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

Sat May 9 23:26:07 EDT 2020

This idea that motivation and intentional terms are descriptive, not explanatory, comes and goes in the 20th century: 

Biologists for a while were prepared to say a turtle came ashore and laid its eggs , but refused to say that it came ashore to lay its eggs. These verbal scruples were intended as a rejection of teleology but were based on the mistaken view that the efficiency of final causes is necessarily implied the simple description of an  end-directed   mechanism ....The biologist's  long-standing  confusion  would  be more fully removed if  all  end-directed  systems  were  described  by  some  other term,  like  "telconomic ,"  in  order  to  emphasize  that  the  recognition  and  description of end-directedness does not carry a commitment lo Aristotelian teleology as an efficient causal principle. (Pittendrigh, 1958, pp. 393-394)

Similarly, from another of the new realists, Albert Hofstadter:

Let us therefore turn to that context in which we do identify actions as teleological and ask what those traits are. All of us in fact make such identifications in the context of social action. The politician and the prizefighter, the military strategist and the chess-player, the business man and the teacher--you cannot name a social actor who does not, in the pursuit of his calling, find it necessary to estimate the objectively purposeful character of others' actions in order to adjust himself thereto. There is, then, no initial difficulty in locating objective teleological processes in the rough. The problem is, what common traits do these actions exhibit? In particular, where in these actions do we find objectively purposeful character? And the answer is, we never find an objective purpose by itself, but always in association with a certain "sensitivity to conditions" and a fund of "operative techniques" possessed by the actor. To seek for objective purpose alone, without reference to these two factors, is to embark upon an impossible quest. A purposeful action is directed to its end always in a concrete set of circumstances and along paths of connection between antecedents and consequences. Differences between purposive actions rest not only upon differences of ends, but also upon the range and depth of the circumstances or conditions which enter effectively as well as upon the scope of the connections of antecedents and consequences actually operative. Hofstadter, 1941

These and many other examples are cited in this paper <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/302329059_The_Misappropriation_of_Teleonomy> .

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Saturday, May 9, 2020 7:17 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Movement vs. Behavior, and what's in the Black Box

Ok, so it sounds like we agree there is a distinction can be made between behavior and "mere movement". So what is that difference? I would argue, following E. B. Holt, that it is the presence of intentionality. Note crucially that the directedness of the behavior described below is descriptive, not explanatory. The intention is not a force behind the behavior, it is a property of the behavior-to-circumstance mapping that can be demonstrated by varying conditions appropriately. 

For simplicity I will take a hypothetical, but strictly possible, case. A small water-animal has an eye-spot located on each side of its anterior end; each spot is connected by a nerve with a vibratory silium or fin on the opposite side of the posterior end; the thrust exerted by each fin is toward the rear. If, now, light strikes one eye, say the right, the left fin is set in motion and the animal's body is set rotating toward the right like a rowboat with one oar. This is all that one such reflex arc could do f or the animal. Since, however, there are now two, when the animal comes to be turned far enough toward the right so that some of the light strikes the second eye-spot (as will happen when the animal comes around facing the light), the second fin, on the right side, is set in motion, and the two together propel the animal forward in a straight line. The direction of this line will be that in which the animal lies when its two eyes receive equal amounts of light. In other words, by the combined operation of two reflexes the animal swims toward the light, while either reflex alone would only have set it spinning like a top. It now responds specifically in the direction of the light, whereas before it merely spun when lashed. 

As thus described, this first dawn of behavior seems to present nothing so very novel... The animal, it is true, is still merely ' lashed' into swimming toward the light. Suppose, now, that it possesses a third reflex arc—a ' heat-spot' so connected with the same or other fins that when stimulated by a certain intensity of heat it initiates a nervous impulse which stops the forward propulsion. The animal is still * lashed,' but nevertheless no light can force it to swim " blindly to its death " by scalding. It has the rudiments of ' intelligence.' But so it had before. For as soon as two reflex arcs capacitate it mechanically to swim toward light, it was no longer exactly like a pinwheel: it could respond specifically toward at least one thing in its environment. 

It is this objective reference of a process of release that is significant. The mere reflex does not refer to anything beyond itself: if it drives an organism in a certain direction, it is only as a rocket ignited at random shoots off in some direction, depending on how it happened to lie. But specific response is not merely in some random direction, it is toward an object, and if this object is moved, the responding organism changes its direction and still moves after it. And the objective reference is that the organism is moving with reference to some object or fact of the environment. In the pistol or the skyrocket the process released depends wholly on factors internal to the mechanism released; in the behaving organism the process depends partly on factors external to the mechanism. This is a difference of prime significance, for in the first case, if you wish to understand all about what the rocket is doing, you have only to look inside the rocket, at the powder exploding there, the size and shape of the compartment in which it is exploding, etc.; whereas, in order to understand what the organism is doing, you will just miss the essential point if you look inside the organism. For the organism, while a very interesting mechanism in itself, is one whose movements tum on objects outside of itself... and these external, and sometimes very distant, objects are as much constituents of the behavior process as is the organism which does the turning. ....

This thing, in its essential definition, is a course of action which the living body executes or is prepared to execute with regard to some object or some fact of its environment. From this form of statement it becomes clear, I think, that not only is this the very thing which we are generally most interested to discover about the lower animals— what they are doing or what they are going to do— but also that it is the most significant thing about human beings, ourselves not excepted. " Ye shall know them by their fruits," and not infrequently it is by one's own fruits that one comes to know oneself. It is true that the term ' wish' is rather calculated to emphasize the distinction between a course of action actually carried out and one that is only entertained ' in thought.' But this distinction is really secondary. The essential thing for both animal behavior and Freud's psychology is the course of action, the purpose with regard to environment, whether or not the action is overtly carried out. (Holt, 1915, p. 52-57)

P.S. I'm going to try to ignore the celery challenge, because while we recognize plants as living, we do not typically talk about them as behaving. And I think the broad issue of living vs. not-living is a different issue. We probably should talk about plants behaving a bit more than we normally do, but I think it is worth getting a handle on what we mean in the more normal seeming cases before we try to look for implications like those. 

-----------

Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist

American University - Adjunct Instructor

On Wed, May 6, 2020 at 9:01 AM uǝlƃ ☣ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:

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.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ

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