Do we inordinately rely on projection to explain the behavior of organisms, including other humans? Will we ever invent an artificial intelligence that will project onto us its worldview in an attempt to understand who and what we are?
In 1899, H. S. Jennings published an article entitled “The Psychology of a Protozoan.” * Jennings put paramecia on a slide and observed their activities. At the time, psychology and psychiatry were in their infancy, or, at least, in their childhood stage. In the same year Freud published Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), and the young Jung was still a year from working at the Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich. From the perspective of someone in the twenty-first century, the idea that paramecia have a psychology to study might seem odd, but keep in mind that Jennings published in the late nineteenth century.
What could Jennings study? He writes, “If Paramecia are placed on an ordinary slide…together with a small bit of bacterial zoogloea…it will soon be found that almost all the Paramecia, which were at first scattered throughout the preparation, have gathered closely about the mass of zoogloea and are feeding upon it.” (503) Okay, I get it. Take a living organism, give it a delicious blob of gelatinous food, and it will eat. I’ve seen the experiment repeated at every restaurant and hotel buffet.
To provide some background for the laity not too familiar with paramecia, Jennings tells us that the organisms live, “by thousands in pond water containing decaying vegetable matter…Examination shows that under normal conditions Paramecia are usually engaged in feeding upon the masses of Bacteria which form a thick zoogloea on the surface of the water in which they are found. These Bacteria form almost or quite their entire food. A first question then might be: How do they choose their food, selecting Bacteria in preference to something else?” (504)
My inclination is to say, “Look, H. S., they eat what they evolved to eat. They can’t eat bigger stuff because they are little.” (But, hold on, Donald, remember what you said above. Jennings wrote this in 1899. People still study paramecia. Serious people. Neuroscientists even. Don’t’ mock what you don’t do or know)
Jennings does pose an interesting question. It seems that paramecia placed on a slide without the buffet also gather as if they are social beings. After asking how the paramecia know to gather about the zoogloea, that is, how they find the food placed at a distance on the slide, he then asks why they gather “like a human crowd.” Now, here’s where the projection seems evident: “If we mount the Paramecia…without the mass of bacterial zoogloea, we shall soon notice another phenomenon reminding us of human beings under like conditions [italics mine]. The Paramecia do not remain scattered [on the slide] as at first, but soon begin to collect into assemblages in one or more regions. It appears as if they did not enjoy being alone and had passed the word along to gather and hold a mass meeting in some part of the preparation….” (504)
Stay with me here. After gathering like some concert crowd in a mosh pit, the paramecia start to separate a bit, but not by much, “as if by common consent no Paramecium was to pass farther out than all the rest.” (504) He wonders whether or not there is a “psychology” at work “which seems forced upon us by the observed facts.”
Consider two of your observations: 1) People gather in concert venues and in bars and restaurants for social interaction, but there are circumstances in which even the seemingly less “mindful” of us reject the overcrowding, grow tired of it, and move apart. We are gregarious to some extent, but our sense of individuality overrides our desire to be in a crowd. You remark, “Whenever the crowd becomes unpleasant or dangerous, we break from it.” 2) Pet owners “just know” when their pets are “happy”? They also ascribe personalities to their pets. “Of course,” you say, “and that’s because pets really do have personalities. Dogs differ, cats differ, and who knows, maybe even snakes differ. Animals have personalities as evidence by their likes and dislikes (as we interpret them), and that’s why people have the pets they have. Golden retrievers, among the most popular of dogs, are generally pleasant. Anyone can see that. There’s definitely a pet psychology.”
Jennings further experimented by putting not bacteria on the slide, but rather “bits of cloth, cotton, sponge, or any other loose or fibrous bodies” only to find that the paramecia also gather to feed. “Thus it appears that Paramecia exercise no choice as to the nature of the substances which they use for food….We may cut out, therefore, any psychological qualities deduced alone from the supposed choice of food….” (507). But what about the gathering in the absence of food?
His conclusion. The animals excrete carbon dioxide that results in carbonic acid, and paramecia seem to be attracted to acidic environments. So, the social gathering is a response to a particular chemical environment. What he found was that paramecia didn’t make any choices and didn’t learn during any of his experiments. “Thus it appears that our social phenomena, with all their implication of higher mental powers, have evaporated into a simple attraction toward carbon dioxide.” (508) Jennings concludes, also, that paramecia have a “machine-like nature.” Finally, he writes, “An animal that learns nothing, that exercises no choice in any respect, that is attracted by nothing and repelled by nothing, that reacts entirely without reference to the position of external objects , that has but one reaction for the most varied stimuli, can hardly be said to have made the first step in the evolution of mind, and we are not compelled to assume consciousness or intelligence in any form to explain its activities.” (515)
So, maybe Jennings, back there at the beginnings of modern psychology, gave us something to think about with respect to what we are. We can learn, exercise choice, respond to stimuli differently, and recognize position (place). As we develop Artificial Intelligence, we keep refining our invention, apparently aiming for the sentience we have, sentience we can project onto a robot. Our propensities and properties seem to characterize mind, and mind is the stuff behind all psychology. Jennings used paramecium behaviors as windows into its “psychology” only to find that the organism had no “psychology.”
Will we study robot behavior similarly? Will we project our personalities onto robots as pet owners project? And if robots achieve what paramecia cannot achieve, the ability to choose, to recognize place, and to learn, will they put us under the microscope and project their way of existing onto ours?
Since the rise of psychology, haven’t we all been under the microscope? Haven’t humans always projected themselves onto both animate and inanimate objects? Why, for example, do we want to put heads on robots? As Jennings also asks: Is there a psychology at work that is forced on us by the observed facts? And I ask: Do we project ourselves into all our observations?
* Jennings, H. (1899). The Psychology of a Protozoan. The American Journal of Psychology, 10(4), 503-515. doi:10.2307/1412661 Online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/1412661?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents Accessed January 20, 2019.
In 1899, H. S. Jennings published an article entitled “The Psychology of a Protozoan.” * Jennings put paramecia on a slide and observed their activities. At the time, psychology and psychiatry were in their infancy, or, at least, in their childhood stage. In the same year Freud published Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), and the young Jung was still a year from working at the Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich. From the perspective of someone in the twenty-first century, the idea that paramecia have a psychology to study might seem odd, but keep in mind that Jennings published in the late nineteenth century.
What could Jennings study? He writes, “If Paramecia are placed on an ordinary slide…together with a small bit of bacterial zoogloea…it will soon be found that almost all the Paramecia, which were at first scattered throughout the preparation, have gathered closely about the mass of zoogloea and are feeding upon it.” (503) Okay, I get it. Take a living organism, give it a delicious blob of gelatinous food, and it will eat. I’ve seen the experiment repeated at every restaurant and hotel buffet.
To provide some background for the laity not too familiar with paramecia, Jennings tells us that the organisms live, “by thousands in pond water containing decaying vegetable matter…Examination shows that under normal conditions Paramecia are usually engaged in feeding upon the masses of Bacteria which form a thick zoogloea on the surface of the water in which they are found. These Bacteria form almost or quite their entire food. A first question then might be: How do they choose their food, selecting Bacteria in preference to something else?” (504)
My inclination is to say, “Look, H. S., they eat what they evolved to eat. They can’t eat bigger stuff because they are little.” (But, hold on, Donald, remember what you said above. Jennings wrote this in 1899. People still study paramecia. Serious people. Neuroscientists even. Don’t’ mock what you don’t do or know)
Jennings does pose an interesting question. It seems that paramecia placed on a slide without the buffet also gather as if they are social beings. After asking how the paramecia know to gather about the zoogloea, that is, how they find the food placed at a distance on the slide, he then asks why they gather “like a human crowd.” Now, here’s where the projection seems evident: “If we mount the Paramecia…without the mass of bacterial zoogloea, we shall soon notice another phenomenon reminding us of human beings under like conditions [italics mine]. The Paramecia do not remain scattered [on the slide] as at first, but soon begin to collect into assemblages in one or more regions. It appears as if they did not enjoy being alone and had passed the word along to gather and hold a mass meeting in some part of the preparation….” (504)
Stay with me here. After gathering like some concert crowd in a mosh pit, the paramecia start to separate a bit, but not by much, “as if by common consent no Paramecium was to pass farther out than all the rest.” (504) He wonders whether or not there is a “psychology” at work “which seems forced upon us by the observed facts.”
Consider two of your observations: 1) People gather in concert venues and in bars and restaurants for social interaction, but there are circumstances in which even the seemingly less “mindful” of us reject the overcrowding, grow tired of it, and move apart. We are gregarious to some extent, but our sense of individuality overrides our desire to be in a crowd. You remark, “Whenever the crowd becomes unpleasant or dangerous, we break from it.” 2) Pet owners “just know” when their pets are “happy”? They also ascribe personalities to their pets. “Of course,” you say, “and that’s because pets really do have personalities. Dogs differ, cats differ, and who knows, maybe even snakes differ. Animals have personalities as evidence by their likes and dislikes (as we interpret them), and that’s why people have the pets they have. Golden retrievers, among the most popular of dogs, are generally pleasant. Anyone can see that. There’s definitely a pet psychology.”
Jennings further experimented by putting not bacteria on the slide, but rather “bits of cloth, cotton, sponge, or any other loose or fibrous bodies” only to find that the paramecia also gather to feed. “Thus it appears that Paramecia exercise no choice as to the nature of the substances which they use for food….We may cut out, therefore, any psychological qualities deduced alone from the supposed choice of food….” (507). But what about the gathering in the absence of food?
His conclusion. The animals excrete carbon dioxide that results in carbonic acid, and paramecia seem to be attracted to acidic environments. So, the social gathering is a response to a particular chemical environment. What he found was that paramecia didn’t make any choices and didn’t learn during any of his experiments. “Thus it appears that our social phenomena, with all their implication of higher mental powers, have evaporated into a simple attraction toward carbon dioxide.” (508) Jennings concludes, also, that paramecia have a “machine-like nature.” Finally, he writes, “An animal that learns nothing, that exercises no choice in any respect, that is attracted by nothing and repelled by nothing, that reacts entirely without reference to the position of external objects , that has but one reaction for the most varied stimuli, can hardly be said to have made the first step in the evolution of mind, and we are not compelled to assume consciousness or intelligence in any form to explain its activities.” (515)
So, maybe Jennings, back there at the beginnings of modern psychology, gave us something to think about with respect to what we are. We can learn, exercise choice, respond to stimuli differently, and recognize position (place). As we develop Artificial Intelligence, we keep refining our invention, apparently aiming for the sentience we have, sentience we can project onto a robot. Our propensities and properties seem to characterize mind, and mind is the stuff behind all psychology. Jennings used paramecium behaviors as windows into its “psychology” only to find that the organism had no “psychology.”
Will we study robot behavior similarly? Will we project our personalities onto robots as pet owners project? And if robots achieve what paramecia cannot achieve, the ability to choose, to recognize place, and to learn, will they put us under the microscope and project their way of existing onto ours?
Since the rise of psychology, haven’t we all been under the microscope? Haven’t humans always projected themselves onto both animate and inanimate objects? Why, for example, do we want to put heads on robots? As Jennings also asks: Is there a psychology at work that is forced on us by the observed facts? And I ask: Do we project ourselves into all our observations?
* Jennings, H. (1899). The Psychology of a Protozoan. The American Journal of Psychology, 10(4), 503-515. doi:10.2307/1412661 Online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/1412661?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents Accessed January 20, 2019.
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