.
This is peripheral to your main point, though. Yes, if I voluntarily visualize being in the Arctic, and that entails my temperature rising, that is in some sense different from voluntarily raising my temperature.
That said, this is a very fuzzy line, and I’m not sure if it’s a useful one. When I was regaining motor control and speech after my stroke, there were lots of functions that I could only access at first via indirect and circumlocuitous pathways, but which I would not want to describe as “involuntary”. For example, there was a long period where I could only move my knee by moving my foot around. (Yes, I know that sounds ridiculous; it seemed ridiculous to me at the time, but there it was. As far as my experience of my body was concerned, i could not voluntarily move my leg, but I could voluntarily move my foot. It felt rather like i imagine telekinesis would.)
And in many cases it’s really not clear to me that I ever changed the pathway that accessed the function after that, it’s just that I stopped attending to the path, much as I don’t attend to the specific muscle movements associated with typing the letter I. (Well, OK, I just did, then. But I usually don’t.)
I think English is deficient in regards to words like “can”—it doesn’t distinguish between what one can usually do, what one can do under particular circumstances, and what one could do with sufficient preparation.
All that, and then it gets used to mean “may”, too.
I don’t think that’s a separate meaning. It’s used as “may” because whether you are capable of doing something usually depends on whether you have the permission of the person you’re asking, which is why that usage is rediscovered over and over and over by speakers young and old. (Same phenomenon when you ask for food, “but” also want a container for it, and various other circumlocutions.)
“Can I have some cake?” --> “if I try to have cake, will you act in a way that prevents this?”
You coukd just as well be cheeky to the child that says, “May I have some cake?” by replying, “Yes, you are permitted to, but I will not get it off the shelf for you [and neither will anyone else and you can’t reach it].”
Where does it end? What word’s usage can you not narrowly interpret and criticize on that basis?
“Self-handicapping is a performance-debilitating characteristic, which in student populations has been consistently associated with negative outcomes such as academic underachievement and poor psychological adjustment. Perfectionism, locus of control, and self-efficacy have been linked with self-handicapping but have not been previously examined within one cohesive framework. This study, therefore, examined a model linking maladaptive perfectionism and external locus of control to self-handicapping, both directly and indirectly through their mediated effect on self-efficacy. Participants were 79 university students who completed an online survey comprising measures of perfectionism, locus of control, general self-efficacy, and self-handicapping. It was found that perfectionism and locus of control predicted self-handicapping; and perfectionism, but not external locus of control, predicted low self-efficacy. The mediation analyses found no support for self-efficacy as a mediator of the relationship between perfectionism, locus of control, and self-handicapping. These findings suggest that the interaction of maladaptive social cognitive constructs associated with self-handicapping requires further investigation.”″
Locus of control is something that you earn. You can’t artificially manipulate because its not a physical variable—just a concept in your head.