Sabbatical Report: Last Day of 2017

With today marking the end of 2017, I thought I would provide an end-of-year update on my current sabbatical. I provided an update at the end of its first month on August 1, and have not provided much information since then. I have been too busy writing sabbatical projects to take the time to add to this blog!

The primary task for my sabbatical is working on a new book. This book explores the probabilistic behavior of simple artificial neural networks with a combination of citations to classic literature in information theory, probability theory, and cybernetics, with the reports of many formal proofs about network behavior, with detailed presentations of many new computer simulation results, and (eventually) with the report of the results of some new experiments on human probability matching.

The book is taking shape. Today – the last day of 2017 – marked the final tweaking of Chapters 4 and 5. So, the current status of the book is very solid drafts of its first five chapters, amounting to 145 pages that hold 73421 words. The next chapter requires me to scrape off the programming rust and write some new neural network code, which hopefully will not take too long. Once the new code is in place I will proceed with a new chapter on including positive feedback in a learning algorithm, which will then lead into a chapter in which I present the results of an experiment with human subjects that I conducted in September. I’ve been at the University of Alberta for 30 years, and this study marked the first time that I used the subject pool on my own!

The development of the book so far has involved collecting data from hundreds of different networks, not to mention reading a lot of new material. Since beginning this project I have consumed 33 books, and have to read several more to write a sensible version of Chapter 6.

The book project is the primary focus of my sabbatical. However, I have been very busy with another project as well. I have had the good luck to collaborate with my colleague Cor Baerveldt and his graduate students on the analysis of archival material related to the Center of Advanced Study in Theoretical Psychology, which existed at the University of Alberta from 1965 until 1990. We have been very busy with this project; we have two articles currently under review at different journals, and I have built a poster that goes with an abstract that I have submitted to Cheiron. With luck I will be able to present some new historical material when Cheiron holds its 50^th annual meeting in June at Akron, Ohio, the home of a huge archive of psychological material.

In short, the sabbatical project is going well, and I am hoping that 2018 is a happy and productive new year – not just for me, but for anyone who has taken the time to read this post.

Happy New Year!

Psychology at the Crossroads -- Again

I have a growing interest in studying the history of psychology, particularly the history of my own Department (Dawson, 2013). One of the surprising consequences of this work is that I sometimes find myself viewing current Departmental problems in a historical context.

 For example, one Departmental debate that arises every few months, and which has reached very high levels of administration, concerns what Faculty the Department of Psychology should be formally part of. We are in the almost unique position of having official status in both the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Science; this unique position has been the cause of considerable angst over the past year and a half.

 Interestingly, a little bit of history and reading indicates how this unique situation came to be. The Department of Psychology became an independent unit at the University of Alberta in 1960, splitting away from Philosophy. Its first Head was Joseph R. Royce; Royce was attracted to this position because the University of Alberta promised resources for his expensive research on behavior genetics (Royce, 1978). Royce was still Head when the Faculty of Arts and Science split into two separate faculties in 1963. In other words, it was Royce who was largely responsible for Psychology keeping a toehold in each faculty.

 Why did a behavior geneticist make this surprising administrative decision? Why did Royce not break away from Arts? Royce had a diverse and far-reaching vision of the discipline of psychology. For instance, he argued that it was a mistake to accept the general definition of psychology being ‘the science of behavior’. Instead, Royce believed that it was better to define psychology as ‘the study of behavior’. Replacing ‘science’ with ‘study’ opened the possibility for psychology to use a broader range of methodologies.

 Royce’s broad vision of the discipline was presented in a 1962 talk that became the opening chapter in his book Psychology and the symbol (Royce, 1965). Its title was “Psychology at the Crossroads between the Sciences and the Humanities”. For Royce, this crossroads was not a moment – unlike today -- of deciding to choose one direction or the other. Instead, the crossroads was an intersection, where psychology necessarily had to integrate the methods of both the sciences and the humanities. Royce recognized that psychology is “both scientific and humanistic, both experimental and clinical”.

 Given this position, it is hardly surprising that Royce’s also saw that it was necessary to attach the Department of Psychology to both the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Arts. This remarkable decision arose naturally from Royce’s unique and broad vision. To me, it is clear that his goal was to offer the Department of Psychology the potential to explore broader, interdisciplinary initiatives than would be possible in a department with a more traditional organization.

 Recently, administrators seem to have lost sight of this possibility, focusing only on the complications that our unique structure produces. My own hope is that my Department is given an opportunity to stop viewing its current structure as problematic, and instead uses its advantages to become the kind of department that Royce imagined as its first Head. A Department that did so would be an exciting one to be a part of, and could bring some unique opportunities to the University at large.

 References 

Dawson, M.R.W. (2013). A case study in Gantt charts as historiophoty: A Century of Psychology at the University of Alberta. History of Psychology, 16(2), 145-157.

Royce, J.R. (1965). Psychology and the Symbol. New York: Random House.

Royce, J.R. (1978). The life style of a theory-oriented generalist in a time of empirical specialists. In T. S. Krawiec (Ed.), The Psychologists (pp. 222-259). New York: Oxford University Press.

Sabbatical Report: End of Month 1

Today marks the end of the first month of my current year-long sabbatical. I thought that this was as good a time as any to reflect on what I have accomplished so far, and to consider where my research is heading.

While the sabbatical is only officially one month old, the stage for the project was set in the fall term of 2016. In order to be fortunate enough to be awarded a sabbatical, one must apply for it, and part of this application involves proposing the kind of work that will be accomplished during the sabbatical. I have a long history of writing a book during each year-long sabbatical that I have been awarded; the plan for the current sabbatical was no different. I proposed using the time to draft a manuscript that extended some recent work in my lab on simple artificial neural networks and probability theory, and was lucky enough to be given the green light for this kind of project from the Faculty of Arts.

With a sabbatical plan required in the fall, it is not surprising that I was in a position to start groundwork for the current sabbatical at the end of the fall term. Much of that work has involved doing a lot of reading – since marking the final exam for my fall cognitive science course, I have read 23 books on systems theory, cybernetics, information theory, and probability. Those interested can see what I have been reading by looking through my Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/drmrwdawson/) for pictures of covers. I use #reading to tag these posts. I have also conducted a pretty extensive simulation study (which has involved training and analyzing the performance of 500 different perceptrons) that explores how networks match the probability of outcomes in a three-cue probability learning task. In the fall, I plan to collect data from human subjects that are trained on the same task that I have used to train the networks; I am pretty excited about the main result that I expect to observe when networks and humans are compared. This has meant that I have also written programs to collect this data from humans. Importantly, I have also successfully navigated the process for getting ethics approval for this work; I haven’t collected human data for years. Most importantly, I have already crafted three complete chapters of a new book manuscript (when published, it will be my eighth book) that relate networks to probability theory and information theory, that explore the relationship between simple networks and Bayes’ theorem in probability, and that report the results of my simulations.

As August begins, the sabbatical project turns to writing the opening chapter of the new book. I have enough of a ‘feel’ for the project now that I need to put it in the context of other theories, and need to lay out its purpose, methodology, and implications. Writing this chapter, though, requires me to do a lot more reading than I have been doing. Up to this point, I have been reading a book every 10 days or so, and I have to accelerate this. In short, currently my next steps are to read, to think, and eventually to write. Some sense of the different topics that I will be considering will be appearing in the near future as Instagrammed book covers.

The Embodiment of Books

When thinking about books, we usually focus on their content, and not on their physical structure. However, the actual layout of a book is sometimes just as important as the meanings of the words one finds on its pages.

One notable example of this is the incredible novel House of Leaves (Danielewski, 2000). In many instances the pages of this book contains only a few words, arranged in peculiar ways to mirror events occurring in the novel. You haven’t experienced reading about a chase until you do so in this book, flipping rapidly to the next page during a pursuit, so that the frequency of moving to the next page reflects the increasing action unfolding in the plot.

A nice scholarly example of an interesting embodiment is The Society of Mind (Minsky, 1985). This book explores the idea of cognition emerging from the interactions of numerous simple agents. It is laid out in such a way that each chapter takes up a single page. This encourages the reader to interpret each chapter as a simple agent, and to consider interacting messages from chapters as delivering the rich message of the book. I was so taken by this sort of embodiment that I drafted two whole book manuscripts in this format (Dawson, 2008; Dawson, Dupuis, & Wilson, 2010). You start to write amazingly concisely when every page has to deliver a standalone message!

I’m thinking about books and embodiment because I’ve just finished reading one of the visionary books of embodied cognitive science, the influential The Tree of Knowledge (Maturana & Varela, 1998). This books provides a strong anti-representational view of cognition, arguing instead that cognition emerges from the linked relationships between self-organizing systems and the environments that they act upon. What is amazing about The Tree of Knowledge is that it is laid out as an introductory text, with a small single column of text on most pages, as well as numerous definition boxes and figures. In keeping with this format, the book is written in a disarmingly elementary style, even as it provides a complex and novel view of cognition that is quite distinct from typical perspectives. That is, the book is easy to read – but challenging to understand!

Maturana and Varela clearly had to work very hard to carry out this particular style of writing and of presenting ideas. The afterword indicates that the book itself was a decade in the making.

References

Danielewski, M. Z. (2000). House of leaves (2nd ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Dawson, M. R. W. (2008). Connectionism and classical conditioning. Comparative Cognition and Behavior Reviews, 3 (Monograph), 1-115.

Dawson, M. R. W., Dupuis, B., & Wilson, M. (2010). From Bricks To Brains: The Embodied Cognitive Science Of LEGO Robots. Edmonton, AB: Athabasca University Press.

Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1998). The Tree of Knowledge. Boston, MA: Shambhala.

Minsky, M. L. (1985). The Society Of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Science in the Service of Humanity

As part of an ongoing history project, I have been reading a great deal about general systems theory and about cybernetics. Much of this reading began with some of the major works of Ludvig von Bertalanffy (Problems of Life, General System Theory, Robots Men and Minds). It has also included some biographical works about von Bertalanffy, as well as of other scholars involved in systems thinking and cybernetics. I have also pulled from the shelves of my library some classic works by Norbert Weiner and Gregory Bateson and placed them on the front burner.

One of the striking characteristics of von Bertalanffy’s writing is his emphasis on human values. Von Bertalanffy spent his career reacting against mechanistic views in science, and proposing an organismic alternative. One of his great concerns was that the mechanistic view of nature and of man deemphasized humans as individuals, and viewed them instead as cogs in a great machine. From his perspective, this led to many of the dark social and political moments of the 20^th century. One Bertalanffy was particularly critical of Weiner’s cybernetics for exactly this reason; he viewed cybernetics as turning men into robots and leading the society into peril by advancing military technology. In contrast, von Bertalanffy was one of the founders (along with Kenneth Boulding, Anatol Rapaport, and Ralph Gerard) of the Society for General Systems Research. They planted the seed for this society in 1955 at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science. SGSR’s initial slogan was “Science in service of humanity”.

In the context of this slogan, von Bertalanffy’s criticism of the Weiner’s mechanized cybernetics misses the mark. Weiner himself had deep concerns about cybernetics’ technological impact on society and expressed these concerns in many of his writings. Similar concerns are easily found in the writings of other cybernetic leaders such as Bateson and Margaret Mead; in general, the cybernetic pioneers were actively sympathetic with the notion of applying their scholarly ideas for the betterment of society.

What strikes me as I read the optimistic values and goals of these eminent researchers; as I see their deep concerns about the relationship between science and the good of mankind; as I reflect upon their explicit goal of improving humanity through their scientific ideas, is this: half a century later all of these concerns seem missing from much of modern science. Nowadays it seems that science is replaced these noble social concerns with goals of developing products or commodities, or with solving specific problems that have been identified by government agencies as requiring particular attention.

“Science in the service of humanity” strikes me as a particularly powerful notion, and on this first day of 2017 I resolve to explore its implementation in my own scholarly activities.