[FRIAM] do animals psychologize?

[Marcus Daniels]

I would say this relates to the reality (or not) of first-world problems.   Humans that thrive in the first world must form (or be educated to acquire) higher-order representations.    Psychologizing is one process that leads to higher-order representations.    In an artificial deep neural network, the neurons in the higher layers represent more and more abstract interpretations of inputs that have be presented, but it can take hundreds of thousands of neurons and dozens of layers.  

One might imagine pets that have fewer neurons and less connectivity amongst neurons could still develop higher-level representations provided that these adaptations did not interfere with other essential information processing functions -- keeping in mind the most important function for a pet is probably anticipating the meaning of human signals.  

Anyway, we'll make great pets. 

Marcus

On 9/17/18, 11:30 AM, "Friam on behalf of Nick Thompson" <friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:

    Yes, Glen and Marcus.  Very interesting. 
    
    But, "Do animals psychologize?" 
    
    N
    
    Nicholas S. Thompson
    Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
    Clark University
    http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
    
    -----Original Message-----
    From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
    Sent: Monday, September 17, 2018 10:57 AM
    To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
    Subject: Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?
    
     Glen writes:
      
    "Even in your example, we might notice that even though there are N licenses
    doled out, the deer population continues to rise.  It would be
    over-intervention to simply issue more licenses. Perhaps the people getting
    the licenses are mostly an aging population who don't hunt much anymore but
    have some semi-automated approach to getting a license?"
    
    A population estimation input comes from tagging stations relative to issued
    licenses by category of deer, so they can & do close-the-loop by way of
    enforcement.  
    The population estimation techniques require some assumptions, of course.   
    
    Marcus 
    
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