From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: sci.med.nutrition,sci.biology,sci.med
Subject: Animal Intelligence (was Re: MILK Nature's Most Perfect Food)
Date: 29 Dec 1997 20:22:16 GMT

In <ELyK2y.C29@world.std.com> dsf@world.std.com (Dawn S Friedman)
writes:

>  By the same argument, if you can't show how truly thoughtful
>behavior would differ from what we see in, say, ravens choosing
>whether to share a kill and how to recruit assistance, that's a
>powerful argument that thought is taking place.


   Agreed.  There's a lot more evidence for animal *thinking* (making
choices about immediate problems) than there is for animal planning and
anxiety about the farther future (like tomorrow).  I think the dogs
I've owned as pets (some very bright lab retrievers) think in some
ways, but I never saw any evidence of planning for the future.  Almost
all of that "planning" behavior is instinctual in animals, and involves
no rational thought at all.  A rational squirrel wouldn't hide nuts for
the winter if you put it in a tropical climate for a few years.  But
try that, and you find that behavior doesn't change.  It's automatic
and inbred.

   In some species of tarantula hawk wasp, the wasp digs a burrow,
flies out and finds a spider, paralyzes it, drags it back to the mouth
off the burrow, and then (just before pulling the spider in) goes down
the burrow to check that it's still empty.  If you move the spider back
while the wasp is doing that, she'll come up, find the spider, drag it
back to the burrow, then (rote behavior) leave the spider and again go
down to see if the burrow is empty.  Pull the spider back while she
does this, even a little, and this whole sequence will be repeated.
You can keep it up as long as you have the heart for it.  The poor wasp
never does learn that the burrow is empty.  She's a machine.  What
looks like rational behavior on her part is just evolutionary
programming.  There's no mind there.

   On the other hand, in Denmark there are a bunch of chimps on a
island who are being closely observed, and I read a book about them not
long ago.  One test the colony was put through was to keep them in
their night cages until a supply of grapefruit could be buried on the
island, to see how long it would take them to find it-- a game they'd
played many times before.  When the cages were opened, the chimps came
boiling out all over the island, looking for the grapefruit they knew
was hidden there.  One chimp was observed to pass over the hiding
place, barely pausing.  After a bit, no chimp had found the grapefruit,
and all the chimps had moved to another part of the island.  Whereupon
the chimp that that passed over the fruit previously was observed to
sneak back very quietly, and dig up and eat it ALL.

    You have to have a big brain for this kind of thing, probably
larger than some people who post in these newsgroups.  I doubt that
this order of intelligence extends beyond the apes and perhaps a few
other primates.

                                     Steve Harris, M.D.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: misc.education.medical,misc.health.alternative,misc.health.aids,
	misc.health.therapy.occupational,misc.kids.health
Subject: Re: Health care -- a right, not a privilege  (article)
Date: 20 Oct 1998 06:01:32 GMT

In <70d22v$b2n@sjx-ixn8.ix.netcom.com> gmc0@ix.netcom.com (George M.
Carter) writes:

>Agamemnon69@hotmail.com (Agamemnon) wrote:
>
>
>>I'd wager you wouldn't know reason if it bit you in the ass.  What
>>your cat did is *not* reasoning.  He watched where you put the bowl,
>>schmuck!  How is that reasoning?
>
>Hmm...figures you're not bright enough to figure it out.  The cat
>reasoned ways to get to the bowl.  The cat will do this even if the
>bowl is out of sight or in a place he can't see but knows I put it
>sometimes.  The cat does not attempt to look for the bowl except
>around feeding time; he reasons that there is no point to that.



   You can read in _The Cat's Mind_ that cats have been seen to
systematically search rooms.  Before reading this, I was recently
witness to a room search by my 4 month old kitten, which I had a heard
time believing, even as I watched it.

   I'd been playing with him with a feather on a string attached to a
pole, which he dearly loves.  I stopped playing before the kitten
wanted to, and put it away in the other room.  When I came out of the
room without it, the cat decided it was in there somewhere.  He went
back in the room and started to look around.  He looked in ornamental
pots. He looked on top of the dining room table, and then at surfaces
out of his line of sight due to being too high.  Next was the top of
the piano.  I had put it on top of the encyclopedias on the top shelf
of the bookcase, and he soon elimiated the bottom two by laboriously
getting one top of their books. All this took 20 minutes, during which
time he searched systematically for something he could not see, and
could not smell.  But kept in his cat mind, ala one of the later steps
of mental development in Piaget.  He couldn't get to the top shelf, but
had obviously decided the feather stick had to be up there, because he
then started to yowl.  Now would am I supposed to conclude from all
this?

  This is the same little cat, BTW, who knows (after a very few demos)
that there are only a few rules in the house.  One is that he can be on
the bed, but cannot bite the covers over my feet (which he dearly loves
to do) because it wakes me up.  The penalty is being blasted by a
squirt gun which I keep on the dresser, and let him have it with, when
he's too playful with the teeth.  One would conclude he'd get the idea
that biting feet is not good.  Wrong.  He understands the feet may be
bitten when squirtgun is on table.  I have caught him more than once
eyeing my legs, eyeing the squirtgun, and then my legs again,
apparently making a calculation.  Then a quick bite and he's off the
bed in one fluid motion and out of range before he gets hit.  Fun game.

   Now, why am I not to infer that any of this is reasoning?  When I
have the squirtgun actually pointed at him, he's very sweet.  He purrs.
Put it down, however, and my legs are fair game.

                                        Steve Harris, M.D.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: alt.sci.physics,alt.sci.physics.new-theories,sci.physics,
	sci.physics.particle
Subject: Re: A philosophy of science
Date: 14 Jun 1999 04:50:28 GMT

In <3763E84D.1C73@gdi.net> "Charles W. Shults III" <aichip@gdi.net>
writes:

>Tom Potter wrote:
>
>> Because man is hardwired to try to be conserved,
>> his languages, religions, philosophies and sciences are
>> based on the concept of "conserved" objects
>> ( Like man wants to be. )
>> varying in "homogenous" media ( Time and space ).
>
>  I've called you on this one already.  I would like to
>see some sort of reference material on this idea, which
>is incidentally disproven by anyone who can raise children.
>We are no more wired for conservation than we are tripedal
>aquatic nose wafflers.  The concept of conservation is
>learned in our early years and reinforced through experience.
>
>Cheers!
>
>Chip Shults


   Don't you believe it.  I've seen a six month-old half grown cat
search a room systematically for a feather on a stick plaything he
wanted, and which he'd seen me take in there, and come out without.  He
looked in the corners, down a large ornamental pots, on top of a table,
the piano, and two shelves of the bookcase that he could get to (it was
on the third).  Every surface too high for him to see, or in which an
object of that size could be hidden, was sytematically investigated.
He simply didn't want to stop playing with the thing, and was going to
find it. He'd previously gotten it off a table, and I had hidden it
better the second time, having somebody hold him so he couldn't see me
do it (I felt silly doing this, but not after seeing the outcome). I
watched this search go on for 20 minutes, hardly able to believe it.
He couldn't smell the thing, since he was looking everywhere in the
room.  And he was really too young to have fully integrated the Piaget
stage of mass conservation (come on-- we're talking about a *kitten*
here....)  I'm afraid that whatever this is, it's hardwired into cats
(the systematic room search behavior of cats has been observed by
others, so I've learned since).  They see a mouse go into a hole or
under a stove, and they know it's in there for as long as it takes.
You see them sitting there waiting, and you think they smell the thing.
Wrong.  They do it with their synthetic fur toys, as well.  And
remember under what appliances they've lost toys the previous day.
They LIKE to do that.  They train for that.  It would not surprise me
at all if some of the same was wired into people, and we just THINK
children figure it out at a certain stage.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Neurons and consciousness
Date: 15 Jul 1999 22:35:46 GMT

In <378dd76b@news3.us.ibm.net> "Sergio Navega" <snavega@ibm.net>
writes:

>>   Ahem-- does the name Pavlov ring a bell?  Synaptic potentiation is
>>inherently inductive.  If you're looking for the "biological" source of
>>this phenomena, I suspect that's it.
>
>
>Ahem, my bell did not ring. Pavlov and Skinner notwithstanding, what
>I had in mind is something that goes *beyond* mere stimulus/response.
>Conditioning cannot explain generative aspects of our cognition
>(such as language, storymaking, design improvement, certain forms
>of recognition, etc). These generative aspects are exactly what
>made our civilization so different from that of dolphins.

   Well, it's not the only reason.  Dolphins can't make fire even if
they were smart enough to, and don't have any hands, either.  Even if
they were very intelligent (which they aren't-- being somewhere between
dogs and chimps, so say their trainers) they would have a very
different "civilization."  Certainly not a technical one.

   Learning is stimulus and response, and when the stimulus and
response get very complex, it gets to be indistinguishable from
thinking.  You will recall that Kasparov disparaged chess playing
computers as being unimaginative machine-like players, easily beatable
by anybody with imagination-- right up until they increased the power
to the point where the machine nailed Kasparov.  At which point
Kasparov started seeing a "mind" opposing him, and started accusing the
IBM team of being in secret contact with the computer during play, and
thus cheating.  They weren't.  Rather, a quantitative difference in
computer power had turned into a qualitative difference, and Kasparov
simply wasn't able to deal with that classically "emergent property."
But everybody should take a lesson here, even if Kasparov couldn't.




>>   Of course, it's turtles all the way down.  How is it that nervous
>>systems evolved synaptic potentiation behavior, reflex arcs, and so on?
>>Because they worked.  So why does induction work?  Dunno.  Nature is
>>uniform, for some reason, at some levels.
>
>Induction is better than random guess, that's the point. But once
>one wants an even better strategy, then one may find that induction
>may be used to develop "mental models" of the world, causal structures
>which may start inductively, but later are developed through
>"hypothesis checking" strategies. In a way, this kind of behavior can
>be found in children, they often test hypothesis (beating his little
>brother to see if hurts, if you know what I mean).


   Induction in a complex world must include weeding and hypothesis
checking strategies (akin to natural selecton after variation) since
the world is just too complex to take all purely combinatorial ideas
seriously.  Induction as practiced in a thinking technique is far more
than just generalization, because the generalizations conflict with
each other, and there has to be a way to prioritize them.  We do this
by weeding out those which are physically inconsistent.  If event A
happens, immediately preceded by event B, we immediately think of a
causal connection, and that is inductive (perhaps when B happens, A
will happen next EVERY time).  But such post hoc ergo propter hoc in
normal people is weeded by knowledge of possible kinds of causal
connections, and that is why we no longer think that black cats
crossing your path is bad luck, and so on.

   Animals are not as good at doing this, but they DO do it.  If you
squirt your cat with a squirtgun when it claws the furniture, or some
other unwanted behavior such as biting your feet as they move under the
bedclothes when you're falling asleep--- and if you don't move much
when you use the squirtgun, the cat will at first associate being wet
with clawing, and not with any motion made by you.  If it's a dumb cat,
after a while it will never claw furniture again.  If it's a smart cat,
it will figure out that it can claw it without consequences when you're
not in the room.  If it's really smart, it will figure out that the
squirt gun in your hand in the operative difference, and it will claw
while looking at you to see if you have it.  And run when you reach for
it.  Then make a game of clawing and ducking out of shooting line of
fire, before you can reach for it, for its own entertainment.  That's
all induction at a fairly high level, and I've seen an animal with a
brain the size of a walnut do it all.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Neurons and consciousness
Date: 17 Jul 1999 08:34:34 GMT

In <378f385b@news3.us.ibm.net> "Sergio Navega" <snavega@ibm.net>
writes:

>Steven B. Harris wrote in message <7mlno2$ei5@dfw-ixnews16.ix.netcom.com>...
>>In <378dd76b@news3.us.ibm.net> "Sergio Navega" <snavega@ibm.net>
>>writes:
>>>>
>>>>   Ahem-- does the name Pavlov ring a bell?  Synaptic potentiation is
>>>>inherently inductive.  If you're looking for the "biological" source of
>>>>this phenomena, I suspect that's it.
>>>>
>>>
>>>Ahem, my bell did not ring. Pavlov and Skinner notwithstanding, what
>>>I had in mind is something that goes *beyond* mere stimulus/response.
>>>Conditioning cannot explain generative aspects of our cognition
>>>(such as language, storymaking, design improvement, certain forms
>>>of recognition, etc). These generative aspects are exactly what
>>>made our civilization so different from that of dolphins.
>>
>>   Well, it's not the only reason.  Dolphins can't make fire even if
>>they were smart enough to, and don't have any hands, either.  Even if
>>they were very intelligent (which they aren't-- being somewhere between
>>dogs and chimps, so say their trainers) they would have a very
>>different "civilization."  Certainly not a technical one.
>>
>
>
>Being unable to make fire and having no hands is a serious handicap.
>But I doubt that this could prevent the emergence of sophisticated
>civilizations. What is really important, IMHO, is the appearance
>of sophisticated and structured symbolic forms of representing
>knowledge (in other words: language).
>
>Dolphins were found to teach their offsprings of techniques developed
>by themselves (a certain hunting behavior, I don't recall exactly).
>But the problem is that this offspring *will not* be able to learn
>what was discovered by its distant forebears. Without that (which
>is a result of sophisticated language-related activities like
>lectures and books), I doubt that a civilization like ours will ever
>emerge. Edward Jenner discovered the smallpox vaccine in 1796 and
>we're still benefiting from this (and subsequent work by Koch, Salk,
>Sabin). This cumulative effect (knowledge added over knowledge)
>is what makes us special.
>
>Regards,
>Sergio Navega.



    You're just arguing against yourself, here.  Our own higher
civilizations (anything more complex than neolithic villages-- about
the level of American Indians) only arose when we began to store
knowledge peripherally from our brains as clay symbols (circa 8000 BC),
then clay tablets (circa 4000 BC), then writing on paper and velum
(1000 BC or so), and finally machine-printed material. With the
invention of the printing press using cast metal movable type (for
which you need fire, obviously), circa 1450, we got the industrial and
scientific revolutions in fairly short order right next.  No
coincidence, I think.  You can't DO good science without printing
presses, because the mass of data in your methods section is just too
damn much work to copy and distribute to a large community by hand, and
then keep archived.

   So it's writing--> urban civilization---> then printing --->
industrial/scientific civilization.  But to DO this kind of thing you
need HANDS, or something equivalent.  Without them, you're reduced to
something like flipper or snout-cuneiform, and I think it's going to be
really hard to base much of a complex civilization on that.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Neurons and consciousness
Date: 18 Jul 1999 06:51:42 GMT

In <3790a1d3@news3.us.ibm.net> "Sergio Navega" <snavega@ibm.net>
writes:

>>Harris:
>    You're just arguing against yourself, here.  Our own higher
>>civilizations (anything more complex than neolithic villages-- about
>>the level of American Indians) only arose when we began to store
>>knowledge peripherally from our brains as clay symbols (circa 8000 BC),
>>then clay tablets (circa 4000 BC), then writing on paper and velum
>>(1000 BC or so), and finally machine-printed material. With the
>>invention of the printing press using cast metal movable type (for
>>which you need fire, obviously), circa 1450, we got the industrial and
>>scientific revolutions in fairly short order right next.  No
>>coincidence, I think.  You can't DO good science without printing
>>presses, because the mass of data in your methods section is just too
>>damn much work to copy and distribute to a large community by hand, and
>>then keep archived.
>>
>>   So it's writing--> urban civilization---> then printing --->
>>industrial/scientific civilization.  But to DO this kind of thing you
>>need HANDS, or something equivalent.  Without them, you're reduced to
>>something like flipper or snout-cuneiform, and I think it's going to be
>>really hard to base much of a complex civilization on that.

Navega:

>Your point is interesting, but I don't agree. Hands are obviously
>important, but much more important is the ability to recognize
>complex symbolic and syntactical structures. Hands help to potentialize
>this, but we could have progressed without them. Before anyone can
>read a book or understand an uttered phrase, one must have the
>ability to deal with abstract concepts, in which symbols represent
>things. This demands brain power.


   Comment: sure.  Brain power is *necessary* for writing and printing,
followed by the specialization which leads to high civilization, but it
is NOT sufficient.



>If dolphins had enough capacity to do that, they would have evolved
>a complex language of their own, and they would have developed
>methods to register symbols (even down water).


   Baloney.  The easy counterargument is that humans didn't develop
anything close to writing until 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, and yet we've
been at our present level of intelligence for at least 40,000 years and
probably more like 200,000.  Most human cultures never did make it, and
remained at the neolithic level in consequence.  Every human in North
America, for example.  The AmerInds were just as intelligent as the
Europeans, but they didn't have writing.  That was all it took.  So
there is NOTHING about intelligence per se which guarantees you can
make a high civilization.  It only happened recently and by chance with
US.  Dolphins, even as intelligent as we, would surely be out of luck,
and would not have made it by now any more than the Anasazi of 1450 AD.

  The situation is confused a bit by the fact that N. American American
Indians didn't have large cities, either---- but large cities are the
PRODUCT of high civilization, not the primary cause of it (though they
help it along in a snowball effect, once going).  Large masses of
humans cannot live together without a pretty sophisticated method of
transporting goods and services from peripheral agricultural sectors to
the city people, who trade specialized services for it.  You cannot
keep TRACK of an economy like that, without writing, and noplace has it
ever been seen to occur without writing.  The N. American Indians (by
contrast with some of their Southern cousins) couldn't stay in one
large village for long, because there was no infrastructure to allow
such a large collection of people to stay in one place for more than a
few weeks' "pow-wow."  The congregation that Custer happened upon at
the Little Bighorn (for example) was a very temporary thing, size-wise.
Custer had never seen that kind of thing before, and for good reason.
It was rare.  Custer just happened to be having a very bad day,
luck-wise, when he did finally see it (making up for a lot of very good
luck days in his past, if you know that history).

   The other advantage Europeans had on the Amerinds of both N and S
America, is that Europeans had been living in large cities for a very
long time by contrast even with the Aztecs, exposed all that time to
contagious diseases which spread in humans only when the population is
very dense.  The natural state of humans can be described as "shit and
move on."  If they don't, dire things happen in terms of disease,
unless they adapt or build high tech sanitation, or both.  The peoples
of the Americas, by and large, had done neither.  European communicable
diseases-- the sort of biowarfare long bred unconsciously by Europeans
in their large cities-- when brought to the New World proved most
deadly.  Again, however, this was simply due to the European head start
on civilization, in turn due to earlier invention of writing in the
East.  The disease thing is a secondary phenomena which comes from a
history of a longer adaptation time to large cities.  It's not a
primary thing.


> Also, they would
>care to teach this language to their offsprings, which for this
>reason would have to have enough brain capacity to understand
>pictorial and symbolic items. Our children have this.


    The children of the Sioux had this.  It didn't give them writing.

>An armless human can "mold" his world to his disability, with
>creativity. But in order to do that, it is necessary to have a
>powerful brain.

   Again, necessary but NOT sufficient.  Look to your history.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Neurons and consciousness
Date: 18 Jul 1999 09:40:20 GMT

In <3791081B.26590BE@jhuapl.edu> "james d. hunter"
<jim.hunter@jhuapl.edu> writes:
>
>  I have to disagree. I think the only native concepts
>  humans come with are to look for food and look for
>  information. The remainding part of the substantial repertoire
>  is the human's synthetic ability to become philosophers.


Comment:

   I doubt that humans are as tabula rasa as all that.  Newborns
recognize faces independently from other objects. Indeed, there is
evidence we have face-recognition *machinery* (hardware, or if you
must, wetware) in the brain, not just programming.  And they smile when
smiled at, so that's built in.  And they don't like insects or heights.
And I suspect there's a lot of other stuff that comes out later when
the developmental programming code unfolds it, and it just looks
learned.

   Take a look at a newborn kitten.  It's blind, it's deaf, and it
can't do a whole lot but right itself when turned over, and pull itself
approximately toward warmth with its front paws.  There's no sign there
of something that can acurately pounce on a moving insect from several
feet away.  But there's little doubt that the programming for a pounce
is there, because all kittens pounce on things more or less the same
way, after they get a bit older.  And they do it without watching other
cats do it, if they are raised by hand.

   If you watch some birds as fledglings flop about, it looks like they
are "learning" to fly, by experiment.  But there's one Australian bird
(don't ask me the species) that can fly right out of the shell, so it's
pretty obvious that all the "how to fly" genes are in at least one
species of bird, and given that, it would be pretty peculiar if most of
them aren't in all birds that can fly.

   What looks like flight "learning" with most birds is probably just
resequencing and unpacking and limbering up, a bit like me "learning"
again to play a piano piece I could once play perfectly 20 years ago,
but since have not practiced.  It might at first-guess look like I'm
learning it anew, and sight-reading poorly at that, but it doesn't feel
a bit like it from *my* side, and if you watch me learning something I
really never HAVE seen before, the difference is much more obvious <g>.
When I "learn" to play a piece I once knew 20 years ago, it's quite a
bit like watching a newborn colt "learn" to get up and walk a few hours
after being born.  It happens quite fast, and it happens rather surely.
You can see pieces of behavior after a bit which convince you that here
is something which is destined to be.  By contrast, when you watch me
learn a piece I've never seen, however, it's more like watching
somebody train cats to look like they're playing the banjo.  Or those
walzing bears at the circus.  You wonder while watching training if
it's ever even going to be possible, for the ultimate result really is
in doubt.

   Of course, I don't pretend it's easy to tell.  Some birds sing the
same song of all their species, and they sing it even if they've never
heard it.  Other birds sing only what they hear, and obviously a
species song is not in the genes, although the learning program to sing
what the bird hears obviously is.  So what's there in humans?  Nothing
much but learning programs?  It's a great question.  I'm only saying
that just because not much *seems* to be there but learning programs at
birth, is no proof or even good indication that there's not a great
deal of pre-programming there (as in a newborn kitten-- or kangaroo!)
that is hidden, and waiting to unfold.

   When Winston Churchill's party lost the elections in 1945 and he
learned he had been ousted as Prime Minister, right in the middle of
the Potsdam negociations on the fate of postwar Europe, his wife told
him it might be a blessing in disguise.  "It is very effectively
disguised," said Churchill.  So, too, with the knowledge in our genes.

                                      Steve

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Neurons and consciousness
Date: 18 Jul 1999 23:03:23 GMT

In <379222D0.5752A8BF@jhuapl.edu> "james d. hunter"
<jim.hunter@jhuapl.edu> writes:

> But most of the stuff your
>  mentioning I would consider as "support" mechanisms for
>  finding food and information. I was really considering more
>  of the higher level language/logic processing that goes on
>  in humans.


   Who knows?  But there's definately something funny about language
acquisition.  It's clear that it's NOT straight learning.  Learning it
at 2 or 3 years of age is NOT like doing it at 12, whereas with most
other things, there's not that much difference.  One suggesting is that
nature turns off most of your language acquisition and generation
ability at puberty, to insure that flow of info goes only one way, and
you don't learn your kids' babble as fast as they learn adult language
from you.  Interesting idea.

   Why we don't concentrate exclusively on teaching our kids different
spoken languages from 0-4 years or so, when it's clear that they are
built to learn them then (while most other formal learning can jolley
well wait) is more than I can see.  Defect of our system.  By the time
kids hit kindergarten, much, perhaps most, of the time-window for
language acquisition is already closed, and even then we waste what's
left, which lasts only another 5 years (sigh).  "Beginning French" in
high school!  Merde!  God, what stupidity.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Neurons and consciousness
Date: 20 Jul 1999 04:28:12 GMT

In <37932e96@news3.us.ibm.net> "Sergio Navega" <snavega@ibm.net>
writes:

>Steven B. Harris wrote in message <7mrthu$kpb@dfw-ixnews4.ix.netcom.com>...
>
>>   Comment: sure. Brain power is *necessary* for writing and printing,
>> followed by the specialization which leads to high civilization, but
>> it is NOT sufficient.
>
>
>
>Yes, I agree, it is not sufficient, but in order to potentialize
>intelligence, one may use a lot of methods to stand for "writing".
>As a really weird idea, imagine if dolphins could move little rocks
>in the bottom of the sea in order to make "primitive symbols", accepted
>by the community. Those could be the ways to make such messages as
>"shark area in that direction", which would obviously improve their
>life condition. Dolphins don't do that mostly because their brains
>don't have the necessary power to link referent to refereed.


   I don't know why dolphins don't do this.  It's not obvious that use
of symbols to communicate such simple ideas are a even a product of
intelligence.  Consider the bee dance-- the info conveyed is even more
complex than "shark area in that direction."  It's on the level of how
far away in that direction and how many sharks.  Not bad.  But bees are
dumb as dirt by most criteria.  Certainly not as intelligent as
dolphins.

   For more complex use of symbols, intelligence I would suspect is
necessary (after all-- that is much of what we mean by the word
"intelligence" so this gets to be a syllogistic argument).   But I
already said that.  It's necessary, but not sufficient for really high
level use of symbols.  And I don't mean what bees do to communicate
information with dance, or what some human cultures do in communicating
with dance, or by ornamenting themselves.  Gorrillas may have 72
different kind of grunts (I don't know the actual number) but it takes
a much more complex symbology, and a concrete one at that, for a "high"
(urban) civilization.


>>>If dolphins had enough capacity to do that, they would have evolved
>>>a complex language of their own, and they would have developed
>>>methods to register symbols (even down water).
>>
>>   Baloney.  The easy counterargument is that humans didn't develop
>>anything close to writing until 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, and
>>yet we've been at our present level of intelligence for at least
>>40,000 years and probably more like 200,000.  Most human
>>cultures never did make it, and remained at the neolithic level in
>>consequence.  Every human in North America, for example.  The [North
>>American] AmerInds were just as intelligent as the Europeans, but they
>>didn't have writing.  That was all it took.  So there is NOTHING
>>about intelligence per se which guarantees you can make a high
>>civilization.  It only happened recently and by chance with
>>US.  Dolphins, even as intelligent as we, would surely be out of
>>luck, and would not have made it by now any more than the Anasazi of
>>1450 AD.
>
>There are two questions here. One is the birth of evolved
>civilizations, which I'm sure you have a point. But I was not
>talking about evolved civilizations, I was talking about a way to
>*symbolically* pass knowledge from one generation to the other. What
>the descendants do with this knowledge (improve it and share it in
>order to make a larger, more complex civilization or just improve his
>life condition and that of his family, is really another question;

   I suppose so, but the answer seems obvious to ME.  What they do with
it if human is make a complex civilization, which requires urbanization,
specialization, agriculture, etc.  EVERY human urban civilization of
ancient times-- from the Chinese to the peoples of the Indus River
Valley, to the Sumerians/Akkadians/Hittites and various civilizations
of mesopotamia, to the Egyptians and Phoenecians and paleo-Greeks, to
the Incas and Aztecs, had writing.  I know of no single counterexample
in either direction.  There are no urban civilizations that didn't have
writing, and there are none which developed writing which did not
urbanize.  That's kind of suggestive, don't you think?  Somewhere there
is a causal assocation.  If writing is a confounder (stasticially) then
I'd like to know what it is that correlates with both writing and
urbanization better than they correlate with each other (which is what
the true "third cause of both" effect would have to do).   Especially
since (so far as I can tell) writing and cities correlate perfectly.
Unless you're going to argue that cities invent writing, I think you've
got some arguing to do.

   Now for dolphins, or an intelligent water critter?   Who knows.
Perhaps writing only leads to cities with humans.  But it seems to me
that what writing does is lead to, is the possibility of high
specialization of knowledge and tradecraft within our limited
lifetimes, and THAT requires a very complex trade system, and lots of
people doing something other than farming or hunting, and being close
together to do it.  I don't think that large cities are just a foible
of human, therefore.  Of course, I can't prove that until I see some
intelligent extraterrestrial cultural history <g>.

>as an aside: I believe that
>the greatest influence on the emergence of civilizations is the way
>in which this civilization makes use of simple versions of the
>"scientific method"; most civilizations that didn't use such a method
>would remain primitive).


   That gets into a long discussion what the scientific method is, and
I'd rather not go there (we've been there on this forum too recently).
But there are lots of urban civilizations in the past with writing
which didn't have anything close to what I would recognize as the
modern scientific method.  Yes, they had people who could think.  But
"scientific investigation" as a systematized method and cultural or
individual pursuit?  That's a modern thing except for very recently.
The Greeks and Romans (who stole the idea from them) came closest in
the deep past, but no other civilizations of BC that I know of even had
an Aristotle, much less a Newton.

>About 40k years ago we had drawings in caves representing animals,
>hunting situations, etc. Although primitive, that's *symbolic*: no
>other animal can do such a thing. In order to do that, it is necessary
>to have enough brain capacity.

   Bees.  And besides, you're being a "visual chauvanist" here in many
ways.  If you could see the territories of wolf packs where raised leg
urinations are marked visually, you would see a very complex thing
(this has been done).  It's just that wolves work in a different media
than sight.  So the information conveyed in a graph of raised leg
urination instances is (of course) far more complex than "wolf was
here."  It also says sex, time of oestrus, something of pack genetics,
and god knows what else.  When dogs sniff each other's butts there's a
heck of a lot more useful knowledge passed, no doubt, than "Hi, how are
you?  Fine, how are you?  Great.  Where you from?  Around here?"


>I concede that there is a distance between symbolic reasoning and
>the "state of evolution" of one civilization, and that distance
>obviously is a function of the interaction among the (social)
>groups of agents in one community. One kind of social interaction
>would remain relatively constant throughout time (as the indian
>communities that you cited). Others would potentialize and add,
>examples of our own. I suggest that this is the result of the
>good use of the scientific method.

    I suggest it isn't.  EVERY group that has writing advances
technically.  Not all are very scientific (does Minoan science impress
you?  Indus River science?).  By contrast, there is no science as we
know it done without writing, and no group with good science that isn't
urbanized and literate FIRST.  As noted, there are no ubanized
societies without writing, no literate socities of the past which
didn't urbanize.  It's one-to-one correlation.  The reverse of some of
these occurs thoughout history (literate and urbanized, crumby science,
as above.  Think of Rome).  In order to make your case you're going to
have to give some counterexamples if you think "science" is primary.
Or else define "science" is some way that is pretty primitive.  If you
mean what a cat or a bluejay hunting dog does in searching an area for
something, not going back to previous places searched (hypothesize,
test, store results, use results in further research), and doing it
systematically, in order to find something, then you have a very loose
definition of the word.  But not one that applies only to people.

>But it is the symbolic ability of each element of one community
>that potentializes the snowball. Although some communities of apes
>demonstrate some kind of organization and hierarchy, there is no
>animal on earth which resembles our "spiral evolution" of societies
>of today.

   But there sure were a lot of human societies of the past which
didn't have any kind of spiral evolution.  For millennia.  The ones
without writing.  Brains they had, writing they didn't.


> I see as the determinant factor for this difference our
>ability to manipulate and communicate symbols, on a first place,
>and our ability to stick with that "scientific method", as a second
>requirement.

   Well, I see it differently, and I've given you my reasoning.


>>> Also, they would
>>>care to teach this language to their offsprings, which for this
>>>reason would have to have enough brain capacity to understand
>>>pictorial and symbolic items. Our children have this.
>>
>>    The children of the Sioux had this.  It didn't give them writing.
>
>This is an evidence of the lack of "sufficient". I wasn't making
>a point of this. I was trying to say that "writing", in the usual
>way we see this, as letters on paper, written by hands, is not
>a *necessary* condition.

   Then give ONE counterexample.  I say it is necessary for high
civilization, which I have defined convenently as urban, technical, and
progressing in complexity over time.

>It is, granted, highly convenient and
>improves the process, maybe we can say that *our* civilization is
>a result of writing on paper.

   No.  We can say ALL human civilization is a result of writing.  Clay
will do.  But is has to be a symbolic process capable of expressing any
high order abstraction.  Many human civilizations were capable of high
order abstraction-- the Neanderthals buried dead with food and tools,
suggesting they believed in an afterlife, a highly abstract concept.
But with no writing, they went nowhere.  Same with a great many other
technically primitive non-urban societies we've met in modern times.
Complex society.  Intelligent as we.  But no writing and nothing high
tech.


> But in order to use that
>potentialization factor, one *must have* symbolic reasoning
>abilities, which demands a brain capable of doing that.


   Never said otherwise.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Neurons and consciousness
Date: 22 Jul 1999 09:37:47 GMT

In <379488b2@news3.us.ibm.net> "Sergio Navega" <snavega@ibm.net>
writes:

>Bloxy's wrote in message <7n0epm$8rh$4@its.hooked.net>...
>>In article <37932e96@news3.us.ibm.net>, "Sergio Navega" <snavega@ibm.net>
>>wrote:
>>
>>>Steven B. Harris wrote in message <7mrthu$kpb@dfw-ixnews4.ix.netcom.com>...
>>>>In <3790a1d3@news3.us.ibm.net> "Sergio Navega" <snavega@ibm.net>
>>>>writes:
>>
>>>>>>Harris:
>>[...]
>>
>>>>Comment: sure. Brain power is *necessary* for writing and printing,
>>>>followed by the specialization which leads to high civilization, but
>>>>it is NOT sufficient.
>>
>>>Yes, I agree, it is not sufficient, but in order to potentialize
>>>intelligence, one may use a lot of methods to stand for "writing".
>>>As a really weird idea, imagine if dolphins could move little rocks
>>>in the bottom of the sea in order to make "primitive symbols", accepted
>>>by the community. Those could be the ways to make such messages as
>>>"shark area in that direction", which would obviously improve their
>>>life condition.
>>
>>And what do you know about dolphins?
>>And what if they ALREADY posess ALL necessary means
>>of identifying such a danger?
>
>
>
>Yes, I agree, they may do (at least most of them). They can perceive
>things beyond our imagination, not only because they are a completely
>different species, but also because they live in a world unlike
>ours. But guess what: their "learning" (sensibility to sharks or
>other potential dangers) was obtained through natural selection. That
>means that *a lot* of dolphins died, and what we've got today were
>only the ones with the "right" perceptual equipment.



   May I point out that none us knows much about the life-table and
demographic structure of dolphins, nor about their natural mortality
rates in the wild.  So spare us the Rousseauvian visions of your
imagined utopian dolphin world.  You don't know.  I don't know.

   I will point out inductively, however, that whenever naturalists
have been able to quantitatively measure the mortality of any species in
the wild, and construct from life-tables the appropriate
Gompertz-Makeham relation, which says something about how the species
dies of exponentially time-dependent mortality causes (loosely, natural
aging) or time-independent mortality causes (loosely, accident and
misadventure and predation not a function of age-related decrepitude),
it is usually discovered that these relations don't look at all like
the age structure of zoo animals or pets, which looks something like
modern human society (ie, a fairly squared curve, with much accelerated
die-off at the end).  By contrast, natural populations, even when
stable in numbers, usually show the same more or less inverse
exponential age structure that humans did thousands of years ago (as
inferred from Roman cemetaries, etc).  That implies rather constant and
high age-independent mortality risks, which overshadow aging.

   In other words, the state of nature (to employ Bloxy's favorite
metaphor) generally sucks.  If you actually follow groups of animals
for a decade or two (as has been done with lions and chimps and many
other creatures-- do turn on the Nature Channel some time) you can
record the deaths of individual animals, mode and means, and find out
the specifics of how bad life in a state of nature sucks.  But that
only adds pathos.  We've known the general facts without the details
for a long time, now.

  It's not a nice world out there, in general. If you're going to
assume something about dolphins in the absense of knowledge, I would
argue that you may just as well assume that this applies to them also.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.physics,sci.skeptics
Subject: Re: Neurons and consciousness
Date: 22 Jul 1999 10:55:09 GMT

In <379488be@news3.us.ibm.net> "Sergio Navega" <snavega@ibm.net>
writes:


[Steve]:
>>   I don't know why dolphins don't do this.  It's not obvious that use
>>of symbols to communicate such simple ideas are a even a product of
>>intelligence.  Consider the bee dance-- the info conveyed is even more
>>complex than "shark area in that direction."  It's on the level of how
>>far away in that direction and how many sharks.  Not bad.  But bees are
>>dumb as dirt by most criteria.  Certainly not as intelligent as
>>dolphins.
>
>
>Bee behavior may look to us as complex, but what we're seeing is
>not the complexity of the bee's brain, but the complexity of the
>social cluster of bees, an emergent phenomenon.

   I suspect the same, but of course the argument is just as easy to
apply to dolpins, since we can no more read their minds than we can
bees'.

   Pushed far enough, of course this decends to solipsism.  Your
behavior may seem superficially complex, but as you repeat one after
another of the "lots of animal are as smart as we human
species-chauvanists are," arguments of the 60's, I do begin to wonder
if *your* behavior is not just a mindless manifestation of a social
phenomenon also.  No offense intended, of course.

> Under this same view, a tornado is another example of mindless
>complexity.

   Not quite, for a tornado shows no signs of learning.  Bees do.  And
the hive is smarter than any individual bee, due to distributed
thinking of a sort (ie, a communal mind, where the organism is the
colony, not the individual social insects).  And, of course,
specialization and division of labor of the colony's members allows
greater adaptiveness and toughness of the colony as a whole.  This kind
if thing drives the development of multicellular organisms (and, we
note in passing, is probably the origin of aging).  It can fool you,
though, when it comes from culture.  Ability to build moon rockets and
leave the planet is an emergent property of humans.  It's not that any
of us got more brainpower-- it's solely a function of extrasomatic
storage of knowledge and the resultant possibility of division of
labor.  Humans who don't have this are still living in the jungle with
sticks stuck through their noses, looking for a monkey to shoot for
dinner, and hoping that some village witch hasn't hexed them so they
don't get sick and maybe even die.  Which they regularly do.

>>>I concede that there is a distance between symbolic reasoning and
>>>the "state of evolution" of one civilization, and that distance
>>>obviously is a function of the interaction among the (social)
>>>groups of agents in one community. One kind of social interaction
>>>would remain relatively constant throughout time (as the indian
>>>communities that you cited). Others would potentialize and add,
>>>examples of our own. I suggest that this is the result of the
>>>good use of the scientific method.
>>
>>  I suggest it isn't. EVERY group that has writing advances technically.
>>Not all are very scientific (does Minoan science impress you? Indus
>>River science?). By contrast, there is no science as we know it done
>>without writing, and no group with good science that isn't urbanized and
>>literate FIRST. As noted, there are no ubanized societies without
>>writing, no literate socities of the past which didn't urbanize. It's
>>one-to-one correlation. The reverse of some of these occurs thoughout
>>history (literate and urbanized, crumby science, as above. Think of
>>Rome). In order to make your case you're going to have to give some
>>counterexamples if you think "science" is primary. Or else define
>>"science" is some way that is pretty primitive. If you mean what a cat
>>or a bluejay hunting dog does in searching an area for something, not
>>going back to previous places searched (hypothesize, test, store
>>results, use results in further research), and doing it systematically,
>>in order to find something, then you have a very loose definition of the
>>word. But not one that applies only to people.
>
>
>I was saying something much simpler, your point appears to be more
>advanced than mine. As an example, take some primitive indian community
>that believes that thunders are the complaints of "gods" in the sky.
>They will pretty much stay in that situation forever. A scientific
>society will start noticing that those thunders appear to happen
>without any regard to what they do on Earth. This is a good way
>to start *doubting* this assumption, which is the *germ* of
>science: to doubt of things that do not appear to be working
>coherently. Then, establish tests: do something really nasty
>and see if thunders complain.


   Sure, though in practice a statement can be made more or less
data-proof and unfalsifiable, as we've argued so much here on the
forum.  You can always think of a reason a posteriori, why the Gods
were angry, or why they were propitiated.

   The problem here is not really theories that are non-falsifiable
(though this is a direct outcome of it)-- the even more root problem is
that people are not really naturally honest, and we have really bad
memories, considering the tasks we have to do in order to
industrialize.  We cheat.  We lie.  Even to themselves.  Hell,
especially to themselves.  In other words, we all have pretty small
brains relative to what there is out there that is necessary to
understand for the "good-life," the world is a complex buzzing blooming
confusion, and it's pretty easy to go about fooling ourselves into
noticing only those parts of it which agree with our theories, and
which therefore raise our status in society and increase our share of
resources.

  Anterior to, and completely underpinning the "scientific method,"
therefore, and something which isn't talked about much, was the
development of the honest contract.  In other words, the public
agreement to do THIS or THAT prediction, and the agreement that if THIS
happens, then you'll pay THAT, and if THAT happens, then you'll pay
THIS (like a bet, but also like a very great many business deals, which
involve assignment and assumption of risk).  After which all parties
witness the test and abide by the implications of the PREVIOUSLY
agreed-on possibilities.  No welching, no fudging.

   Now, even there it won't be perfect.  I won't say that lawyering is
causally anterior to real and "modern" methodic science, though it may
well be (shudder).  But there's no doubt in my mind that commercial
contracts, involving written records of "deals" ARE the direct
precursor of science, as a method.  Contracts are not just to keep
poople honest, but also for the benefit of honest people's memories
(which seem to be plastically favorable to our own interests in
society-- surprise).  In this view mathematics enters science mainly as
a way to keep people honest about what they are predicting.  Math is a
shorthand method of writing logical and quantitative predictions, based
on a *few* well defined parameters, and explicitly excluding all
others.  That keeps things a *great* deal more honest.  An equation is
a *contract.*  Not with nature, but with your society, when you publish
it.  If you write it down and publish it, it's a bet, and you have to
stand by it.  No welching.  No fudging when the data generated don't
fit.  People try to do this all the time, of course! (Guess what--
we're human).  But they're less sucessful at it than ever before.
Because of clear and unambiguous quantitative language (ie, math), and
public prediction a priori (publication-- pringing).

   I would like to suggest that this is the real core of science.  It's
not really hypotheses and testing and induction-- though these are part
of the machinery.  The core of science is public, unambiguous
prediction.  Math removes ambiguity, and publication (writing,
printing) is what makes it public and checkable, and stops
argumentation based on weak memory.  How people actually get from
looking at the world to making the published quantitative predictions,
is of quite secondary importance.  In the history of science we've seen
many routes.  All have been fruitful and some times and places for some
people.  But whether some of the process lies in Bayes' theorem where
we can look at it, or some of it deep in the unconscious of a genius
like Newton, or both, it doesn't matter.  That part just affects how
fast we get to where we want to be in understand and predicting the
future (ie, to having wealth and women <g>).  It's the basic mechanism
of keeping ourselves honest that insures that no matter what, fast or
slow, we as a society make progress without having to wait for
mutations in our genes and the early deaths or failure of reproduction
of people who don't have them.  Dolphins and bees aren't gunna do this.



>>>But it is the symbolic ability of each element of one community
>>>that potentializes the snowball. Although some communities of apes
>>>demonstrate some kind of organization and hierarchy, there is no
>>>animal on earth which resembles our "spiral evolution" of societies
>>>of today.
>>
>>   But there sure were a lot of human societies of the past which
>>didn't have any kind of spiral evolution.  For millennia.  The ones
>>without writing.  Brains they had, writing they didn't.
>
>And I believe we can find some societies that had brains, had writing
>but didn't developed.

  Well, you may believe it, but you'll have to come up with some
concrete examples.  In public I've now said there aren't any.  If you
can come up with some, it's going to do horrible things to my theory
that I won't be able to welch on.  Or welch very well.

> Or societies that had all this, *including*
>scientific methods and also didn't survive.


  Ditto on this.



>>   Then give ONE counterexample.  I say it [writing] is necessary for
>>high civilization, which I have defined convenently as urban,
>>technical, and progressing in complexity over time.


>You're looking at this example right now. We are communicating
>over an entirely "electronic" medium, with no paper. In the future
>(maybe 50 or 100 years) we may dispense keyboards and link
>the thing directly into our cortex. Now some 500k years or
>1 million years from now, even our hands could atrophy, if we
>can control things mentally. What remains, then?


  Only the Krell Machine, obviously....    Monsters from the id.


You write (not so morbidly/Morbiusly):

> Only our
>symbolic processing abilities. Now, if we talk about *symbolic
>languages*, then, I agree entirely with all the rationale. The
>progress of any civilization appears to be strongly related
>to language.
>
>Regards,
>Sergio Navega.



    In the year 3535, if man is still alive, and woman can survive,
they may find... who knows?   "Some machine is doing that for you."
But you've made a lot of assumptions above and bollixed up the
argument. Welching by adding new variables and cosmic constants, a
postiori!   I'm talking (as I thought was rather clear) about human
beings as we know them, not brains in jars with cortexes connected to
computers.  Writing is necessary because of our lousy memories, and to
keep us "honest" in our dealings (which is BOTH a selective memory AND
a processing problem, as noted).  Writing doesn't have to be on paper,
and I never said it did (I mentioned clay and vellum, and CD ROMs are
just one more extension of that).  And as soon as our memories are
connected directly with cyberspace (both directly to each other's, and
to very secure and relatively tamperproof extrasomatic cyber-storage,
all bets are off.

   Not relevent to our discussion of dolphins and bees and Sioux.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Neurons and consciousness
Date: 27 Jul 1999 09:09:27 GMT

In <379CB19E.5583@online.no> Tore Lund <tl001@online.no> writes:

>Let's consider Merleau-Ponty's take on this:
>
>    [on pointing:]
>
>    "...this pointing gesture, which animals do not understand...



   Which some animals do not understand.  Obviously this dude has never
owned even a halfway bright retriever.  And no, you don't have to train
it all in.  If you were doing that, it would be just as easy to do with
a cat, and it certainly is not.  However, that is not to say it's
impossible.

   It ought to be obvious that "pointing" is basically an extension of
throwing, with the motion made, but object not actually released.  If
you do that with a dog (or for that matter a cat) which is used to you
playing with it by being throwing objects to chase, you'll find that
moving your hand in a particular direction will cause the animal to
move its head toward the projected path of an object coming from your
hand (even if you don't throw-- this is an ancient way of teasing dogs,
as every boy knows).  That's a kind of induction that both cats and
dogs do quite well.  Moreover, you don't want to extinguish this
behavior, but reinforce it.  If the animal has been given many examples
of having you do this, and being shown something interesting that way
most of the time, you can eventually train it to (sometimes) look where
you point.  For example, one of my cats loves bugs and spiders, and
will sometimes respond to having me point them out on walls, by now.
It's no longer necessary for me to be standing right next to them.  If
I get the cat's attention and point, the cat will turn his head in that
general direction.  If the bug is moving at the time, the cat will
usually visually "acquire" it.  That is, if he's interested in play, or
hungry.

From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.physics
Subject: Re: Neurons and consciousness
Date: 28 Jul 1999 13:30:23 GMT

In <379D9475.C2487E3C@sandpiper.net> Jim Balter <jqb@sandpiper.net>
writes:

>"Steven B. Harris" wrote:
>
>> >Take your allusion to Linneaus.  It might seem reasonable to say that
>> >'feline' is a general term, including many Linnean categories.  But
>> >when the term was used many years before Linneaus had provided us
>> >with his nomenclature, what did it then generalize?
>>
>>    Cat-like animals.  Duh.  Not only the familiar house cat, but other
>> animals which looked like, but weren't it.  A generalization of
>> "like" "like"  -- as Daryl observed, this is the problem to be solved
>> in the first place.  "dormative virtues", and all that.
>
>> certain
>> features which house cats have in common with lions and tigers and
>> leopards and bobcats and cheetahs and do forth.
>
>And what features are those, other than that they look "like"
>cats?  Do you really think that people enumerate characteristics
>before deciding that a cat and a tiger are "alike"?



   They may not do it vocally, but they do it nearly universally.
There is a famous study by Erst Mayr of the isolated Papuans, natives
of New Guinea, who were found to distinguish (by separate native name)
136 of the 137 Linnean species recognized by the taxonomists by
somewhat more formal morphological methods (the natives had lumped two
species of pretty ordinary and generic warblers).  There are a great
many similar examples, and S. J. Gould has a delightful essay about it
("A Quahog is a Quahog").  Rather than suggest that these divisions are
preborn into our minds (which means you have genes to distinguish 136
varieties of New Guinea, also, on the basis of subtle characteristics,
but you're just not using them because you don't happen to live there.)
Or, you can admit that it is not the particular abstractions from
concretes that are wired in, but the same tendency to pick the same
ones as your fellow humans, similary wired.  As I've said, this would
not seem to take a great deal of explanation.  I used colors, but we
know there is retinal processing in a frog's retina which already does
the preprocessing computations necessary to decide if it's looking at a
flying bug or not.  That all happens before the decision even reaches
the brain.  Flying bug is a category, an abstraction.  No two are
alike, yet they share a characteristic important to frog survival.  It
would be hard to argue that the same does not apply, more or less, to
us.  I'm not sure we disagree about that or not.

From: "Steve Harris" <SBHarris123@ix.netcom.com>
Newsgroups: alt.food.vegan.science,sci.med.nutrition
Subject: Re: excessive dietary protein
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 01:17:56 -0600

"Martin E. Lewitt" <lewitt@swcp.com> wrote in message
news:9fser6$2ot@boofura.swcp.com...
> The distinction I think Laurie is failing to see, is the difference
> between instinct and reinforced learning.  You combined reinforced
> learning with play and parental demonstration, protection and
> "instruction", you can get behavior that is much more flexible
> and innovative than instinct.  Some of the "reinforcement" is
> genetically determined, cats will play and chase, that is
> genetically determined, once they have somehow killed and
> tasted flesh, that behavior will be reinforced, they will
> practice it and get better, but individuals will have
> different techniques from each other and for different
> prey and even different prey preferences in the same
> environment.
>
> Yes, they will learn faster if they see their mother
> catch an animal they wanted to chase, and if their
> mother introduces them to the taste of the flesh, and
> brings prey back still living to be played with and
> killed.  But I can see how someone can be struck by
> that fact that many of these juviniles even if
> will learn how to kill on their own if somehow that
> instruction was missing.  This can seem like instinct,
> but it is much more flexible and it is a key part
> of mammalian behavior.


COMMENT

Very good. It's an urban myth that cats can't hunt unless taught. I have one
raised from a very small kitten by me who is now a very efficient mouser and
birder, and he acquired his skills on his own, because I certainly didn't
teach him, and none of the other cats in the household are worth a damn as
hunters. It is also true that many cats never figure it out. It takes a cat
of unusual "talent" who is presented with the opportunities, has the
instincts to chase, and manages to teach himself the fine points, as you
say.

I'm always interested in how much is instinct. For cats, I'm reasonably sure
that not only is chasing moving objects instinctive (common knowledge), but
also so is attraction to feathered objects and mouselike objects (small with
tail and ears). My cats have many play toys, but the ones they come back to
are these. The mice aren't even all that good reproductions, but they hold
fascination much longer than similar-sized things made of similar materials,
which aren't mouse-like. Even toys that flash and squeak aren't appreciated
as much as those mass-produced grey mice with the pink ears. I don't find
them carrying anything else to their food dishes.

And feathers on a stick? Drives almost every cat wild.