Category: Human Behavior and Cognitive Science

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—“We used a new theory of the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits to generate hypotheses about the association of each trait with the volume of different brain regions. Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Extraversion covaried with volume of medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in processing reward information. Neuroticism covaried with volume of brain regions associated with threat, punishment, and negative affect. Agreeableness covaried with volume in regions that process information about the intentions and mental states of other individuals. Conscientiousness covaried with volume in lateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in planning and the voluntary control of behavior. These findings support our biologically based, explanatory model of the Big Five and demonstrate the potential of personality neuroscience (i.e., the systematic study of individual differences in personality using neuroscience methods) as a discipline.”—

Image revision by CD, above text by https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610370159?Brendan HegartyIs “empathy” just an oxytocin response?Mar 12, 2019, 4:50 PMJWarren PrescottNow consider Steven Reiss work on motivation- 16 basic desires that are also correlated to biology. (This is right up my alley 😁)

http://idspublishing.com/resources/Multifaceted-nature-of-intrinsic-motivation.pdfMar 12, 2019, 4:50 PMJWarren PrescottNow you have a beginning template for personality AND motivation.Mar 12, 2019, 4:52 PMPhilip ClarkTotally stealing this for my own archives. ThanksMar 12, 2019, 5:13 PMReece HaynesPersonality neuroscience seems like an intriguing field. Provides a useful overview of mental traits and links them back to the biological implications.Mar 12, 2019, 6:27 PMThomas NorgateCaspian Lipman-EnglandMar 12, 2019, 8:25 PMVira HigginsWow! So fascinating. Gedalia RubensteinMar 12, 2019, 9:47 PMNick’s ReasonLewis-Hector PhaceasMar 13, 2019, 3:54 AMPrem PrayojanThis study is from 2010. Debunked in 2012 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-phrenology/201202/how-not-do-personality-neuroscience-brain-structure-and-the-big-fiveMar 13, 2019, 4:02 AMNick’s ReasonIt’s not a correct statement to suggest it ‘debunked’ though it’s obvious to anyone who studies the mind-brain and it’s associated behaviors/personalities the large number of possible confounding variables that would require controlling for makes such research difficult.

This is why many neuroscience labs focus on such tiny little niches of the mind-brain because attempting to take a big-picture frame, such is the case in this study, makes them easy to poke holes in.

Debunked? No

Incomplete? Always.

This guy basically attempts to poke holes at one of their assumptions and claims that they (those that conducted the study) misinterpreted their supporting evidence when it seems to me that their supporting evidence suggests precisely the assumption that I would make. E.g IQ is as much a measure of ‘behavior & personality’ as is the Big 5. Therefore making the assumption that increased volume & density in grey matter as a correlation to IQ may well also correlate to the Big 5 is not a huge leap.

He goes on to say this

“It’s quite true that middle frontal gyrus is involved in those processes. But it is also involved in attention; in counting; in semantic and episodic retrieval; in rhyme generation; in music cognition; in processing color words; and in conflict detection, just to name a few of the things that activate this structure. Given the functional complexity of individual brain regions, to interpret the correlation between a complex personality factor like Conscientiousness with reference to a selective sub-set of the tasks the region supports is simply to make up post-hoc just-so stories”

Which as mentioned in my first paragraph, controlling for large numbers of confounding variables is a difficult task and makes these types of critiques easy to produce.

This is the authors last paragraph.

“And yes, of course, that makes the science hard. But even if 1:1 mappings were preferable to the authors for pedagogical reasons, it would at least have been an acknowledgment of the real complexity here had the authors analyzed the functional profiles of individual brain regions and tried to find all-things-considered best hypothetical matches between the range of functions a given region supports, and the range of traits comprising a given factor. But instead of trying to manage this complexity with deliberately chosen provisional abstractions, the authors simply ignore it. That makes the science easier, but only because it’s no longer good science.”

Overall he draws the same conclusions as I. Though he calls out their willingness to ignore the complexity involved in what they were measuring as opposed to managing it “with deliberately chosen provisional abstractions”

Bad science? Maybe

Incorrect hypotheses & theory? I don’t think so.Mar 13, 2019, 4:29 AMAndrew ClaytonNow this is a nice can of worms.

I wonder what fantastic obfuscations Brett Weinstein can come up with to ignore this.Mar 13, 2019, 6:11 AMPrem PrayojanI respectfully disagree. The article clearly accuses the study of arbitrarily interpreting the data to fit the hypothesis: (quote) “Did you catch that sleight-of-hand? The increased volume of lMFG is indicative the greater self regulation typical of Conscientiousness, while the reduced volume of lSTS is indicative of the greater ability to interpret others exhibited in Agreeableness. When both positive and negative relationships between the variables of interest equally support an hypothesis, this is a sign that the authors don’t yet really have a scientific handle on their area of inquiry.” (unquote) Yes people, volume increases your conscientiousness but decreases your ability to interpret other’s behaviour. 🙂 It’s science.Mar 14, 2019, 3:58 AMNick’s ReasonI would agree with this statement

“When both positive and negative relationships between the variables of interest equally support an hypothesis, this is a sign that the authors don’t yet really have a scientific handle on their area of inquiry”

Only insofar as my previous comment that controlling for behavior while trying to map neural correlates is difficult science.

It is entirely in the realm of possibility that such a positive & negative relationship between these variables exists.

I agree it would be a stretch to declare the relationship as a proof of something but I don’t see how this negates the hypotheses.

They are measuring something and reporting on those measurements whilst speculating on possible causality.

They don’t declare any proof or fact of the matter.

Debunking = case closed

Science = case [always] open

I’m glad the author doesn’t use that word ‘debunked’ :)Mar 14, 2019, 4:29 AMPrem PrayojanHere’s another hole: (quote)” It is, for instance, somewhat unusual to norm one’s measures to a single individual. Presumably what the authors want is a neural explanation for the observed differences in personality (or a personality explanation for the observed differences in regional brain volume), but what we have here appears to be at best a series of potential explanations for deviations from the characteristics of a single individual.” (unquote) They literally selected an individual to become the “Greenwich Mean Time” standard personality, relative to whom everyone’s personality can be measured. This is clearly agenda driven science meant to promote moral relativism and social conformity, while pathologizing in-group preference ( a la JBP). Are you not agreeable with open-borders, incest, and gender fluidity? Do these things make you angry? Then the part of your brain related to agreeableness is too small and the part related with neuroticism is too big. The social sciences are trying to appropriate the credibility the hard sciences to further their agenda. Find out who is paying for this research and then tell me I’m wrong.Mar 14, 2019, 4:29 AMNick’s Reason”This is clearly agenda driven science meant to promote moral relativism and social conformity, while pathologizing in-group preference ( a la JBP). Are you not agreeable with open-borders, incest, and gender fluidity? Do these things make you angry? Then the part of your brain related to agreeableness is too small and the part related with neuroticism is too big. The social sciences are trying to appropriate the credibility the hard sciences to further their agenda. Find out whose paying for this research and then tell me I’m wrong.”

I have no idea how you get ‘moral relativism and social conformity’ from attempts at measuring neural correlation to biological differences. If anything, if it was agenda driven, it would be in the corner of the opposite side.

You think leftists want to acknowledge behavioral differences as intrinsically biological when they can’t even acknowledge gender & race?

The purpose of the scientific realist frame is precisely to fight against “moral relativism and social conformity”Mar 14, 2019, 4:37 AMPrem PrayojanI’m not objecting to the legitimate project of researching neural correlates. Rather, I am agreeing with Dr. Anderson : (quote) Shouldn’t we let the data speak for themselves here, and conclude that the authors may indeed have taken “an important step toward the integration of individual differences research in psychology and neuroscience?” No, because data never speak for themselves. They are always placed inside an interpretive frame, and when that frame is inadequate, no interpretation can be valid. That appears to be the case here.” (unquote) You are quibbling over words. He wrote that the interpretation appears to be invalid and gave many reasons to support his assertion. You have to admit, it’s a polite debunking.Mar 14, 2019, 4:58 AMPrem PrayojanMy problem is not with the project of science. I object to coupling science with the personality trait model because the model itself is skewered towards a post-modern worldview.Mar 14, 2019, 5:08 AMPrem PrayojanAre you really so naive to think that leftists are concerned with being consistent? They will argue for Darwin against a religious conservative, and against Darwinian principles with a race realist.Mar 14, 2019, 5:14 AMCurt DoolittlePrem Prayojan ^ Correct.Mar 14, 2019, 10:03 AMCurt DoolittlePrem Prayojan I’m going to watch you work thru this series of arguments because there is something very curious in your approach. But unless you start with “the difference between the purely physical function, the ‘stories’ we use to operate that function, the experience of those stories on that function, and the outcomes in our display word and deed produced by the experience and stories, then I will continue searching for some falsehood you are trying to preserve.

We already know how to train people into mindfulness without appeals to falsehood or escapism and have since the roman era. We just know the science of it today.

As far as I know we are very close to submission to the inescapable necessity, that the physics of the universe at existential scale is complete, and that no forces or interactions exist or can that we do not know of.

Moreover that modifying our ‘stories’ such that they, our experiences, our thoughts, and actions work ever closer to those rules. In other words, a majority of people demonstrate preference for the results even if a minority demonstrate preference for what produces those results.

Worse, that we evolved our language, cooperation in a division of labor, and all our works, in a period of very short ‘safety’ here on this earth, and here in this place in the universe. We do not have any luxury of ‘free riding’ on this world or the universe.

But it is this particular difference between those of us who seek to consume(relax) above all else, and those of us who seek to produce(achieve) above all else, that separates our understanding of the world.

As far as I can determine, we all seek to create stories that are discordant with that universe for a host of reasons – all of which are reducible to our desires being contrary to it.

Because we survive and prosper by the same means as does all life: the seizure of opportunity to resist entropy.Mar 14, 2019, 11:53 AMCurt DoolittleAFAIK,

1) we can train the vast majority of people into mindfulness by simple means.

2) we can eliminate the stresses that drive demand for mindfulness by fairly simple means.

3) The central problem is the rate of reproduction of the underclasses which must always remain lower than our ability to put them to self supporting (sustainable) ends.

Nothing will matter without fixing 3.Mar 14, 2019, 11:55 AMPrem PrayojanCurt Doolittle: “Prem Prayojan. I’m going to watch you work thru this series of arguments because there is something very curious in your approach.”

Prem Prayojan: OK Curt. Let’s get to work on these points. First I want to refute some of your philosophical assertions with hard scientific facts. Then I will proceed to pinpoint the root of your error, namely, elements of scientism. I define scientism as the arbitrary imposition of the epistemology of logical positivism onto the scientific method. I will proceed to define the defects of scientism and then proffer an alternative hypothesis.

This conversation is long overdue and vital to the future of P. Many people are inspired by the prospect of P, but repelled by unnecessary elements of scientism, which are irrelevant to the core principles of P and which engender an unjust and irrational hostility towards the entire sphere of human spirituality. Conservatives of various persuasions need room to breathe under the umbrella of a parasite-proof legal system. I am afraid that the P movement could be stifled in its infancy by pairing with a defective epistemology.

You mentioned that you “will continue searching for some falsehood” that I am trying to preserve. Good for you. All I ask is that you apply the same level of scrutiny to your own positions, and read my words, though pithy, in the non-adversarial tone in which they are intended. We are in this together on the same team.

Curt Doolittle: “As far as I know we are very close to submission to the inescapable necessity, that the physics of the universe at existential scale is complete, and that no forces or interactions exist or can that we do not know of.”

Prem Prayojan: This is a fiction you are telling yourself and one which not supported by the professional scientific community. When P is successful we may have to initiate legal proceedings against you for this. 🙂 It is such a low-res analysis of the present state of science that it is really quite surprising, given your high-res analysis of legal and social issues, for which I have great admiration.

The notion that science is on the brink of figuring it all out is nothing but wishful thinking. How do we NOT understand the natural world? Let me count the ways.

1) The Hard Problem of consciousness:

How does the singular category of electrochemical charges in neural networks diversify into the first person subjective experiences of sound, colour, fragrance, flavour, and texture? There is no physicalist theory to account for qualia.

2) The Binding Problem:

It’s known that different areas of the brain correlate with the perception of shape, colour, motion, etc. What remains unknown is the mechanism by which the various features of perception are collated into one image viewed from a unitary perspective. There seems to be no perceptible structure to facilitate the “binding” of the components of perception into a singular experience.

3) Memory:

It was once thought that memory involved information stored somewhere in the brain; the biological equivalent of computer memory. Advancements in neurology have shown that there are no physical structures for “storage” within neural networks, even on the molecular level. Attempts to solve the problem with quantum theory have been discredited by the scientific community as implausible. There are no credible theories to date.

4) Dark Energy:

The aptly named String theory, the attempt to tie up quantum theory with the theory of relativity, has been itself completely tied up, that is, no progress for decades. It received a crushing blow in 1997 when analysis of the light from a distant supernova led astronomers to conclude that the universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate. This revelation has stunned cosmologists. No one knows why. All they can say is that some mysterious “dark energy” is inflating the universe.

5) Dark Matter:

Another cosmological problem, dark matter, was first identified in the 1930s. It was ignored for nearly forty years. In the early 1970’s, Vera Rubin, an astronomer at Washington, D.C.’s Carnegie Institution, showed that the shape, size, and spin of galaxies means either there is something wrong with our conception of gravity or there’s much more matter out there in space than we can see. No one knows what this dark matter might be.

It’s comforting to imagine that science is mastering the universe, but the facts tell a different story. Put together, dark matter and dark energy make up 96 percent of the universe. Just two anomalous scientific results indicate that we can see only a tiny fraction of the cosmos.

6) Variable “constants” in Standard Model Physics:

Evidence shows that many of the fundamental “constants” of Standard Model Physics such as alpha and mu are actually not constant, but changing over vast periods of time. It is a significant problem because alpha and mu are essential in determining three of the four fundamental forces in nature (strong, weak and electromagnetic). We still do not know anything about why these “constants” have the values they do, including the gravitational constant. No one can explain them, that is, there is no deep theory that matches the constants to their experimentally determined values.

This is the short list. There are many other problems that remain unassailable to empiric investigation, but this is enough to invalidate your statement that “no forces or interactions exist or can that we do not know of.”

In summary, we do not know ultimately what matter/energy is. Neither do we know how consciousness can emerge from a configuration of matter. We do not know the mechanisms by which perception of qualia takes place, or how those perceptions are “stored” and retrieved from memory. That covers practically everything. Is there anything left that we actually know? Oh yes. We have operational knowledge that allows us to effectively achieve the fulfilment of some of our instinctual drives and survive for a modest period of time. It is always possible to know how to operate a system without knowing what it is or how it works.Mar 18, 2019, 2:19 PMPrem PrayojanNow we come to address the defects of scientism. Science is a methodology involving observation, hypothesis, and demonstration. Logical positivism is an epistemological stance that rejects any truth claims that cannot be proven empirically or mathematically. Logical positivism ostensibly extends the possibility of eradicating superstition and falsehood, but at a great cost, as we shall illustrate.

Logical positivism could be successful if and only if there were a one to one correspondence between our organs of perception and the totality of categories of existing objects. Do our senses correspond both in range and type with external objects? For argument’s sake, if humans had no sense of hearing, would that mean that sound did not exist? Could there exist objects for which we don’t have senses? If not, then what a remarkable coincidence it would be that miraculously everything in the universe precisely corresponds to the sensory instruments of some puny biological organisms called humans on one tiny planet floating in a vast cosmos. Peak Anthropic Principle. Really?

Is it realistic to expect that the chain of cause and effect, or reality itself, ends precisely at the point of our perceptual horizon? Or is it more realistic to say, “No, reality extends further, but how much further we do not know.”

Our perceptual horizon may be extended by telescopes, microscopes, and so on, but there is still a limit to our sphere of empirical observation. Herein lies the rub for logical positivism. The assertion that only knowledge that can be proven empirically or mathematically can be true, implies that facts about objects outside our narrow range of sense perception cannot be meaningful or true, and, for all intents and purposes, do not exist (which is patently untrue).

More importantly, (and I cannot emphasize this enough) the notion that the things within our perceptual horizon are fully explicable in terms of our limited empirical experience implies that the chain of cause and effect that extends beyond our perceptual horizon has no causal relationships with its own visible effects. Again, a patently absurd notion. (Please read it three times.)

The irony is delicious. On close inspection, logical positivism turns out to be positively illogical. Furthermore, the positivist perspective tragically precludes the possibility of an honest conversation about human spirituality.

What is the viable alternative? I fully appreciate the concerns of positivists to keep at bay the all too human predilection for irrational quasi-religious hysteria. I get it. Believe me. But there is a way to accommodate ontological/religious/spiritual matters within our worldview without compromising rationale and scientific objectivity. I propose a system of meta-psychology based on the Aryan science of Vedanta (V.) for the following reasons:

1) V is to religion what Propertarianism is to law. Parasite-proof spirituality.

2) V avoids all types of escapism and laziness by defining its entry level practice as the stoic acceptance of the sacred duty of every person to perform productive work in society in accordance with his connate proclivities within a scientific division of labour. Work is worship. Zero negative externalities for society.

3) V is the ultra-rational application of the scientific method to the human condition, to philosophy and religion.

4) V accommodates and harmonizes monist/atheist, dualist, pagan/polytheist, and monotheistic conceptions as naturally occurring perspectives on the spectrum of the evolution of human consciousness. In-group conflict wastes a lot of energy. V provides maximum conflict resolution.

5) V provides models to circumvent the impasses encountered by the current limited positivist approaches in physics, biology, neurology, and cosmology, opening up the possibility of exponential progress.

6) V provides a process to gradually eradicate all subjective psychological entropy, resulting in the enhanced perception and intuition by which the seemingly intractable first principle questions of life become resolved.

Aryan is a Sanskrit (Indo-European) word meaning noble, dignified, and dedicated to truth. Let’s remove the scientism and put the Aryan back in Propertarian. All the best, Prem.

(Further details in the next post.)Mar 18, 2019, 2:20 PMPrem PrayojanBrandon Hayes Daniel Roland Anderson …this conversation may be of interest to you.Mar 18, 2019, 8:07 PMCurt Doolittle—” I define scientism as the arbitrary imposition of the epistemology of logical positivism onto the scientific method.”—

That’s just a failure to understand the difference between positivism falsification and the competition between. P = critical naturalism by philosophical standards.

So it is not at all what I do or what scientists do, it is that there are no premises we can claim are true only meaningful, for the purpose of commercial, financial economic, legal, and military discourse.

WHy? the means by which we hypothesize (imagine) are irrelevant. The means by which we COERCE are not.Mar 18, 2019, 8:16 PMCurt DoolittleAs for the rest. a) I’ll send you to sean carroll for the current state. Meaning that the fundamentals at human scale appear to be known and why it cannot be otherwise, b) you misunderstood my statement of human scale then proceeded with arguments beyond human scale, and those that are at human scale are simply falsehoods (memory, mind body)., c) I have been working with artificial intelligence since I was able to breathe, and there is nothing at all ‘magical’ about the mind’ problem and I think this is pretty common among ai developers these days. it’s actually a very simple thing that like nature is produced by the means nature uses: simplicity in large numbers. In fact I don’t think I’ve learned anything substantially new since the early 2000’s other than the neural crest cell theory which seems to have been the origin of the ‘costly’ production of ‘otherwise very unlikely’ neural density.

So you know, a) not logical or scientific positivism, and failure to grasp that it is not truth I identify but lying, and that whatever is beneath current scale of understanding does not and cannot affect that which is above the current understanding of particles. And that does not mean that we know all the transformation operations above particle scale, but that we know all the rules and that there are no forces (means of information transmission) unaccounted for.

So now I know that this conversation is above your pay grade. That does not mean that you lack insight into producing mindfulness or some other insight that has nothing to do with truth and testimony but possibly due to means of hypothesizing and experiencing.

As far as I know, religion and philsophy exist as gateway drugs to help us tolerate that he universe is hostile and we are unimportant, and all we have is achievement and each other, and many of us are not very much worth anything to one another – and the more of us there ar the worse it will become.Mar 18, 2019, 8:30 PMPrem PrayojanI am in full agreement with your statement: (quote) “..there are no premises we can claim are true only meaningful, for the purpose of commercial, financial economic, legal, and military discourse.” Then on the basis of positivist epistemology, which you acknowledge has no access to ontological truth, you proceed to contradict yourself by making a whole set of ontological truth claims such as “the universe IS hostile” and “humans are unimportant.” These are your subjective philosophical value judgements. They are not inescapable deductions implied in the premises of science. Thus your reply is a performative simply confirming and illustrating the validity of everything I wrote.Mar 18, 2019, 11:35 PMMERGED

—“We used a new theory of the biological basis of the Big Five personality traits to generate hypotheses about the association of each trait with the volume of different brain regions. Controlling for age, sex, and whole-brain volume, results from structural magnetic resonance imaging of 116 healthy adults supported our hypotheses for four of the five traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Extraversion covaried with volume of medial orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in processing reward information. Neuroticism covaried with volume of brain regions associated with threat, punishment, and negative affect. Agreeableness covaried with volume in regions that process information about the intentions and mental states of other individuals. Conscientiousness covaried with volume in lateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in planning and the voluntary control of behavior. These findings support our biologically based, explanatory model of the Big Five and demonstrate the potential of personality neuroscience (i.e., the systematic study of individual differences in personality using neuroscience methods) as a discipline.”—

Image revision by CD, above text by https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610370159?