[FRIAM] do animals psychologize?
Nick Thompson
nickthompson at earthlink.net
Wed Sep 19 16:49:34 EDT 2018
You want to make novel cats, right?
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: Wednesday, September 19, 2018 4:44 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?
If I cared about skinning the psychological cat. I'm more interested in what could be implemented with the hardware than what happens to be.
On 9/19/18, 2:41 PM, "Friam on behalf of Nick Thompson" <friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:
Marcus,
But doesn't psychology supervene upon physiology. I.e., aren't there an infinite number of ways to physiologically skin the psychological cat?
Nick
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 3:23 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?
I wasn't making a hypothesis about type, I was making one about degree -- that unless a computing system has some number of functional units and a certain degree of connection between those functional units, some representations and calculations on those representations won't be practical. A predator may (in effect) have very high-speed square root operations as it relates to predatory pursuit motor skills, but no abstract representation of what a number is. The particular behaviors of individual functional units seem to be what you are calling physiology. I'm speculating that if one has a reasonable model of the functional units, then one can build artificial neural systems from that component model, and from those, estimate what different species could calculate. Can a certain neural net of some size learn an arbitrary distribution of some dimensionality?
On 9/17/18, 1:01 PM, "Friam on behalf of Nick Thompson" <friam-bounces at redfish.com on behalf of nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:
Marcus,
I have never understood how it comes to be that people answer a psychological question with a physiological answer. I, of course, share your belief that all psychological functions are physiologically (or electronically) mediated. Still, for instance, it would seem odd to me, if I asked a person if an animal can calculate the square root of three, for that person to answer, "That animal does not have the sort of brain that can calculate the square root of three". The natural course of argument would seem for me for the person to answer the question about the calculation activities of the animal and THEN go on, perhaps, to explain that answer in terms of the physiological limitations of the animal's brain.
We once had a famously smart cat. One day we were watching TV and a cat came on. Our cat roused itself from dosing on the rug, went over and looked behind the tv, came back to the rug, looked at the TV, looked at us disgustedly, and lay down on the rug with its back to the TV. It never roused to a cat on the TV again. No cat would be dumb enough to be fooled by pornography. I don't know what that proves about the question at hand, but I love cat stories.
Nick
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 1:53 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] do animals psychologize?
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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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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