Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit on NDT philosophy

Burl

We have no idea how a dog "feels". I would claim that a feeling is a cognitely processed idea of an emotion. We have an idea of what emotions a dog is undergoing by some of the behavours that the dog "emits".

 Damasio could have posted this.

 

Any plagarism is unintentional. Now i will have to look up  Damasio again!!!

Kevin Behan

A dog loves to play with toy in back yard, but at park it's as if the ball doesn't exist. Another dog plays 100% with toy in back yard, and then 100% at park no matter what is going on. The distinction is Drive in service to Temperament and If you subtract thoughts from the incident, you can indeed find a formula that arrives at a clear defintion of consciousness, emotion, feelings, instinct and thinking. 

If there is something i know about in both theoretical and practical spaces is how to play with a dog. It isn't simple, and this is off putting rubbish. .You can work with any dog to get it to play some how in many conditions. You just have to observe the dog and what may bother it...and do something about it!

Panksepp and others offer a model that leads to much more postive and clear outcomes. It is reasoned and works.

Kevin Behan

KB: Most concepts of auto-tuning talk about maintaining optimal homeostasis. That's not what I'm referring to because if the system is in perfect stasis, then it is stagnant and dying. The auto-tuning has to be about adding energy to the system and my argument is that this renders a coherent definition of emotion/feeling/cognition and will simultaneously explain why tool making, problem solving crows along with language mastering parrots and signing apes and chimps are never going to evolve out of their environmental niche    

 

Kevin

 Take it from me that you are so far off beam that i can't even think of where to refer you to to start. A system in perfect statis is a highly tuned system because no matter what disturbances are occuring to the system it is mantaining it's input set outcome.  You need to get an idea of what I mean. I am using control systems jargon which is pretty universal in this area.  Some systems that the body has that are auto tuning include the blood sugar level, respiration, heart beat. It has nothing to do with energy. The control system typically uses very low amounts of energy and may control energy input but may not. It is not a requirement.

Another clever auto tuned system is our hearing gain. it varies depending on the external loundness of the signal.

I think for coherence that you really need to ban the energy thingy from your discussions too. It keeps on making your arguements look a bit thin.

 Dogs experience changes brought on by the onset of sexual maturity and so yes, fundamentally, it has nothing to do with it, and also because according to Panskepp higher order cognition can modify underlying affective systems. 

 Hearing is finely tuned so that it can be knocked out of balance, i.e. a sound wave displacing a membrane that then vibrates and produces the nerve impulse. Its inherent instability is how a sound wave becomes neurochemical energy. Likewise the body/mind is a displaceable medium as well. Sensory input creates neurochemical energy and this increases a constitutional state of tension. (This is why dogs like exercise) Resolution of this tension follows a universal dynamic deeper than the affective systems Panskepp and colleague were talking about on his video and there's no way around it, but the ultimate result is that energy (as in how to adapt and make a living) is added to the system.

I'm not talking about training a dog to play. I'm simply talking about a dog that might attend to a particular stimulus in one situation and yet not in another and I picked a toy as an example. I could have picked cat, as in dog chases cat outdoors but doesn't pay attention indoors, although this isn't as straightforward an example. At any rate, my point being when a dog's behavior is uniform no matter the context, this is a function of drive and an analysis of the animal mind has to take this aspect of consciousness into account. 

 Maybe you should stick to one species, and study it.  So far you don't seem to know anything about dogs or orangutans. It's also strange that your comment was about Orangs, my response was about Orangs and your reply is about dogs.  Stick to the subject.

 The subject was the domestication of the dog and what singular feature of dog enables it to be domesticated as opposed to other species with demonstrably higher cognitive capacities. You raised the point and now you avoid the logical consequence of your untenable position. 

 Marc Bekoff's blog http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal-emotions/201012/dog-learns-more-1000-names-and-chimpanzees-make-dolls shows a dog with a vast memory/recall and complex reasoning functions whereby he indexes 1000 items.

This looks to me to be a whole lot like those humans on 60 Minutes who can remember everything in their lives and have a simple way of indexing memory for recall.

One of the most profound things about emotion is as a reflective medium in that internal energies are projected outward and are then returned as perception. For example, some one calls someone a liar and a coward on a forum where they post anonymously.

*MODERATOR MESSAGE*

This thread has been warned, yet personal attacks persist.  This thread is locked for 24 hours to allow some folks to collect their sensibilities and consider if they would like to continue to be members of this forum and post according to our Forum Rules.

It's really quite simple - debate the topic, don't attack the poster.

To quote the forum rules:

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Kevin Behan

Hearing is finely tuned so that it can be knocked out of balance, i.e. a sound wave displacing a membrane that then vibrates and produces the nerve impulse. Its inherent instability is how a sound wave becomes neurochemical energy. Likewise the body/mind is a displaceable medium as well. Sensory input creates neurochemical energy and this increases a constitutional state of tension. (This is why dogs like exercise) Resolution of this tension follows a universal dynamic deeper than the affective systems Panskepp and colleague were talking about on his video and there's no way around it, but the ultimate result is that energy (as in how to adapt and make a living) is added to the system.

Kevin,

You really have got it out of kilter this time. A ear drum is a mechanism that is stable , elastic and able to respond predictably and in a damped way and against an unstable way to sound waves. You could never call it "unstable". I think that for this control systems or mechanical oscillation definitions seem to work. There are appropite resources on the web.

Now an ear drum moving can cause electrical signals. The exact details of these signals are also on the web. Almost universally, our senses are adaptive, they respond to the over all level and adjust accordingly. These signals are information, they may act as stimulit, they may not.

It is simple stuff really. One of the amzing things about our sensory systems is the ability to filter inputs that are not important. Other  wise we would all go mad. You have to discard this energy thing, it is a postulation several steps away from what actually happens.You may like to check out the energy levels that say the eye and ear work on, and get back to us on whether they are a real serious level of energy.

I can't get any sense out of what you are saying and i am tryng.

 Yes, it would be incorrect to argue that the ear is unstable, what I'm saying is that it isn't static, but dynamic, it can be displaced, knocked off kilter and this is necessary to convert a physical energy into neurochemical energy. Of course it must be stable so that it can return to equilibrium. And the point this all traces back to is that I don't think that emotion is fundamentally about maintaining homeostasis as in Damasio's model, but rather is that in the RETURN TO STASIS the body/mind therefore captures the energy of change. So a stimulus excites the organism, and by returning to stasis, that energy is now captured, i.e. internalized by the individual. An incident of change has become part of that individual's consciousness and the seed of this captured energy is that agent of change, which I argue now serves as an object of attraction. When I watched the video on the Border Collie with 2000 word vocabulary, I don't see this as demonstrating a dog mastering the concepts of round, or squeaky, or blue etc so that it can ponder the fundamental distinctions between various states of matter in an abstract way. Rather I believe it demonstrates that a dog can discern a round object from a square one, as Jung said, form gives energy its quality, (I knew a dog that favored red balls over other ones) but I don't think the dog is making an abstract concept that transfers outside of the training regime. In other words, the dog is learning these items as a function of its attraction to its owner. And when its enthusiasm lags for the exercise, the trainer can't help but clap his hands to rekindle the feeling of attraction between them otherwise without this emotional grounding, the distinctions between the various objects have no weight. The training routine taught the dog that these various attributes had something to do with its feeling for its owner, and so to be in resonance it becomes excited about performing the various tasks specific to the vibration of his owner's speech. So the cognitive value in the dog's mind about the item isn't a self-contained concept that can then illuminate the nature of its reality as it applies the concepts across the range of its experiences, but is a group consciousness, a function of how it feels connected to its owner so that when the owner says "round," this displaces the dog emotionally in a way that is distinct from "square" and he seeks to attain resonance by getting that specific aspect of roundness, that vibrational quality, into its mouth.   

 Kevin, the border collie article mentions its skills were at the level of a 3 yr old human.  Is what you just described as how the dog's epistemic behavior is explained also much the same as for the human? 

Kevin Behan

Rather I believe it demonstrates that a dog can discern a round object from a square one, as Jung said, form gives energy its quality, (I knew a dog that favored red balls over other ones) but I don't think the dog is making an abstract concept that transfers outside of the training regime. In other words, the dog is learning these items as a function of its attraction to its owner.

Actually, I think it demonstrates that the dog learns that if he discerns the right object, it earns him some resource.  Now, the resource could be the owner, but more frequently among domestic dogs, it's a tidbit or a toy produced by the owner in response to a correct decision on the part of the dog.  This is much more an indication of operant conditioning than it is a "feeling" for its owner, which is not to day that dogs don't have feelings for members of their social groups.  Resources vs "resonance" - I'll take resources every time.  Even I like my paycheck, and I can choose to do the correct task to get it, whether or not I like my boss.  The owner who can't resist clapping his hands is much like the one who can't resist a tug on the leash.  It has more to do with not wanting to be wrong, or with not wanting the dog to "fail" than it does with rekindling a "feeling of attraction."  I think you need to do more thinking about the nature of correlation versus cause and effect.