You wrote,
>-But few working in practice oriented traditions seem interested in the
material >basis of learning within folks <cut> My Question: Why isn't the
material basis for >learning (in-the-head learning) interesting?
I apologize for jumping on your faith in the cognitive guys, but here's
my take on it.
The brain is *not* a computer, or any other kind of machine. (I have had
several collisions with the local advocates of this theory in the
department I am currently attempting to escape from.) Machines are human
creations - and basically, they can only do what we plan that they can
do. At this point in the brain game the neuroscience people have
scarcely gotten a handle on what's going on on the neuronal level, and
it's already worth a separate subdiscipline. The brain is *alive* and
*organic* and exists at a level of organization which includes the
biological, psychological and, yes, cultural. There is no generic
*brain* we can study, only the particular brains of particular people
with specific personal and cultural histories. Organisms inevitably have
histories, and unique ones at that. For living things, time is indeed
unidirectional.
Having learned applications programming in COBOL and BAL (old fashioned
assembly language) I can tell you that this is *not* what is going on in
people's heads. BAL doesn't get you *all* the way down to the bare
metal, but close enough.... And as you pointed out, computers have no
volition and no agency - they're just hunks of metal and silicon until we
tell them what to do.
Luria was beginning to get at some of what's going on at the organ
systems level, but neuropsychology, at least in this country (excluding
such people as Luria's pupil Elkhanan Goldberg) has pretty much
degenerated into a drill of clinical testing and evaluation.
I am currently trying to "bridge the gap" in pain perception and there is
the problem that except for the crudest type of phenomena - without
resorting to neurophysiological reductionism - we are still far, far from
correlating the material basis of what's going on with observed/reported
behavior/feelings/sensations. You think, what could be more elemental
than pain? Well, nobody can even come up with a definition that
satisfies everybody, and even on its "simplest" level it's an interplay
of neurologically afferent, efferent, biochemically modulated, culturally
modulated, experientially modulated events. Researchers have yet to
figure out how to get reliable reports even on such seemingly unitary
issues as intensity.
And you want cognitive researchers should do this with *learning?* And
learning language, and in children, whose nervous systems are changing as
they grow? Those who are actually teaching can probably feel the basic
disconnectedness from their real tasks of what the connectionists are
doing. The material basis of learning in a human child is a human brain,
not a Cray-1, and as long as we try to find reductionist, non-human
bases for our models, I'm afraid we're going to continue to have trouble.
Any suggestions for new avenues of approach to the issue?
Regards,
Rachel Heckert
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