Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit on NDT philosophy

TheMilkyWay

Like Blumberg and Sokoloff, I too find Panksepp's use of higher/lower more/less, or any such value laden comparsions out of place.

 

I was aware of this critism. I think that one of the things that i most cherish about Panksepp is that is work is available to outsiders like me. I am so sick of trying to chase papers on animal behaviours that either cost a fortune, or rely on very slow delivery through my Alumunus libary card.

As an aside, we as a science community need to get our act together and communicate better to lay people. If we sell a story full of holes, Kevin has a home for his stories. If we fill these holes and communicate them, then the vacumm is filled. 

The only reason that i knew that Panksepp and others existed and had valid work was because of two books that exist for lay people. One was a reference by Temple Grandin, and another was a reference by Stephen LIndsay.Remember that most of us Lay people get fed a story that is pretty behavourist in nature or starts to tend towards the totally wacky in various different degrees. Now when i bought Panksepp's book and parts seemed to fill long standing intellectual itches that i had about canine behaviour, one of the first statements that i had about him was a two line rebuttal from a long standing and quite rigid behavourist on this list!!

I have learnt to be a  sceptic. I expect to pick up papers in my field and find basic errors of maths. It is normal. (and annoying). I expect to also pick up papers where shall we say the novely or lack of it seems just a little geo political. I kind of gathered that the same thing would happen in your field, but just don't have the background to sort out what might or might not be the truth.

 First of all we didn't domesticate dog, wolf or proto-dog wolf like canid domesticated itself into dog. Likewise the cat domesticated itself. So why isn't the cat as adaptable as the dog? You will keep running into that paradox when you don't understand how apples and oranges are nonetheless fruit.

 Different strokes.  Sharing similar physiological systems and similarities of behavior do not logically imply identical behavior.  Quite to the contrary, it likely means the specific combo of cat is tuned differently than dog.  A deer and a cow calf look alike in the face, but that is probably the extent of any close similarity.  They all evolved into different unique composites of the hardware shared by most creatures.

I'm trying to be definitive, concise and clear and so saying at the beginning of every sentence, IMHO is redundant and boring to write and read. Everything I'm saying is my interpretation of the facts, I don't claim otherwise. I read the basic books on dogs and animals, I understand the theory of natural selection and I see dogs do the same things everyone else sees and so of course this is my take on what they are doing. It's also interesting that outright abusive language doesn't seem to upset anyone.

And if emotion is universal, and Panskepp is saying this to quite an extent but not quite going far enough from my point of view, then we actually can know what another being is feeling and thus I believe we can know what's going on inside the mind of a dog. The key (imho) is to begin with the feeling of attraction.

Kevin Behan

The key (imho) is to begin with the feeling of attraction.

It is right at this point that we depart..

 Okay, but then I ask what else could it be? Panskepp says an affective system, but an affective system is goal/object oriented so that it can reach a point of satisfaction, and that is just a complex way of saying attraction. The only alternative is to insert a thought (we could explore what it means to say an instinct and why I don't find that a logical argument because it ultimately means a thought or a robot). So then what is the proof for inserting a thought, in other words, leaping instantly to the very tippy top of the consciousness platform?

 "Milky Way" said: "We don't need to invent such a construct to get an idea why dogs have been so adaptable. We selected them for it."

Let's run it down then. What exactly did early man select for? 

Kevin Behan

 First of all we didn't domesticate dog, wolf or proto-dog wolf like canid domesticated itself into dog. Likewise the cat domesticated itself. So why isn't the cat as adaptable as the dog? You will keep running into that paradox when you don't understand how apples and oranges are nonetheless fruit.

 I replied:

Different strokes.  Sharing similar physiological systems and similarities of behavior do not logically imply identical behavior.  Quite to the contrary, it likely means the specific combo of cat is tuned differently than dog.  A deer and a cow calf look alike in the face, but that is probably the extent of any close similarity.  They all evolved into different unique composites of the hardware shared by most creatures.

Did you reply back??

 "They all evolved into different unique composites of the hardware shared by most creatures."

This is precisely the kind of logic I find unsatisfying. It's like saying this airplane is a different composite of characteristics than that airplane, so I already know that. Saying that the dog was selectively bred by man and hence is domesticated isn't saying anything. What exactly are those characteristics?

 Maybe I missed your point and you got caught in the cross fire since I'm responding to my inter-galactic friend in regards to this line of discussion.

You know, a while back when I suggested to some people that there were important social aspects to play, I was laughed out of town. It didn't bother me very much. That suggestion did not come out of thin air. I had read a few papers and a few different opinions, looked at what isn't understood about play, which was all fuelled by an observation that dog behaviour during intense games of tug or chase doesn't look the same to me as dog behaviour during a hunt. Anyway, they can laugh all they like. My bet is in ten years time it will be common knowledge and I will be able to say "told you so", which I won't, because I think it's just so much funnier to think it every time I say something to these folks. They know and it cracks me up that they can't bring themselves to say "Oh, turns out you were right." I've said it to people before! It doesn't hurt at all.

Anyway, my point is, while it's annoying when people ridicule me for reading some stuff before I throw it out there, the truth will prevail sooner or later. Either I'll be right (hooray) or I'll be wrong (hooray). I don't really care except that it makes me feel smug when I'm right and I get to watch all those that were wrong squirm. I just like to know stuff. I have learnt my lesson, though, and I don't go around spouting too many heretical things at once. People don't like it. Start with something small, research the heck out of it so I am as sure as I can be, then just ease it into mainstream as an off-hand comment and make sure I use as much of the accepted vernacular as I can, or no one will know what the heck I'm on about. I feel like I might have a hope in hell of understanding what the heck Kevin Behan is on about if he just started with one thing and stuck with it, using the accepted vernacular. Every time I think I know what he's saying he makes some outrageous, heretical statement and everyone gets upset and attacks it and then he makes several more, unrelated, outrageous statements and it turns into a big mess.

To get the ball rolling, what is this about attraction? Are you talking about attention? Any frightened animal attends to what is frightening them. In the 6 years I've had my hare, I have NEVER seen him blink or close his eyes. Never. He attends to every changing stimulus with something approaching obsession. He has to. He relies on knowing when to run to keep him safe. He will keep distance between himself and anything that could get him. I love the switch when he goes from distance guarding to approach. It is very obvious, and usually I have to approach him first when he's feeling safe and I have to do it just the right way. It's not just safe, though, it's a very specific safe. Everything is very specific with him. Now, my domestic rabbit is quite different. She couldn't run to save her life even if she only had to go a metre. She seems to rely on fiercely ignoring anything that bothers her. She will literally turn her back on my dogs and vehemently stare anywhere but at them. It is quite ridiculous and she would only last more than a day in the wild through sheer luck. I don't see anything of attraction in this behaviour. She is at best saying "I am so unconcerned that I'm not even looking at you", which is a bluff.

corvus

You know, a while back when I suggested to some people that there were important social aspects to play, I was laughed out of town. It didn't bother me very much. That suggestion did not come out of thin air. I had read a few papers and a few different opinions, looked at what isn't understood about play, which was all fuelled by an observation that dog behaviour during intense games of tug or chase doesn't look the same to me as dog behaviour during a hunt. Anyway, they can laugh all they like. My bet is in ten years time it will be common knowledge and I will be able to say "told you so", which I won't, because I think it's just so much funnier to think it every time I say something to these folks. They know and it cracks me up that they can't bring themselves to say "Oh, turns out you were right." I've said it to people before! It doesn't hurt at all.

 I think i row a similar boat on these issues, but really dont' even try to be that diplomatic. Something to do with age i think.

I am alwasy suprised at the difference between play and prey behaviour. Both my dogs kill things. It is so quick and uninvolving. You would think that they had been sitting there all of the time if you hadn't known the behaviour sequence a little before. I think that we sometimes get carried awy with the noble savage/hunter concept except we hang it on dogs, and need to believe it desperately for some reason. I think we take Jack London's stories way to seriously and they have permeated culture. My way of having the last laugh is queing up for various different trials. Weird i know, but you have to get your kicks some how. 

I find trying to work through Kevin's stuff tiring and annoying. it is real needle in haystack stuff. I do try. I find the bit about attraction so obviousy deniable that i can't almost he bothered, and besides that  i am back at work and they don't pay me to do that stuff. I just hope somewhere there is  gem there becuase otherwise i have wasted a hell of a lot of time looking for it...

Very well put. I don't want to throw bombs. I would like to convey these ideas clearly and simply. I don't know if this helps but the way I arrived at these ideas and the concept of everything as a function of attraction, was to consider what it would be like to have no conception of time whatsoever. In other words, what would it be like if one apprehended their reality as if that moment was forever. There was no idea of cause and effect, or of consequences, or of one thing relative to another thing, or of change proceeding along some kind of chronological time line, or that another being could be entertaining a point of view different from one's own. That there was only one point of view in that present moment and this experience constituted in that moment the entire scope of conscious awareness. In such a mind set, an animal would have no sense of its self as separate from its surroundings, its sense of self would be a function of its surroundings. So then I asked myself, if this were the case, then how would time deferred, socially adaptive, multifaceted and intelligent behavior, of which animals are clearly capable, be possible? This led me to understand emotion as an overarching principle, a medium of synchronization, in which animals align and self-organize in an intelligent manner according to what they feel (the various species constrained by their evolved emotional capacity). The intelligence in all this comes from the fact that this capacity to integrate with others as if the others were a part of one's own self, not only makes the individual feel better, but by virtue of the inevitable cooperative behavior that results, ends up realizing very real material rewards by virtue of coordinated team work. Feelings were by their nature social expressions so that in any group of animals that were able to go by feel they would immutably evolve to come into sync. This emotional capacity would render a level of intelligent behavior that would sure look as if the individual understood the ramifications of its actions over time, or as if it was taking in multiple points of view and mentally deliberating a course of action. But there would be telling clues that this wasn't the case. And then in my work with problem dogs, it became apparent to my way of looking at things, that even so called dysfunctional problem behavior was nevertheless still a function of a dog being in sync with its owner because of what the owner was feeling, but was most likely unaware of because they were figuring out everything according to a conception of time with causes and effects and because we as intellectual beings are quite far removed from our animal minds. I don't know if any of this resonates with your own experiences with dogs and animals but I do recommend Jill Bolte Taylor's book "Stroke of Instinct," a neuro-scientist who suffered a stroke and has given an account of what it was like for her to experience reality without the rational capacities of her intellect. It is quite stunning and I believe she has put into words what reality is like for an animal. 

Kevin Behan

I don't know if this helps but the way I arrived at these ideas and the concept of everything as a function of attraction, was to consider what it would be like to have no conception of time whatsoever. In other words, what would it be like if one apprehended their reality as if that moment was forever. There was no idea of cause and effect, or of consequences, or of one thing relative to another thing, or of change proceeding along some kind of chronological time line, or that another being could be entertaining a point of view different from one's own.

What makes you think animals have no sense of time? Doesn't learning theory show us that even the simplest of animals that don't even have brains can learn to make associations and this changes their behaviour?

When I watch animals doing their thing, I am struck by the way they bounce off everything around them, even when they have a fairly strict behavioural routine. A bird approaching its active nest always has elements to its behaviour that makes it look like a bird approaching its active nest. They will have a couple of flight paths to the nest. Habit, is my guess. A safe way once is a safe way twice is a safe way 20 times and so on. It doesn't pay to take risks. But their flight path will include one or two perches where they can stop just before going to the nest to check that it's safe. Even if they built their nest somewhere that doesn't have such a perch nearby, they will do the stop and check routine from the next tree over, which might be 20 metres away. Anyway, if you go and stand in the flight path, the bird coming in will overshoot, swoop aside, or stop somewhere nearby and look at this problem, then any number of things could happen. If you take a step towards it, another dozen behaviours might become possible, each with a different probability of occurring. The probability is almost certainly affected by the animal's individual personality, their past experiences, and even how life has been going for them lately. They don't really need a sense of time for this. They just need a cumulative sense of what has occurred in their experience in the past. If they could not do this, they could not learn, which they obviously do. Having said that, on a regular basis they will do something loopy that makes little sense. To me, this doesn't have to make sense. There is probably a reason and I just don't have enough information to work out what it was. IME, sometimes it makes sense later on when more information comes to light. I love that about behaviour.

Now, take a dog. It sometimes pays for them to take risks, so they tend to take more of them than small, wild birds do. Not as many things want to eat them, so statistically, a risk that a small bird might not take is not a risk at all to them. Wonder of wonders, this affects the way they behave. Animals MUST be able to assess risks. I saw a rabid fox once that was clearly unable to assess risks anymore. It was truly disturbing to see this wild animal with no concept of what was safe and what wasn't. All the usual behavioural patterns were absent and it was just profoundly, incomprehensibly weird and completely unpredictable. I do not see how an animal could assess risks without being able to make associations and I don't see how it could make associations without at least a rudimentary sense of time in the form of sequences. Am I completely missing your point?