Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit on NDT philosophy

I knew there was a name for this, but I'd forgotten it. I'm still getting a hang of cognition and psychology terms. This episodic memory was kind of what I was talking about when I said a cumulative sense of what has happened in the past. I have access to the full article if anyone is interested. PM me.

Neuropsychologia

Volume 48, Issue 8, July 2010, Pages 2273-2280

Episodic memory in animals: Remembering which occasion

Madeline J. Eacott, a, and Alexander Eastona

a Dept. of Psychology, Durham University, Science Site, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK Received 29 May 2009; revised 22 September 2009; accepted 5 November 2009. Available online 11 November 2009.

Abstract

Episodic memory, the recollection of past events in one's life, has often been considered a memory specific to humans. Recent work in a variety of species has challenged this view, and has raised important questions about the nature of episodic memory itself. We present a review of the types of task proposed as episodic-like in animals and consider that these tasks require animals to demonstrate memory for specific occasions in the past. We propose that identifying episodic memory as the memory for what happened where on a specific occasion is a more encompassing definition than one that relies on information about when an event occurred. These episodic-like tasks in animals support the view that the hippocampal system is necessary for episodic memory, and that the neural substrates of episodic memory can be dissociated from those of other forms of declarative memory.

Here's a similar one:

Black-capped chickadees (poecile atricapillus) anticipate future outcomes of foraging choices.

Feeney, Miranda C.; Roberts, William A.; Sherry, David F.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, Aug 16, 2010, No Pagination Specified. doi: 10.1037/a0019908

Abstract

In 2 experiments we investigated the cognitive abilities of wild-caught black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) in future anticipation tasks. Chickadees were sensitive to anticipatory contrast effects over time horizons of 5, 10, and 30 min (Experiment 1). Chickadees also learned the order of events and anticipated that the quality of future foraging outcomes was contingent on current foraging choices. This behavior was demonstrated while foraging in a naturalistic aviary environment with a 30-min delay between the initial choice and the future outcome (Experiment 2). These results support the hypothesis that black-capped chickadees can cognitively travel in time both retrospectively and prospectively using episodic memory. This result shows the occurrence of anticipatory cognition in a noncorvid species of food-storing bird and supports the idea that cognitive time travel may have evolved in nonhuman animals in response to specific ecological selection pressures.

 You've nailed it, Corvus.  Whether you realize it or not, your description of the similarity among animals' affective/cognitive activity is straight from the pen of David Hume's epistemology, and Hume is somewhat considered as the heralder of scientific empirical method.  Darwin certainly was influenced.

Alas, Kevin is not.  His 'epistemology' is supported nowhere - it is literally only in his head.  I have so often tried to point this out to him.  Lately I have taken his approach and asked him and corgidog for a few critical specifics, but they haven't materialized.

I must second poodleowned's words:

I find trying to work through Kevin's stuff tiring and annoying. it is real needle in haystack stuff. I do try ... I just hope somewhere there is a gem there because otherwise i have wasted a hell of a lot of time looking for it...

 HI Kevin

I now understand how to read your posts and they start to make sense, provided that i understand that they are speculative and that the underpinning is that canines have no understanding of time which is so easy to dispute .

At least,very simply, most animals have an understanding of sequence which is a time based idea.

I can very quickly and wonderfully (for me ) go into some specualtive stuff on behaviour sequences, and have  a lot of fun in my lovely maths world. But if you think i am going to make it public without  checking it out and doing some validation experiements i will not!!. I have a vague wooly idea that we are missing some basic data which we have discarded by not noting the sequence of micro behaviours.

Now Corvus mentioned something else that i hang hats on, which is that even relatively "primitive " birds do something erratic or unusual . I would say that is neccessary for evolutionary adaption , that without some random behaviour there is no possibility of the genetic evolution of behaviour. Now i think i can nearly comfortably  prove that this is a neccessity,(Mathematically) that it means that adpative behavour can exist in what seem like very small populations, but my guess is that someone has been there before me. It is an example of" chaotic" behavior. It is a long and quite intersting debate and the full sense in not at all correct in this posting.

You can get an idea of chaos here, but in a very primitive way..

http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html

There are another couple of wonderful maths that help us with this, Wavelts and fractals. I drool over this stuff .. despite it's seemingly huge theoretical bias, it has enormous practical applications.

poodleOwned

Now i think i can nearly comfortably  prove that this is a neccessity,(Mathematically) that it means that adpative behavour can exist in what seem like very small populations, but my guess is that someone has been there before me.

I have never been especially good at math, but I am not so bad at more "arty" applied sciences. So I am not sure if this is related to what you're suggesting, but there has been some work done on boldness and shyness in fish populations. It would appear you can identify bold and shy fish from a sample by how quickly they explore new surroundings, then make them all bold or all shy by changing their environment to make it seem more risky or less risky. On a broader scale, it seems like most populations have a fairly even ratio of bold to shy individuals and that this is stable. There are always advantages for bold individuals and advantages for shy individuals. It reminds me of the bird behaviour I did my honours project on. My population had birds that were extremely good at identifying foreign eggs in their nest and throwing them out, and a couple of birds that accepted everything put into their nest that looked remotely like an egg. I didn't have enough to test it statistically, but it was interesting that even where there is a strong evolutionary advantage for a behaviour, not every individual will do it. It pays to remember that when we look at behaviour in a population we are looking at a snapshot of evolution. We don't know where it's going or even where it's come from. There is ALWAYS a few individuals doing things that defy all reason. Like Kevin. Just kidding.

Oh, there is this idea of the adaptive optimist. The theory goes it's adaptive to be more optimistic when the consequences of a mistake are minor, and more pessimistic when the consequences of a mistake are more serious.

 I read somewhere that the human mind composes its conceptualization of time from motor muscle inputs, and this is consistent with another factoid that young children first apprehend the notion of time as a function of distance. I also find childhood amnesia interesting since I believe this is when we go by our animal mind more, and we can't recall it once our intellectual mind becomes our basis of awareness at which point our experience becomes categorized and cataloged chronologically. But at any rate I'm not saying that dogs don't have a memory, but rather that they are informed by a "physical memory" so that the present moment's intensity/resistance value triggers these older memories and thus the dog relives the past by way of the present. In this regard I would like to call your attention to the recent Sixty Minutes piece on what they call "autobiographical memory" whereby its "victims" have total recall of every day they've ever lived (sans infancy if my memory of the piece serves me correctly). This research is challenging the current conceptions of memory and I believe that these folks by some physiological/neurological quirk have access to their physical memory based on feelings (however don't have access to an even deeper layer that is based on unresolved emotion and which in my model is what feelings are composed of.) Now the fact that they can recall by reliving the most subtle details of any given day in their life, just by hearing the date, and that they can do so instantly without contemplation, means that this process of recall is not mental retrieval in the way we think of remembering, but rather the result of a deep kind of math like computation that the body/mind is doing in every moment, sort of like a math genius can factor out any formula instantly. So in other words, moments are connected by some process that isn't chronological or rational but is related to the way by which the conception of date and time arises into the higher reaches of our mind, i.e. according to the laws of motion and resistance to same.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7166313n&tag=contentBody;housing

And then to your point about sequences, I believe that a dog senses the affective change from compression (right before the explosion) to release (this can be a coherent kind of behavior rather than a simple overload explosion) and that this is a basis for responding coherently to the way things change, but not in the linear way of understanding that A caused B and this led to C. Rather, my premise is that from the dog's point of view, whatever it is feeling it then associates with the process of change, in other words, just as if its feelings are what caused things to change. So for example, a dog has no understanding that its owner leaves the house and then returns. But rather if it is calm in absence of owner (hence the value of crate training) that this state of calmness is what led to return of owner. Conversely the anxious dog is learning that an internal state of anxiety is what caused the owner to return, and no matter how much it is corrected were one to take that tack, that would merely deepen anxiety and increase dog's resolve to be anxious in order to compel return of owner. Little children are remarkably like this as well. The kid soils his bed, his parents get a divorce, the kid feels his behavior caused his parents to break up.

 Fascinating link, THX.  It seems we need an emotional valuation attached to an experience or we disvalue/forget it.  But these people ignore emotion from experience as a means of valuation.

On your discussion of this, my big comment is that all memory is physical memory.  Where else to put it?

 Well, that's what we're going to contest about is how is that value acquired. I would say that the object of an animal's behavior is to move its body in a way that makes it feel good, but that this isn't hedonistic for it's simultaneously the way by which social, cooperative and altruistic behavior evolves, this process I label with the principle of emotional conductivity, in other words, the most advanced expression of which in the animal mind would be that my stress can't get resolved unless the stress of that to which I'm bonded is simultaneously resolved. In other words, resolving unresolved emotion (Drive) is the highest form of pleasure for an animal.

I make a distinction between mental and physical memory this way. I can remember happy days on a warm beach in the middle of some bleary weather and recall such a pleasant memory, or a brine laden breeze might work its way inland and with that scent my entire body relaxes into the feeling of being at the beach. I see these as two separate memories.

Finally, the rabbit that turns its back in avoidance I also see as a function of attraction because the feeling of attraction to that which is more excitement/stress/fear that the rabbit can handle, is what guides the rabbit to want to turn its focus away. The "pull" becomes a "push." It's like not looking at something that one craves so badly it aches to look at it. 

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.

There is not enough evidence to make a definitive statement regarding the initial steps that led to the human/proto-dog relationship.   There are various legitimate competing ideas. Same for cats.  You may get to present such garbage in your blog without a fear of challenge, but once you step outside your secure bubble, expect to be slapped down.   There is no paradox, except the one generated in your mind by the ignorance of the facts. Regardless of the initial reason for first contact, it was humans who shaped and deternined the various characteristics of the dog.

I understand the theory of natural selection

You've done everything possible to hide it.

Kevin Behan

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

A feeble attempt to get me to participate in your argument by exclusion.

Kevin Behan

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?

It's saying that humans applied selective pressures, and just like in nature that selection changed the species.   We do it everyday with bacteria, algae, fungi, plants, and animals. Humans have applied artificial selection to every biological product we use.

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

I'm picking on words here, but only because Behan often fails to recognize the problems with his arguments.  How is  the animal with no concept of time supposed to understand 'forever"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofjo26O0z_o

 Boy, if America had not given away all its manufacturing jobs, we could really have used a worker so handy with tools as that bird.  Wonder if it speaks Chinese.

ron2

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."

 

I wouldn't say "clipped", I think of "clipped" as "posh".  S/he sounds common to me!!  I heart MP'sLOB. 

Do carry on.

ron2

The crying baby is still interacting with the environment. The fact that baby becomes quiet is an adaptation. It does not mean that the baby is no longer human or communicating. It is conserving energy, I think.

Zipped face smiley, zipped face smiley, zipped face smiley.....

ron2

Problem is, you brought a knife to a gun fight.

I was thinking more of the phrase about hammers and nails.  Fight is such a strong word.

I am loving this discussion, although I am finding it impossible to keep up with!