How do animals form categories?

[coberst]

Otto Rank has concluded, I think, that what others have called ego is what he would call will.

 

Quickie from Wiki:

No one has expressed the conflict between the will to separate and the will to unite better than Ernest Becker (1973), whose award-winning The Denial of Death captured the largest—macrocosmic—meaning of separation and union for Rank: "On the one hand the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic forces, to merge himself with the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart" (Becker, 1973, pp. 151-152). "You can see that man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can't stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can't allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof ..." (ibid., p. 155).

 

On a microcosmic level, however, the life-long oscillation between the two "poles of fear" can be made more bearable, according to Rank, in a relationship with another person who accepts one's uniqueness and difference, and allows for the emergence of the creative impulse—without too much guilt or anxiety for separating from the other. Living fully requires "seeking at once isolation and union" (Rank, 1932/1989, p. 86), finding the courage to accept both simultaneously, without succumbing to the Angst that leads a person to be whipsawed from one pole to the other. Creative solutions for living emerge out of the fluctuating, ever-expanding and ever-contracting, space between separation and union. Art and the creative impulse, said Rank in Art and Artist, "originate solely in the constructive harmonization of this fundamental dualism of all life" (1932/1989, p. xxii).

 

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Ego says, HOLD IT, TIME OUT!

 

The ego is our command center; it is the “internal gyroscope” and creator of time for the human. It controls the individual; especially it controls individual’s response to the external environment. It keeps the individual independent from the environment by giving the individual time to think before acting. It is the device that other animal do not have and thus they instinctively respond immediately to the world.

 

The id is our animal self. It is the human without the ego control center. The id is reactive life and the ego changes that reactive life into delayed thoughtful life. The ego is also the timer that provides us with a sense of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. By doing so it makes us into philosophical beings conscious of our self as being separate from the ‘other’ and placed in a river of time with a terminal point—death. This time creation allows us to become creatures responding to symbolic reality that we alone create.

 

As a result of the id there is a “me” to which everything has a focus of being. The most important job the ego has is to control anxiety that paradoxically the ego has created. With a sense of time there comes a sense of termination and with this sense of death comes anxiety that the ego embraces and gives the “me” time to consider how not to have to encounter anxiety.

 

Evidence indicates that there is an “intrinsic symbolic process” is some primates. Such animals may be able to create in memory other events that are not presently going on. “But intrinsic symbolization is not enough. In order to become a social act, the symbol must be joined to some extrinsic mode; there must exist an external graphic mode to convey what the individual has to express…but it also shows how separate are the worlds we live in, unless we join our inner apprehensions to those of others by means of socially agreed symbols.”

 

“What they needed for a true ego was a symbolic rallying point, a personal and social symbol—an “I”, in order to thoroughly unjumble himself from his world the animal must have a precise designation of himself. The “I”, in a word, has to take shape linguistically…the self (or ego) is largely a verbal edifice…The ego thus builds up a world in which it can act with equanimity, largely by naming names.” The primate may have a brain large enough for “me” but it must go a step further that requires linguistic ability that permits an “I” that can develop controlled symbols with “which to put some distance between him and immediate internal and external experience.”

 

I conclude from this that many primates have the brain that is large enough to be human but in the process of evolution the biological apparatus that makes speech possible was the catalyst that led to the modern human species. The ability to emit more sophisticated sounds was the stepping stone to the evolution of wo/man. This ability to control the vocal sounds promoted the development of the human brain.

 

Ideas and quotes from “Birth and Death of Meaning”—Ernest Becker

[Kriminal99]

@Kriminal99: "Without the ability to construct a formal model of free will, I am forced to conclude there is no such thing." I'd rather sa you'd be forced to conclude that "there is/you don't know of any way to construct a formal model, and that's about it. don't get me wrong, i like your way of thinking, at least as i see it in your replied to coberst, it's just that in this particular case i think you jumped at a bit too far-fetched a conclusion.

 

I disagree. All evidence is in direct contradiction to the idea of free will. I know that some people believe in free will. I know reasons why a human being would want to believe in such a thing, and pitfalls of reason they might fall into that would make them feel like they are justified in such a belief.

 

But most importantly when I ask these agents of the opposing belief questions that would allow me to construct a formal model of their idea using their reasoning they can give me nothing. Their claims are self-contradicting in less than obvious manner, contain weak inductive reasoning that cannot be used to create such a formal model, or they simply resort to violating the implied rules of debate. Thus I am forced to conclude that free will does not exist. If it existed, someone, somewhere would likely be able to explain it better, and then that explanation would spread and become popular. Even if not, without such an explanation I have no choice but to resume what I would otherwise believe given the evidence.

 

This is as close to knowledge as a person can get, given the limits of induction (skepticism in philosophy, assumptions of random sampling from the population in probability theory etc)

[Kriminal99]

@ Coberst

 

If you are familiar with the ability of different belief sets to realize some of the same truths while having some different constraints (and thus different degrees of complete accuracy) and labels, then you might understand what I mean when I say I feel that the things you are talking about are better represented by other models.

 

However I understand and agree with much of what you have said - with the exception that I do not believe we can rule out the capacity for complex symbolic communication between animals completely. You may have heard claims before about the large percent of communication that consists of interpretation of non-verbal cues. IMO To understand this process in depth is to understand that there is no clear line between what you might consider simple communication and creating an external symbolic language.

 

Obviously a dog has an ability to make a limited range of sounds. Perhaps a dog growling is a symbol for "hey get away from my stuff", and this is not a particularly complex interaction. But thinking about nonverbal communication between people, the context often goes far in defining a simple gesture. If already intelligent people were restricted to such a narrow range of sound making, I would expect them to be capable of communicating quite a lot... Quite a lot of ideas that their more complex interaction has already afforded them.

 

I bring this up because it is my belief that animals are not truly physically limited from advanced communication. I believe it would just require more work for them, and they see no reason to do it. I think that when humans developed this ability, they at first did not consciously want to communicate with one another in depth. I think they just developed a greater sort of expressive contrast when dealing with things going on around them, and others learned to interpret these different levels of expressiveness, and began to be surprised at some of the things that were being expressed by others, and this began the process of building intelligence. Or maybe the contrast remained the same, but their interpretive abilities increased as they evolved mechanisms that helped them better avoid threats.

 

I think that if animals had a sort of belief that there is no point in such communication it would not be entirely wrong. Of course they have no knowledge that coordination and technology could provide them greater comfort in the long run. But as far as using such tools to trigger emotions and responses from each other, I feel a judgment call is made independently by all parties that this is not a productive use of time. Such emotions are triggered by events in the real world, of which for animals, there is no short supply. Why resort to such artificial triggering of emotions under such conditions?

 

I also draw a parallel between people of lower intelligence and these ideas. I feel some people do not care about intellectual matters because they see no immediate reason to be concerned with them. It is of the utmost importance to me to identify and collect those sort of paradigm shifting realizations that cause such people to suddenly begin to care about more abstract (but yet still formal) ideas. I ambitiously hypothesize that if society as a whole adopted this process as part of teaching, we might see a large increase in the flynn effect (increased intelligence over generations). I feel that society currently focuses more on the long term benefits of adapting more intelligent behaviors when trying to motivate intelligence, and that such efforts are simply ignored. These long term benefits can only be understood a long time after taking the first steps.

 

I do not agree that the metaphor in general holds a particularly strong place in this process. Yes there are symbols involved, and symbols are metaphors, but I feel these symbols are only supposed to be used as a bridge between 2 formal models. Or rather a bridge between two intrinsic symbolic creations in your language. Without this functionality, I feel the extrinsic symbols have no value and in fact may be damaging in the sense that focusing on them alone takes time away from the creation of survivability (or efficiency in less intense circumstances) increasing intrinsic symbolic models.

[coberst]

Kriminal

 

 

 

Metaphorically thinking

 

We commonly think of metaphor as something like analogy. We are trying to explain something to someone and we say this something new is very much like this other something you are familiar with.

 

This is one form of metaphor but there is another metaphor that is automatic and unconscious. The child playing with objects has an experience of collecting objects in a pile. This experience results in a neurological network that we might identify as grouping. This neurological structure that contains some sort of logic related to this activity serves as a primary metaphor.

 

The child has various experiences resulting from playing with objects. These experiences result in mental spaces with neural structures that contain the logic resulting from the experience. When the child then begins to count perhaps on her fingers these mental spaces containing the experiences automatically map to a new mental space and become the logic and inference patterns to make it possible for the child to count because counting contains similar operations.

 

Primary metaphors are the contents of mental spaces developed in experience and the contents then pass to another mental space to become the bases for a new concept. The contents of space A is mapped to space B to then be the foundation for the new concept at space B. This mapping is automatic and unconscious.

 

Many years ago, before ‘self-service’, it was common to pull into a gas station and when the attendant came to the car the motorist would say “Fillerup”.

 

“More is up” is a common metaphor. I think of it every time I pour milk into a measuring cup when baking cornbread. The subjective judgment is quantity, the sensorimotor domain is vertical orientation, and the primary experience is the rise and fall of vertical levels as fluid is added or subtracted and objects are piled on top of or removed from a collection.

 

We can see (know is see) by this mechanism that we equate vertical motion in the spatial domain with quantity; we use the vertical domain to reason about quantity. We have a vast experience in vertical space domain reasoning and thus we derive this great experience to help us in reasoning about quantity; no doubt a very useful thing when first learning arithmetic. Teachers of mathematics, I suspect, depend upon this storehouse of knowledge to make abstract mathematical reasoning for children more comprehensible.

 

In a metaphor the source domain, ‘up’, is mapped onto the target domain ‘more’. The neural structure of the sensorimotor domain, the primary metaphor, is mapped onto the subjective domain ‘more’. Reasoning about the vertical motion in the spatial domain is mapped onto reasoning about the quantity domain. This is a one-way movement; reasoning about quantity is not mapped onto spatial domain reasoning. The direction of inference indicates which the source is and which the target domain is.

 

Physical experiences of all kinds lead to conceptual metaphors from which perhaps hundreds of ‘primary metaphors’, which are neural structures resulting from sensorimotor experiences, are created. These primary metaphors provide the ‘seed bed’ for the judgments and subjective experiences in life. “Conceptual metaphor is pervasive in both thought and language. It is hard to think of a common subjective experience that is not conventionally conceptualized in terms of metaphor.”

 

Cognitive science informs us that “Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical”. Can you think of an abstract concept that can be described without metaphor?

 

Quotes from Philosophy in the Flesh—Lakoff and Johnson

[gyll]

@kriminal

"I disagree. All evidence is in direct contradiction to the idea of free will."

I don't have a problem with that. When i said "you jumped too far" i didn't "accuse" your conclusion, but rather the jump itself, the argument for the jump is not standing (and you repeat the same sort of mistake when you say "I am forced to conclude that free will does not exist. If it existed, someone, somewhere would likely be able to explain it better, and then that explanation would spread and become popular. Even if not, without such an explanation I have no choice but to resume what I would otherwise believe given the evidence."). Your conclusion w/r to whether there is free will or not is not even of any interest to me (not to mention that there is no definition for "free will" beyond the circular "what someone wants", it's just being used as-is in sentences).

 

Again, i sort of like the way you think, it's just that you seem to me too impulsive, too opaque to points of view that either are not yours or are somehow in contradiction with your views. I think you should try to be a bit more open-minded with people that clearly demonstrate a great insight (like coberst), that's all.

[gyll]

@kriminal

As for your reply to coberst, "To understand this process in depth is to understand that there is no clear line between what you might consider simple communication and creating an external symbolic language".

I think you're wrong here: there is a rather clear distinction i'd say, and the distinction is called "grammar". Being able to bark is being able to communicate an isolated symbol, even if it's a symbol with a potentially very complex meaning, while the ability to send a "complex message" resides in the capability to use grammar in order to serialize the complexity of a particular set of interconnected concepts that you want to transmit. In brief, the complexity of a message stems from the complexity of grammar.

[gyll]

@coberst: "“More is up” is a common metaphor. I think of it every time I pour milk into a measuring cup when baking cornbread. The subjective judgment is quantity, the sensorimotor domain is vertical orientation, and the primary experience is the rise and fall of vertical levels as fluid is added or subtracted and objects are piled on top of or removed from a collection."

 

Actually there was an interesting study on this:

"Even basic aspects of time perception can be affected by language. For example, English speakers prefer to talk about duration in terms of length (e.g., "That was a short talk," "The meeting didn't take long"), while Spanish and Greek speakers prefer to talk about time in terms of amount, relying more on words like "much" "big", and "little" rather than "short" and "long" Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)"

[full article on edge: Edge: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? By Lera Boroditsky ]

[Kriminal99]

@kriminal

As for your reply to coberst, "To understand this process in depth is to understand that there is no clear line between what you might consider simple communication and creating an external symbolic language".

I think you're wrong here: there is a rather clear distinction i'd say, and the distinction is called "grammar". Being able to bark is being able to communicate an isolated symbol, even if it's a symbol with a potentially very complex meaning, while the ability to send a "complex message" resides in the capability to use grammar in order to serialize the complexity of a particular set of interconnected concepts that you want to transmit. In brief, the complexity of a message stems from the complexity of grammar.

 

Well the expressive power of a dog bark is huge. He can use morse code to replicate any language. He can alter his tone, the frequency with which he barks. He can use the context to do most of the communication.