Mr.Samsa wrote:

natselrox wrote:Evil Katja ftw!

There go your study-plans, Samsa!

Too right. I'll have to get Lazar to come back me up, Pinkerians can get nasty when you point out that Pinker is a crappy scientist.

Voilà!

*evil chuckle*

I really should get some work done now but I'll be back later for some

Tried to understand the Godel theorem from a dude who is volunteering at the mathematics conference in Hyderabad. Then started watching the video again. Currently stuck at 49:43. Mr. Penrose is trying to go to Copenhagen.

Does the absence of light always produce an increase in adrenaline and sympathetic activation all the time in every person? Surely that would make it incredibly difficult to sleep? Or did you mean that happens in people who are afraid of the dark? In which case, it is an effect of the fear, and not the fear itself. The "fear of light" you've described sounds more like, at most, a physical aversion to light. "Fears" are behavioral phenomena, and these effects may trigger or increase the level of fear, but describing "fear of the dark" as "an increase in adrenaline levels, etc" is looking at it bass ackwards.

Suppose a man is standing in a brightly lit room when the light suddenly turns off. His sympathetic system is stimulated. But he is soon accustomed with the darkness. Similarly, a person is looking at a dim light when suddenly a bright light is put on his retina, his pupils contract. But after a while he accommodates. What I tried to say, was that there was no fundamental difference between the two phenomena. The point is, we have different fears that serve an evolutionary purpose. When exposed to the right stimulus, a specific set of neurons fire. Pupillary reflex is the simplest of this type of aversion response. Being afraid of an incoming Samsa response is on the more complicated end of this spectrum.

And like I said before, if there is indeed a gap in this graph where modifiability creeps in, still I'd say that the graph is continuous on either side of that gap.

Which part? My questioning of the use of the term "natural", my claim that you failed to catch perfectly as a kid, or that it requires years of pretraining? The first claim is perfectly reasonable given the vagueness of the term, the third is undeniably true, but arguably the second is on shaky ground - you bloody Indians probably do have a "cricket gene" in you so you might have always been able to catch perfectly..

Reminds me of the 'shoelace tying gene' of Maynard Smith. We'll come to the third claim in a while I suppose.

But things like motion sensing requires a degree of skill in discriminating objects from the world, and discriminating pre and post positions of objects, and so on, and all these things are done through learning.

Nyah. Discriminating objects from the world and estimating their pre and post positions require training? This is getting absurd! In a world where you have to make split second decisions, relying on LTPs and other synaptic modification mechanisms that probably occur on a timescale of seconds would mean that the tiniest of frog would have to live for 200 years.

So we need the visual system that is capable of being able to see far enough to detect objects, with a "refresh rate" capable of being able to notice motion, etc etc., but the calculations are still learnt. We have a brain powerful enough to make the calculations, yes, but the actual equations we use are all developed over time through our experience with various situations.

I always wanted to dissect the ALU of the brain but if my hunches are correct and given that how pathetic most students are at elementary High School Physics (especially football quarterbacks), my hunch would be that not even the ALU is as flexible as we make it out to be.

And identifying what an object is, what a position is, how it behaves in 3D space has a lot of environmental components. Nature/nurture, you can't separate the two and pretend to have a meaningful discussion.

You can. Nurture is trivial but it is the bit under our control hence its perceived over-importance.

Doesn't have to be zero gravity, just a different gravity. I can't think of any way to ethically test this though. But if you describe your "inherited calculator" as the thing which requires a mass of environmental data and learning before it can start producing accurate results, then you need to reassess the usefulness of assuming the existence of an "inherited calculator".

Really? More the amount of data a calculator is able to process, technically the more complicated it is. I was actually being generous in saying that the calculator is less of a calculator and more of a connection of wires.

Anyway, the closest to this experiment that I can remember is one that was published a while back. Apparently, life has totally adapted to this third planet around the sun.

On the basis of published Magnetic Resonance Images and the values of the specific fetal and amniotic fluid
weights, apparent weight of the fetus from the 18th week of gestation until term was determined. Up to the 21–22nd
gestation week the fetus is in conditions similar to neutral floating, while after the 26th gestation week the apparent
weight of the fetus is 60–80% of the actual weight. Decreased effect of the buoyant forces that affect the fetus in human
species during the last trimester has a number of implications for the colonization of the solar system. During space flight it
is impossible to apply the existing countermeasures against microgravity deconditioning of the muscular and
cardiovascular systems to the fetus. Absence of gravitational loading during the last trimester of gestation would cause
hypotrophy of the spinal extensors and lower extremities muscles, reduction in the amount of myosin heavy chain type I in
the extensor muscles of the trunk and legs, hypoplasy and osteopeny of the vertebras and lower extremities long bones,
and hypotrophy of the left ventricle of the heart muscle. Because of decreased capacity of postural and locomotor
stability, acquisition of the gross developmental milestones such as sitting, standing and walking could be delayed. In the authors’ opinion, only artificial gravity (rotating platform) during space flight will allow physiological development of the
human fetus. Independency of offspring’s of the guinea pig as regards locomotion and nursing increases probability of
successful breeding in microgravity compared with rat offspring’s, and make this species a candidate for future
experiments under conditions of microgravity and hypergravity. Examining the gestation of this species in different
gravities requires first the experimental determination of the amount of buoyant force to which the fetus is exposed in
physiological conditions.

Someone from RDF mailed me the whole pdf. I don't remember who though. Another example that comes to mind (because I studied them recently) are the clockwork genes that have a time period roughly coinciding with the light-dark phase of the day/night. Completely extraterrestrial conditions would be impossible for a fetus to adopt into.

True, they aren't mutually exclusive but given the variation and unpredictable nature of different environments, I imagine that having fixed rules for calculating certain things would be a disadvantage to any organism. Unless, as I said above, you're referring to extremely fundamental rules that facilitate the nature of future learning, then again such a claim is undeniably true.

But I think we have fixed rules that are disadvantageous to us.

I had never heard of him before, but he sounds like a jackass with shit experiments. Apparently he was measuring the behavior of his subjects by videotaping them and then coding their behavior. May as well sit them down on a leather couch and get them to talk about their feelings..

Have you read his 'Moral Minds'. I thought of borrowing it from the library but after the scandal, I feel odd. Prejudice can be a deadly thing in science.

Anyway, I don't understand what claim you're trying to make by bringing him up. That because one scientist was fraudulent then all of science is flawed? Oh wait, you just wanted to take a specific jab at behavioral researchers...

But given that his papers were reviewed by journals like Science, Cognition, etc, then this is a reflection of science in general and not behavioral research. Also, the best rebuttal to people who claim that one bad apple in science refutes all of science (or part of it) is to point out that the misconduct was discovered and refuted by other behavioral researchers..

Absolutely. I was just kidding. Some of the strongest critics of him have been his own colleagues.

If that's what you think my position is then I haven't explained myself very well. I'm strongly arguing in favour of nature and nurture influences, I don't think arguing for one over the other, or claiming that one is "more" influential, is helpful at all. I do, however, think that people severely misunderstand the role that environmental factors and learning plays in how we understand the world. In other words, I take a similar approach to John Watson:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

That is, I do sometimes argue for, or emphasise, the side of nurture but this is simply an attempt to balance the scales, not because I think that we can discuss behavior without reference to genetics.

I totally understand the sentiment. But I somehow don't trust what John Watson said.

There is one point I'd like to make here and it's that environmental determinism (like the John Watson quote) is as fatal (as in the verb-form of 'fate'. English is my second language so boo!) as genetic determinism. What Watson implies is that every thief has been made so by his environment and this is the same as blaming his genome IMO. Every non-Einstein/non-Picasso/non-Obama has his parents/environment to blame. Sounds weird to me.

Problems arise when people politicise the issue. Nature might indeed be a racist/sexist/whatever but that does not imply that we should be. (Mind you, I'm not saying that nature is any of these.)

natselrox wrote:I don't. I perform like shit at the Iowa gambling task. Must be an orbitofrontal cortex damage and not the way I was brought up, you nurturist!

Maybe you have a testicular problem, otherwise known as "Big Balls Syndrome"

I have to agree. I'm like a vervet monkey on Prozac! I want it big. Damn fucking big!

And just to clarify, my position in no way represents a nurturist position!

I know. Consider this my lame attempt at pulling your leg.

I have managed to royally fuck up the reply. The top 3 paragraphs are missing!

Ignore me, Samsa. I'm totally worthless.

natselrox wrote:Suppose a man is standing in a brightly lit room when the light suddenly turns off. His sympathetic system is stimulated. But he is soon accustomed with the darkness. Similarly, a person is looking at a dim light when suddenly a bright light is put on his retina, his pupils contract. But after a while he accommodates. What I tried to say, was that there was no fundamental difference between the two phenomena. The point is, we have different fears that serve an evolutionary purpose. When exposed to the right stimulus, a specific set of neurons fire. Pupillary reflex is the simplest of this type of aversion response. Being afraid of an incoming Samsa response is on the more complicated end of this spectrum.

But you're still looking at it backwards.. When someone is scared then there might be a pupil response, so there is some correlation between the two actions, but it doesn't mean that pupil response is fear, nor does it even suggest that pupil response is an accurate measure of fear.

And evolutionary fears, you say? I'd be very interested in hearing some of them. Because I'm a nice person I'll give you a hint: there is no evolutionary fear of things like spiders or snakes, certain colours, or heights, and if there is a fear of the dark, it's an incidental effect of another factor and not technically a fear of the dark itself.

Have at thee.

natselrox wrote:And like I said before, if there is indeed a gap in this graph where modifiability creeps in, still I'd say that the graph is continuous on either side of that gap.

And I still think you are severely misunderestimating ( ) the size of the gap.

natselrox wrote:

But things like motion sensing requires a degree of skill in discriminating objects from the world, and discriminating pre and post positions of objects, and so on, and all these things are done through learning.

Nyah. Discriminating objects from the world and estimating their pre and post positions require training? This is getting absurd! In a world where you have to make split second decisions, relying on LTPs and other synaptic modification mechanisms that probably occur on a timescale of seconds would mean that the tiniest of frog would have to live for 200 years.

Why would it need to live for centuries? Modification happens as experience happens and the discrimination, once learnt, requires almost no time to occur. To be honest, I think you're really misunderstanding what learning is and how it manifests in organisms. When I say that organisms need to learn to separate objects from the world, I don't mean that they sit there mentally figuring out where the contours of one thing separate it from another and then ponder their future possible actions.. Learning results in split second decisions.

To be fair, some animals are born with some of these "calculations" in-built, like sharks which are forced to swim the moment they are born. But humans are fundamentally different in this respect, we don't have these same defences. We are born as 'learning machines' whose evolutionary strength is the extent to which we can adapt and learn.

natselrox wrote:

And identifying what an object is, what a position is, how it behaves in 3D space has a lot of environmental components. Nature/nurture, you can't separate the two and pretend to have a meaningful discussion.

You can. Nurture is trivial but it is the bit under our control hence its perceived over-importance.

Nah, nature is redundant. It's perceived over-importance is due to trivial necessity but it has no real world effects.. This is fun!

natselrox wrote:Really? More the amount of data a calculator is able to process, technically the more complicated it is. I was actually being generous in saying that the calculator is less of a calculator and more of a connection of wires.

Sure, but my point is that your "calculator" is something we need to build before we can use it. It's like me telling you that I have this super awesome calculator, here's the plastic and a few buttons, all you need to do is create the PCB, stick it all together then write the software. It's not a calculator, it's a lump of stuff with the future potential to calculate if assembled correctly.

natselrox wrote:Anyway, the closest to this experiment that I can remember is one that was published a while back. Apparently, life has totally adapted to this third planet around the sun.

On the basis of published Magnetic Resonance Images and the values of the specific fetal and amniotic fluid
weights, apparent weight of the fetus from the 18th week of gestation until term was determined. Up to the 21–22nd
gestation week the fetus is in conditions similar to neutral floating, while after the 26th gestation week the apparent
weight of the fetus is 60–80% of the actual weight. Decreased effect of the buoyant forces that affect the fetus in human
species during the last trimester has a number of implications for the colonization of the solar system. During space flight it
is impossible to apply the existing countermeasures against microgravity deconditioning of the muscular and
cardiovascular systems to the fetus. Absence of gravitational loading during the last trimester of gestation would cause
hypotrophy of the spinal extensors and lower extremities muscles, reduction in the amount of myosin heavy chain type I in
the extensor muscles of the trunk and legs, hypoplasy and osteopeny of the vertebras and lower extremities long bones,
and hypotrophy of the left ventricle of the heart muscle. Because of decreased capacity of postural and locomotor
stability, acquisition of the gross developmental milestones such as sitting, standing and walking could be delayed. In the authors’ opinion, only artificial gravity (rotating platform) during space flight will allow physiological development of the
human fetus. Independency of offspring’s of the guinea pig as regards locomotion and nursing increases probability of
successful breeding in microgravity compared with rat offspring’s, and make this species a candidate for future
experiments under conditions of microgravity and hypergravity. Examining the gestation of this species in different
gravities requires first the experimental determination of the amount of buoyant force to which the fetus is exposed in
physiological conditions.

Someone from RDF mailed me the whole pdf. I don't remember who though. Another example that comes to mind (because I studied them recently) are the clockwork genes that have a time period roughly coinciding with the light-dark phase of the day/night. Completely extraterrestrial conditions would be impossible for a fetus to adopt into.

Uh... yeah, but that completely misses the point of my hypothetical. My point wasn't that if you remove all the muscles and tendons from a person's body then they would still be able to catch a ball. Obviously different environments will have different effects on the body, but attacking my hypothetical on the grounds of an unrelated factor is surely irrelevant? It's like me presenting the hypothetical: "If a homicidal maniac held two people at gun point, an old man and a child, and asked you to pick which one should die, which would you choose?" and you replying, "Why would he be asking me? Surely the police would have a negotiator on hand to deal with situations like that? Why don't they just set up a sniper to shoot him?".

In other words, my point was that the calculations we make to judge objects are malleable and in my example of different gravities there was the implicit assumption that the people would not be dead - as obviously no learning could take place then. But how about a more simple example, take the world cup that just went past. Players have learnt to calculate the path of a soccer ball for their entire lives but suddenly the physics of the ball changes, the jabulani. At the beginning of the world cup people were shit at kicking the ball and the goalkeepers made horrific mistakes because they couldn't figure out how it was moving (like a child initially learning how to catch). Eventually, however, they learnt how to judge all the variables necessary to catch and kick the ball despite the physics of the situation being different from what they have encountered before and unlike anything you'd find in nature.

natselrox wrote:

True, they aren't mutually exclusive but given the variation and unpredictable nature of different environments, I imagine that having fixed rules for calculating certain things would be a disadvantage to any organism. Unless, as I said above, you're referring to extremely fundamental rules that facilitate the nature of future learning, then again such a claim is undeniably true.

But I think we have fixed rules that are disadvantageous to us.

Absolutely. However, the disadvantage I was talking about is the fact that I doubt many organisms would live to reproductive age if they had specific fixed rules for dealing with situations. They'd just be absolutely useless as soon as the environment changed slightly and it would require a massive evolutionary shift each generation just to keep the rules relevant. Instead, evolution took the simple path and gave organisms the ability to learn from experience.

Now, this doesn't mean we don't have fundamental fixed rules (we certainly do) and it doesn't mean that they are always advantageous (as they certainly aren't) but it does mean that the specific rules that you are arguing for are simply untenable.

natselrox wrote:

I had never heard of him before, but he sounds like a jackass with shit experiments. Apparently he was measuring the behavior of his subjects by videotaping them and then coding their behavior. May as well sit them down on a leather couch and get them to talk about their feelings..

Have you read his 'Moral Minds'. I thought of borrowing it from the library but after the scandal, I feel odd. Prejudice can be a deadly thing in science.

I just read through the wiki page for "Moral Minds". His premise sounds ridiculous, like he's been talking to Sam Harris or something..

natselrox wrote:Absolutely. I was just kidding. Some of the strongest critics of him have been his own colleagues.

I thought you were kidding but couldn't tell.

natselrox wrote:

If that's what you think my position is then I haven't explained myself very well. I'm strongly arguing in favour of nature and nurture influences, I don't think arguing for one over the other, or claiming that one is "more" influential, is helpful at all. I do, however, think that people severely misunderstand the role that environmental factors and learning plays in how we understand the world. In other words, I take a similar approach to John Watson:

Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select – doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors. I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years.

That is, I do sometimes argue for, or emphasise, the side of nurture but this is simply an attempt to balance the scales, not because I think that we can discuss behavior without reference to genetics.

I totally understand the sentiment. But I somehow don't trust what John Watson said.

There is one point I'd like to make here and it's that environmental determinism (like the John Watson quote) is as fatal (as in the verb-form of 'fate'. English is my second language so boo!) as genetic determinism. What Watson implies is that every thief has been made so by his environment and this is the same as blaming his genome IMO. Every non-Einstein/non-Picasso/non-Obama has his parents/environment to blame. Sounds weird to me.

John Watson wasn't arguing for environmental determinism though? The whole point of his quote was to point out the obvious (nature and nurture are inseparable) but to emphasise the fact that his focus is on environmental factors due to the historical ignorance that has plagued science in that area. The key part you need to read is the last line: "I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years." In other words, he's absolutely not saying that he could create a thief out of any baby. He's making a completely wild claim that is aimed to produce a backlash and outrage, then he counters it with what amounts to: "But you guys have been making stupid claims about biology and nature for centuries and no one bats an eyelid". He's highlighting the fact that ignoring an entire half of what constitutes a living organism is a surefire way of fucking things up.

Just as evidence of my point, Watson was an ethologist who studied the evolutionary behaviors of organisms. He spent a good portion of his life learning how our genetics (or just biology in his day) determines our behaviors.

(Oh, and your English is perfect, by the way. Far better than most native speakers I know, even university educated ones, so I wouldn't worry if I were you. My Hindi is much worse, all I can say is "You like sex in the bum" and I don't even know how to write it down ).

natselrox wrote:Problems arise when people politicise the issue. Nature might indeed be a racist/sexist/whatever but that does not imply that we should be. (Mind you, I'm not saying that nature is any of these.)

Yeah certainly, no arguments there.

natselrox wrote:I know. Consider this my lame attempt at pulling your leg.

Troll!

natselrox wrote:I have managed to royally fuck up the reply. The top 3 paragraphs are missing!

Ignore me, Samsa. I'm totally worthless.

Must be your genetics..

Mr.Samsa wrote:But you're still looking at it backwards.. When someone is scared then there might be a pupil response, so there is some correlation between the two actions, but it doesn't mean that pupil response is fear, nor does it even suggest that pupil response is an accurate measure of fear.

That's not what I said. I said that response to any fearful stimulus is like the pupillary reflex. Only more complicated.

And evolutionary fears, you say? I'd be very interested in hearing some of them. Because I'm a nice person I'll give you a hint: there is no evolutionary fear of things like spiders or snakes, certain colours, or heights, and if there is a fear of the dark, it's an incidental effect of another factor and not technically a fear of the dark itself.

Have at thee.

Do babies have to fall from a height before they learn to fear height? How do you explain the fact that all the common phobias indicate a strong evolutionary heritage?

natselrox wrote:And like I said before, if there is indeed a gap in this graph where modifiability creeps in, still I'd say that the graph is continuous on either side of that gap.

And I still think you are severely misunderestimating ( ) the size of the gap.

You're overestimating it.

Why would it need to live for centuries? Modification happens as experience happens and the discrimination, once learnt, requires almost no time to occur. To be honest, I think you're really misunderstanding what learning is and how it manifests in organisms. When I say that organisms need to learn to separate objects from the world, I don't mean that they sit there mentally figuring out where the contours of one thing separate it from another and then ponder their future possible actions.. Learning results in split second decisions.

Imagine a frog throwing out its tongue to catch a fly. This involves the muscles of the tongue and their precise contraction preceded by an accurate measurement of the location of the fly. Now do you seriously think that this involves tiny adjustments at every synaptic connections involved in the whole process? As a matter of fact, I think we know that it doesn't. It's a reflex phenomenon involving the superior colliculus (that which is involved in visual reflexes in human). Adjusting every synapse by LTP or else seems too slow for the lifetime of the frog.

To be fair, some animals are born with some of these "calculations" in-built, like sharks which are forced to swim the moment they are born.

We're getting there.

But humans are fundamentally different in this respect, we don't have these same defences.

As a matter of fact, I was just looking at images of the shark-brain and the human brain. The missing part is the neocortex. The basic survival arsenal remain the same. So swimming might not come naturally to the primate but catching a ball surely does.

We are born as 'learning machines' whose evolutionary strength is the extent to which we can adapt and learn.

We are born as machines that are capable of learning a few things. (Btw, that was a pretty strong claim! Speak of big balls!)

Sure, but my point is that your "calculator" is something we need to build before we can use it. It's like me telling you that I have this super awesome calculator, here's the plastic and a few buttons, all you need to do is create the PCB, stick it all together then write the software. It's not a calculator, it's a lump of stuff with the future potential to calculate if assembled correctly.

Woo! Man! The amount of plasticity you allow is astounding! Wonder if we could change the curriculum to make everyone understand quantum mechanics and hyperspace.

Uh... yeah, but that completely misses the point of my hypothetical. My point wasn't that if you remove all the muscles and tendons from a person's body then they would still be able to catch a ball. Obviously different environments will have different effects on the body, but attacking my hypothetical on the grounds of an unrelated factor is surely irrelevant? It's like me presenting the hypothetical: "If a homicidal maniac held two people at gun point, an old man and a child, and asked you to pick which one should die, which would you choose?" and you replying, "Why would he be asking me? Surely the police would have a negotiator on hand to deal with situations like that? Why don't they just set up a sniper to shoot him?".

You didn't say that humans would be able to adapt to an environment with altered gravitational parameters, I know. You just said that they'll be able to solve the dynamics equations in a zero gravity space. I was trying to show how intricately related gravity is to our normal development. And I bolded the part where it said that "Because of decreased capacity of postural and locomotor stability, acquisition of the gross developmental milestones such as sitting, standing and walking could be delayed" trying to emphasize the fact that gravity is an integral part in our learning phase of motor control. A baby raised in space would not be able to stand up properly, let alone catch a ball. Your claim that a human brain is a bunch of raw material that will be able to assemble itself to fit any circumstance does not stand.

My example was not the best one but it was the only one I could remember.

In other words, my point was that the calculations we make to judge objects are malleable and in my example of different gravities there was the implicit assumption that the people would not be dead - as obviously no learning could take place then.

Or without a mal-developed cerebellum, an improper muscle growth etc.

But how about a more simple example, take the world cup that just went past. Players have learnt to calculate the path of a soccer ball for their entire lives but suddenly the physics of the ball changes, the jabulani. At the beginning of the world cup people were shit at kicking the ball and the goalkeepers made horrific mistakes because they couldn't figure out how it was moving (like a child initially learning how to catch). Eventually, however, they learnt how to judge all the variables necessary to catch and kick the ball despite the physics of the situation being different from what they have encountered before and unlike anything you'd find in nature.

1. Not really. Up to the quarter final, there were more misplaced passes than at any of the last four tournaments.. If you look at the statistics more than 80% of passes to the far post have been over hit.

2. But this is getting trivial. Obviously, you have natural counterparts of objects with different shapes. A falling banana is different from a falling coconut. Try teaching a man catching a bullet.

Absolutely. However, the disadvantage I was talking about is the fact that I doubt many organisms would live to reproductive age if they had specific fixed rules for dealing with situations. They'd just be absolutely useless as soon as the environment changed slightly and it would require a massive evolutionary shift each generation just to keep the rules relevant. Instead, evolution took the simple path and gave organisms the ability to learn from experience.

Absolutely. We are only arguing over the limits of the ability.

Now, this doesn't mean we don't have fundamental fixed rules (we certainly do) and it doesn't mean that they are always advantageous (as they certainly aren't) but it does mean that the specific rules that you are arguing for are simply untenable.

We are both coming off as extremists. I'm not as rigid as you think.

I just read through the wiki page for "Moral Minds". His premise sounds ridiculous, like he's been talking to Sam Harris or something..

What do you and Jerome have against Sam Harris? He's smart and eloquent.

John Watson wasn't arguing for environmental determinism though? The whole point of his quote was to point out the obvious (nature and nurture are inseparable) but to emphasise the fact that his focus is on environmental factors due to the historical ignorance that has plagued science in that area. The key part you need to read is the last line: "I am going beyond my facts and I admit it, but so have the advocates of the contrary and they have been doing it for many thousands of years." In other words, he's absolutely not saying that he could create a thief out of any baby. He's making a completely wild claim that is aimed to produce a backlash and outrage, then he counters it with what amounts to: "But you guys have been making stupid claims about biology and nature for centuries and no one bats an eyelid". He's highlighting the fact that ignoring an entire half of what constitutes a living organism is a surefire way of fucking things up.

It's like what Dawkins says. When the pendulum has swung too far in a direction, you have to push it to other extreme so as to restore the equilibrium.

We are by polar by nature, Samsa ( ). I was just reading the paper by Tajfel that led to the theory of social identity. We try to identify ourselves with an existing camp (however unscientific that might be). Whole pdf available here.

Tajfel tested subjects by having them perform a more or less meaningless task, like choosing between one of two painters or guessing a number of dots shown on a screen. Then, each subject was assigned to a group, ostensibly based on their answer. When the groups were formed and asked to distribute real rewards, they became loyal to their own group and were stingy with the other group. Many variations on this experiment have been performed subsequently, and they have shown that people can develop group loyalty very quickly even in the absence of real differences. Subjects even became emotionally invested in their meaningless groups, cheering for their own group’s rewards and mocking the other group

And that is one of the reasons for most conflicts IMO. But that's another discussion.

(Oh, and your English is perfect, by the way. Far better than most native speakers I know, even university educated ones, so I wouldn't worry if I were you. My Hindi is much worse, all I can say is "You like sex in the bum" and I don't even know how to write it down ).

My first language is not Hindi btw. It's Bengali! That actually makes English my third language. (Beng, Hindi, Eng)

natselrox wrote:Problems arise when people politicise the issue. Nature might indeed be a racist/sexist/whatever but that does not imply that we should be. (Mind you, I'm not saying that nature is any of these.)

Yeah certainly, no arguments there.

Can you type that in the racism-thread?

natselrox wrote:That's not what I said. I said that response to any fearful stimulus is like the pupillary reflex. Only more complicated.

Oh I see. On a very general level, perhaps, in the sense that they are cause-effect relationships. But it seems overly simplistic to describe it as such.

natselrox wrote:Do babies have to fall from a height before they learn to fear height? How do you explain the fact that all the common phobias indicate a strong evolutionary heritage?

Place a new born in a situation with a contraption where there appears to be a large drop off (obviously with some transparent material to prevent any possible injury to the child) and they will happily move toward it. These studies tend to be hampered by the motor abilities of babies though - obviously new borns don't possess the ability to move toward things so they have to be placed toward it and you have to measure their responses (which is an inaccurate measure), and by the time babies can crawl they've had experience with heights. Fortunately, people don't really care about animals and as far as I'm aware new born animals will happily walk toward, and fall, off the side of large step.

As for common phobias indicating a strong evolutionary heritage, this is explained by the fact that evolutionary psychologists are brilliant at telling just-so stories. Seriously, name absolutely any real or imagined behavior in humans and I will give you a decent explanation as to how it conferred an advantage to our ancestors. That discussion would be a waste of time though, as there is absolutely no evidence that common phobias are present in children. Seriously, do a literature search for it and all you'll get is articles from the 70s. In the late 70s people starting questioning the idea that we are innately scared of spiders and snakes due to a slightly odd observation that was consistently being made - children love playing with spiders and snakes. They'll put them in their mouths and everything.

natselrox wrote:Imagine a frog throwing out its tongue to catch a fly. This involves the muscles of the tongue and their precise contraction preceded by an accurate measurement of the location of the fly. Now do you seriously think that this involves tiny adjustments at every synaptic connections involved in the whole process? As a matter of fact, I think we know that it doesn't. It's a reflex phenomenon involving the superior colliculus (that which is involved in visual reflexes in human). Adjusting every synapse by LTP or else seems too slow for the lifetime of the frog.

I don't know much about frogs to be honest, are they perfect at this from birth? If so, then they probably do have a mechanism for this like sharks. Likely, it will be a FAP; the presence of the fly will elicit the tongue response.

natselrox wrote:

But humans are fundamentally different in this respect, we don't have these same defences.

As a matter of fact, I was just looking at images of the shark-brain and the human brain. The missing part is the neocortex. The basic survival arsenal remain the same. So swimming might not come naturally to the primate but catching a ball surely does.

So because we have similar parts of the brain to sharks, and sharks have an innate tendency to swim when born, we can automatically catch balls?

natselrox wrote:

We are born as 'learning machines' whose evolutionary strength is the extent to which we can adapt and learn.

We are born as machines that are capable of learning a few things. (Btw, that was a pretty strong claim! Speak of big balls!)

Really? I don't know of any evolutionary biologist that would disagree. Humans are pathetically weak creatures, we don't have talons, or deadly incisors, we have no venom or poisons, we can't fly, we can't run particularly fast, and we tend to drown a lot in water - we are generally failures of evolution. Except for one thing, the fact that we can learn so much.

natselrox wrote:You didn't say that humans would be able to adapt to an environment with altered gravitational parameters, I know. You just said that they'll be able to solve the dynamics equations in a zero gravity space. I was trying to show how intricately related gravity is to our normal development. And I bolded the part where it said that "Because of decreased capacity of postural and locomotor stability, acquisition of the gross developmental milestones such as sitting, standing and walking could be delayed" trying to emphasize the fact that gravity is an integral part in our learning phase of motor control. A baby raised in space would not be able to stand up properly, let alone catch a ball. Your claim that a human brain is a bunch of raw material that will be able to assemble itself to fit any circumstance does not stand.

My example was not the best one but it was the only one I could remember.

In other words, my point was that the calculations we make to judge objects are malleable and in my example of different gravities there was the implicit assumption that the people would not be dead - as obviously no learning could take place then.

Or without a mal-developed cerebellum, an improper muscle growth etc.

Sure, but in my defence, I didn't say zero gravity, you did. Obviously learning is dependent on normal bodily functions and needs being met.

natselrox wrote:

But how about a more simple example, take the world cup that just went past. Players have learnt to calculate the path of a soccer ball for their entire lives but suddenly the physics of the ball changes, the jabulani. At the beginning of the world cup people were shit at kicking the ball and the goalkeepers made horrific mistakes because they couldn't figure out how it was moving (like a child initially learning how to catch). Eventually, however, they learnt how to judge all the variables necessary to catch and kick the ball despite the physics of the situation being different from what they have encountered before and unlike anything you'd find in nature.

1. Not really. Up to the quarter final, there were more misplaced passes than at any of the last four tournaments.. If you look at the statistics more than 80% of passes to the far post have been over hit.

That just proves the point I was making. At the beginning of the tournament, everyone sucked but by the end they improved.

natselrox wrote:2. But this is getting trivial. Obviously, you have natural counterparts of objects with different shapes. A falling banana is different from a falling coconut. Try teaching a man catching a bullet.

Well that would just be silly, only Ozymandias can do that.

It just seems like your approach to calculating the physics of objects requires so many assumptions and it seems incredibly unparsimonious.

natselrox wrote:We are both coming off as extremists. I'm not as rigid as you think.

Fair enough

natselrox wrote:

I just read through the wiki page for "Moral Minds". His premise sounds ridiculous, like he's been talking to Sam Harris or something..

What do you and Jerome have against Sam Harris? He's smart and eloquent.

Anybody who has read an introduction to morality understands why Sam Harris is an idiot. His work on neuroscience is cringeworthy as well - he makes the same mistakes as creationists, just from the opposite angle (that is, starts with his conclusion and attempts to prove it). His arguments for the 'science of morality' essentially amount to: "I'm going to show you all how we can objectively determine morality without the use of philosophy! Okay, first I'm going to assume that utilitarianism is true, next we're going to....".

Basically, all he's said is what everybody already knew. If we can decide on a philosophical position to take then we can use science to help us make judgements. So if we decide that abortion is only morally wrong when the little thing is "alive" and we define "alive" as having brainwaves, then science can tell us that this is around 20(?) weeks.

natselrox wrote:It's like what Dawkins says. When the pendulum has swung too far in a direction, you have to push it to other extreme so as to restore the equilibrium.

natselrox wrote:We are by polar by nature, Samsa ( ). I was just reading the paper by Tajfel that led to the theory of social identity. We try to identify ourselves with an existing camp (however unscientific that might be). Whole pdf available here.

More "nature" talk!

natselrox wrote:

Tajfel tested subjects by having them perform a more or less meaningless task, like choosing between one of two painters or guessing a number of dots shown on a screen. Then, each subject was assigned to a group, ostensibly based on their answer. When the groups were formed and asked to distribute real rewards, they became loyal to their own group and were stingy with the other group. Many variations on this experiment have been performed subsequently, and they have shown that people can develop group loyalty very quickly even in the absence of real differences. Subjects even became emotionally invested in their meaningless groups, cheering for their own group’s rewards and mocking the other group

And that is one of the reasons for most conflicts IMO. But that's another discussion.

Hmm.. it's a slightly old paper but I'm not sure what the current thinking is on this topic. I think people generally do pigeon hole themselves and defend "their side" and attack "the enemy". I don't think that's what I'm doing though, my position is firmly the idea that nature and nurture are inseparable forces - I've taken the emphasised side of nurture partly because it's what I know, but also because you've swung a bit too far in the other direction (in my opinion). If someone would have entered this thread and claimed that the water striders' behavior from the OP (yeah, remember that topic! ) was caused completely by the environment and had no genetic basis, or if someone made the argument that people are blank slates, then I would swing into the side of nature and argue what idiots they are because Skinner was clearly wrong. And I have done this before, the advantage of knowing your "side" quite well is that you know all the flaws with it too

Generally though, on boards like this people will strongly argue that any behavior that exists in humans or animals is a result of evolution. A thread about attraction? "Oh yeah, I heard people are attracted to symmetry, it's evolutionary!". A thread about phobias? "People are scared of snakes because in the past those who were scared of snakes survived". Basically every topic that comes up is "explained" with a just-so story and it seems like everyone forgets to ask the basic question of - is this effect even real? It's something that even evolutionary psychologists (and sometimes biologists) miss quite often, which is why we always get ridiculous stories like, "Scientists explain why women speak more than men!" or "Research discovers why men can't multitask!".

The experiments are always 'interesting', their speculations are always more thrilling than a Dan Brown novel, but the actual thing their looking at, the thing they're trying to explain, usually doesn't even exist. People aren't attracted to symmetry, nor scared of snakes, there are no differences between the amount men and women speak, nor in their multitasking skills...

/rant

natselrox wrote:

(Oh, and your English is perfect, by the way. Far better than most native speakers I know, even university educated ones, so I wouldn't worry if I were you. My Hindi is much worse, all I can say is "You like sex in the bum" and I don't even know how to write it down ).

My first language is not Hindi btw. It's Bengali! That actually makes English my third language. (Beng, Hindi, Eng)

Show off.

natselrox wrote:

natselrox wrote:Problems arise when people politicise the issue. Nature might indeed be a racist/sexist/whatever but that does not imply that we should be. (Mind you, I'm not saying that nature is any of these.)

Yeah certainly, no arguments there.

Can you type that in the racism-thread?

Wouldn't make any difference. Half of the people in that thread think I'm a bleeding heart liberal with an agenda against scientific honesty, and the other half think I'm a cold-hearted racist bastard.

However, I take pride in the fact that there are such conflicting thoughts on what my position is, I assume that it's evidence of my impartiality.

Mr.Samsa wrote:

natselrox wrote:That's not what I said. I said that response to any fearful stimulus is like the pupillary reflex. Only more complicated.

Oh I see. On a very general level, perhaps, in the sense that they are cause-effect relationships. But it seems overly simplistic to describe it as such.

Cause-effect relationships mediated by similar physiological responses to an external stimulus. Yes.

natselrox wrote:Do babies have to fall from a height before they learn to fear height? How do you explain the fact that all the common phobias indicate a strong evolutionary heritage?

Place a new born in a situation with a contraption where there appears to be a large drop off (obviously with some transparent material to prevent any possible injury to the child) and they will happily move toward it. These studies tend to be hampered by the motor abilities of babies though - obviously new borns don't possess the ability to move toward things so they have to be placed toward it and you have to measure their responses (which is an inaccurate measure), and by the time babies can crawl they've had experience with heights. Fortunately, people don't really care about animals and as far as I'm aware new born animals will happily walk toward, and fall, off the side of large step.

And when you say animals I take it that you mean to include all the animals that there are. All of them need to learn to fear a fall from a height? I remain highly skeptical of this claim.

Even in case of humans, how do you propose a possible neural mechanism in an infant that enables it to learn a fear of height before it can even crawl? The baby learns it by watching other people falling from heights? Let's see how minimalist can you be in proposing the requisite materials in the human brain...

As for common phobias indicating a strong evolutionary heritage, this is explained by the fact that evolutionary psychologists are brilliant at telling just-so stories.

They have indeed overdone it.

Seriously, name absolutely any real or imagined behavior in humans and I will give you a decent explanation as to how it conferred an advantage to our ancestors.

Reminds me of that joke where a EvoBiologist explains how the redness of hemoglobin confers an evolutionary advantage.

That discussion would be a waste of time though, as there is absolutely no evidence that common phobias are present in children. Seriously, do a literature search for it and all you'll get is articles from the 70s. In the late 70s people starting questioning the idea that we are innately scared of spiders and snakes due to a slightly odd observation that was consistently being made - children love playing with spiders and snakes. They'll put them in their mouths and everything.

This is where they have overdone it. Spiders and snakes may not be inherently fear-evoking in humans but condors are to the hatchlings of certain birds. Height might be one in humans. So can be a host of other fears/phobias across species.

I don't know much about frogs to be honest, are they perfect at this from birth? If so, then they probably do have a mechanism for this like sharks. Likely, it will be a FAP; the presence of the fly will elicit the tongue response.

What's wrong with the hypothesis that catching a ball is a FAP in humans?

natselrox wrote:

But humans are fundamentally different in this respect, we don't have these same defences.

As a matter of fact, I was just looking at images of the shark-brain and the human brain. The missing part is the neocortex. The basic survival arsenal remain the same. So swimming might not come naturally to the primate but catching a ball surely does.

So because we have similar parts of the brain to sharks, and sharks have an innate tendency to swim when born, we can automatically catch balls?

Basically, yes. When you subconsciously catch a ball you might be using those parts of the brain that are common in humans and sharks.

Really? I don't know of any evolutionary biologist that would disagree. Humans are pathetically weak creatures, we don't have talons, or deadly incisors, we have no venom or poisons, we can't fly, we can't run particularly fast, and we tend to drown a lot in water - we are generally failures of evolution. Except for one thing, the fact that we can learn so much.

The last part gives some of us the arrogance to think that if trained for some time we might even learn to fly! We are really arguing for the extremes.

Sure, but in my defence, I didn't say zero gravity, you did. Obviously learning is dependent on normal bodily functions and needs being met.

There is smooth curve that connects 9.8 m/s^2 to 0 m/s^2 and bodily functions would be hampered as you go along the curve in a linear (just simplifying. I don't know the exact relation.) fashion. So my point holds.

That just proves the point I was making. At the beginning of the tournament, everyone sucked but by the end they improved.

The first link said that starting from the quarter finals, there was a reduced incidence of missed free-kicks etc. Given that 8 of the best teams qualify for the QF and there are only 8 matches in that stage of the tournament, that claim does not hold. And the second link compared the misses across the whole tournament with previous ones.

natselrox wrote:2. But this is getting trivial. Obviously, you have natural counterparts of objects with different shapes. A falling banana is different from a falling coconut. Try teaching a man catching a bullet.

Well that would just be silly, only Ozymandias can do that.

It just seems like your approach to calculating the physics of objects requires so many assumptions and it seems incredibly unparsimonious.

On the other hand, I find your approach to be unparsimonious. A totally plastic neural circuit capable of calculating dynamic equations and modifying the motor responses accordingly is by definition a less parsimonious system than a rigid structure with limited abilities to act in a short range of variable parameters.

natselrox wrote:

I just read through the wiki page for "Moral Minds". His premise sounds ridiculous, like he's been talking to Sam Harris or something..

What do you and Jerome have against Sam Harris? He's smart and eloquent.

Anybody who has read an introduction to morality understands why Sam Harris is an idiot. His work on neuroscience is cringeworthy as well - he makes the same mistakes as creationists, just from the opposite angle (that is, starts with his conclusion and attempts to prove it). His arguments for the 'science of morality' essentially amount to: "I'm going to show you all how we can objectively determine morality without the use of philosophy! Okay, first I'm going to assume that utilitarianism is true, next we're going to....".

Basically, all he's said is what everybody already knew. If we can decide on a philosophical position to take then we can use science to help us make judgements. So if we decide that abortion is only morally wrong when the little thing is "alive" and we define "alive" as having brainwaves, then science can tell us that this is around 20(?) weeks.

Jerome said, "I'm as much of a fan as harris as I am of herpes."

Hmm.. it's a slightly old paper but I'm not sure what the current thinking is on this topic. I think people generally do pigeon hole themselves and defend "their side" and attack "the enemy". I don't think that's what I'm doing though, my position is firmly the idea that nature and nurture are inseparable forces - I've taken the emphasised side of nurture partly because it's what I know, but also because you've swung a bit too far in the other direction (in my opinion). If someone would have entered this thread and claimed that the water striders' behavior from the OP (yeah, remember that topic! ) was caused completely by the environment and had no genetic basis, or if someone made the argument that people are blank slates, then I would swing into the side of nature and argue what idiots they are because Skinner was clearly wrong. And I have done this before, the advantage of knowing your "side" quite well is that you know all the flaws with it too

You are like a mercenary/lawyer! You can argue/play for any side you wish! I love people like that. Fluidity is my favourite character in a human. No absolute stances. Or am I hyperboling much?

Generally though, on boards like this people will strongly argue that any behavior that exists in humans or animals is a result of evolution. A thread about attraction? "Oh yeah, I heard people are attracted to symmetry, it's evolutionary!". A thread about phobias? "People are scared of snakes because in the past those who were scared of snakes survived". Basically every topic that comes up is "explained" with a just-so story and it seems like everyone forgets to ask the basic question of - is this effect even real? It's something that even evolutionary psychologists (and sometimes biologists) miss quite often, which is why we always get ridiculous stories like, "Scientists explain why women speak more than men!" or "Research discovers why men can't multitask!".

Yep. People try to get out of a situation by applying the least possible amount of brainwork (was it Nietzsche who said that or did I just paraphrase Feynman's Principle of Least Action? ). EvoPsy offers a shortcut.

The experiments are always 'interesting', their speculations are always more thrilling than a Dan Brown novel, but the actual thing their looking at, the thing they're trying to explain, usually doesn't even exist. People aren't attracted to symmetry, nor scared of snakes, there are no differences between the amount men and women speak, nor in their multitasking skills...

/rant

Much appreciated.

Wouldn't make any difference. Half of the people in that thread think I'm a bleeding heart liberal with an agenda against scientific honesty, and the other half think I'm a cold-hearted racist bastard.

However, I take pride in the fact that there are such conflicting thoughts on what my position is, I assume that it's evidence of my impartiality.

Ha! I stopped visiting that thread for the same reason.

natselrox wrote:
And when you say animals I take it that you mean to include all the animals that there are. All of them need to learn to fear a fall from a height? I remain highly skeptical of this claim.

I just said those that I'm aware of. There might be some animal that has a genetic predisposition toward avoiding heights, but I personally haven't heard of any. Most animals do need to learn this though - or rather, they need to learn folk physics. That is, things that go up come down, and when you come down it hurts a little, and the greater the distance the more the hurt.

natselrox wrote:Even in case of humans, how do you propose a possible neural mechanism in an infant that enables it to learn a fear of height before it can even crawl? The baby learns it by watching other people falling from heights? Let's see how minimalist can you be in proposing the requisite materials in the human brain...

No, social learning like that would be ridiculous. It would be basic learning from experience, as they aren't always in a secure harness every moment they grow up there will be times where they'll have small "falls" (e.g. rolling onto their backs). As they get older, the falls get bigger. So they start to learn how to crawl and they'll faceplant a lot, then they climb things and fall, etc etc.

This would explain why newborns have no aversion to being held over (apparent) heights, and why the fear of falling (heights) doesn't appear until they are much older.

natselrox wrote:

That discussion would be a waste of time though, as there is absolutely no evidence that common phobias are present in children. Seriously, do a literature search for it and all you'll get is articles from the 70s. In the late 70s people starting questioning the idea that we are innately scared of spiders and snakes due to a slightly odd observation that was consistently being made - children love playing with spiders and snakes. They'll put them in their mouths and everything.

This is where they have overdone it. Spiders and snakes may not be inherently fear-evoking in humans but condors are to the hatchlings of certain birds. Height might be one in humans. So can be a host of other fears/phobias across species.

Yes, they could be, I'm not denying that possibility. I'm just telling you that they aren't. Humans simply do not have a universal fear of things like certain animals, heights, the dark, etc. So there is literally no observation to explain, we don't need to argue over whether this "fear" is innate or learnt because there isn't a fear to begin with.

It's true that some universal fear we have could be innate (and if it was universal, this seems likely), but my point is that the common phobias usually listed are not universal and none are present from birth. This fact rules out any speculation of innateness.

natselrox wrote:

I don't know much about frogs to be honest, are they perfect at this from birth? If so, then they probably do have a mechanism for this like sharks. Likely, it will be a FAP; the presence of the fly will elicit the tongue response.

What's wrong with the hypothesis that catching a ball is a FAP in humans?

What would be the eliciting stimulus? If you say the ball, then I'd obviously ask why evolution would go through all the trouble building such a complex neural pathway for ball catching (bit of a personification there, I know ). If you say "any moving object", then I'd ask why we don't stick our hands out to try to catch speeding cars.

There needs to be a specific feature of some kind of stimulus which produces the "catching" response in all humans, every single time it is presented. I can't think of any for catching. And the fact that we're shit at catching would make it a pretty useless FAP...

natselrox wrote:

So because we have similar parts of the brain to sharks, and sharks have an innate tendency to swim when born, we can automatically catch balls?

Basically, yes. When you subconsciously catch a ball you might be using those parts of the brain that are common in humans and sharks.

"Subconsciously" catch a ball? (I'll spare you my rant about conscious/unconscious, which is on the same level of my "instinct" rant...).

I don't understand your claim though. Sure, parts of our brain might produce innate tendencies (in fact this seems to be necessarily true), and we probably would share at least some of these parts with sharks, so the comparison is redundant really. The problem isn't whether the brain can produce innate behaviors in humans (it's a hugely complex machine, so such a feat would be fairly easy), the problem is whether it does for particular behaviors in question.

natselrox wrote:

Really? I don't know of any evolutionary biologist that would disagree. Humans are pathetically weak creatures, we don't have talons, or deadly incisors, we have no venom or poisons, we can't fly, we can't run particularly fast, and we tend to drown a lot in water - we are generally failures of evolution. Except for one thing, the fact that we can learn so much.

The last part gives some of us the arrogance to think that if trained for some time we might even learn to fly! We are really arguing for the extremes.

Really? I don't think so (as I think I've stated above that our learning is constrained by our biology, using the very example of us never being able to learn to fly), but funnily enough, the claim isn't that ridiculous. It is through our powerful learning mechanisms that has allowed us to "learn" how to fly - we use machines and gadgets to aid us in this, but we're still flying. On a more simpler level, we have learnt to create the tools that nature did not provide for us - we lack claws, so we build spears and swords. We lack speed, so we build bikes and cars. We lack a tough coat, and we steal them from other animals, or create bulletproof vests from various elements we can find.

So even though we our constrained by our biology, our super brains can substantially push those borders back a bit.

natselrox wrote:

Sure, but in my defence, I didn't say zero gravity, you did. Obviously learning is dependent on normal bodily functions and needs being met.

There is smooth curve that connects 9.8 m/s^2 to 0 m/s^2 and bodily functions would be hampered as you go along the curve in a linear (just simplifying. I don't know the exact relation.) fashion. So my point holds.

Fair enough then. Change the hypothetical to a situation where two children were only ever exposed to falling objects inside a weird gravity room, but they lived most of their lives in an isolated normal-gravity room. So their only experience with physics is in the weird gravity but they develop perfectly healthily.

natselrox wrote:

That just proves the point I was making. At the beginning of the tournament, everyone sucked but by the end they improved.

The first link said that starting from the quarter finals, there was a reduced incidence of missed free-kicks etc. Given that 8 of the best teams qualify for the QF and there are only 8 matches in that stage of the tournament, that claim does not hold. And the second link compared the misses across the whole tournament with previous ones.

I'm still not sure how you think this falsifies my claim? Playing with a ball that moves differently takes time to adjust to, and this could take 5-6 games (i.e. until they reached the point of QFs). Are you suggesting that it took them too long for it to be a demonstration of a learnt effect?

Obviously looking at the statistics overall would be useless, as the QFs are only played by the best teams that take part - I assumed that the links would have been looking at them by comparing each team before and after? In which case the quality of the team is irrelevant. The links didn't really give too much info though.

natselrox wrote:

natselrox wrote:2. But this is getting trivial. Obviously, you have natural counterparts of objects with different shapes. A falling banana is different from a falling coconut. Try teaching a man catching a bullet.

Well that would just be silly, only Ozymandias can do that.

It just seems like your approach to calculating the physics of objects requires so many assumptions and it seems incredibly unparsimonious.

On the other hand, I find your approach to be unparsimonious. A totally plastic neural circuit capable of calculating dynamic equations and modifying the motor responses accordingly is by definition a less parsimonious system than a rigid structure with limited abilities to act in a short range of variable parameters.

Your explanation is simpler, not more parsimonious. We know that animals learn to calculate the behavior of objects through experience and adjust their behavior as a response to their prior experiences, at least to some degree - this much is documented fact. However, the question is whether there is a structure in the brain that is present to bring it about, or whether it's just a learnt understanding of the world (based on a few biological processes necessary for basic skills).

In other words, we have one approach which produces quantifiable results, based on known mechanisms and laws (my suggestion), and then we have the other approach which necessarily depends on the first approach PLUS some unknown biological mechanism which makes it all possible (your suggestion). You're basically making the same mistake Chomsky did when he suggested that language depended on a Language Acquisition Device.

Note: Being unparsimonious doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means you're making assumptions that aren't currently needed. But, given new observations or data, the tides could easily shift in your favour. It all comes down to what makes the best predictions, explains the most amount of data, and uses the fewest assumptions (generally).

natselrox wrote:You are like a mercenary/lawyer! You can argue/play for any side you wish! I love people like that. Fluidity is my favourite character in a human. No absolute stances. Or am I hyperboling much?

I'm the same. I figure that if someone can't argue a reasonable case for the opposite side of their position then either a) the argument is over an undeniable truth that is so watertight that a person would be committed to a mental asylum for even suggesting it might not be true, or b) they don't really understand their own position. Most subjects in the world, especially in science, have at least a few inconsistencies, errors or areas of incompleteness. To know exactly what you're arguing for, then you need to understand all the flaws with what you're arguing.

Great discussion, I think this is the only forum where I find as ardent behaviorist as my myself Just one quick point on what Mr. Samsa said which I could not resist commenting on.

If someone would have entered this thread and claimed that the water striders' behavior from the OP (yeah, remember that topic! ) was caused completely by the environment and had no genetic basis, or if someone made the argument that people are blank slates, then I would swing into the side of nature and argue what idiots they are because Skinner was clearly wrong.

I must say I'm disappointed. Someone such as yourself certainly would not state that Skinner believed in any way that humans were blank slates :-p

Imadzaheer wrote:Great discussion, I think this is the only forum where I find as ardent behaviorist as my myself

Thanks Imadzaheer, and good to see you're still around!

I got accused of being "The Last Behaviorist" a while ago, although I thought it was insulting to all the professional scientists and philosophers in the world, I must admit I quite liked the title... Unfortunately, now that you're around it's not even technically true on this forum!

Imadzaheer wrote:Just one quick point on what Mr. Samsa said which I could not resist commenting on.

If someone would have entered this thread and claimed that the water striders' behavior from the OP (yeah, remember that topic! ) was caused completely by the environment and had no genetic basis, or if someone made the argument that people are blank slates, then I would swing into the side of nature and argue what idiots they are because Skinner was clearly wrong.

I must say I'm disappointed. Someone such as yourself certainly would not state that Skinner believed in any way that humans were blank slates :-p

Correct you are - and I think even in this thread I noted that Skinner was not a blank slatist. I was just trying to point out that my argument is with emphasis on nature in the OP's article, not because I'm committed to a "nurture" perspective, but because the authors had clearly ignored it altogether. So if they had pushed for a nurture explanation whilst completely ignoring the influence of genetics, then I'd jump the other way. My hypothetical example did contain incorrect information though, but my point was hyperbole, not accuracy.

ChH Says:
August 10th, 2010 at 1:19 pm

This is extortion, not blackmail.

charle Says:
August 11th, 2010 at 2:27 pm

A teen age woman confessed to me that a man had told her if she didn’t have sex with him, that he would tell her boyfriend that he had had sex with her. She had sex with him.

This is blackmail.

Mr.Samsa wrote:

natselrox wrote:
And when you say animals I take it that you mean to include all the animals that there are. All of them need to learn to fear a fall from a height? I remain highly skeptical of this claim.

I just said those that I'm aware of. There might be some animal that has a genetic predisposition toward avoiding heights, but I personally haven't heard of any. Most animals do need to learn this though - or rather, they need to learn folk physics. That is, things that go up come down, and when you come down it hurts a little, and the greater the distance the more the hurt.

The testing device, called a visual cliff, consists of a
sheet of plexiglas that covers a high-contrast checkerboard pattern.
On one side of the device, the cloth is placed immediately beneath
the plexiglas, and on the other side it is placed 4 feet below. The
majority of infants would not crawl onto the seemingly unsupported
surface, even when their mothers beckoned them from the other
side. These results suggest that infants perceive depth by 6 months
of age. (Gibson and Walk, 1960)

Cruel as it sounds, one of the simplest ways to determine whether depth perception is present in young animals is to ask whether they are willing to crawl off a “cliff.” To do this safely, an infant is placed on an elevated glass surface that is
patterned on one half and clear on the other. If an infant is willing to crawl out over the clear surface, off the “perceptual cliff,” then one assumes poor depth perception. By the time that they crawl, most infants do avoid the “cliff,” indicating that depth perception is present (Walk and Gibson, 1961). To determine whether infants can perceive depth before they
crawl, 1- to 4-month-old subjects were equipped with a heart rate monitor and suspended either above the shallow side or the deep side. Interestingly, the heart rate was lower when the infants were suspended above the deep side, suggesting that they were interested but not fearful. An accelerated heart rate was measured after the infants began to crawl (Campos et al., 1970).More precise measurements of depth perception obtained in nonhuman species show a rather sudden improvement. For example, binocular perception in cats goes from being rather poor to almost adult-like between 4 and 6 weeks postnatal (Timney, 1981).

I was reading the 'Development of Nervous System' by Sanes and came across this. Thought I should share this.

So it seems that with the perception of depth coming with binocular vision which develops over a short period of time, comes the fear of height. Quite a short window for so much learning to occur. I'll get back on this with more research.

natselrox wrote:

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The testing device, called a visual cliff, consists of a
sheet of plexiglas that covers a high-contrast checkerboard pattern.
On one side of the device, the cloth is placed immediately beneath
the plexiglas, and on the other side it is placed 4 feet below. The
majority of infants would not crawl onto the seemingly unsupported
surface, even when their mothers beckoned them from the other
side. These results suggest that infants perceive depth by 6 months
of age. (Gibson and Walk, 1960)

Yep, that was the exact experiment I was thinking of when I made my statements above. The point being that this result is found in infants 6 months of age - which is a huge amount of time where learning is concerned.

natselrox wrote:

Cruel as it sounds, one of the simplest ways to determine whether depth perception is present in young animals is to ask whether they are willing to crawl off a “cliff.” To do this safely, an infant is placed on an elevated glass surface that is
patterned on one half and clear on the other. If an infant is willing to crawl out over the clear surface, off the “perceptual cliff,” then one assumes poor depth perception. By the time that they crawl, most infants do avoid the “cliff,” indicating that depth perception is present (Walk and Gibson, 1961). To determine whether infants can perceive depth before they
crawl, 1- to 4-month-old subjects were equipped with a heart rate monitor and suspended either above the shallow side or the deep side. Interestingly, the heart rate was lower when the infants were suspended above the deep side, suggesting that they were interested but not fearful. An accelerated heart rate was measured after the infants began to crawl (Campos et al., 1970).More precise measurements of depth perception obtained in nonhuman species show a rather sudden improvement. For example, binocular perception in cats goes from being rather poor to almost adult-like between 4 and 6 weeks postnatal (Timney, 1981).

I was reading the 'Development of Nervous System' by Sanes and came across this. Thought I should share this.

So it seems that with the perception of depth coming with binocular vision which develops over a short period of time, comes the fear of height. Quite a short window for so much learning to occur. I'll get back on this with more research.

So how exactly are you interpreting this section: "To determine whether infants can perceive depth before they
crawl, 1- to 4-month-old subjects were equipped with a heart rate monitor and suspended either above the shallow side or the deep side. Interestingly, the heart rate was lower when the infants were suspended above the deep side, suggesting that they were interested but not fearful. An accelerated heart rate was measured after the infants began to crawl (Campos et al., 1970)."

If there was an innate fear of heights, and an accelerated heart rate is generally considered to be an accurate measure of fear, then why wouldn't this factor be present until they start crawling if this fear was innate? From a learning perspective, this observation is not only easily explained but it's exactly what we would expect to find. How do you square it up with an innate fear though? (The historical accounts presented above seem a little circular to me - they measure depth perception as "fear of heights" and suggest that an innate fear of heights does not present itself until later because they have not developed depth perception, which they measure by testing their fear of heights....)

And really, you think 4 months or so is a short window for learning to occur? I can teach a pigeon grammar in far less time than that, so an infant learning depth perception (especially given the massive amount of neural connections being formed at that age) is child's play.

I think you didn't read the whole thing. Kids upto 4 months do not show a fear of height as shown by the heart rate measurements. But this fear appeared with the appearance of binocular vision which as shown by the studies in cat is a rather abrupt development (4-6 weeks of postnatal development). That's what I meant by a short time window- 2 weeks.

natselrox wrote:I think you didn't read the whole thing. Kids upto 4 months do not show a fear of height as shown by the heart rate measurements. But this fear appeared with the appearance of binocular vision which as shown by the studies in cat is a rather abrupt development (4-6 weeks of postnatal development). That's what I meant by a short time window- 2 weeks.

I have a vague recollection of a claim that it is not the case that forest dwellers view distant wildebeest as close insects. Nevertheless, the contrary claim exists.

natselrox wrote:I think you didn't read the whole thing. Kids upto 4 months do not show a fear of height as shown by the heart rate measurements. But this fear appeared with the appearance of binocular vision which as shown by the studies in cat is a rather abrupt development (4-6 weeks of postnatal development). That's what I meant by a short time window- 2 weeks.

I read the whole thing, and I'm still not seeing how it proves your point - and I don't understand where you're getting the 2 weeks time frame from. I thought we were discussing humans, in which case the time frame for developing a fear of heights appears to be around 4 months, which is aided by the development of depth perception. This time frame for cats appears to be around 4-6 weeks. But obviously the sudden improvement in non-human species doesn't mean we can conclude that humans have a sudden improvement that we can't measure - that would be an incredibly odd claim to make.

As for the whole "babies don't fear heights until a certain age because they haven't developed adequate depth perception", this is an old falsified theory:

Bertenthal & Campos (1990) report that perceptual sensitivity to objects
and surfaces changes significantly following some experience with crawling.
For example, Campos et al (1992) report a series of studies showing that
precrawling infants show no evidence of fear (as indexed by heart rate acceleration)
when lowered onto the deep side of a visual cliff (simulating an
apparent drop-off in height), whereas crawling infants show a significant
degree of fear. Fear is also shown by precrawling infants if they are given
sufficient experience with self-locomotion in baby-walkers. Apparently, such
experience with perceptual guidance of self-locomotion changes infants’ perceptual
appreciation of an apparent cliff. Precrawling infants do not show fear
of heights not because they cannot perceive depth (Yonas & Owsley 1987) but
because they do not yet need to coordinate the perception of surfaces with their
direction of heading.

From here: http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/ber ... tation.pdf

The predictive factor in what produces the fear is experience with the situations in question - i.e. height. (The quote above presents the work from here: Early Experience and Emotional Development: The Emergence of Wariness of Heights).

This is bloody not going anywhere. Perception of depth is a needed for the concept of height. Locomotor experiences being necessary for the fear of heights is totally dependent on the perception of depth. So we have three entangled systems here. And we are trying to gauge the relative importance of external signals in a proper co-ordination of the three, right?

So let's go back to the drawing board, shall we?

I have to take out my pen and paper.



So let's say our stick man has arrived at this point and the question is whether he takes the step forward or not? The avoidance of taking the step and any other associated physiological response (heart beat, adrenaline blah blah) is called fear of height. Am I correct up to this point?




So if he does not take the step forward, that means he understands that surface B is deeper than surface A and there is a difference 'h' between the two.

Now the physiological response that follows is dependent on the relative value of 'h' (the relation may not be linear). Now what the articles you quoted are saying is that the integration between these two systems is dependent on the locomotor experiences of the individual within a critical time period. This is obvious. It wouldn't make sense if you are afraid of heights but you are stationary at a position. So the integration of the depth perceptive device with the height-avoidance device is dependent on the locomotory status of the individual.

From your article:

“artificial” experience locomoting in a walker generates evidence of wariness of heights

See the point? Locomotion just enforces or maybe even establishes the connection. And it does not matter if the locomotion is 'artificial'. Seems like a clever evolutionary solution to me.

But that does not give any inference as to whether there is any significant environmental contribution in linking the two.

I hope I'm clear now.

Guesstimating without concrete empirical data is surely not my cup of tea. Phew!