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The Case Against Dualism
philosophy, psychology
August 30, 2003, 11:21 PM
I've decided that I've been posting about technology too much recently, so in this entry I'm going to talk about some good, old-fashioned philosophy of consciousness.
First, a few concepts. Philosophy of consciousness is that branch of the field that considers questions like "What does it mean to be self-aware?" and "What is 'the mind'?". The theory of substance dualism (also called "Cartesian dualism" since Rene Descartes was the main originator of the theory) claims that humans are divided into two distinct types of substances: "physical substances" which are directly observable and obey the well-known laws of physics, and "mental substances" that are not directly observable using any known measurement technique. Any theory that asserts the existence of a "soul" or a "spirit" that is separate from the body is probably a form of substance dualism.
Substance dualism is a very popular theory, which tends to irritate philosophers since its actually pretty easy to disprove. I believe that more people would doubt the theory if they were aware of the strength of the argument against it, so I'm going to take a shot at explaining it here. It's called "the argument from causal interaction".
This is a proof by contradiction, so assume for a moment that substance dualism is true. In essence, I am a "ghost in a machine": a noncorporeal spirit that controls a material body as my sole link to the physical world. It's important to note, then, that my body and my soul must engage in two-way causal interaction in order for this theory to make sense. In other words, my mind must be able to affect changes in my body (at a thought, I can move my arm up and down, for instance) and my body must be able to affect changes to my mind (when my finger is pricked with a needle, my mind experiences pain, for example). So far so good.
But in order to interact causally, these two entities have to obey certain physical laws. One of these laws is the First Law of Thermodynamics (Conservation): energy cannot be created or destroyed. Granted, the mind is a different type of substance (a mental substance, to be precise) and need not obey the laws of physics, but the body, at least, is a physical object and thus it is beholden to Conservation and everything else we know about the material world. So in order for the mind to causally interact with the body, it must expend energy to alter the body's state (probably in the region of the brain, since that's where all the neural impulses that control most of the body's processes originate from). Since we cannot observe the mind itself (it is a mental substance and indetectable by our instruments), this should create the illusion that energy is appearing and disappearing in our brains. Neural processes are being altered by an energy source that is invisible to us.
Problem is, no such phenomena has been observed. All the energy in our neural system is accounted for.
Thus we must conclude that either dualism is false, or physics is wrong. You can choose the latter if you'd like, but the consequences of that proposition's truth are far-reaching. Most of the consumer products we have in our homes shouldn't work if these fundamental laws of physics aren't universally true. The very way in which we interact with reality would become radically different if energy was not conserved. That's a lot to throw away for an unobservable ghost in a machine.
Here's the argument in brief:
- If substance dualism is true, then the mind and the body must engage in two-way causal interaction.
- But such an interaction violates the laws of physics, so if the mind and the body engage in two-way causal interaction, physics is wrong.
- Physics is not wrong.
- The mind and the body cannot engage in two-way causal interaction.
- Therefore, substance dualism is false.
There. Now that we've got that out of the way, perhaps we can move on to some of the more interesting and less one-sided questions in philosophy of consciousness...
Email Rob:
Dancing Bears
design, usability
August 29, 2003, 08:20 PM
Against my better judgement, I was flipping through the first half of "Inmates" a couple days ago. I came across an interesting concept Cooper describes as a "Dancing Bear":
In essence, a dancing bear is a product that is interesting and useful not because it works particularly well, but because it works at all. Cooper describes his car's keyless entry system as an example, which is horrendously difficult to use but still addictively useful because of the advantages of remote entry to his vehicle. In his words:
In spite of its weak and clumsy design, it is still a wonderful thing. It's like the fellow who leads a huge bear on a chain into the town square and, for a small donation, will make the bear dance. The townspeople gather to see the wonderous sight as the massive, lumbering beast shambles and shuffles from paw to paw. The bear is really a terrible dancer, and the wonder isn't that the bear dances well but that the bear dances at all....
The difficulty of devising a better interaction isn't what makes the problem so intractable. Instead, it is our almost universal willingness to accept bad interaction as an unavoidable cost.
There are many dancing bears on the technology market today, I'm afraid. Sometimes, after seeing a series of poorly designed products beat out well-designed alternatives just because they were "new and cool", it's easy for us user-centered designers to dispair; sometimes it seems like people just don't want usability! I think it can be encouraging to consider these products dancing bears; the problem is that right now information technology-enabled products are so new that many will buy them even if they are unusable simply because they don't know any better. As these products sink into society, however, the buying public will become more informed consumers. Then, our skills will really have a chance to prove their value.
Email Rob:
The Right Tool For the Right Type of Job
design, software development
August 28, 2003, 10:39 PM
I've recently found myself complaining a lot about how there are no good tools specifically designed for developing software prototypes for formative usability evaluations. Oh sure, there are products like Flash and Visual Basic that are often used for prototyping, but both of these tools were initially designed for other uses (web vector graphics animations and novice programming, respectively) and were later repurposed into prototyping tools. And yes, there are plenty of IDEs out there that claim to support Rapid Application Development (RAD), but I hope to show that these are insufficient since the design philosophies that created them are misguided.
First off I want to make a distinction. There are two types of software:
- Production Software, or real systems intended for real use. Any software people use to accomplish real work or real play should be this type of software (sadly, this isn't always true in practice, as we'll see).
- Prototype Software, or mockup systems that behave similarly to the final product but aren't as polished. By "polished", I mean that the developers have paid sufficient attention to good design and testing practices that the system doesn't crash very often, is secure against intrusion, works on all the supported platforms, etc. Prototypes are used both to explore technologies and to elicit user test data; by having users interact with the prototype you can examine how long it takes them to complete tasks, how much they struggle to learn how to accomplish their goals, how much they like the product, etc. Since these tests are run in a controlled environment, the quality attributes that are so important for production system use are much less important for prototypes.
There is actually a third type of software: small, specialized programs or "scripts" that are written quickly to fulfill a very narrowly defined automation need. Usually, these are written directly by users: a system administrator writes a shell script to purge user records, a programmer writes a Perl program to format his source code, a researcher puts together some code to analyze a large database of survey results. But, for the most part, these types of programs tend to have short life spans, are easy to write, and thus need little tool support to develop.
Most of the commercially available programmers' tools today are highly "schitzophrenic"; that is they were designed to try to satisfy the needs of developers of both types of software. Unfortunately (as we interaction designers and usability professionals could have predicted) these tools have ultimately failed to effectively satisfy either purpose. GUI Builders are great for prototyping, but produce unmaintainable messes when doing production development. Strong typing and other language-enforced constraints, on the other hand, save hours of debugging during production development, but just get in the way when putting together prototypes.
What we need is tools designed exclusively for prototyping and other, different tools designed exclusively for production. The prototyping tools will require features such as:
- Support for rapid development. These tools will need to take care of as many menial programming tasks as possible for the developer to make her more efficient. Features like wizards, code generators, and GUI builders are examples.
- Highly malleable interface capabilities. To facilitate trying out lots of different ideas, these tools must be flexible in the interface options they provide to the developers. The problem with lots of RAD tools is that they impose a strict framework on the developer that greatly limits interface design options (e.g., Visual Basic).
- Quick feedback. The developer must be able to see and interact with the results of interface and interaction design changes quickly, ideally at the push of a button.
- Easy rollback. The developer must be able to easily roll back to previous versions of the prototype in case changes don't work out. It would also be a good idea to keep a history of these changes, and possibly allow developers to associate commentary with them (such as why certain design changes didn't work out) to make documentation of the design process easier.
- Deemphasis on maintainability, portability, etc. These are unnecessary for prototypes, as I mentioned before.
- Easy and fast debugging. The developer needs to be able to get it working well enough for the next round of user tests quickly.
Prototyping tools may even be best when they explicitly do not afford building complete-looking systems, since this discourages the temptation to "just ship the prototype" that is so common when time and money is tight (which it always is). Perhaps prototyping tools should even include "sketchiness features", like Denim, to help visually communicate the incompleteness of the prototype product to decision makers.
Production development needs its own set of tools. They will require features such as:
- Facilitation or enforcement of best practices. This includes language features like strong typing, Eiffel-style design by contract, etc.
- Good refactoring tools. Production code changes too, but when it does, the integrity of the design must be maintained. Refactoring tools can help with this.
- Ways of visualizing code structure. This includes modeling languages like UML and architecture description languages. Graphical notations like these can help give high-level views of the software's structure, which is likely to be complex in production environments.
- Team features. Most software is written by teams of programmers, so the tools must facilitate group interaction. Version control is the most common and probably the most important example.
- Automated test building environments. Production tools should favor automated, repeatable test suites over step-by-step debuggers (although these, too, may have their place). Tests such as these help form release baselines on which all future development can be built.
This is, of course, just an initial list of thoughts based on my own readings and experience. Someone needs to work on these more to identify the real needs and appropriate solutions.
Are you listening, Andy??
Email Rob:
Damaged Merchandise?
usability
August 27, 2003, 11:24 AM
I skimmed a paper by Wayne Gray (recommended by Bonnie) last night entitled "Damaged Merchandise? A Review of Experiments that Compare Usability Evaluation Methods". This is apparently considered one of the more infamous papers in academic HCI, since it single-handedly halted most of the research on HCI methods. In it, Gray and Salzman cover a number of serious flaws in common HCI methods experiments, then go on to show how these flaws taint the conclusions of five highly influential papers, including ones by Nielsen, Atwood, Jeffries, and others.
Gray and Salzman argue that the experiments in question violate many well-known best practices of experimental design, citing a book on designing social science and psychology experiments from 1979 to back up their claims. Their arguments are convincing, and its disconcerting to think that a fair amount of evidence for some of our most critical techniques in HCI is flawed. Some of the mistakes are even pretty basic ones that I knew about (without having any real background in psychology, social science, or experiment design) like ignoring the effects of group psychology (e.g., counting a focus group's results as testing eight users instead of one) or asserting propositions in the conclusions that are either unsupported or even directly refuted by the research.
I think the lesson to take away from this paper if you aren't an academic is that you need to realize when someone is speaking with the backing of scientific validity and when they are not. For example, certain usability gurus are wont to frequently provide tons of specific advice to practitioners, and, if you respect the opinions of said gurus, you may be wont to receive it. But you should realize that this advice is offered without scientific backing, frequently even if the guru claims it comes from "numerous user studies". The advice may be the opinion of a well-respected, experienced individual, but it is still an opinion and must be considered as such.
And if you are an academic, the lesson to take away is to get your shit together and learn some research methods.
Email Rob:
On the Inadequacy of Categories
design, information
August 24, 2003, 10:11 PM
As I just mentioned yesterday, a common technique for organizing information is to put this information into categories, thus making it easier for users to locate specific information as well as search for types of information based on predefined properties. Generally speaking, this works pretty well; libraries and other information-rich environments have always lived by their categorization schemes.
But then someone got the bright idea to allow ordinary users to define their own categories for their own information. This, I'd argue, doesn't work so well.
A case in point is the very weblog you're currently reading. Shortly after starting roBlog, I went through a fairly rigorous process to develop categories for my current and future posts. I was hoping these categories would be fairly exhaustive (most every future post would fall into one or more of them), fairly meaningful to my readers, fairly few (I didn't want a huge list of categories that was hard to scan), and fairly balanced (I didn't want all my posts clustered into one category).
I'm becoming more and more dissatisfied with the results. I'm finding that most of the posts are clustering into a few categories and even I can't always tell what category a particular post should fall under, so I can't imagine its intuitive for you guys and gals. One option is to simply create more specific and a wider variety of categories, but I'm concerned that this will soon cause the number of categories to balloon into something unmanagable.
In "Inmates", Cooper complains about file systems (which are generally hierarchical, but hierarchies are essentially nested categories); he feels it is unrealistic to expect users to effectively organize all their personal information through this paradigm. And I can certainly relate to this; I know many people, all of whom are highly intelligent and very computer-saavy, who constantly lose track of where they put things in the file system. But even more specialized applications have this problem; I've given up on trying to categorize my MP3s by genre; I'm never able to remember what I filed a particular song under and I rarely want to hear all songs in a given genre.
The basic problem, I believe, is the user-built categorization schemes expect users to know what kinds of questions they're going to want to ask when searching for their information before they actually need to ask them. Most users don't have sufficient experience in the domain to know their own behavior patterns. And most of those users that do won't have reflected sufficiently on their own practices to design effective categorization schemes anyway.
The upshot is that designing good categorization schemes often requires extensive training. Library Science is an entire field that focuses mainly on solving this very problem. For those of us that lack such training, its difficult to know how to categorize the information we work with for maximum productivity.
For my own categorization problem with roBlog, I'm considering taking a suggestion Micah made; he thought I should group posts by certain interesting topics (such as some of my professor's names) since this would gather information on those topics in one location for Google searchers and the like. I'm thinking that these topics wouldn't be exhaustive; they'd be more like the "features" sections that Micah has on his own weblog.
Posted by Dan on August 25, 2003 at 07:28 AM
Micah made the same suggestion to me. I've considered making a MT category for each professor, but, over the course of a semester, since I'm trying to write about each class, the prof would have dozens of entries. Plus, I worry about stealing a prof's mojo in my blog. :)
As far as your categorizations, you took a "top-down" approach to creating them: trying to create broad categories to contain everything. That approach usually means some things will be odd fits. The other approach, "bottom-up," is the opposite: the content's characteristics create the categories or, in other words, the information architecture. As you pointed out, this can be too specific. This is why IAs get paid money.
An IA would probably do a card sorting exercise with your users, having them arrange your entries (one per card) into piles, then having them name the piles. Do that with several groups users and you some semblance of a navigation scheme. You've also spent several days and many thousands of dollars. :)
Have you looked at your logs to see how much your categories are even used? In six months of reading, I've never used them, but perhaps I am an atypical user. Search seems to fit the content of your blog much better.
Dan
Posted by Rob on August 26, 2003 at 11:15 PM
Yeah, I made a conscious decision to take a top-down approach to developing the categories; I didn't want to make them up as needed for each post since I was afraid of winding up with the "category soup" that lots of weblogs suffer from. I wanted the number to be short, sweet, and managable. Plus coming up with categories on the spot may wind up with lots of categories at wildly different levels of generality.
I agree with your assessment of the "correct" approach to take in this situation, but as you implied, I can't spend several thousand dollars on this weblog. I think this lends credence to my claim in the post that developing effective categories requires training and most ordinary users (even fairly design-saavy ones like me) can't do it effectively.
I have checked my logs, actually, and surprisingly categories are accessed fairly frequently. Much less so than the main page, of course, and less so than some of the more popular individual entries, but still a respectable amount and much more than the search url. Which surprises me too; I certainly search my weblog much more than I browse categories. But then I'm as far from a "typical" user as you can get (or maybe not; I have a sneaky suspicion that I use this weblog much more than anyone else does ;)
Email Rob:
Posted by Melissa Connelly on March 20, 2004 at 11:39 PM
Why is Physics not wrong? Just because some scientist hasn't come up with a theory to disprove the laws of thermdynamics doesnt mean it is absolutely true. You can't base your ebtire philosophical argument on "Physics is not wrong". Seems kinda weak. Anyway, there's always an exception to every rule so maybe the rules of conservation don't apply to our body.
Posted by Melissa Connelly on March 20, 2004 at 11:57 PM
Here's a theory I saw some where, what do you think?
1.Conscious minds exist.
2.The physicalist cannot account for conscious minds: all attempts to show that consciousness is a physical phenomenon fail.
3.Therefore, conscious minds cannot be physical.
4.Since conscious minds exist, they must be non-physical things, i.e. dualism is true.
Posted by Rob on March 21, 2004 at 12:13 AM
You can believe physics is wrong if you want, but you have to realize that many, many natural phenomenon that drive the technologies we use every day shouldn't work the way they do if the laws of thermodynamics don't hold. What seems to be the weaker argument; that the laws of thermodynamics apply to the body the same way they do everywhere else, or that they just happen to apply differently to the mind-body system in just the right fashion to hide any evidence of the mind's existence?
There are several materialist theories of mind. Type-identity theory, where the mind is viewed as identical to the working human brain, is an example. Strong AI is another, where the mind is viewed as a complex set of instructions "executed" by the brain similar to the way a digital computer executes programs. There are strengths and weaknesses of all these theories, of course, but you can't summarily dismiss them as false. The arguments against any of them are, at least, less convincing than the arguments against dualism. Or so I've found.
Posted by Pyrovus on March 29, 2004 at 03:51 AM
It is in fact possible to change the physical state of a system without changing the total energy in the system. For a simple example, consider a system which considers of two ions, initially at rest, sodium (positive) and chloride (negative), separated by some distance d, with the sodium to the left of the chloride. The two ions will experience an attractive force towards each other, and as a result will have potential energy relative to one another. Now suppose we interfere with this system by moving the sodium ion to the right of the chloride ion, bringing it to rest at a distance d. What is the total energy change? Zero! The ions still experience the same attraction, and their potential energy is still the same, but the system is different: Previously it looked like this:
Na+
Posted by andrew on September 26, 2004 at 11:57 AM
Correct the totasl Energy did not change, but you first stated that the state would be changed and
energy not. how is it that the physical state has changed? you still have two ions, you havnt made anything a different state such as solid, liq, or gas. to change from different physical states it does require change in energy. to get from solid to liq you must apply energy normally in the form of heat (ice to water) and also liq to gas (water to
vapor) remind me again how the ions changed physical states.
Posted by David on September 06, 2005 at 09:01 PM
Problem with premise 1
The theory of pre-established harmony can explain dualism without causal interaction. It states that the mental and physical realms are both closed circuits that are perfectly in tune to each other, like to parallel clocks each beating together. IE, I will decide to move my arm at the same time my body moves its arm.
This requires two qualities, both of which seem obvious; that the mental and physical realms are both deterministic.
Posted by Luke on September 17, 2005 at 09:29 AM
We think about the world in a physical way, and our conscious minds in terms of the non-physical. Materialism is riddled with problems in the same way dualist argument’s are.
The thing to do is to look for alternatives.
Problems with physics at present have led to the idea of a unified field theory - a theory that can easily show the relation between what we see as force, matter and energy. It is entirely possible that the conscious mind can be included in this theory if people were not so close-minded about the world around them. We look at the world in a very physical way because of the science we are brought up with. Imagine a cave man, he knew nothing of atoms or molecules; he would look to explain the world in terms of a God.
We just have to keep adjusting our view of the world, things may not be physical and non-physical, everything may be fundamentally the same, we just haven’t found the correct way to look at the world to unite everything in this way (yet).
Posted by Ven on September 26, 2006 at 01:30 PM
I'm puzzled by how quickly you dismiss substance dualism. It seems quite obvious that certain properties like the ability to experience emotion cannot be attributed to insentient matter (neither the brain, nor the neurons that compose it, nor the electricity in the brain can 'feel' or 'think'. Since such a property is not possessed by matter, one must accept the existence of something distinct from matter.
Yes, there is the argument that certain brain states are identical to emotions, or that the functioning of the brain IS an emotion of some sort. But you cannot simply declare matter/chemical reactions to be an 'emotion'. At the very least you would have to say something like "the functioning of the brain **appears** to us as emotions". That's substance dualism right there!! In separating the functioning of the brain (just chemical reactions, neurons firing) from something that can experience emotion, the latter is the mind, the former is the body--mind-body dualism.
How can you explain something like emotions/thoughts without resorting to some kind of substance dualism? The difficulty is that there is a *single* thing that can experience emotion, whereas if you take anything that is made of matter, or even energy, it's divisible. Matter is divisible, the 'experiencer' in the body is not, hence the two must be different.
And does it really cause some problem for physics to say that both exist? Not really, because physics is only applicable to the physical world, it doesn't hold for non-physical entities, such as a mind. But addressing your point about the causal interaction--though we may not understand it fully, you do it every day don't you? Every time you lift your hand, your brain will only send signals to lift your hand if you so choose. There's some *thing* that triggers the brain to send those signals. As we all know, matter is deterministic, it doesn't have the ability to "choose". The thing that desires/wishes/has the ability to choose must necessarily be deterministic. Mind-body dualism essentially prevents us from the idea that we're simply carbon-based machines.
Yes, it may seem strange, when you get an inclination to do some physical action, the energy that triggers the brain seems 'mysteriously' to come out of nowhere, but nonetheless, that does happen right? If the physical world is all that exists, there's no way to explain something like free will, because neither matter,nor energy, nor anything composed of the two possess such an ability, and once again it has to be a single indivisible 'thing' that can experience, desire, and as mentioned earlier matter & energy are both divisible