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#Post#: 366--------------------------------------------------
Intelligence
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: November 16, 2013, 9:32 pm
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The Nature Institute
In Context #1 (Spring, 1999, pp. 16-19); copyright 1999 by The
Nature Institute
Programming the Universe: Are Animals Robots?
Stephen L. Talbott
Artificial intelligence researchers are fond of creating little
robots that scurry around on the floor and possess - or will
soon possess, so we are assured—the wit of an insect. The
assumption, often made explicit, is that with each technical
advance the intelligence of these devices will ascend another
step of the evolutionary ladder, finally approaching the mental
cleverness and versatility of man.
But this gets things exactly backward. The truth of the matter
is that it is much easier to program human intelligence—or, at
least, certain aspects of it—than to program anything at all of
an insect's intelligence. After all, we're the ones who have
invented computers. Clearly we can learn to pattern our thinking
in step with the mechanisms of a computer; we do this every time
we write a program—and therefore the computer so programmed is
patterned after our thinking. The execution of a computer
program must reproduce our thinking in some sense. But it's
quite a different matter with the beetle, who is presumably a
long way from being able to hire on as a software engineer.
What artificial intelligence researchers like about insects is
their supposedly simple, rule-based intelligence. This is odd,
however, since it is the human being, not the insect, who has
gained the ability to think in a rule-driven manner. We are the
ones who not only speak, but derive syntactic rules of
speech—and then admonish our children to "obey the rules". We
are the ones who not only analyze our experience, but tease out
of our analytic activity the logic of analysis. We alone
formulate volumes of legal code, rules of etiquette, protocols
of office, organizational procedures, New Year's resolutions.
"But even if the insect doesn't consciously formulate the
relatively simple rules of its behavior, isn't it obvious that
it obeys rules?" No, it's not. Here several things need saying.
The Commonsensical Beetle
In the first place, no one would be so foolish as to claim that
an insect obeys rules in any literal sense. Certainly there is
no conscious obedience going on, nor even a conscious
apprehension of rules. At most one might say that the insect has
rules of behavior somehow "built in" to it, which it must
follow.
But this, too, is a misrepresentation. Yes, an insect often
displays a kind of rigidity in its behavior, and, yes, when we
apply our narrowly focused, abstracting intellects to this
behavior, we may all too easily reduce it to rules of thumb.
Rules of thumb, however, are not the behavior they summarize and
reduce, nor do they adequately describe the behavior. We learned
this during the early days of artificial intelligence work, when
researchers confidently applied the same reduction to human
intelligence. Only slowly did they realize that our common
sense—which lies at the opposite pole from the more highly
conscious activity whereby we explicitly formulate and obey
rules—was hopelessly beyond any imaginable collection of rules.
There is every reason to think that this must hold true all the
more for the intelligence of the insect, which surely lies even
further toward the "organic" and implicit end of the spectrum
than does our own common sense. Only the abstract, rule-bound
activity of our intellects allows us to think otherwise. We see
the fly expending the last energies of its life banging its head
against a window pane, and we think, "What a simple-minded
program it is following!"
Do Reflexes Exist?
But the fly was not made for a world of window panes. Its powers
of adaptation are extremely limited. A lack of adaptability to a
wholly alien world, however, is not the same as
simple-mindedness or rule-mindedness. Within its own, infinitely
complex and ever-changing world, the fly demonstrates an
intelligence that in many respects is more subtle and
efficacious than our own.
Even the behavior at the window pane would reveal endless
subtleties if we were to observe it carefully enough: how does
it vary with different light and reflective conditions,
different temperature conditions, time of day, the presence of
other insects or spider webs, different chemical gradients in
the air, and so on? The simple-mindedness of its "rules" is
really the simple-mindedness of our observation.
All this was put into clear relief by Kurt Goldstein in his
several-decades-old and decisively important book, The Organism
(recently reprinted with a foreword by Oliver Sacks). A
neurologist, Goldstein looked at the various ways we analyze
organisms into rule-based, mechanical parts and then try to
reconstruct the whole from these parts.
It never works. He assesses the idea of the "reflex" in animals
and shows in exhaustive detail that the "simple-minded" reflex
mechanisms we so easily imagine actually don't exist.
For example, slight changes in the intensity of a stimulus can
often reverse :o a reflex; a reflex in one part of a body can
be altered by the position of other parts; an organism's
exposure to certain chemicals such as strychnine can reverse a
reflex; other chemicals can completely change the nature of a
reflex (a decerebrated cat will immediately swallow any water
placed on its pharynx, but will produce wiping movements of the
tongue instead if there is a little alcohol in the water);
fatigue can have the same effect; consciously trying to repress
a reflex can accentuate it (try it with your "knee-jerk"
reflex); and so on without end.
[b/Goldstein showed that the reflex is an artifact of our own
stance as researchers, whereby we conceptually and
experimentally isolate one part of an organism, cutting the part
off from its whole.
HTML http://www.pic4ever.com/images/128fs318181.gif
[/b]Moreover, he finds that higher organisms, including human
beings, are much more likely to show approximations of reflexes,
because it is we who can allow parts of ourselves to become
isolated and de-centered. (That's what many procedures of
medical assessment are all about.)
Human beings are able, by assuming a special attitude, to
surrender single parts of their organism to the environment for
isolated reaction. Usually, this is the condition under which we
examine a patient's "reflexes"....But [regarding the pupillary
reflex] it certainly is not true that the same light intensity
will produce the same contraction when it affects the organ in
isolation (as in the reflex examination) and when it acts on the
eye of the person who deliberately regards an object....one only
needs to contrast the pupillary reaction of a man looking
interestedly at a brightly illuminated object with the reaction
of an eye that has been exposed "in isolation" to the same light
intensity. The difference in pupillary reaction is immediately
manifest. (Goldstein, 1995, p. 144)
"I Am the World"
If we would approach the intelligence of the insect in its own
terms, without imposing our artificial requirements on it, then
the fly on the window pane usefully reminds us that the insect
is inseparable from its environment. The naturalist E. L. Grant
Watson speaks of this when describing a newly emerged mason-bee
taking flight for the first time and alighting on some chance
object. It has no experience of the world as yet; how will it
find its way?
I ask it: "What do you know, young bee, of the world and the
universe?" It answers: "I am the universe." (Watson, 1995, pp.
142-43)
Our temptation is to take this as poetic shorthand for "the bee
comes equipped with a set of built-in rules that prepare it for
what it will meet in its normal environment." As we have seen,
this is a highly problematic view.
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What are the
alternatives?
One alternative is to take Watson's remark at face value. The
bee is a whole, integrated within a larger whole; its
intelligence is at the same time an expression of the world's
intelligence. What it meets in the world is not something
foreign, but itself.
Such statements will doubtless offend conventional scientific
sensibilities.
HTML http://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-141113185047.png<br
/>And yet we are driven to them as soon as we try to understand
conscious intelligence, whether an insect's dull and "sleeping"
intelligence or our own focused and self-aware intelligence. You
cannot speak of the unity or coherence of any activities of
consciousness—in fact, you cannot speak of consciousness at
all—without speaking of qualities. Take any state of your own
consciousness and subtract all its qualities, and you will have
nothing conscious left. Without the qualitative experience of,
say, a tree, you won't even have anything from which to abstract
quantities.
Now, the peculiar thing about qualities is their double nature.
They are "in here"—part of the interior of the self (which is
why science has shied away from them). But they are also "out
there" in the world we share. That is, once you have discounted
hallucinations and other purely subjective contents, you are
left with the phenomenal world we hold in common. It remains
qualitative through and through. Only our habits of abstraction,
and our willingness to mistake abstract residues for the reality
they came from, could convince us otherwise.
Qualities that are both in here and out there raise the question
whether the task of programming a beetle's
consciousness—programming the qualitative texture of its
experience—is also a task of programming its environment. It may
be less true to think of the beetle as a centered, executive
agent responding by-the-rule to stimuli from the world than to
think of the world gathering itself (in all its qualitative
beetleness) to a focus in the insect.
That focus may be diffuse, perhaps vaguely analogous to the soft
focus of our dreams. In the human being, on the other hand, the
gathering of interior light has become intense and sharply
defined, finally igniting a flame within us, so that we, unlike
the beetle, can throw light back upon the world. We can
understand and bring ever new things to pass. It is not only
that the world gathers and expresses itself in us; we express
ourselves through the world.
What Is It Like to Be a Program? (Not Much)
So the spectrum of conscious intelligence, running from "simple"
organism to complex, can be seen to reflect a shifting balance
between a diffuse, world-intelligence raying into the organism
from without, and a bright, focused intelligence partly raying
back out into the world. This is a very different matter from
seeing the spectrum as reflecting an ever more complex
assemblage of rules.
What makes the latter view possible is the abandonment of the
attempt to understand conscious intelligence altogether.
It is replaced by the search for mechanisms that can more or
less approximately reproduce particular behaviors. And with this
narrow, isolating focus come the pathologies of understanding
that Goldstein documents so devastatingly. Once you have
abandoned the only ground upon which unities and wholes can be
recognized—and that ground is irreducibly qualitative—you will
inevitably find separate, well-defined mechanisms where there
are none—creating them if necessary. And you will no longer care
very much for the kind of qualitative observation that alone can
show you the limitations of your viewpoint.
It's no surprise, then, that the abiding problem at the center
of all efforts to create artificial intelligence remains as
untouched today as it was forty years ago: how do we program the
qualitative texture and content of consciousness? How, that is,
do we program a consciousness as experienced "from the inside"
(and, of course, the experience of things from the inside is
what consciousness is.)
Is any organism ever precisely bound by rules in the strict,
computational sense?
HTML http://www.freesmileys.org/emoticons/tuzki-bunnys/tuzki-bunny-emoticon-026.gif<br
/> It would be a healthy thing if those attempting to program
animal behavior and intelligence would attempt to answer this
question through direct observation of animals in their natural
habitat. What I think they would find, if they were good
observers, is that their rules became ever more compromised,
more qualitative, more artistic in form as the range of their
observation expanded, until finally they realized that they were
striving to experience the inner being of the animal, its
meaning or expressive unity, more than a set of rules.
It was long ago pointed out (by Thomas Nagel, 1980) that
artificial intelligence researchers have not been able to
approach the qualitative side of consciousness. They have not
satisfactorily answered the question, "What is it like to be a
bat?" This is sometimes viewed as the "last frontier" of
artificial intelligence. The truth of the matter, I think, is
that it is the entire unsolved and unsolvable problem of
artificial intelligence. In the end, there is no other question
to ask about an organism, except "What is it like to be that
organism?" All the "mechanisms", all the "reflexes" and
"drives"—if we were to explore them fully enough—would be
recognized as nothing more than stranded fragments of the answer
to this question. The organism is a unity, and the only way for
anything to be a unity is for it to be an interior shining
through—integrally expressing itself through—an exterior
(Barfield, 1977).
The interior is given in consciousness, and this consciousness
can, at one extreme, possess the soft focus that is more an
expression of the world than of the "separate" organism. At the
other extreme, it can exhibit the sharp, self-sustaining focus
that enables us—unlike the fly and the beetle—to detach
ourselves from the world and thereby to make both rules and
mistakes. Many of our mistakes, it turns out, have to do with
projecting our own, lately achieved, rule-following
consciousness upon the living dynamic of the world from which we
have detached ourselves.
Stephen L. Talbott is a senior researcher at The Nature
Institute and author of The Future Does Not Compute:
Transcending the Machines in Our Midst.
HTML http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic1/robots.htm
#Post#: 369--------------------------------------------------
Wisdom of the Potter Wasp
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: November 16, 2013, 11:45 pm
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The Nature Institute
In Context #1 (Spring, 1999, p. 18), published by The Nature
Institute
The Obscure Wisdom of the Potter Wasp
E. L. Grant Watson
HTML http://commandpestcontrol.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Potter-Wasp.jpg
What a Paint
job!
HTML http://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-141113185047.png<br
/>
Among the fascinating stories of animal life told by the French
naturalist Henri Fabre is that of the sand wasp Eumenes [usually
referred to as the potter wasp]. The fertilized female builds a
little domed house of sand spicules on some stone or rock
foundation. The foundation ring is traced in minute pebbles. On
this she builds a series of concentric rings, each diminishing
in circumference, so as to enclose a domed space. At the top she
leaves a hole. She then begins collecting certain species of
small caterpillars. She stings these into a partial paralysis,
but does not kill them, for they will be needed as fresh meat
for the young she will never see.
[/img]
HTML http://bugguide.net/images/raw/2R0H6RLHGRRH0R9L0RELFLOZ5RTL0ZOL6RVL4RDL0ZRHMZTLGRSH7RELQZVL4RRHQZQHSZTLSZAL.jpg
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When the wasp has collected either five or ten caterpillars, she
prepares to close the dome, reducing the size of the hole. She
now goes through a complicated process which would seem to
indicate foresight on her part. Yet she has no foresight, only a
highly developed instinct. From her ovipositor she excretes a
juicy substance, working it with her legs into a narrow,
inverted cone. With a thread of the same substance, she stitches
the cone to the top of her domed building. Into the inverted
cone, she lays an egg. She then seals up the hole, leaving the
egg safe within the cone, suspended on a thread. This done, she
goes off and builds another dome to repeat the same cycle of
events.
HTML http://aminus3.s3.amazonaws.com/image/g0016/u00015040/i01096485/635c8465c865fc540338df2f7110db1b_large.jpg
In a short time the egg hatches into a tiny, white grub, so
helpless and delicate that if placed among the still-living
caterpillars on the floor of the dome, it would inevitably be
injured. In its cradle it is safe. When hungry it spins a thin
thread of its own, on which it descends and takes a bite of
caterpillar. If the wriggling caterpillars appear threatening,
it can retreat up the thread, and wait. In this way the grub
spends its infancy; but, as it grows stronger, it risks a final
descent, and devours, at its leisure, the still living food that
mother has so satisfactorily provided.
HTML http://sp2.fotolog.com/photo/34/26/39/treebeard/1244151008047_f.jpg
From the domes that contain five caterpillars male wasps emerge;
from where there are ten caterpillars, the larger female wasps.
This raises an interesting question: Does the amount of food
determine the sex? The mother wasp, who appears throughout her
lifetime as a highly nervous and brilliantly alive creature, has
built just the right sort of houses for the offspring she will
never see; and has provided just the right amount of food. She
is singularly well-adapted for her life; she stings the
caterpillars just enough to keep them quiet, but not enough to
kill them; she packs each dome with the right amount of food for
male or female grub. The suspended cradle protects the tender
infant from the rough reactions of the caterpillars while being
eaten. Everything is in order, and as the emerging sand wasp
dries her wings in the summer sunshine, she must surely feel
that God is in his heaven, and all is well the world. The
caterpillars might harbour different sentiments....
The generally accepted belief is that the sex is already
determined by the arrangement of genes in the fertilized egg. If
this is so, the wasp must be controlled by an infallible guide
within the unconscious working of her body as to the sex of the
egg she will be ready to lay when her dome is completed. Nature
certainly propounds puzzles for any who would suggest premature
answers.
HTML http://natureinstitute.org/pub/ic/ic1/potterwasp.htm
#Post#: 375--------------------------------------------------
Otters and their "tools" Skin Pocket
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: November 17, 2013, 8:31 pm
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HTML http://www.oceanlight.com/stock-photo/enhydra-lutris-california-sea-otter-image-21602-734356.jpg
[I]Enhydra lutris [/I](California Sea Otter
Otters have skin pockets, located under their forearms near the
armpit area, which are used as storage for rocks or for prey
that they have already caught. These pockets allow the otters to
keep their hands free. These sea mammals are one of the few
animals to use tools.
HTML http://www.pic4ever.com/images/8.gif
The
rocks stored in otters' skin pockets are used to crack open the
hard shells of prey such as mollusks or clams. An otter will
float on its back with the rock on its belly, and then crack the
shellfish against the rock to get to the shellfish's insides.
More about sea otters:
•Sea otters spend about eight hours each day hunting for food or
eating, because they must consume roughly one-fourth of their
body weight per day in order to survive.
•Milk from sea otters has an extremely high fat content, at
about 25%. By comparison, whole cow’s milk has a fat content of
4%.
•The sea otter is the only marine animal without blubber to keep
warm, but it does have the thickest fur of any animal. :o
HTML http://www.wisegeek.com/do-otters-have-skin-pockets.htm
#Post#: 376--------------------------------------------------
The Wise, Gentle and Caring Fox
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: November 17, 2013, 8:52 pm
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HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_YZ0ggpYJc&feature=player_embedded
What looks like a dog, purrs like a cat, and has an undeserved
bad reputation?
HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=819Kg9NSkz4&feature=player_embedded
English Fox that is totally wild, but quite friendly as well as
intelligent enough to communicate her desires.
HTML http://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-141113185441.png
#Post#: 432--------------------------------------------------
Bees beat supercomputers at finding the shortest route to non
visited flowers.
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: November 23, 2013, 6:37 pm
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Bees can find the most efficient route between flowers faster
than a supercomputer can.
HTML http://www.pic4ever.com/images/170fs799081.gif
HTML http://kgov.com/files/images/science/honeybee-routes.jpg
Bees navigate by recognizing patterns and symmetry, and although
they have very small brains, they are one of the most efficient
species in terms of navigation, scientists have found. In fact,
research shows that bees are better than even supercomputers at
finding the shortest route between many flowers without visiting
the same flower twice.
The problem-solving abilityof bees is thought to be because of
the bees’ need to preserve as much
energy as possible to find food and make their way home.
More about bees:
Honey bees might fly as far as 6 miles (9.7 km) away from their
hives to find food.
Other than humans, bees are thought to be the only species that
communicates with symbolic language or about things that are not
present at the time. Bees use “dances” to communicate with one
another.
Bees have three sets of eyes and are able to sense movements
that are one 30th of a second apart, or the equivalent of
individual a single frame of film during a movie.
HTML http://www.wisegeek.com/how-do-bees-navigate.htm
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#Post#: 609--------------------------------------------------
Wolf puppies make sounds that trigger lactation in HUMAN
FEMALES!
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: December 23, 2013, 9:13 pm
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HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9t2RKYCBvE&feature=player_embedded
Amazingly informative video. Wolf puppies make sounds that
trigger lactation in HUMAN FEMALES! Furthermore, the touching
and handling triggers Oxycontin release which fosters empathy
and pack unity. Orphaned wolves taken in and fed by humans is
believed to be the beginning of domestication.
Agelbert NOTE: What the above video calls "evolution" is NOT
evolution; it is selective breeding to trim the ORIGINAL DNA
package as has been done by man in all domestication.
This is ADAPTATION, not evolution because no non-wolf DNA was
introduced into the DNA to create some "evolutionary advantage"
like docility, longer legs for running down prey, shorter legs
for animal heel nipping or digging out prey in holes, retrieving
ability ( soft mouth, water loving), increased intelligence,
etc.
They are ALL still capable of BREEDING with each other. And most
of the radical changes in morphology have only occurred in the
last 300 years or less. Therefore they is no ORIGIN of NEW
SPECIES here despite the INTELLIGENT, rather than NATURAL,
selection involved. Sorry Darwinists, no evolution here!
The success of the border collie in flushing birds out of
airports to prevent bird strikes on aircraft as opposed to using
loud noises is claimed to be because of the "evolutionary"
traits of the birds to fear a furry ground predator. The claim
is that birds haven't "evolved" to respond to loud aircraft
noises and avoid them. Well, YEAH, they sure HAVEN'T!
Using a dog doesn't have beans to do with evolution, but does
confirm the birds are afraid of dogs. When a dog scares them,
they don't come back. when a loud sound or a human scares them,
they come back. Evolution? NOPE! Aircraft don't HUNT birds.
Birds have never seen an aircraft come back and eat the birds
that flew into it. They have no reason to think an airplane is a
predator. Humans move a LOT slower than a dog. That sounds like
the basic DNA genetic PACKAGE of a bird, not evolution.
I hate this continual reaching for justification that
"evolution" exists without a shred of proof! >:(
Many of our modern dog breeds that have radically changed
morphology from the wolf are not BETTER animals (as in
"evolved"). They have inherited defects due to specialization.
THAT is another bit of PROOF that the wolf DNA has been, not
just trimmed, but in some breeds, DEGRADED. Again, this is NOT
evolution.
The last part of the Video, where a great man called Randy
rescues 2,000 dogs a year, is ANTI-evolutionary and ALL ABOUT
LOVE. The narrator celebrates the love without realizing the
contradiction of his position with prevailing evolutionary
theory.
Randy realizes humans are stewards of these animals. He is a
responsible human and a showing a spiritual quality no
evolutionary theory can be explain with the release of
oxycontin. 8).
There is NOTHING NATURAL about keeping stray animals from dying
because they aren't "fit" enough to survive on their own. It's
ALL about LOVE. Remember that the next time someone praises the
theory of "evolution". Without love, humans are NOTHING.
#Post#: 883--------------------------------------------------
Amazing Dolphin Intelligence
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: April 1, 2014, 12:33 am
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-YftsskHy0&feature=player_embedded
#Post#: 1132--------------------------------------------------
Re: Intelligence
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: May 16, 2014, 11:57 pm
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HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kum1s5rq0oM&feature=player_embedded
#Post#: 1267--------------------------------------------------
Friendhip among Animals
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: June 1, 2014, 10:21 pm
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HTML https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv2OGph5Kec&feature=player_embedded
Animals DO Feel As Much As We Do
HTML http://www.freesmileys.org/emoticons/emoticon-object-106.gif
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It proves the simple, eternal truth that connection to other
living beings is the purpose of our lives, whether we are a goat
or a human.
We need to stay together and believe what our hearts tell us.
Feelings are real, and they guide us, and they even control our
physiology.
Watch this beautiful, life-affirming video, but be sure to get
a box of tissues ready.
--Celia Farber
This video was produced by Animal Place
- See more at:
HTML http://www.nextworldtv.com/videos/humane-treatment-of-animals/goat-too-depressed-to-eat-until-reunited-with-best-friend.html#sthash.A9JCZEIh.dpuf
#Post#: 1648--------------------------------------------------
Just a Couple of Guinea Pigs Playing Basketball (Video)
DIR By: AGelbert
Date: August 3, 2014, 4:08 pm
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HTML http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=046lujOgBy8&feature=player_embedded<br
/>
Animal Trainer Barbara Heidenreich is clearly a genius. Using
treats as rewards, she’s taught her guinea pigs to play
basketball. Each guinea pig even knows his designated basket, so
it’s a proper game of guinea pig basketball!
Heidenreich calls her training method “force free,” meaning she
doesn’t use punishment or any other negatives in her training
practices. These piggies learned to play basketball in a loving,
rewards-only environment. How cute is THAT?
Read more:
HTML http://www.care2.com/greenliving/just-a-couple-of-guinea-pigs-playing-basketball.html#ixzz39MhxcUrs
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