Posted: Aug 25, 2010 10:39 am
natselrox wrote:Mr.Samsa wrote:
What's the alternative, a sky hook?
I should have been more clear. I meant that the complexity is much higher in the latter case. And you can't simply equate the association between blue colour and food via the octopamine reward system in a bee with the way a human relates his food to different colour perceptions. The basic principle might be the same, but the human brain, by the virtue of being more complex, has more opportunities to modify the simple action-reward circuit than the bee-brain.
Well yes, we have much more complex forms of learning which can override or modify more simple learning associations (like the link to "stimulus equivalence" earlier which is the process by which we develop concepts), but these are still based on behavioral laws. Obviously simplifying behavioral laws to "stimulus-response associations" or "action-reward" type learning makes it sound ridiculous, in the same way describing the visual processing system in people as relying on a "light-image process" would sound silly. On a very general level it's kind of right, but so vague it doesn't really tell us anything.
natselrox wrote:I wasn't being rigorous in my use of the term "physiological" there, as obviously all psychological responses are physiological in nature too. I was simply trying to contrast the basic difference between the two; that is, a reflex is just a cause-effect "behavior", so if you bang the tendon in your knee, your leg jerks etc. whereas a FAP is a more complex set of behaviors that is elicited by a stimulus. Arguably, a FAP is just a complex set of reflexes that doesn't require any physical contact to be initiated.
Sound wooish to me! Pupillary reflexes require photons to be initiated. And since you can't transmit information without a physical medium, your so-called difference between reflexes and FAPs crumble.
Wooish? Look, there is a difference between a reflex like hitting a tendon and making it flex, compared to the presentation of the colour red causing a pecking behavior. On a physical or deeper level there might not be any difference at all between the two processes, but they are conceptually distinct enough to make it worthwhile dividing them into different categories. Specifically, we have reflexes that refer to "input-output" relations, and FAP which are "input - series of reflexes and learnt behaviors" relations.
natselrox wrote:However, they can be altered, to some degree at least. You can train a hatchling to love the shadow of a condor and you can train a child to enjoy the taste of tree bark. Some things are more difficult to change, and there are still basic biological needs that have to be met, but even with things like pain (which is generally considered to be an aversive stimulus), we could train people or animals to enjoy it - e.g. BDSM.
Again your bias is showing! When you are making someone enjoy an adverse stimulus, you're merely hijacking another deep-rooted evolutionary trait to achieve this feat. The ones you can modify, are left that way by evolution.
How can my statement possibly be construed as biased? There is nothing in that above paragraph which is unreasonable. It is all trivially true, i.e "We have genetic components, some of which can be modified to a degree by experience and learning". Undeniably true.
Whether something is "left to be modified" by evolution or not is irrelevant to this discussion because such a position is not under debate. We know that some things can be modified, and when they can be modified, we call this learning. The "credit" is not given to genetics by virtue of it being necessary for an organism to live - we inevitably reach a point where we have to change our level of explanation before we can produce any meaningful results.
natselrox wrote:Fear of excess light?..
Why not? An absence of light on your retina can cause your adrenaline levels to go up and symapthetic activation (fear of dark). Similarly excess light on our retina causes your iris to contract and your hands and orbicularis muscles to protect the eye. What's the difference?
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.
natselrox wrote:What do you mean by "natural"? Innately? Do you remember the first time you tried to catch a ball? I bet you failed horribly and that would have been with years of pretraining beforehand.
Seriously?
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..
natselrox wrote:Oh sure! I know what you mean. But I'm willing to bet that a motion sensing and computing device is inherited in all terrestrial animals. A little bit of tweaking is allowed but not much.
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. 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.
natselrox wrote:but the initial co-ordinates, estimated velocity, acceleration and final position judgements are all largely learnt.
Locating the position of an object in a 3D space has a a lot of genetic components (fixed projections of different optical neurons blah blah) and they are different from the calculating circuit. Combine the two and you get the device for calculating velocity and acceleration.
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.
natselrox wrote:'Learning' is minor junior-artist in this film.
Trolling, reported.
natselrox wrote:Stick a kid in a room with weird gravity, or some other quirks of physics, which makes flying balls behave in completely fucked up ways, and they will learn to play catch at the same rate a kid in a normal environment will.
Although I doubt that an organism spending 3 billion years on a planet with g=9.8 m/s^2 will suddenly be able to adapt to a zero gravity environment, my point still holds. All it means is that our inherited calculator is pretty good!
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".
natselrox wrote:If your claim is that we have a genetic predisposition toward being able to learn how to do all those calculations, then obviously I agree, but I think that's the point I was trying to make?
If you're suggesting that we calculate all those things using innate rules then I can't see how you could possibly think that was true..
These positions are not always mutually exclusive. But I don't have the evidence to back it up right now. I'll come back with some non-human examples.
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.
natselrox wrote:How so? All animals can show self control when placed in a situation where it is possible. I'm not aware of any studies that show a significant difference between humans and animals when all variables are controlled for.
After Hauser-gate, you guys have less credibilitybut I think I've addressed this before.
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.. 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..
natselrox wrote:
You are the one swinging too heavily, you fat bastard!
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.
natselrox wrote:Pick any you like. This isn't my opinion, it's an accepted fact in science. So unless you're using a completely different definition of "instinctual", or can why the scientists studying this are wrong, then you might want to reconsider your position
I have studied a little bit of the language development and visual system development. You can pick an example from those. The 'catching response' might be a good one as well.
How in the world can you argue that language is instinctual?!... (Please, please, please, don't reference Pinker..
)The visual system development might be a good example, you'd have to be more specific though. And you have to make sure you're discussing behaviors (that which an organism does) and not biological processes. In other words, describing the activation of rods and cones in the eye when light hits them as "instinctual" is as ridiculous as describing a heart beat as "instinctual".
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"
And just to clarify, my position in no way represents a nurturist position!