Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit on NDT philosophy

 Okay I will double my efforts to master the logic that ties the evidence together while also refraining from using the term "dogged." So a stubborn frustrated donkey is engaged in the same affective system as a working GSD tending sheep all day, and dogs investigate and consume their own you-know-what in order to decipher their own internal physical condition and check their social status and in case female dog may be in estrus, but no other animal does since the arms race between host and parasite precipitated the evolution of sexual reproduction and thus avoiding parasitic infection is a chief selective pressure and even though dogs will mount pillows, humans, cats, their spayed and neutered peers.  

 I can see the faalacy of nearly every statement in the above attempeted parady of the modern approach to affective systems (sigh). And i don't even begin to pretend to be a serious scholar in this field..

 What i do find humorous is a working GSD.. You have to go several kilometers to see a real one of them.. and i don't know about your country but  there is a long list of breeds that i would prefer to be using to work sheep... even though my own father used to use one to herd very soft dairy cows.

I have this great photo of my little poodle all 390mm of her on a shocking horrible day with near horizontal sleet after you got "track of the day" for her tracking championship title. There were a couple of GSDs that preferred to stay in the car!!! I think the idea of GSD and "working" were several poles apart. For much of the track i could not see her above the wheat that she was working in.. It was physcially daunting for her, but unlike some of the GSDs she actually did it..

I think that the GSD legend is that.. a legend now. The show people have done weird things to the breed and here they just aren't the force they used to be here, very sadly...

 

I trust that my lack of response has not been taken as any kind of agreement ;)

==

@themilkyway i'm not asking you to prove/disprove anything related to kbehans theory. i'm asking you to explain the statement you made, that kbehan has misinterpreted margulis. it is not sufficient for the sake of meaningful discussion, to say one is wrong and not provide the reason why you think so. i'm also asking for a very high level answer. when you state you are deeply familiar with the work/writings of margulis, i can only assume you are also able to defend her thesis. failure to do so demonstrates that you just made the statement, which obviously doesn't have any bearing on the overall point. the evidence or lack thereof, in kbehan theory, has no bearing on the question i'm asking you.

furthermore, to the other posters in this thread, your intellectual curiosities are also called into question if you let this accusation stand. if you're not in the least bit interested in the resolution of this point, i'm baffled. to level the heavy charge of "lying" at someone does indeed place the burden on the accuser. @themilkyway must point out how kbehan is "lying". i think it is appropriate for you to address the quotes and resources i posted as well.

==

@poodleowned the point i was making is enteric nervous system is autonomous in terms of digestion and directly controls the process. it has tens of thousands of neurons and it isn't controlled by the brain to perform its duty. so it is a "brain" in this regard as it coordinates said functions. i'm not stating that it thinks or is as capable or complex as the brain.

furthermore, it is not a case of "convient relabeling". numerous publications determine it adequate as a descriptive term to convey meaning. dr gershon is the author of a book called "the second brain" in which he coined the term.

thanks for the food energy wikipedia article. however, you should take to editing it and remove the term "energy". it was used nearly in every paragraph.

What your statement says is that if i have a molecue that comes from a food that is X and is formed by the process of photosynthesis then it will be treated differently than the same moleclue X that is formed by another process. I hope that you cans see that there is no detector in digestive systems that do this. That it is the molecule type that causes the digestive system to adapt and differntiate.

obviously, this is not the argument i'm making. i'm unsure how you arrived at that analysis as it is not in the least bit related to my point. i was specific in response to @themilkyway's ridiculous position that there is no energy in food. energy is transferable. our digestive systems exact energy from nutrients that our bodies can then put to use. it must be in a certain form for our bodies to make use of it, as we can't directly absorb sunlight. though at the end of the day, you'll most certainly agree that almost all of our energy comes from the sun. speaking of cars, even the fossil fuels we burn. my point ends there. you can read what you like into those statements, but only post a response to the statements i'm actually making, not the hidden assumptions which you're carrying into the argument.

i think you're right that it could be a separate side discussion, the relevance the organ and it's relentless pursuit to exact energy from food sources, has on behavior. but as @themilkyway made the statement to refute kbehan's point, i was pointing out that he is wrong to say that there is no energy in food.

==

@burl

Gasoline provides the energy to propel a car, but my fellow civil engineers who study and manage traffic can completely ignore it in the course of dealing with congestion or safety issues. Much the same about psychotherapy and its underlaying neural systems. Right?

writ large, i don't think you can. in the traffic example, you have to pay attention to the number of gas stations in a given area. cars have to pull over and refuel. there have to be an adequate number of gas stations and gasoline available to service a population. when there is a gas shortage, traffic can come to a standstill while people wait in line. gasoline rationing dramatically influences patterns in traffic as well. and of course, no gasoline equals no traffic.

i do however, understand the point you're making. i think it's a valid objection, but it doesn't quite negate the proposition kbehan is suggesting either. i think it matters if dealing with animate v. inanimate objects, machines v. living organisms. as we have built machines and fully understand how they operate and they are also constructed from rather simple parts in comparison to living organisms. they don't have behavior by their own volition, at least not at the moment. so if you're talking about traffic, you really are talking about the behavior of drivers, which brings us back to our original problem. however, there is definitely modeling at a mathematical level where you can factor out the drivers and look at the larger picture.

also, perhaps the gut has more to do with what scientists feel at conferences than they think http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/health/23gut.html

==

Finally, I don't think that kbehan's theory isn't fantastic. But then when you think about the problem and then very concept of life, what isn't fantastic? I think in order to make any progress with the idea you have to put any knee jerk objections on hold to explore the concept. Understand the argument, be able to regurgitate it, and see what he is really saying and then deconstruct it. I think skepticism is wonderful and welcome. However, objections that are just based on semantics and peripheral afterthoughts that aren't core to kbehan's message, don't provide the necessary pessimism needed to refute or confirm his observations and experience implementing these ideas.

corgi

Your points are well said and worthy of consideration.  But I kind of lost interest in going further with this discussion after delving into Panksepp’s affective neuroscience and going back to review Damasio.  

They present a good picture of the physiology of animal physical energy, emotion/instinct, consciousness (necessary to ‘feel’ emothions –as opposed to merely acting them out robotically) and cognition (simple reasoning and thinking).  What they say is not what Kevin says.

Somewhere on this thread someone else made what to me is the key important point:  emotions are not energy, they are the triggers that activate physical responses that can indeed reveal tremendously active behavior.

 

 

corgidog

i agree with you, however, that is not what this discussion is really about. this thread is about the logical ramifications of believing in ToM that dogs do/do not possess. actually, the thread is really just we don't like ndt and we're going to make fun of it. both sides can accuse the other for lack of critical assessment when the two camps hold different criteria for what is critical to assess. so i'm not sure that mode of dialog is worth pursuing.

though, i'd agree that lack of critical assessment can be dangerous in certain circumstances. however, we're talking about dog training. and not training them to build bridges or fly airplanes. so it's really not that dangerous. furthermore, when you consider the level of aggression of dogs in america/the world and the lack of kbehan's ideas in the marketplace, you can't possibly say it's dangerous learning and practicing ndt. if you're interested in reading about the practical applications of ndt you may be interested in neil sattin's blog http://naturaldogblog.com/forum people have success stories with aggressive dogs (including neil himself) as well as implementing other very practical methods derived from kbehan's philosophy. i think that a new thread could be started if there is interest in discussion surrounding practical side of ndt so as to not change gears on this discussion.

 

Wow, look what happens when I take some time to celebrate New Year's Eve/Day;-)  

At any rate, the level of dog's aggression in the world has less to do with Kevin's principles' presence or absence in the world than it does with our simply tampering with how dogs, in their natural world, would become socialized, or not, from whelping onward.  As a child of the fifties, I'm old enough to remember that in those days most dogs were in the habit of roaming free.  They were "let out" of the back door to do their business, not taken for walks.  It was a common happenstance for dogs to become acclimated to other dogs who were in the same boat.  Of course, the did engage in fights occasionally (after all, most of them still had testicles and ovaries then), but most of them were used to, and friendly with, other neighborhood dogs.  Gradually, as towns got more crowded and people kept complaining about noise, bites, fights and poop, cities and towns enacted leash laws.  That put a barrier between dogs that was quite unnatural.  They no longer socialized willy nilly (which was a good thing, absent any interactions with cars or rifles), and so many of them didn't learn proper bite inhibition, or to be unafraid of new and different things.  So, humans came upon an idea to remedy that and still shut the complaining neighbors up - the training class.  Trouble is, they waited until the dog was six months old before they took him there and then they coerced the dogs into submission with choke collars and ear pinches.  Enter Ian Dunbar et al.  Puppy class - what an extraordinary idea.  Now we could replicate nature and let our little ones socialize with one another at an early enough age so that the socialization window didn't clamp shut before the dog learned to be a "richard noggin."  And, wonder of wonders, we could use other, more dog-friendly principles, to explain how we wanted them to behave.  But, alas, we justified our treatment of them again, despite the gentler methods, by insisting that their abilities couldn't possibly parallel ours in any way.  I think that we are now on the cusp of understanding more about how similar our brain functions are in various ways, and should not assume that dogs lack emotion or a ToM, just because it may not approach the nature of those things within the human context.  It is only through legitimate scientific method that we will come to final conclusions, but my guess is that we would arrive at them faster by not assuming the absence of characteristics that have not been thoroughly enough investigated yet.  Fighting amongst ourselves does little to further that investigation, incidentally.  What I'd like to see is a genuine move toward expressing actual results, questioning one's own assumptions, and less on professing to know things just by observation.  As we all know, observations that we think mean one thing, could mean something different, and in any discussion of sentient beings, even the smallest nuances can be important.  Unless you have data, it's disingenuous to codify your own hypotheses by couching them in embellishments of language that don't contribute to understanding, but are rather designed to aggrandize and support a weak position.

corgidog

i'm not asking you to prove/disprove anything related to kbehans theory. i'm asking you to explain the statement you made, that kbehan has misinterpreted margulis.

 

I'll say it again. No one that has every passed a first year biology course would ever claim that "all mutations are deleterious." because by then they understand that some mutations are neutral and some are beneficial. Some mutations... Yes.   Most mutations... yes.  ALL...NO.

So, Behan is either lying for the sake of convenience, doesn't care about the truth or like so many other cases he just doesn't know what he's talking about. Secondly, I posited 'lying' as an option. For the most part I bank on Behan's ignorance to carry the day.--- like confusing aggression / bite inhibition.

 

corgidog

i was specific in response to @themilkyway's ridiculous position that there is no energy in food

Ridiculous is accusing me of something you've fabricated.  I wrote "The digestive system doesn't recognize energy, it recognizes molecules", this doesn't suggest there is no energy to be extracted from food.

 

@themilkyway, you simply are not familiar with margulis work. you are just making semantic arguments.

“[R]andom mutation is wildly overemphasized as a source of hereditary variation. Mutations, genetic changes in live organisms, are inducible; this can be done by X-ray radiation or by addition of mutagenic chemicals to food. Many ways to induce mutations are known but none lead to new organisms. Mutation accumulation does not lead to a new species or even to new organs or tissues. If the egg and batch of sperm of a mammal is subjected to mutation, yes, hereditary changes occur, but as was pointed out very early by Herman J. Muller (1890-1967), the Nobel prizewinner who showed X-rays to be mutagenic in fruit flies, 99.9 percent of the mutations are deleterious. Even professional evolutionary biologists are hard put to find mutations, experimentally induced or spontaneous, that lead in a positive way to evolutionary change.” pg. 12 of Evolving Genomes: Acquiring Genomes: The Theory of the Origins of the Species

Her opening statement was that all mutations are deleterious. She's a credentialed first tier scientist who doesn't believe in theory of random mutations.

it's certainly within the realm of possibility that margulis made such a statement,that all mutations are deleterious, at a lecture, as that was kbehan's assertion. do you also take kbehan's statement to mean that mutations don't happen? he's saying that random mutations aren't the "driver" behind evolution. i know you disagree with this statement. however, margulis would not.

Ridiculous is accusing me of something you've fabricated. I wrote "The digestive system doesn't recognize energy, it recognizes molecules", this doesn't suggest there is no energy to be extracted from food.

so you agree that there is energy in food and it is the job of the digestive system to extract it. therefore how far off is this statement?

"one's digestive system recognizes the essence (energy) of things"

the only charge you can levy is that it's a little imprecise... however, on a thread discussing concepts from such a high level, you should be able to derive meaning from language that may be imprecise to hit at the larger point. apparently not.

i'm not suggesting in my statement that the absence of ndt in the marketplace is corollary with the amount of aggression. i'm just stating that because there is such a high level of aggression at present, for whatever reason, it isn't by itself "dangerous" to try something different that might remedy the problem. my main point being that aggression really is the only "dangerous" part concerning dog training. so it's an exaggeration on the part of an earlier poster to suggest that kbehan's ideas could be "dangerous" because they are lacking in "critical assessment".

i've heard the you need data cry before(@themilkyway), and i agree to an extent. however, kbehan is providing an alternative interpretation to the same data set. for instance, http://naturaldogtraining.com/articles/do-dogs-have-a-sense-of-fairness/ argues from the same data but draws different conclusions.

but i do agree in spirit that having a data set is crucial for ndt theories to be accepted. however, a lack of ndt specific accumulated data at the moment doesn't refute the logic being put forward by kbehan, either.

 corgi

 I asked Kevin to summarize 5 concepts of NDT that are novel to what is now out there in dog training theory.  Results were rough.

Could you summarize the top 3 things that Kevin wants us all to understand about dogs that we currently don't?

If to draw a clearer picture you feel the need to offer 5 or more points, no problem.

 Hi Spirit Dogs

spiritdogs

At any rate, the level of dog's aggression in the world has less to do with Kevin's principles' presence or absence in the world than it does with our simply tampering with how dogs, in their natural world, would become socialized, or not, from whelping onward.  As a child of the fifties, I'm old enough to remember that in those days most dogs were in the habit of roaming free.  They were "let out" of the back door to do their business, not taken for walks.  It was a common happenstance for dogs to become acclimated to other dogs who were in the same boat.  Of course, the did engage in fights occasionally (after all, most of them still had testicles and ovaries then), but most of them were used to, and friendly with, other neighborhood dogs.  Gradually, as towns got more crowded and people kept complaining about noise, bites, fights and poop, cities and towns enacted leash laws. 

 

Well, i am a child of the seventies,and came to Australia fifteen years ago from New Zealand. We like many others, had dogs sort of go from house to house and  the local parks were pretty dog friendly. The assumption was that the dog was OK. In fact the selection pressure was against aggressive dogs. When i got here the first cultural shock was the kind of apolexy that owners would go into if we asked them if it was ok for our dog to play with their dog. Now one thing is that no human can tire a dog out nowhere as quickly as two dogs playing together. So there was a whole lot more frustration. It was so sad. And the prevailing social mores about dogs were so different.

spiritdogs

But, alas, we justified our treatment of them again, despite the gentler methods, by insisting that their abilities couldn't possibly parallel ours in any way.  I think that we are now on the cusp of understanding more about how similar our brain functions are in various ways, and should not assume that dogs lack emotion or a ToM, just because it may not approach the nature of those things within the human context.  It is only through legitimate scientific method that we will come to final conclusions, but my guess is that we would arrive at them faster by not assuming the absence of characteristics that have not been thoroughly enough investigated yet. 

 

I couldn't agree with you more.! One of the things that we do is we try to model behaviours. We sometimes forget to check the validity of this model by seeing whether it gives us the result that we expect. The fact that we struggle to duplicate the behaviours is a huge warning sign that we have got it wrong. Sure , we use behavourist models in machine design and adaptive learning, and we are now trying to follow brian function more closely. I have shown a couple of places where small neural networks can be used. You might like to have a look at some of the IEEE spectrum articles which are available to the public. Here is an intersting one http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/charles-babbage-robot-head

Now i have to warn you that as a whole Engineers tend to be highly pragmatic and hugely self critical people. If the idea doesn't fit, it gets dropped without a whole lot of thought.. These ideas are starting to fit and work.

 

spiritdogs

What I'd like to see is a genuine move toward expressing actual results, questioning one's own assumptions, and less on professing to know things just by observation.  As we all know, observations that we think mean one thing, could mean something different, and in any discussion of sentient beings, even the smallest nuances can be important.  Unless you have data, it's disingenuous to codify your own hypotheses by couching them in embellishments of language that don't contribute to understanding, but are rather designed to aggrandize and support a weak position.

 

 

I sometimes wonder why we continue with this discussion. I guess we have to. I couldn't agree more with this statement. What do we actually have to predict what a dog will do next? Is it workable? Can we use it for training or are we actually making other assumptions? What assumptions did KC make in his observations? How many dogs? What method did he use for Behavourial Analysis? Why is it that certain gurus can throw this stuff at us and get away with it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kevin Behan

My point is that man's ways are novel in regards to instinct. Therefore, if emotion is instinctive, there would be many circumstances in man's worlds wherein emotional affects would prove to be maladaptive. Therefore are you saying that the key to the domestic dog's social adaptability to man's ways the capacity of higher order brain functions to moderate emotional affects?

 

Man, that statement is awkward because it is missing an action verb. Yes, there are many situations in which Man's emotional affects are maladaptive. Such as freezing when one should jump. And the converse. Reflexively moving when remaining still is the solution. Happens all the time. A bus is bearing down on you and you freeze because your emotional state cannot accomodate this change. Ergo, "splat!" Mother Nature, a much abused euphemism, is harsh but fair. Leading me to think that one of our greatest contributions to civilization is the Darwin Awards. Awarded, sometimes posthumously, to those who have improved the species of Man by dying before they can reproduce. But I digress.

It doesn't do well to make too much hay out of one straw but, even in the interest of being objective, neither should we reject something because we haven't proven it, yet. Or have yet to find the causal link. There are times when Occam's Theorem still hold true. In essence, sometimes the simplest explanation really is the correct one, or, at least, accurate enough to explain the majority of evidence. I will say it again. When you hear hoofbeats, you expect horses, not zebras. Once in a while, it is a zebra, the exception that proves the rule.

 

poodleOwned

As Monty Python said " he aint the Messiah , just a naughty boy...." sic porbably got the quote wrong :)

I could not resist. The line is from "The Life of Brian." Spoken by Brian's mother, in a clipped british accent similar to Julia Child. "He's not the Messiah ... he's just a very naughty boy."

 

"richard noggin.

 

There is a NZ horse that got registered as Richard Cranium. You can have a look here

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/10/29/1098992286897.html?from=storylhs

The registry must have been asleep that day.....

Kevin Behan

In fact a 50% divorce rate proves that attraction cannot be extinguished because due to the principle of conservation, a state of attraction is conserved as its equal and opposite form, stress, hence the divorce. 

Actually, this statement shows a misunderstanding of the conservation principle in physics and some slippery math. You might want to stay away from the physics thingy.

 

ron2

I could not resist. The line is from "The Life of Brian." Spoken by Brian's mother, in a clipped british accent similar to Julia Child. "He's not the Messiah ... he's just a very naughty boy."

 

 

Yep, that sounds right. So if you think that parts of your country are very conservative, i had to walk through a protest by several rather conservative churchy types to see the movie which much have been about 1979 1980. For years , we thought that the "correct" accent was the one you heard here rather than our own :(