Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit on NDT philosophy

 Burl: "Furthermore,  note that consciousness is not energy, as you often say – in this case, it is awareness of an affect/emotion = feeling."

Consider someone who has a food allergy because of a bacterial over growth in their digestive tract. They are unaware that they have this overgrowth and yet they find themselves unconsciously hungering for the specific food stuffs that feed this bacterial bloom. Their diet shifts without any cognition on their part. Every aspect of bacterial respiration can described energetically and consciousness is affected directly and completely below the person's awareness. The afflicted person thinks they like what is actually bad for them. My argument is that even complex social behavior is predicated on similar template (energetic principles of anatomy, physiology, neurology) and thsi is the substrate of consciousness which is what we are intuitively recognizing when we say, emotional, sexual, social APPETITE.  What keeps this subconscious template from being toxic to the individual is whether or not it adds energy to the network, and this standard is the predicate of a true feeling.

Burl: "An innate sense/expectation of balanced behavior amongst peacefully interacting creatures needs fairness as an operating principle to keep things orderly."

 KB: Does this mean than an innate sense of fairness is fully formed at the dawn of whenever one might hold that consciousness evolved? Or is there a logical evolutionary progression?

Burl: "This naturally keeps individual passions/desires tempered, otherwise no peaceful interaction in nature could exist."

KB:  Saying that otherwise no peaceful interaction in nature could exist is not the same as actually articulating the dynamic which tempers passions/desires. And this brings us to a fundamental misreading of the animal mind. I am arguing that it's the gratification of desires/passions that leads to peaceful interaction rather than their dampening. A dog self-modifies his behavior to maximize his pleasure from the interaction, (a true feeling results from syncopated action and it always adds energy to the network) rather than according to a standard of fairness.

 At least give me the courtesy of reading and quoting my corrected material.

1) a sense/instinct of balanced behavior amongst peacefully interacting creatures - fairness - keeps things orderly; it naturally keeps individual passions/desires tempered, otherwise no peaceful interaction in nature could exist - agression would be all there is.

2) a metaphysical conceptual understanding (i.e., a belief) that there is a principle of fairness which, when violated, causes an uneasy awareness of moral failure - guilt.

I do not have certainty of our creature morality (innate, highly conceptual, spiritual ??). 

As for lower 'energies' explaining all aspects of advanced organisms, only  in that lower order systems lay a support system down for the next more advanced system.  From Whitehead's philosophy of organism we know every little part of our organism (and same for dog) is interconnected into 'societies' (organs, vessels, nerves, etc) and in mammals, a good old CNS that allows for conscious activity.   So while we may not know we have cancer, it may be making us gradually weaker.  I support feelings thru and thru, bottom to top.  If you recall, I also pointed out that consciousness itself is the subjective form of a certain feeling (a feeling of contrast - intentionality of something).

http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_sapolsky_the_uniqueness_of_humans.html

All I know is that if this guy's rudimentary "theory of mind" explanation with the chimps is correct, I've seen dogs do the same thing over a toy;-)  I think the issue is not whether dog's have a theory of mind, but how rudimentary it is compared with our own.  Anyway, his little presentation is fascinating.  And, FWIW, you gotta love a guy with a true academic's beard, who studies baboons for thirty years.

Kevin Behan

 Do dogs have a sense of fairness? Do dogs experience guilt?

how to you turn selective imitation into uncontrollable urge?

Can you design an experiment that will illustrate any unique aspect of NDT?

Kevin Behan

 So then dogs experience guilt?

Kevin's incessant and often irrelevant questions reminde of a technique I've seen with others like him selling quackery.  They demand answers to every minutiae, every trivial question they can come up with. And of course any question not answered to tehir satisfaction it means that their brand of quackery is right.  The grown ups here recognize that this is an argument of exclusion as well as a dichotomous fallacy.

Kevin Behan

Consider someone who has a food allergy because of a bacterial over growth in their digestive tract.

Then they don't have a food allergy.  Good call, Behan.  We can add immunology to the long list of things you know nothing about.

Kevin Behan

 I seem to recall you said earlier that chemistry, anatomy and quantum mechanics had nothing to do with behavior. Why exclude these disciplines when everything in nature is integrated?

The day you cut open a dog and find a second brain on it's thorax (that it hasn't eaten) then you can talk about anatomy. Until then, it's best you avoid the subject.

spiritdogs

http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_sapolsky_the_uniqueness_of_humans.html

All I know is that if this guy's rudimentary "theory of mind" explanation with the chimps is correct, I've seen dogs do the same thing over a toy;-)  I think the issue is not whether dog's have a theory of mind, but how rudimentary it is compared with our own.  Anyway, his little presentation is fascinating.  And, FWIW, you gotta love a guy with a true academic's beard, who studies baboons for thirty years.

My longest chess game lasted just short of 6 hours, went home at 10pm and slept until 12am. 

It also much of this supports what I wrote in the 2nd post of the first page.

TheMilkyWay

They demand answers to every minutiae, every trivial question they can come up with. And of course any question not answered to tehir satisfaction it means that their brand of quackery is right. 

Funny, I've seen a lot of this on both sides of the science vs quackery squabble.

Hasn't this intellectual chest-thumping run its course yet?

TheMilkyWay

 

Kevin Behan

 So then dogs experience guilt?

Kevin's incessant and often irrelevant questions reminde of a technique I've seen with others like him selling quackery.  They demand answers to every minutiae, every trivial question they can come up with. And of course any question not answered to tehir satisfaction it means that their brand of quackery is right.  The grown ups here recognize that this is an argument of exclusion as well as a dichotomous fallacy.

Hi

It is good to be in another country (China). It sort of clears your head. I just think that Kevin and his camp follower aren't worth the effort. I have spent a grand total of 10 years in post school education, and silly idiot that i am have been prepared to share that, and to learn how to get it across to others. In real doggy life i do exactly that. Here i have been severly insulted by a fool with a  two bob intellect that hasn't got the good grace to apologise. I think that we should start a marketing exercise, everywhere Kevin pops up we have a little slogan Warning : This ain't the real deal. What i have learnt is that the discipline of science is alien to most of the general public. It isn't sexy. Clever marketing does work. us engineers know this dam it!!

 Fantastic vid, Spirit.

Paige, I think we are enmeshed in what the vid speaker should identify as "hope".

Thus, we are holding out as possible that which seems impossible.  That is, we think there might be agreement on something at some point.

poodleOwned

TheMilkyWay

 

Kevin Behan

 So then dogs experience guilt?

Kevin's incessant and often irrelevant questions reminde of a technique I've seen with others like him selling quackery.  They demand answers to every minutiae, every trivial question they can come up with. And of course any question not answered to tehir satisfaction it means that their brand of quackery is right.  The grown ups here recognize that this is an argument of exclusion as well as a dichotomous fallacy.

 

Hi

It is good to be in another country (China). It sort of clears your head. I just think that Kevin and his camp follower aren't worth the effort. I have spent a grand total of 10 years in post school education, and silly idiot that i am have been prepared to share that, and to learn how to get it across to others. In real doggy life i do exactly that. Here i have been severly insulted by a fool with a  two bob intellect that hasn't got the good grace to apologise. I think that we should start a marketing exercise, everywhere Kevin pops up we have a little slogan Warning : This ain't the real deal. What i have learnt is that the discipline of science is alien to most of the general public. It isn't sexy. Clever marketing does work. us engineers know this dam it!!

 

Clever marketing always seems to win out, and the reason is that many people who have the IQ of a kumquat are willing to grasp explanations that make sense to *them* without having to exert the brain power or intellect that it takes to question something in a truly investigative way to come to a conclusion that can be proven scientifically.  Then, they hold tight to their beliefs, no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary, because they really need to be right about something in their otherwise unremarkable lives. 

spiritdogs

 they hold tight to their beliefs, no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary, because they really need to be right about something

It occurs to me that this is part and parcel of dogmatically insisting that dogs have no ToM.  Anyone so tuned to interpret what we observe everyday is also likely to presume much the same thing about other people - they too have trivial-to-no ToM. 

Burl

t occurs to me that this is part and parcel of dogmatically insisting that dogs have no ToM.  Anyone so tuned to interpret what we observe everyday is also likely to presume much the same thing about other people - they too have trivial-to-no ToM. 

Yep, they are right we are wrong. You did great work explaining force etc but it was ignored. I could have chipped in with the electronic equivalents but the idea of battling people with near zero education and rock hard ideas sent me running. In our industry you often get people with mild delusions of grandeur (usually marketing ******s)  that somehow think that if they drive something hard enough (usually engineers) that they can beat industry standards by many yards. Of course  it mostly can't be done, but there are enough examples in management texts to show that this is a faint possibility.

I think that this is what we have here, the faint possibility of a theory thrown together  from some observations, which is so precious to it's owner that it can't be discarded. The reason for this value is that the education isn't there. One of the skills of a good engineer or scientist is to hop off our hobby horses when it becomes clear that we are wrong. We know that we have the background to develop new ideas . We also speak to specialists in other disciplines. I sure as hell am subject to review processes despite seniority .

What amazes me is why people choose such a load of vodoo in the first place. Why don't we expand on that? I think spirit dogs has started...