Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit on NDT philosophy

 
Actually, yes indeed I am on board [w/ subconscious] but I am also maintaining there is a deeper emotional system (emotion as universal "force" of attraction), and that this is the part of our unconsciousness that subscribes to a network template, and that this is the only logical model that is consistent with the phenomenon of evolution. This template can be shown to run through all behavior as in the dog/deer video linked on my site. I've also commented that given fractal mathematics and how it has been shown by Mandlebrot to be expressed everywhere in nature, I'm surprised that modern biology isn't concerned that no such fractal module in behavior has been identified. Each gene is a distinct unit of information, and genomes are fundamentally different sets of information, their own unique blend of random mutations as filtered by selective pressures and environmental constraints. In this vein, and I believe this is true of modern evolutionary theory, you have stated earlier that capacities can emerge from the substrate without precedent in regards to any specific capacity of the substrate, and therefore you're not concerned with absence of a common behavioral module constantly repeating itself as the source of complex behavior. In other words, there doesn't have to be a straight line running from the "bottom" to the "top" of the evolutionary phenomenon of consciousness. But if this is true, then unless dog and human minds are exactly alike, your assumption that --- "I am applying analogous experience reasoning that as similarly structured higher-ordered brainminds, dogs and we should have similar subconsciousnesses." --- is not logical. According to this logic (which I don't subscribe to) human capacities could have emerged without precedent from capacities of animals as the substrate of human consciousness.


Not sure if you are talking to what I have said, or a mix of lots of others’ posts.  I think I know you well enough to tell you are mad, now.  Your statements form a rambling mashing together of concepts that don’t mate up in a single sentence, and the sentences do run on long.  I still wonder why your coherently stated 5 discussion points and blew up before we got anywhere.

The giveaway is you are being defiantly stubborn when you just wrote “force” of attraction, which you had started calling function of attraction since the big force-energy discuss.


If Panskepp is being cited as the definitive rebuttal of my theory of a universal and monolithic emotion, shouldn't running that fact down and bringing it into the discussion be the first order of business before arriving at an opinion of NDT theory?


I mention Panksepp in reference to you mentioning affects in your 5 points.  However, I think you will find a better explanation of subconscious and cortical (conscious) aspects of the affect systems here (many scientists and therapists are cited):

http://www.thinkbody.co.uk/papers/panic-seeking%20-play.htm

It almost reads like something you would have written if you could better express your concepts in commonly accepted behavioral terms…It is a VERY good read, and one quote ties together a lot of what we are discussing:

“Panksepp suggest that PLAY may be the daytime version of dreaming.”

Kevin, you need to give up the possessive clinging to your thoughts as though they are from only one source in the universe (namely, your head), and synthesize.  If you could allow others’ concepts to substitute when they are equivalent to what you keep saying in less than coherent imagery, you might make better headway w/ NDT.

Start with your function/force/whatever of attraction being much akin to the SEEKING affect.


Or are you simply saying that my theory just doesn't seem right and/or square with your observations of dogs and that is the basis of your opinion and not Panskepp?  

 I am offering helpful advice for you to frame your ideas so others might understand, assess, and see value in what you have learned from training dogs.

 

Kevin Behan

critics of NDT cannot reprise my argument which on one level is to be understood, but is clearly also a knee jerk reaction that anyone who questions mainstream biology is being illogical, mystical, religious and is anti-scientific. You would think that people interested in behavior would enjoy debates about behavior, I know I do. But if I say the sky is blue it would be challenged (I know, I know, it's not really blue, but rather scatters the light of that wavelength)

Well so what?  A challenge is why one does the scientific inquiry.  I like spirited debate, too, as most of the long time members here will tell you, but this is not exactly a debate about behavior, it's a debate on whether our perspectives on dog behavior have been proven in any rational and scientific way.  I submit that yours have not.  BUT, that doesn't mean you can't be right, it simply means that you have not yet been proven right, and may, in fact, ultimately be proven wrong.  The problem isn't with your proposing a hypothesis - it's in your belief that the hypothesis is correct, but with no scientific proof of that.  Why don't you undertake some properly constructed studies and prove your hypotheses?  Not being mainstream is not an excuse to just blame the mainstream for not believing, it's an opportunity to shift opinion by doing the work required.  Even Columbus, the hateful illegal immigrant, got in the boat and kept sailing to prove he wouldn't fall off the Earth.  

Burl

Start with your function/force/whatever of attraction being much akin to the SEEKING affect.

Yes, it is interesting that Panksepp expands on this concept in his book. I noted his critique on P45 and P46 of his book Affective Neuroscience. Another word for SEEKING may well be enthusiasm/investigating. I personally look for large doses of this with any dog that i wish to track with above all else.The sort of dog that straightaway is checking things out, mouching, looking around.

I won't make another posting for this, but i think that i have observed behaviour in dogs that could be considered as mild deception. In Rugby Union terms we talk about selling the dummy or getting an opponent to believe that we are about to pass the ball when we aren't. So i throw two treats, one at the top of some stairs, some at the bottom. Both my dogs one a couple of occasions have been in the middle, and try to feint or pretend to be going in the direction that they aren't. You can get this process to also occur in play. 

 Someone's signature somewhere:

Let a man share your fire, and he is warm for a nite; set him afire, and he will be warm for the rest of his life.

Time keeps everything from happening at once.

With three different watches, you have no way to tell time.

Did you hear about the insomniac, agnostic, dyslexic who stayed awake wondering if there really is a Dog?

 Whitehead was all about creativity/curiosity/valuation.  He is famous for saying "It is more important that an idea be interesting than that it be true."

To properly appreciate the richness of Whitehead's cosmology, it will take a Joseph Campbell type thinker that can reframe Whitehead's dense but rich prose into a profound mythological speculation.

FWIW

Trust me, I'm not blowing up. I just took a little digression which threw us off track when the point occurred to me that you don't actually have any evidence that Panskepp is talking about the deepest dynamic, you're making an argument based on logic. No problem. And I couldn't agree more about play and dreaming being synonymous because both are pure examples of the principle of emotional conductivity. In effect I said that several pages ago. Glanced through the article and this statement really jumped out.

"The basic emotional operating schemes may act as “strange attractors” within widespread neural networks that exert a certain type of ‘neurogravitational force’on many ongoing activities" ---- Almost saying attraction as a virtual "force" like gravity.

Trust me, I'm very excited about synthesizing with what Panskepp is saying and I also believe it will reinforce the existence of a deeper mechanism. You'll note the point in the paper how Oxytocin is irrelevant to rats if there aren't other rats to play with: in other words, as triggers of physical memory. 

I love this quote as well: "You cannot tickle yourself!" In my model this is because it takes an external trigger to activate physical memory, the individual does not have autonomous access as one does a mental memory, being the focus of attention triggers physical memory. Thus when someone falls in public, they feel humiliated/embarrassed because they perceive that force (that interrupts the flow) as the memory of being shamed or scolded. 

The only point I want to get to is whether you are clear or unclear that the affective systems Panskepp is talking about are as deep as one can go in regards to plumbing the emotional depths, especially now that we've established that play and dreaming are synonymous? 

Kevin Behan

You'll note the point in the paper how Oxytocin is irrelevant to rats if there aren't other rats to play with: in other words, as triggers of physical memory. 

Kevin Behan

This template can be shown to run through all behavior as in the dog/deer video linked on my site. I've also commented that given fractal mathematics and how it has been shown by Mandlebrot to be expressed everywhere in nature, I'm surprised that modern biology isn't concerned that no such fractal module in behavior has been identified.

Kevin, first up please understand that i am not trying to do anything other than to illuminate and speculate with this post. I am yet again going out on a limb. Mandlebrot showed how what seems to be a simple equation on paper can produce suprisingly complex shapes, and i guess that if we applied it to the right behaviours that it would tend to reinforce my points that much complex behaviour is a combination of very simple behaviours.

This simple equation is suprisingly difficult to understand. Most people have trouble with complex numbers. I used to spend several weeks trying to explain them to quite bright technicians. Much of say complex analysis looks (the basis to some extent of Mandebrot) very simple. It ties many experienced Maths people up in knots. Personally i like it. It is my kind of stuff. The problem with maths is that it says the same thing in many different ways. They are equvalent. An example is that we may choose to look at sine waves with magnitudes and  angles or complex numbers . They are equivalent.

Well how does this relate to behaviour? One of the interesting things about Panksepp is that he has tied Affects to Anatomy. It is no longer speculative for a fair bit of what he says. Now taking my hat off as a trainer and becoming a cynic for a minute, my suspicion is that we may have missed some simple links for some behaviours becuase of data loss. Statistics is a kind of compression,  a way of analysing things that are hard to analyse any other way. I think in this process that we could have lost three things, micro behaviours, time based information, and discarded sequences that might matter a dam. Now getting these behaviours requires intense possibly video analysis, right at the cutting edge o what we have now. The effects of Affects are very quick, and a sequence may produce behaviours that we would miss any other way.

I think that we have to acknowledge the neccessity of Behavourism, that it gave us some great pointers and ideas and was based on quite rigourous statistical analysis. My uneasiness has always been with the experiment design, and the underlying assumptions about body weight and the function of food to name a couple and of course the loss of data.

Skinner himself saw shortcomings. He said to Panksepp "A behavourial account has two unavoidable gaps - between stimulus and response and between reinforcement and a resulting change in behaviour. These gaps can only be filled with the instruements of Neurology"

P12 Panksepp "Affective Neuroscience"

I couldn't agree more, and i think this is where further analysis may be useful.

I think that you should also look at Wolframs book,  A new kind of science.It is populist, he does over extend but he may make some points that you agree with. It is free to download.  If you have questions about this stuff, i am always happy to help, either via a posting or via a PM. It is a genuine offer, as an Applied Scientist i have always spent a lot of time mentoring and educating . It is a kind of duty that comes with the knowledge.

Personally i try like hell to find some gem in what others say. I work hard with much younger engineers trying to sort the great stuff from the waffle, and have got quite good at it. I an struggling with your NDT to a high level of frustration.

 I am SEEKING (AKA, Googling) relationships among Jung, J Campbell, Panksepp (JP), et al on the unconscious/conscious interactions.  This belongs on one of the other two threads I started on dreams and cognition -- I'm just sayin'...

 Kevin will esp love this book excerpt where Panksepp says REM is primitive emotional consciousness that was made secondary as the cortex enlarged and allowed for more rationality.

Poodle should like it, as well (PO, I must read Affective Neuroscience) 

http://books.google.com/books?id=A3MUJJ0Gcu0C&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109&dq=jungian+archetype+%2B+jaak+panksepp&source=bl&ots=qi0XSmkNR6&sig=43w3h5tJNQ_tL6JscuYbHDbgpUw&hl=en&ei=TvNDTarvH4a0lQfQztQ1&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&sqi=2&ved=0CBkQ6AEwAQ

I found the link as I sought some support of my notion that the 7 affective operating systems are defined much as a Jungian would define an archetype (like Kevin's gravitational force).  I once asked a Jungian speaker to give a simple definition of archetypes.  She said they are 'like the channel of a river absent the water.'  The big activity occurs as we see the raging current of flowing water, but the form of this particular behavior is dictated by the river channel as 'affect'.

An Aristotelean would say the raging river is the potential capability of water being actualized by a form, an essence, which in this case would be the river channel.

OK, that's our morning cup 'o Aristotle...I am off to read this other google result that popped up with the one above.

http://www.thinkbody.co.uk/books/about-a-body.html#top

 I almost forgot, it also occurs to me that the hero archetype of J Campbell is also the SEEKING affect...

Addendum

Wow, I finished the link above.  I love synthesis across disciplines, especially when they confirm my synthetic hunches (I am quite prone to synthesis).

This article was GREAT.  It even meshed in Whitehead by way of discussing 'process oriented psychotherapy' as one of many body psychotherapies.

Exciting discoveries.

I like where you're going with the archetypes, I admire what Jung has to say. 

Two quick points about seeking; it is always preceded by the collapse of a previous state of (attraction) or fill in one's own blank if preferred. And it is always satisfied by the brain-to-gut connection at one of its infinite levels of elaboration, as in hunger-->mother's milk, or sexual: i.e. "eye candy" or intellectual: a book that one can "sink teeth into."

Note that Horowitz in "Inside A Dog" used high speed cameras to record interactions and this didn't really add much to the existing models. Whereas subtract human thoughts from dynamic and one can parse apart the interplay according to principle of emotional conductivity, one dog absorbs, one dog projects, flipping of these roles thereby recapitulating the "weightlessness" of "dream time" what we call play, and then this continues to elaborate into complex, time deferred cooperative behaviors and social structure.   

Kevin Behan

And it is always satisfied by the brain-to-gut connection at one of its infinite levels of elaboration, as in hunger-->mother's milk, or sexual: i.e. "eye candy" or intellectual: a book that one can "sink teeth into."

Note that Horowitz in "Inside A Dog" used high speed cameras to record interactions and this didn't really add much to the existing models. Whereas subtract human thoughts from dynamic and one can parse apart the interplay according to principle of emotional conductivity, one dog absorbs, one dog projects, flipping of these roles thereby recapitulating the "weightlessness" of "dream time" what we call play, and then this continues to elaborate into complex, time deferred cooperative behaviors and social structure.   

This would all be wonderful Kevin if you could provide some evidence, or write it in a way that is not definite. Otherwise it is just words over the ether.

I'm technologically challenged but I've taken to carrying a "flip camera" so that I can record interactions and theoretically download onto my computer and then theoretically upload onto my web site, and then I'll theoretically try to accompany with schematics if I can get the tablet software to cooperate. So then I'll be able to point to precisely what I'm talking about. 

 That would be a good start.. then after that you can learn to test several theories out and not to get too invested in any one theory.. They have a habit of changing with our increased knowledge base. One of the things you learn in any science is to drop theories (even if they are your own) in the face of evidence that suggests that this theory is wrong.

. I find the flip camera quite helpful for preparing my dogs for trialling, i can see very clearly what i am doing wrong. Notice "what i am doing". Just poor communication most often. I also like to check what i think my dog's emotional state is. Not interested in trialling an unhappy dog.

I don't like tablets a whole lot and prefer a full on lap top. Just a personal thing.