Vorkosigan

Sorry about the delay! My default setting only goes back two days, and this thread disappeared in the morass of randman threads.

Michael

Dr Rick

Thanks alot, Michael; your response is irrelevant, but thanks, anyways.

<strong> Great. I take what you originally posted seriously, read it and research it, take the time to analyze its components and point out the flaws I perceive and await a response, and you send me on another wild ride as if I'm some sort of ignoramous in need of further education.

Let's suppose I now tell you all of my prior posts were mere "introductions" and ask that you read War and Peace, The Illiad, the Encyclopedia Brittanica, and the Bible because they are all extraordinary, funny , and well-written.

You'll recognize what they say. Get back to me when you are done.

<strong> Christians find it hard to believe that you could claim the universe and our existence is not intelligently designed; your reasoning is no less inpeccable.

<strong> Affirmative claims, such as "human adults have instincts" require affirmation. I ask you once again to provide some evidence.

Vorkosigan

I believe, rbochermond, that you are making the affirmative claim: "humans are the only evolved adult mammals without instincts." Unless it is your claim that all adult animal behavior is learned behavior.

But, since I challenged you, it is right that I supply the first argument. So on to your response.


Great. I take what you originally posted seriously, read it and research it, take the time to analyze its components and point out the flaws I perceive and await a response, and you send me on another wild ride as if I'm some sort of ignoramous in need of further education.

Well, it is sort of shocking to meet someone who thinks modern human adults don't have instincts. And rather than have a public clash between a former administrator and a moderator, I tried to steer a middle ground. But your second response, I think, has relieved me of any further fear on that matter.

To start with, the reason I referred you to further reading is that you were obviously clueless about what you had read. I didn't think your "analysis" was worth shit, you were simply picking over their piece in light of your prejudices, and completely missed what they were saying. Here's what you quoted and said.

Your "analysis" said this:

Is this really how one is to define the word instinct?

That's how they do. I see that your complaint is really a question, and not really a valid criticism. In any case, let's see what your complaint is:

If so, how does the definition distinguish instinct from reflex? Even the autonomic beating of a heart fits this self-serving definition: it is complex, reliable, requires no conscious effort or instruction, and is distinct from more general abilities; are we now supposed to believe that our hearts act "instinctively."?!

If you had just read one more sentence, you would have found:

(5) they are distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.

rbochermond, (5) above rules out anything outside of the brain, unless you want to add some rather outre anatomical claims to your suppositions about human cognition. What they are talking about is cognitive processing biases that force humans to attack problems in certain ways we prefer to call "instinctive." "Instincts" are features of the brain that channel human behavior.

But let's see an example of what <a href="http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html" target="_blank">the primer</a> says.

Go down to the section on Reasoning Instincts.
They argue, based on experimental evidence, that humans instinctually solve certain logic problems better if framed in certain social terms.

Your blithe dismissal of food aversion as a classically learned behavior simply shows the problem: how could I "learn" anything if I did not have sets of information processing instincts that sorted, ranked, prioritized, and tabulated data like food experiences? Why should I ever develop a food aversion, unless I had an instinct that biased me into concluding that such aversions are handy thing to have? Indeed, why should I even think about food at all unless I had some built-in instinct that pushed me to learn about what I was eating, and keep learning. Learning cannot take place without instincts, and that includes learning as an adult. Your classically-learned behavior turns out to be a highly complex system of organizing and skewing data so that evolutionarily useful outcomes can be obtained.

Michael

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: turtonm ]</p>

Oolon Colluphid

To Dr Rick: an apology and an apologia.

I'm really sorry Rick, that wasn't how it was supposed to read at all. If it were, as you should know by now, you'd have either really known it, or it would have included a lighthearted I greatly respect what you say here, and the surprise and confusion is therefore genuine. From all that I have read -- and I admit it's mostly 'popular' stuff, but by well-regarded authors (Ridley, Pinker, Dunbar etc) -- it is blindingly obvious that we do not enter the world as a tabula rasa, but instead have plenty of what, for want of a better term, are called instincts, just as other mammals do. If they do, then why might not we? We weren't specially created! Conversely, if we do not, one has to argue that they don't either, or find some damn good reasons why we're such an exception. Hence my surprise and confusion at your position. Simple as that.

I'll probably bow out of this thread for now, with just a couple of quick bits of justification / explanation.

Of course learned behaviours are not instinctive. As I said, I think learning itself, the tendency to learn certain things -- 'wanting' to and being able to -- is instinctive behaviour. Not what is learned.

I wasn't. It's a simile, used as a ready-reference point for the idea, or simple prompt for a concept. Delete the "Lamarck's blacksmith's" from that sentence, and it still makes the point. It means simply 'grow in response to being used'. As opposed to being 'designed' by natural selection of genes for building those areas. And they are areas to do with the acquisition and use of language -- a behaviour. That's all.

Sorry Rick, you've lost me. How is gobsmacked surprise insulting? Is 'credit' the problem? Perhaps it's my Classics background, but I use 'credit' in its strict sense of 'believe'. I just checked <a href="http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=credit" target="_blank">Dictionary.com</a>, and that is the first listed meaning. "I can hardly believe it." Because you're usually so knowledgeable and conversant with current science, and this is a significant disagreement. That's all. How else was that sentence offending?

&lt; takes deep calming breath... nope, still cross &gt;
Please show me some instances of this.

&lt; takes another deep calming breath... nah, sod it &gt;
If you had not bothered to mention this -- I'd suggest, unsubstantiable -- claim, I might even have avoided mentioning your terrible lack of a spellchecker. (For example, "synonomous".)

I'll leave it there for this discussion, since I do not wish to accidentally insult you further.

Cheers, Oolon

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: Oolon Colluphid ]</p>

Dr Rick

<strong> Free-thinkers should be able to civilly discuss, debate, and educate eachother, but only if a dissenting view is not treated as heresy. You took no middle ground then or now; you expressed amazement that I would question your prejudices and foregone conclusions. Consider your first sentence in your last post with slight changes:

You are "shocked" that I don't accept what you say blindly, that I would dare to question your dogma.

<strong> Well, now that we've dispensed with the pleasantries...

<strong> First of all, cognition is knowing, thinking, learning, and judging, not instinctive. A spider builds a web instinctively; a human cognitively aquires a food aversion, and can overcome that aversion cognitively, as well. A spider cannot cognitively decide it does not want to eat flies.

Secondly, your heart, your digestive tract and many other organs are guided by independent nervous systems that are more complex than those of most animals "brains." The enteric nervous system, for instance, processes information and reacts. It senses its environment such as the type of food within it and reacts with peristalsis, secretion of enzymes, and it commiunicates to other parts of the body with hormonal and neurochemical signals. It's responses are "distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently." It will function on its own even if all connections with the brain and spinal cord are severed.

Pinker's definition is self-serving and includes many functions that would not generally be considered instinctive. His definition could be used to describe the "instincts" of the heart and digestive tract. The definition is flawed.

Finally, this definition isn't much better:

Learning and drives "channel human behavior;" you've done nothing to distinguish the three.

<strong> Their evidence does not support their conclusions. Throughout the article, the authors cite their own subjective work and repeatedly speculate on the observational studies of others.

<strong> You can learn because you have a brain. Your digestive tract has a nervous system that processes information within a hierarchy but cannot learn.

A drive to learn is not an instinct any more than the hunger drive, the sex drive, or the sleep drive are instincts. They are all urges; stimuli to act, not actions themselves. The "problem" is that you do not distinguish learning from instinct and/or drives.

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: rbochnermd ]</p>

scigirl

Not that I want to jump in the middle of a debate between people I admire greatly, but as my favorite line (favourite for Simon) from Law and Order goes. . . "Keep em in your pants gentlemen!"

The problem seems to be how we are defining "instinct." Obviously, behaviors of mammals have multifactorial causes, both from the environment as well as their biology. The truth about human behavior is probably a strange and intricate combination of both nature and nurture (which is I think what this debate is all about).

When my heart pounds after almost rear-ending someone in my car, I think this is both an instinct and a learned behavior. The instint comes from millions of years of evolution - the sympathetic adrenaline system that Dr Rick probably knows more about than any of us. This is the instinct for survival - that has been adapted by us thinking mammals to avoid dangers that our ancestors couldn't even dream of. The learned behavior comes from knowing that car wrecks are bad. That information I was not born with.

So is this response an instinctual behavior? Dr Rick would say "no" because I learned to be afraid of car wrecks. Oolon would say yes because I did not consciously learn how to have an adrenaline rush.

Also, to add to the confusion, could you also say that learning about the world to avoid death is also an instinct of higher mammals? (Note: lots of speculation follows ) After mammals evolved to care for their young, their offspring could 'afford' to be inquisitive about their world since any harmful behaviors would be prevented by the parents. Indeed, it is thought that the large cats require quite a bit of "play" before they become expert hunters. So the actions becomed learned behavior (hey if I swipe my paw this way, the bird dies quicker!) , but the fact that the cats are even capable of these practice hunting exercises. . . is probably instinctual.

Just because we can ponder why we do things (like go to graduate school ) does not mean that we have no instincts, I think it simply means we have learned some ways to control them. But you can see evidence of basic instincts in human behavior: think of the drug addict. He (she) will do anything to get high - even kill people. Or a heterosexual in a prison situation will engage in homosexual sex. Are these learned behaviors? Or a revertance to those basic desires we were born with, that carried us through evolution?

scigirl

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: scigirl ]</p>

Skydiving_Grandma

I have a question:

What about the outside influences that affect perception of comedy and tragedy? Laughter is contagious, no? This is why recorded laughter is so frequently used on the most idiotic of sitcoms. Especially for Americans, we are easily fed and tricked into this kind of response, even if it wasn't our true feelings that envoked them.

I think babies learn to laugh simply because they're compelled to by their environment. A baby does not usually laugh in the most early stages of its life, but it cries, because that is the only way they can communicate that indicates that something is wrong. It's not a emotional stimuli, but survival. Does laughing mean individual survival? No, it doesn't. Thus this ability is acquired later. But I wonder what a baby would be like if it were raised in a total deadpan household?

How did we get on this issue? Anyway, I have one more thing to say about the first reply of this topic...you have one misconception. Animals didn't simply *po0f* have lungs or any other complex body part (this is what I gathered from the explanation, so I could be misguided). Evolution starts from the bare minimum which is thus influenced and nurtured (or destroyed) by genetics and the environment. I would conjecture that the morality you speak of developed in this fashion, and that a baby simply did not pop out one day having a full, complete sense of right and wrong and what would make the most people happy. Hardly a person today has this gift, does he/she? Perhaps we are still in that process of evolving into the moral beings many of us so desire. Morality then again may be just as mutable and impressionable as our own consciousnesses, probably caused by a mixture of both gifts and givens.

Maybe I'm reiterating. Lazy humans like me really don't read blocks of information well when we want to voice our objections. ^_^** Anyway, have a good day everyone.

Dr Rick

Here's someone else who is skeptical of Evolutionary Psychology and so may also be "clueless:"

<a href="http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/Gould.html" target="_blank">http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/Gould.html</a>

"...Humans are animals and the mind evolved; therefore, all curious people must support the quest for an evolutionary psychology. But the movement that has commandeered this name adopts a fatally restrictive view of the meaning and range of evolutionary explanation. "Evolutionary psychology" has, in short, fallen into the same ultra-Darwinian trap that ensnared Daniel Dennett and his confrères--for disciples of this new art confine evolutionary accounts to the workings of natural selection and consequent adaptation for personal reproductive success.

Evolutionary psychology, as a putative science of human behavior, itself evolved by "descent with modification" from 1970s-style sociobiology. But the new species, like many children striving for independence, shuns its actual ancestry by taking a new name and exaggerating some genuine differences while ignoring the much larger amount of shared doctrine--all done, I assume, to avoid the odor of sociobiology's dubious political implications and speculative failures (amid some solid successes when based on interesting theory and firm data, mostly from nonhuman species)."

There is a little irony in your mention of Lamarck:

"...human cultural change operates fundamentally in the Lamarckian mode, while genetic evolution remains firmly Darwinian. Lamarckian processes are so labile, so directional, and so rapid that they overwhelm Darwinian rates of change. Since Lamarckian and Darwinian systems work so differently, cultural change will receive only limited (and metaphorical) illumination from Darwinism."

Stephen Gould

[ March 14, 2002: Message edited by: rbochnermd ]</p>

Vorkosigan

You can learn because you have a brain. Your digestive tract has a nervous system that processes information within a hierarchy but cannot learn.

A drive to learn is not an instinct any more than the hunger drive, the sex drive, or the sleep drive are instincts. They are all urges; stimuli to act, not actions themselves. The "problem" is that you do not distinguish learning from instinct and/or drives.

Yes, rbochermond, you can learn because you have a brain. But the organization of the brain gives you sets of instincts that bias you to learn about some things over others, and spend more time learning about them.

You have described the definition of 'instinct' used in the Primer and claimed that it is flawed, although you have not really shown why. Your argument has so far amounted to "I don't like this."

You are "shocked" that I don't accept what you say blindly, that I would dare to question your dogma.

The issue robochermond, was not that you were speaking some 'heresy.' I was not shocked that you had a different opinion than me. It was that you are acting as though the last 50 years of cognitive science never occurred. As if Chomsky had never lived. The reason for the shock and blank stares was the same as if you had walked in here and suddenly started arguing for phrenology or the theory that disease was caused by humors and star alignments.

Here was your response when I pointed out that there was no way the definition given in the primer could refer to the heart or stomach:

First of all, cognition is knowing, thinking, learning, and judging, not instinctive.

And how could we perform any of those actions without built-in, instinctual equipment? That was Chomsky's whole point. How can learning take place without built-in inductive equipment? Humans have an instinct that allows them make inductions, indeed, to know that inductions can exist. Huamns are social animals. Is this something we learn as kids, or is it built into the way we think about our fellow beings?

a human cognitively aquires a food aversion, and can overcome that aversion cognitively, as well.

Perfectly correct. And we can do this not because we have fewer instincts than a spider, but because we have more instincts than a spider.

Pinker's definition is self-serving and includes many functions that would not generally be considered instinctive. His definition could be used to describe the "instincts" of the heart and digestive tract. The definition is flawed.

His definition cannot be used to describe the instincts of the heart, as number 5 very clearly showed. But I sort of figured you'd simply repeat your original claim....

Well, then, what the hell are instincts in your view?

Michael

Dr Rick

Instincts are inherited purposive adaptations of an action or series of actions in an organized being not governed by consciousness of the end to be attained. They are distinguished from reflexes, in mammals at least, because instincts always involve the cerebral cortex, while reflexes are confined to the lower nerve centres.