rationalskepticism.org

Mr.Samsa wrote:There is a difference between coming up with a theory of behavior, and an explanation for an individual's behavior. To say that some guy out there might buy a car because he thinks it will get him women is most likely true. The troubling part is when the claim becomes more general, like "men buy cars as a product of a desire to have sex with women". It's also problematic to try to explain a behavior by way of a complex and convoluted causal factor; like the idea that even though men (or a particular man) thinks he's working hard to ensure he has some kind of financial stability, in reality it is an attempt to satisfy some subconscious need to obtain status and increase the likelihood of sexual encounters, when there's really no evidence to suggest that such an idea is true.

Because it is problematic trying to explain a behaviour thorough a causation stack or the making of invalid generalisations, does that mean we are unable to make valid generalisations or define the causation stack with various caveats? Surely there must be a consistent cause and effect pathway between the base biology and various levels of behaviours?

Mr. Samsa wrote:Behavior is generally controlled by 'reinforcers'. Some of these are "primary" reinforcers, like food and water, which require no real learning to acquire their motivating properties, whereas some are "secondary", like money or other tokens, which require a learning process to acquire a positive association.

If the primary reinforcers require no real learning, I assume this means they are innate and presumably there is less or no choice when compared to the secondary reinforcers? Are there defined links between primary and secondary, I am assuming the numbering indicates that there is at least a partial layer of primary and secondary arise from these?

Mr. Samsa wrote:So "base needs" and "higher behaviors" are essentially equal when it comes to causes of behavior. The important factor is the power of the particular reinforcer, not whether it's a base need or not.

What do you mean by equal? That a base need for water can be matched/cancelled out by the need for status? Or do you mean that they all operate independently and the effects might be quite unrelated?

Mr. Samsa wrote:Yes it's a difference in degree, and I'm using the term animal to refer to all members of the animal kingdom. Even things like insects respond according to the same laws of behavior, and things like fruit flies and worms serve as some of the best animal models for behavioral and learning research.

As I understand it, chimps are supposed to have some sense of self although not as advanced as ours. However is the human ability to understand the past, present and future not unique and wouod presumably give rise to unique behaviours?

Mr. Samsa wrote:Sorry, I'm not quite sure what you're asking here. Conditioning processes are equal across humans and other animals so the conditioned behavior can be very similar; the only limiting factors are things like the physical design of the organism (e.g. we can't teach an eagle to clap because it has no hands) and the general cognitive abilities of the organism. That is, there are genetic constraints to learning which is why nature and nurture are both important factors to consider when explaining a behavior.

This depends upon your perception of conditioned behaviours. If you believe that people do no or very little free will due to their subjection both to biology or environmental conditioning which results in our behaviour – in which case we would suggest that equally animals also have no free due to the same forces. Or if you believe that humans are able to arise above their biology and conditioning and be autonomous, free willed individuals does it mean animals can do the same?

Mr. Samsa wrote:This is a fair point. Other animals are, as you suspected, also capable of cheating and deceiving others (as well as identifying cheats) but the ability of language does bring a unique tool to the cheat.

Are humans also able to not only deceive others, but also themselves, however depending upon your view of conditioning, possibly they are simply marching to the beat of the social drum? It also raises the question of animals being able to deceive themselves, something I am not aware they can do.

Mr. Samsa wrote:It's not exactly that I believe without society we'd be equal to all other animals but rather I think society is a huge confounding factor that needs to be considered when comparing the innate capabilities of humans and other animals. There are other social animals that display similarities to human societies but the main component I was trying to highlight was the cultural transmission in human society. This is found in some other animals, like bees passing down a certain dance waggle, or crows teaching their young different and new tool designs, the lack of language and ability to write really puts our cultural transmission on a different level. Even in our own recent history, the invention of the printing press brought about massive cultural change and innovations, so we need only imagine what the creation of language itself would have done for our ancestors.

I agree, and assuming that the original split from other primates occurring some millions of years ago would have been caused by a combination of innate ability and some limited social conditioning. Given the limited ability for scaling society in the other primates, I would imagine it was something innate in origin? Even given the multiple steps it has taken to arrive today as human and where we were at the time of the split, it brought profound changes through a series of cause and effect.

Mr. Samsa wrote:It's just a physiological reaction, like the activation of digestive enzymes when they come into contact with food. I'm not sure if there is any kind of particular terminology that describes it.

I cannot see how all these work given there must be differences of type. If someone is drowning, they react in a way that tries to save their life. Is it just a physiological reaction when this happens, a simple reflex that evolved and survived in people (and their ancestors) that were able to survive drowning, or being eaten by predators, or not jumping off a cliff?

Mr. Samsa wrote:There is no known instinct to have sex or stay alive. Those "instincts" are examples of how the term has been misused in history and is part of the reason why science dropped the term for more precise terminology (like referring to something as a fixed-action pattern, or a reflex, rather than the broader, vaguer term "instinct"). They are "instincts" in the same way people have a "mothering instinct" or a "bargain-hunting instinct" - what people mean is that there are general behavioral patterns in people or groups of people (but often these patterns aren't actually due to any innate component). Although it's a little old now, parts of this article are relevant here:

So a person taking fairly consistent and predictable steps to prevent themselves from drowning is not an instinct to stay alive, rather it is a FAP or something similar that is still designed to assist in survival? Since my interest is in how the whole process works, I am not fussed which words get used to describe these and I can see how the liberal misuse of the term ‘instinct’ creates issues. Are there a limited number of these that tend to operate at the base level, like one that works to keep a person or animal alive as well as one that operates to procreate?

Mr. Samsa wrote:What we would generally consider to be "instincts" do occur in animals but I'm not sure it's enough to consider humans and other animals to significantly differ behaviorally. Instincts like fixed-action patterns (e.g. the herring gull example I gave earlier) do occur in other animals but they form such a small part of the animal's behavioral repertoire that it shouldn't really be considered a fundamental difference. If, on the other hand, all or some animals responded purely in these fixed stimulus-response patterns, like mindless automata, then that would be enough to claim a difference in kind, in my opinion.

So you are saying that if animals responded in all cases like mindless automata, then this would be a difference in kind to humans. You say that there are very few FAPs, yet surely they form a critical part of behaviour without which they would not survive. Unless all behaviours then ultimately assist the animal to survive, surely there must be a foundation of behaviours in place that provide part of the causation stack? You are also saying that humans do not respond like mindless automata, however surely the whole principle of conditioning means that we are subject and a product of our environment (subject to its influence on our nature), surely this provides a case for a range of behaviours that only exist because of this environment/biological mix?

Mr. Samsa wrote:I meant drives but I'm just referring to the concept you were discussing. Drives, in the sense you were using, aren't instinctive behaviors. That is, if it were true that men buy cars in order to achieve some level of status and have sex with women, then that wouldn't be an "instinct". It would be something like an innate predisposition which is like a priming towards a certain behavior given certain environmental conditions, whereas an "instinct" would be more rigid and fixed; e.g. when a man sees a car, he is forced (even against his will) to buy it.

You are saying that if it were an instinct it would be fixed and rigid, much as we might expect from a person trying to avoid drowning are rigid and fixed. What do you mean by the term ‘will’? If a person has been conditioned to behave in certain ways by their environment acting upon his biology, his will must be a complex mix of both of these forces, and while everyones biology is different, as is their environment, I cannot see where something like a will (assuming some degree of autonomy and choice) fits in here, and how it can be seen to be something separate to common mechanisms.

Mr. Samsa wrote:If there was a FAP that was triggered upon seeing a shark, then you would see every individual of the human race react in the exact same way everytime they see a shark (or even a picture or film of a shark). If the proposed reaction is something like, "try to swim away" then we should see aquarium staff doing this every time they try to feed a shark or audiences of Jaws trying to swim away in their seats.

Surely the key factor would be the reality of being faced by a shark as opposed to facsimiles of sharks. I understand that gulls can be deceived to some degree by the red spot into a FAP, but surely when faced with actually drowning people behave in a way similar enough to be a FAP?

Mr. Samsa wrote:The kind of innate reaction that humans are claimed to have in regards to dangerous animals, like spiders or snakes, is more along the lines of an idea called "prepared learning" or "preparedness". The idea is that whilst there is no instinctual relationship with those creatures, we have been primed by evolution to be able to easily make the association between "that animal" and "danger". There are major problems with this hypothesis, the main being that there is no real evidence that humans pick up a fear of spiders or snakes easier than other things, and there's the more fundamental problem in the fact that the idea of "preparedness" in learning theory has largely been rejected. Instead of organisms being "prepared" (or "unprepared" and "counterprepared"), it seems that there are just methodological issues surrounding experimental designs which determine how effective a learnt association is.

So once again humans are conditioned by their environment and society to react to various stimuli, once again this raises the question of ‘will’. Depending upon what the function of our will is, surely it would be something that allows us not to be conditioned, in which case its surely a matter of being part of our common biology, and while we do have different biologies, you would then expect to find vast numbers of people unmoved by conditioning? As regards animals, see this link that says that mice have an innate ability to identify predators smells and respond. If this is the case then surely if we are different to animals in kind, we might also have innate reactions to some stimuli?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 162701.htm

Mr. Samsa wrote:Sexual responses are incredibly complex and certainly can't be reduced to an instinct (otherwise people would be forced to have sex whenever aroused). There are definitely biological components involved, and these would be considered "primary reinforcers". In regards to the "undergoing a readiness for sex response", this would largely just be a physiological reaction like getting goosebumps when cold or having an increase in heartbeat when scared.

So you are saying that something like an instinct will force a behaviour to happen? Why does the act of sex have to occur for this to be ‘enforced’. Surely any reaction that it innate and taken to a certain point can be considered. You have said that in order for a sexual response to be considered instinctive (or similar), we need to be forced to have sex. Why is stopping before this point make it invalid as an ‘instinct’? What criteria defines that the act of sex is the point at which we judge. If a person is sexually attracted to another, why is this not considered the entire behaviour. The fact that this does happen, and most people then control their ‘sexual urges’ and prevent themselves from actually performing the sex act not qualify as a ‘instinct’ or similar because at least the first stage of the process is autonomic?

Mr. Samsa wrote:What are these behaviours (as distinct from innate responses), and what happens at 6 months for them to disappear. If there are other things that exist that were previously known as instincts, like a desire to stay alive or have sex, how are these defined and described?
Most of them are basic behavioral responses that are termed the "primitive reflexes" like the stepping response (where a baby will make a "walking" motion when the pad of their feet are touched) or the suckling response (where they start to suck whenever something is pressed against their lips). Even though some of these are termed "reflexes", it's a bit of a misnomer as behaviors like the suckling response are better described as fixed-action patterns (but that's probably not overly relevant to this discussion).

As I said earlier my interest is understanding how it all hangs together. Intuitively I do not believe that it is possible to have something, a behaviour, or reflex that arises in a vacuum. I believe that every effect is preceded by a cause(s), however complex and inscrutable it might appear and when it comes to behaviour, regardless of the complex interaction between nature and nurture, that most if not all behaviours will be subject to innate biology, however remotely. This does not mean that a person wants to wear a yellow cycling jersey because he has a ‘yellow jersey’ gene, but you can be sure if he has no genes, he wont have a jersey either.

Mr. Samsa wrote:Why do they disappear? That's a difficult question to answer and I don't think a concrete answer has been presented yet. The main theories at the moment suggest that they are either lost as a result of inhibiting processes (like the massive amounts of culling that goes on in a babies' life could clean out unneeded neural space or new learnt behaviors are incompatible with the instinct and block it from appearing) or they are integrated into new behaviors and are still there on a fundamental level but simply aren't as obvious.

Does this mean that it will only operate on certain of these reflexes/FAPs and not others? Presumably the tendency to try and avoid drowning would be very difficult to overcome even with much learning. People are able to commit suicide using various means thus overcoming a reflex to live, but I do not think too many people could hold their head under water long enough to die. I can see that certain reflexes become redundant at various ages and stages, in which case they get culled and then tested to see if the individual survives without them.

Mr. Samsa wrote:I'm not saying that the difference would definitely disappear but rather that it's a massive environmental confound that could explain the difference. And it's not just less women being prepared to put in the same degree of work (because they are affected by negative social pressures) but also the fact that many women drop out of sport entirely because of those social pressures. So from a purely statistical perspective, even if both groups were equal but the women had a significant drop-off rate early on in these athlete's careers, then we should expect that world records are held primarily (or even entirely) by men.

In other words, I was just highlighting the obvious problem with trying to use records and stats to demonstrate an innate difference.

What about other differences that might explain the differences in results?
The hip and shoulder/arm structures are different between men and women, womens wider hips being less suitable for sprinting. Also the fact that the differences in records/times etc are replicated at every level of the sport, at school level, state, club etc. Olympic level is the most easy to measure as it represents the elite. Here the other difference that comes out is the consistent differences depending upon the discipline, track events are different by around 10% while track events like the hammer, javelin etc are different by around 30%. I don’t see a lot of evidence that the differences are as a result of conditioning or bias.