[FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

[uǝlƃ ☣]

While lying in bed this morning, waiting patiently for the alarm to go off, moving nothing but whatever autonomous functions are required to keep me alive, I *struggled* to find a biological example of behavior that doesn't involve movement. The best I could come up with was the change in color you see if you water a (clipped) flower with colored water (or a fresh clipping of celery).

This is also "movement", but of a clearly different scale, one we normally wouldn't call "movement". My analogous example was (as hinted by Marcus's suggestion that we put our cell phone next to some speakers or by my mention of TEMPEST) is an antenna. Antennas *behave* like inductors, an EM wave hits them and induces a current ... again, it's movement, but as Dave points out, not what we talk about in the context of dogs or ducks. Examples like EEGs don't inspire me because they imply a *purposeful*, intentional measurement device. The cell phone speaker and TEMPEST examples of movement are interesting because the former is annoying (unintentional consequences) and the latter is *adversarial*, with white, black, and red hats.

So, what distinguishes the still *alive* piece of celery in the food colored water versus the antenna reactively responding to EM waves in the air? These are all "behavior". But as EricS points out, that word isn't explanatory absent the entire lexicon/ontology it *tugs* at ... like gently pulling on one strand of a spider web and seeing the whole mesh deform.

On 5/5/20 8:20 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
> Perhaps even /just/ his gut fauna.
> Is it that we define behavior so that we can distinguish it from
> /just/ moving? I could be ok with that as a starting point.


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☣ uǝlƃ