Vygotsky vs reality [Archive]

Lievo

Feb12-11, 06:57 PM

What evidences support or contredict Vygotsky's philosophy of mind? I'm interested specifically in the experimental evidences supporting or contradicting:

1-that self-awareness in human is the result of language
2-that any "higher mental abilities" is the result of language and cultural evolution.
3-that chimps can extrospect, but they are not introspective - able to have thoughts about their thoughts.

As an example of the kind of response I'm looking for

Evidence contradicting claim 3 can be found here (http://www.springerlink.com/content/755235w58453268q/).

The current study attempted to address these two criticisms by presenting great apes (seven gorillas, eight chimpanzees, four bonobos, seven orangutans) with a seeking information task whose basic procedure consisted of presenting two hollow tubes, baiting one of them and letting subjects choose. Conditions varied depending on whether subjects had visual access to the baiting, the cost associated with seeking information, the time interval between baiting and choosing, the food quality and the additional information offered regarding the food’s location. Although subjects showed a high retrieval accuracy when they had witnessed the baiting, they were more likely to check inside the tube before choosing when high stakes were involved (Experiment 3) or after a longer period of time had elapsed between the baiting and the retrieval of the reward (Experiment 2). In contrast, providing subjects with indirect auditory information about the food’s location or increasing the cost of checking reduced checking before choosing (Experiment 1). Taken together, these findings suggest that subjects knew that they could be wrong when choosing.

I'm not very familar to Vygotsky's work, so if there exists even more interesting claims AND experimental evidences to support it, thanks for sharing your knowledge. Please number the claim to facilitate the discussion.

Pythagorean

Feb12-11, 08:56 PM

No evidence, but 1 doesn't seem restricted to humans. Animals use language too, and find their place with it (particularly other mammals)

Of course, in say, ants, roles seem more biologically determined. But is that solely the case? Or will ants breed more workers when they need more workers?

Lievo

Feb12-11, 09:15 PM

1 doesn't seem restricted to humans.
Sure, but that's apeiron's words thus not self-awarness as you and I would understand it. It's supposed to be some specific self-awarness specific to humans. Maybe a clearer (for you and I) way of reformulating the claim would be:

1'-that human language makes human self-awarness different from animal self-awarness.

JDStupi

Feb13-11, 12:02 PM

I think that if you wish to understand Vygotsk'y ideas, you shouldn't start a thread on the subject, but rather pick up "Thought and Language" and read it.

No evidence, but 1 doesn't seem restricted to humans. Animals use language too, and find their place with it (particularly other mammals)

This is the reason why you shouldn't start a thread, because (nothing against anybody) views are thrown about based off of misinterpretations. Vygotsky completely agrees that language is found in other animals and even cites language-like relations in ant colonies and the like. Vygotsky does not wish to identify thought with language at all, this is something he argues against. Vygotsky's position is that the emergence of specifically human higher mental functions comes about through the changes in the functional interrelations between the langauge function and the thought function.
He dedicates an entire chapter to "The Genetic Roots of Thought and Speech" (keep in mind, he doesn't mean genetic as in gene theory) I will quote a summarization of 6 points from this chapter

1. Thought and Speech have different genetic roots
2. The two functions develop along different lines and independently of each other
3. There is no clear-cut and constant correlation between them in phylogenesis
4. Anthropoids display an intellect somewhat like man's in certain respects (the embryonic use of tools) and a language somewhat like man's in totally different respects (the phonetic aspect of their speech, its release function, the beginnings of a social function)
5. The close correspondence between thought and speech characteristic of man is absent in anthropoids
6. In the phylogeny of thought and speech, a prelinguistic phase in the development of thought and a preintellectuial phase in the development of speech are clearly discernible

1'-that human language makes human self-awarness different from animal self-awarness

I suppose to be nitpicky we'll say this, maybe I'm silly I just kind of assumed that coming from a psychologist, concerned with development, art, culture and human higher functions this was evident.

The general idea is that the human "I" and human self-reflective capabilities come about through the evolution of language and social interaction. The development of speech is intimatley related to our socialization, language is taught to children and they associate the word with the scenario it represents. Speech becomes manifest as a social function, and is entirely external, the egocentric coefficient measured by Piaget can be experimented upon by putting children through various tasks and puzzles and seeing how external egocentric speech is related to their awareness and problem-solving capabilities. Younger children put through these experiments show an increase in ego centric speech (which is the measure of ego-centric statements to total statements---for more information see "The Language and Thought of the Child-Piaget)--as older children are put through similar experiments they are found to sit quietly and look at the problem, being asked to say what they are thinking their speech is startlingly similar to the younger childs external egocentric speech. This leads Vygotsky to suppose that the function of egocentric speech is that it serves as a mediator between socialized speech and its internalization for personal speech.From here personal speech becomes a psychological tool for problem solving, its relation to human self-awareness is that our personal awareness emerges by viewing ourselves from the perspective of how others view us. This internalizing of an originally socialized function, and its growing interrelation with problem solving leads to higher mental forms.
In the light of ideas about mirror neuron discovery, I do not think this is at all controversial, or should be.

Also, for a slightly similar perspective from a different point of view see Wilfrid Sellar's ideas particularly "The Myth of Jones" http://www.iep.utm.edu/sellars/

In fact, see how similar Wilfrid Sellar's reasoning regarding how Jones comes to make inferences about other's behaviours and how people come to make inferences regarding their own behaviours to the aformentioned ideas about problem-solving

apeiron

Feb13-11, 02:02 PM

As an example of the kind of response I'm looking for.....

Discussing this seems a waste of time as you just appear to want to score points rather than put any effort into studying the arguments or providing proper citations.

But briefly, the example of the chimps is about complex trains of thought scaffolded by the immediate situation.

What would be thoughts about thoughts in the human language scaffolded sense would be if a chimp went off and later that afternoon was known to be sitting there, thinking over the tactics it employed, perhaps cursing a wrong decision, considering what might work better next time - then drifting off into daydream fantasies about a pretty bonobo he saw, etc.

JDStupi gave a clear general answer with plenty of supporting refs. So if you really want to pursue a fruitful conversation Lievo, you have to be prepared to answer specific questions as they are raised and be able to back your assertions with examples drawn from the relevant literature. And you can't keep asking for sources then saying it is too much like hard work to read them (though of course you will :frown:).

Pythagorean

Feb13-11, 09:50 PM

Thank you for clarifying JD. I do not have time for Vygotsky currently, but I don't want to argue for his wrongness, only to understand the position better.

This leads Vygotsky to suppose that the function of egocentric speech is that it serves as a mediator between socialized speech and its internalization for personal speech.From here personal speech becomes a psychological tool for problem solving, its relation to human self-awareness is that our personal awareness emerges by viewing ourselves from the perspective of how others view us.

This all seems straightforward. Wernicke's area is unique to humans of course. So to be clear, there's no statement equivalent to "No such equivalent tool exists in non-human animals"?

apeiron

Feb13-11, 10:25 PM

Wernicke's area is unique to humans of course.

As the quotes from Ramachandran show, there are still a lot of people who expect to find unique brain areas underlying higher human mental abilities, yet the trend is for such differences not to be found in the gross morphology of the primate cortex.

For instance....

http://home.gwu.edu/~sherwood/2010.Chimp.AreaTpt.ProcRSocB.pdf

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000170

http://www.frontiersin.org/human_neuroscience/10.3389/neuro.09.031.2009/full

And of course others argue the other way....

http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/29/37/11523

So this is still a fluid area of research. But generally the findings, in my view, show that there is surprisingly little that is different about human brain architecture.

Which of course is another line of evidence for the Vygotskian position that the invention of symbolic language was the big jump.

The crucial biological change was perhaps just the redesign of the human throat to allow rapid syllabic utterances. Probably for refined emotional vocalisation - the singing ape hypothesis. This then enforced a serial utterance constraint on the brain, a fruitful constraint that quickly allowed full blown grammatical speech to evolve (evolve socially that is).

There would have been brain adaptations to - but more a host of minor tweaks, or reasonably major ones of maturation schedule. And also a major one of more "top-downness" in neural connectivity.

One of the actual striking difference between apes and humans is that human primary visual cortex is much more foveally-dominated, for instance. We devote more space to mapping the centre of vision presumably because we are much better at being able to anticipate where our vision most needs to focus in any moment.

Pythagorean

Feb13-11, 11:27 PM

So this is still a fluid area of research. But generally the findings, in my view, show that there is surprisingly little that is different about human brain architecture.

So the question is can we socialize self-consciousness in apes then?

And perhaps we can, eventually (in a way that is meaningful to humans, I mean; which I don't know how we'd measure that in apes); I know there are some interesting projects underway, but I haven't reviewed them in any depth. I know we can teach them language and they can make their own word combinations in meaningful ways (watermelon = "candy fruit")

But do we ever see apes sitting alone signing to themselves (allegedly pondering) or are they only particularly interested in language during seeking behavior?

Lievo

Feb14-11, 12:05 AM

if you wish to understand Vygotsk'y ideas, you shouldn't start a thread on the subject, but rather pick up "Thought and Language" and read it.
Fair enough. But you did not get the idea of starting this thread. Up to now, I'm absolutly not interested in Vygotsky ideas. Or, more properly said, I don't think it's worse spending the time, and time is a very acute limite.

So what I'm looking for here, is reasons to change my mind. All one need to do is to present some interesting statement plus the experimental evidences that support it (by fairness, contradicting evidences should be looked for too). I started with three interesting claims apeiron made because he already suggested it was evidence based and easy for him to provide a bunch of reference. Still waiting.

But the question would hold irrespective of apeiron's behavior: if there is anything that you think may correspond to what I'd like to see, that would be a pleasure to discuss it.

Math Is Hard

Feb14-11, 12:30 AM

It seems like there could be some confusion between the ideas of Vygotsky and the ideas of apeiron from another thread. I know that apeiron loves Vygotsky, but I don't know if his assertions are identical or if there is some extrapolation.

It also seems like this thread is more about the question of metacognition in animals than anything else.

Which way would we like to go here?

apeiron

Feb14-11, 02:20 AM

But do we ever see apes sitting alone signing to themselves (allegedly pondering) or are they only particularly interested in language during seeking behavior?

In fact this has been observed with Kanzi, the bonobo that learnt signing from infancy. It was said to sign to itself in private monologue during idle moments.

apeiron

Feb14-11, 05:07 AM

Which way would we like to go here?

Clearly Lievo started the thread asking the world to prove something to his satisfaction. He also PMed me politely so I gave him a couple of reference packed links that addressed his questions. If he wants to dispute some of that evidence publicly, this could be his next legitimate move. Provided of course he can rustle up some sources to back anything he may claim.

In the meantime, to legitimate even opening the thread, he supplied a single putative counter-example. To which I replied, pointing out the error in logic. He can either let my explanation stand, or refute it - with sources.

But I don't yet get the impression that Lievo's real mission here is to understand the pros and cons of a Vygotskean approach to the higher mental faculties.

Lievo

Feb14-11, 08:11 PM

I gave him a couple of reference packed links that addressed his questions.
The two references you sent me had nothing to do with experimental evidences, which the topic of this thread. Again, you have strongly suggested that evidences exist that support your claims. But you never show any. Maybe because you confound discussing the pros and cons and exhibiting experimental evidences? Not the same thing!

But I don't yet get the impression that Lievo's real mission here is to understand the pros and cons of a Vygotskean approach to the higher mental faculties.
And you are right. Again, the 'mission' of this thread is to collect the experimental evidences that supports or contredict Vygotsky's most interesting claims.

...or what one may think is Vygotsky's claims. I notice it seems controversial that your claims are truly identical to Vytgotsky ideas. I'm not qualify to judge that. Enough to me it's close to this stream of ideas.

Lievo

Feb14-11, 08:15 PM

Which way would we like to go here?

Anywhere one can find experimental evidences. Maybe the best move would be to look at what support/challenge the 6 points JDStupi summarized:

1. Thought and Speech have different genetic roots
2. The two functions develop along different lines and independently of each other
3. There is no clear-cut and constant correlation between them in phylogenesis
4. Anthropoids display an intellect somewhat like man's in certain respects (the embryonic use of tools) and a language somewhat like man's in totally different respects (the phonetic aspect of their speech, its release function, the beginnings of a social function)
5. The close correspondence between thought and speech characteristic of man is absent in anthropoids
6. In the phylogeny of thought and speech, a prelinguistic phase in the development of thought and a preintellectuial phase in the development of speech are clearly discernible

apeiron

Feb14-11, 08:15 PM

The two references you sent me had nothing to do with experimental evidences, which the topic of this thread. Again, you have strongly suggested that evidences exist that support your claims. But you never show any. Maybe because you confound discussing the pros and cons and exhibiting experimental evidences? Not the same thing!

And you are right. Again, the 'mission' of this thread is to collect the experimental evidences that supports or contredict Vygotsky's most interesting claims.

...or what one may think is Vygotsky's claims. I notice it seems controversial that your claims are truly identical to Vytgotsky ideas. I'm not qualify to judge that. Enough to me it's close to this stream.

More evasion. You put forward a specific example in the OP. I replied with an explanation. Now let's hear your response.

apeiron

Feb15-11, 03:56 AM

It would still be nice if Lievo responded to the argument against his original example. But in the meantime, here is a test that gets closer to the cutting edge of human/ape differences in social cognition.

There is currently much controversy about which, if any, mental states chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates understand. In the current two studies we tested both chimpanzees’ and human children’s understanding of both knowledge–ignorance and false belief – in the same experimental paradigm involving competition with a conspecific. We found that whereas 6-year-old children understood both of these mental states, chimpanzees understood knowledge–ignorance but not false belief.

http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/pdf/Kaminski_Cog_08.pdf

The study concludes that the reason for the failure is 1) it is a specific brain function that just has not evolved in chimps, 2) chimps have less ability to inhibit the wrong choice, or 3) the Vygotskian answer. And they throw in a few concrete reasons for preferring 3.

Third is the possibility that children’s development of a fully representational theory
of mind, including false beliefs, is dependent on several years of linguistic communication – and of course chimpanzees are not evolved for this. There is much evidence for the role of language in the development of false belief understanding, including the findings that deaf children who do not learn sign language in the normal way are much delayed in this task (Peterson & Siegal, 2000) and that children who are given special training in certain kinds of linguistic discourse pass the task earlier than those who are not given such training (Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003; see Astington, (2001), for a review).

Evidence for a Vygotskian perspective comes from a wide variety of sources (which I supplied Lievo as requested) including feral children, deaf/mutes, child development of self-regulation, children's drawing, EEG recordings of throat muscles, cross-cultural anthropology, etc. There is also good negative evidence, such as a lack of marked brain architecture differences, the too rapid emergence of symbolic culture in sapiens, and so forth.

The metacognition literature is more likely to confuse than enlighten IMHO as you cannot really devise experiments that show what animals are thinking about off-line. You can only create a cognitive task to be performed at that moment. And the abilities of large brain primates to extrospect (or even dolphins, elephants and ravens) is not that much inferior to us. That would indeed be the Vygotskian hypothesis - they would be on an evolutionary continuum. It is only the introspective abilities which are the product of sociocultural learning.

But anyway, when it comes to experimental evidence - something Lievo says is important to him - clearly it is better to focus on tests that reveal a reliable discontinuity between humans and apes, rather than ones where apes are able to do what humans can do.

SolidGold

Feb16-11, 11:31 PM

Cats' language has been quantified to about 900 different sounds and meanings. Newer studies actually prove that not only chimps, but dumber capochin monkeys can have thoughts about their own thoughts, or introspect. Why pursue such idiotic philosophy of this guy and waste all this time?

There are even groups of monkeys that run through the jungle together and are of different species, and they all communicate with each other with their own language, making them all bilingual.

Pythagorean

Feb17-11, 12:00 AM

SolidGold, you should provide references to your post so that those of us that are interested can look into it more.

JDStupi

Feb17-11, 10:00 AM

Okay, first...That doesn't prove anything considering as was said one million times the speech function was never denied existence in other animals, simply the close functional interrelationship between thought and speech.
Second, from the tone of your post I find everything you say questionable, whether it be blatant lies or mis-interpretations I don't know. As always, I could be wrong, but I doubt it. I'm certainly interested in these alleged experiments that "prove" that monkeys have "meta-representations" of themselves and introspect.

*edit, haha not "as always I doubt that I'm wrong" but rather "as always I could be wrong, but in this case I doubt it".

*Moreover, your helping nobody's case as I'm fairly sure that even the thread starter who disagrees with Vygotsky's approach, or at least isn't convinced, would disagree with the verisimilitude of your claims.

Lievo

Feb17-11, 02:10 PM

I'm fairly sure that even the thread starter who disagrees with Vygotsky's approach, or at least isn't convinced, would disagree with the verisimilitude of your claims.
Well I'm still waiting for a single experimental evidence supporting or contradicting blabla. I saw apeiron repeteadly claiming he was having plenty, none he could cite it seems. Now SolidGold is claiming the opposite and provides exactly the same number of experimental evidence. Honestly, as long as no one tries to support his/her claims, I don't even care to agree or disagree. :zzz:

apeiron

Feb17-11, 03:04 PM

Honestly, as long as no one tries to support his/her claims, I don't even care to agree or disagree. :zzz:

That comment doesn't fool anyone. You cited an example to legitimate the thread. I explained why it doesn't prove what you say it proves. You can either argue it further, or just keep quiet and hope people forget.

Lievo

Feb17-11, 03:35 PM

Apeiron, I opened this thread with the candide belief you'd provide the citations you were claiming to have. This was not a trap at all. I just don't understand the smoke and rethoric you're making as if this thread was supposed to be a battle and not something for getting information. Look at your last reply: you say that I should stay quiet and hope people forget ...forget what? That the evidence I indicated as an example of what I wanted would be questionnable? True or not, for what reason on Earth should I be ashamed of that? Of course I can understand you're ill-at-ease with your own inability to provide experimental evidences to support your claim, despite your repeatedly claimed you could cite many. Again, it was not the purpose of this thread to prove you were pretending. The fact it is... honestly that's belongs to you and I will stop this discussion now. Just don't be surprised if I don't take your word for granted next time.

apeiron

Feb17-11, 05:03 PM

Apeiron, I opened this thread with the candide belief you'd provide the citations you were claiming to have.

And after you PM-ed me, I posted you links to the two best introductory sources that lay out the arguments, the nature of the evidence, full sets of references.

If, having got acquainted with the literature, you want to come back with further specific queries, feel free.

For instance, you might want to dispute the feral children evidence, the deaf/mute evidence, the EEG throat recording evidence, the development of self-regulation in children and other paedogogic evidence, the cross cultural anthropological evidence.....I really can't guess what in advance.

The fact it is... honestly that's belongs to you and I will stop this discussion now. Just don't be surprised if I don't take your word for granted next time.

The only thing that could surprise me here is if you did what was asked and reply to the challenge regarding your original assertion.

You said this evidence contradicts the Vygotskean perspective:

Evidence contradicting claim 3 can be found here.

The current study attempted to address these two criticisms by presenting great apes (seven gorillas, eight chimpanzees, four bonobos, seven orangutans) with a seeking information task whose basic procedure consisted of presenting two hollow tubes, baiting one of them and letting subjects choose. Conditions varied depending on whether subjects had visual access to the baiting, the cost associated with seeking information, the time interval between baiting and choosing, the food quality and the additional information offered regarding the food’s location. Although subjects showed a high retrieval accuracy when they had witnessed the baiting, they were more likely to check inside the tube before choosing when high stakes were involved (Experiment 3) or after a longer period of time had elapsed between the baiting and the retrieval of the reward (Experiment 2). In contrast, providing subjects with indirect auditory information about the food’s location or increasing the cost of checking reduced checking before choosing (Experiment 1). Taken together, these findings suggest that subjects knew that they could be wrong when choosing.

I pointed out that it doesn't:

the example of the chimps is about complex trains of thought scaffolded by the immediate situation.

What would be thoughts about thoughts in the human language scaffolded sense would be if a chimp went off and later that afternoon was known to be sitting there, thinking over the tactics it employed, perhaps cursing a wrong decision, considering what might work better next time - then drifting off into daydream fantasies about a pretty bonobo he saw, etc.

You can now remain silent and indeed "never take my word for granted again" :smile:.

JDStupi

Feb17-11, 07:51 PM

Lievo, I'm just wondering, what are your beliefs regarding humans higher mental functionality and/or self-consciousness? This isn't meant to attack you, I"m simply curious, because honestly you seem very against Vygotsky's ideas, not just passively skeptical, but doubting the theoretical premise and everything, and I"m curious as to the nature of your beliefs that would cause such a response. What do you believe about the phenomena of ego centric speech in children? What is its functionality? How does it relate to their "self" and the general developmental process?....

SolidGold

Feb17-11, 11:24 PM

Anything that has memory has some sort of introspection period. Here's something I found in about 3 seconds of googling.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/terrace99/usem/usem-hampton3.htm

Notice how this PHD guy is concluding that monkeys can introspect. Whether you believe it or not it doesn't matter, because he has more credibility than you. The other one was from a Discover Magazine article which I will find. In the article, monkeys were trying to steal oranges from a guy, and they would wait until he looked away to steal. Which means they are introspecting on their desire to want to steal the orange, and thinking about the consequences, and also reasoning that the guy may see them if he isn't looking away. This means they have to put themselves in the guys shoes to imagine how they would feel if they tried to steal the orange in front of him.

Here is the definition for introspect.
http://www.google.com/search?sclient=psy&hl=en&site=&source=hp&q=define%3A+introspect&aq=0&aqi=l1g1g-sx1g1g-s1g-sx1g1g-sx4&aql=&oq=introspect+d&psj=1

More to come I just don't have all the time right now.

SolidGold

Feb17-11, 11:30 PM

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/nov/13-the-monkey-whisperer-learns-the-secrets-of-primate-economics/?searchterm=monkeys%20steal%20island

SolidGold

Feb17-11, 11:30 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kvQHGZU86A&feature=related

SolidGold

Feb17-11, 11:33 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6w7qxRg8ep8

Math Is Hard

Feb17-11, 11:59 PM

SolidGold

Feb18-11, 01:12 AM

SolidGold, could you please also summarize the points made in the videos rather than just posting the links? Some of us are on slower connections, and using youtube videos as references is a bit iffy, anyway. I'd like to know that I'm going to get something meaningful if I have to wait through the streaming. Thanks.

Before I posted the references I summarized the points. I provided a link to the definition of introspect. The discover magazine link is to the article done by a scientist on some island, which shows proof that little monkeys can introspect. The youtube videos are from BBC Life documenting the cleverness of the monkeys, of which retrospection is necessary to accomplish. The other two videos are of the multilingual capacities of interracial monkey traveler groups in the jungle, which I mentioned in my first comment. All of it is worth watching.

JDStupi

Feb18-11, 08:01 AM

Lievo

Feb18-11, 08:52 PM

Lievo, I'm just wondering, what are your beliefs regarding humans higher mental functionality and/or self-consciousness?
At present day, I agree with all interpretations which doesn't claim to have solve the hard problem of consciousness. Regarding higher mental functions, I would bet that such a notion will one day be considered as more misleading than helpfull.

Pythagorean

Feb18-11, 09:34 PM

apeiron

Feb18-11, 09:46 PM

I'm still not sure how people define "higher" mental functions vs "lower" mental functions. I'm guessing it has to do with how much information is being integrated (at the higher levels, you are integrating a lot of different sensory and memory Information, at the lower levels a single or small set of input/s is being computed such as in reflexes. )

but we don't consider a reflex a mental function I guess, but you get the idea...

The answer in the context of this thread is easy as it is a Vygotskean distinction. Basically it is what we share with animals, and then that which is distinctively human (and due to language/society).

See: http://psych.hanover.edu/vygotsky/subbot.html

But you can also make such distinctions just with the biological animal mind (because higher and lower are also hierarchical distinctions). So we can talk of attentional processing as higher, habit level or automatic level as lower.

Spinal and brainstem reflexes are even lower of course :smile:. Attention vs habit really is a distinction of the higher brain! So about cortex~striatum.

Hierarchy theory explains just why we see brains organised with this logic...

Holarchy approach gives some essential true insights - holons at the higher levels of the hierarchy enjoy progressively more degrees of freedom and holons at the lower levels of the hierarchy have progressively less degrees of freedom. Moving up the hierarchy, we encounter more and more complex, flexible and creative patterns of activity. Moving down the hierarchy behavior becomes more and more mechanized.

http://www.scaruffi.com/nature/emergenc.html

ThomasT

Feb18-11, 10:33 PM

ConradDJ

Feb19-11, 06:35 AM

Anything that has memory has some sort of introspection period.

Of course. I have no doubt that monkeys, dogs, birds, etc. introspect. They just don't do it with agile terms (words). And neither do we most of the time. We, as well as other animals, introspect in terms of sensual recollections of events and our emotional associations with those events. As a wise man once said, you might not remember anything of what someone has said to you, but you will remember how that person made you feel.

I remember a high-school English teacher who told us that "we think with words" and I got incensed (as I often did in that class)... it was so obvious to me that most of what I'm "conscious of" can't even be put into words.

However, human language operates within consciousness at a much deeper level. As we learn to talk, we not only learn how to perceive and interpret the world as other people do, but most importantly, we learn how to conduct purposeful communicative relationships with them. As apeiron noted in a parallel thread –
The point about humans is that we carry around in our heads a second "objective" view of ourselves - the view that society would have of our actions and our existence.

In conversation we learn to see ourselves as other people see us, and also begin to conduct conversations with them and with ourselves, in our heads. This process couldn’t happen without words and grammar. But the “internal dialogue” in our heads also involves all those feelings and perceptions that we can’t “put into words.” So “talking to ourselves” evolves into the process called “thinking” in which words and grammar fall into the background.

So it’s true that what we’re “conscious of” goes way beyond words. But it’s also true that the ability to think about things beyond the “here and now” or to think about ourselves – which is what I understand by “introspection” – is completely dependent not only on the tools of language, but even more basically on the kinds of interpersonal relationships we develop through talking, including our relationship to ourselves.

I think investigations into the mentality of other primates are very interesting... the pre-linguistic brain-hardware we inherit from our ancestors is such remarkably sophisticated technology that I’m sure we’ll still be making major new discoveries about how it works a hundred years from now, long after we’ve figured out physics. But I don’t see that this argues against the importance of linguistic software in the way humans think.

Pythagorean

Feb19-11, 08:50 AM

None of this seems unreasonable to me. I had the idea from the opening post that this was a Nature vs. Nurture argument and Vygostsky took the side of Nurture.

But now it seems (with Conrad and apeiron's contributions) more that Vygotsky only makes the point about Nurture's contributions, not claims they're the end-all.

It seems to me, anyway, that the Nature vs. Nurture arguments is long dead. Nature and Nurture are shown to be coupled to each other; this should be especially clear in the wake of the "junk DNA" and epigenetics. Protein action can effect genes, genes code proteins...

proteins interact with neurons, which interact with stimuli, which come from the environment. There's an obvious Nature side to our higher mental functions (the evolutionary developments that allow us to have larger brains in the first place also constrains how the brains must operate.) And then coming, full circle, the evolutionary development of the brain is guided by stimuli from the environment. This is actually very exciting for neuroscience:

An organism's behavioral and physiological and social milieu influence and are influenced by the epigenome, which is composed predominantly of chromatin and the covalent modification of DNA by methylation. Epigenetic patterns are sculpted during development to shape the diversity of gene expression programs in the organism. In contrast to the genetic sequence, which is determined by inheritance and is virtually identical in all tissues, the epigenetic pattern varies from cell type to cell type and is potentially dynamic throughout life. It is postulated here that different environmental exposures, including early parental care, could impact epigenetic patterns, with important implications for mental health in humans. Because epigenetic programming defines the state of expression of genes, epigenetic differences could have the same consequences as genetic polymorphisms. Yet in contrast to genetic sequence differences, epigenetic alterations are potentially reversible. This review will discuss basic epigenetic mechanisms and how epigenetic processes early in life might play a role in defining inter-individual trajectories of human behavior. In this regard, we will examine evidence for the possibility that epigenetic mechanisms can contribute to later-onset neurological dysfunction and disease.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20053376

Here, we're particularly interested in stimuli from other members of our species, or even other species (which we call social). But we still have a very powerful source from Nature to consider that drives social development: sync. This is beyond genes, even: our solar system's dance gives us night and day (earth's rotation), months (moon cycle), seasons and years (earth's orbit).

The way sync appears in the social context (as in syncing behavior of members of a group of organisms) is fascinating... but what's even more fascinating is the feedback loop that develops between Nature and Nurture across many spatiotemporal scales in this view.

Strogatz (Author of "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos" text book) on sync:
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync.html

I have no doubt that the development of language has greatly influenced the Nature of man. That should be a rather uncontroversial statement.

The only question I have at the moment is how we know whether another species has an equally complex and articulate language that we don't happen to comprehend because we weren't raised (socially "encoded") by these species, and once we have an example of someone who is (animal raised feral children) ... we don't understand them (or they us) enough for such an inquiry.

I think dolphins could be such a candidate. While looking at other primates is interesting because we're primates, we tend to forget that all the other species (including other primates) have evolved in parallel with us.

What's particularly motivating for me is that I have experience with wild porpoises (I used to fish commercially) who like to play with humans (no, we don't give them our fish) and have been known to save humans, even. And these aren't even dolphins (who have the second highest brain/body ratio next to humans).

But here's a more expert opinion:

Like most other animals, dolphins do have communication. Their squeals and whistles communicate emotional states and, often, the presence of danger and food in the area. They may also help them coordinate “herding” processes. Dolphin females often act as “midwives” to new mothers, and every dolphin in the pod cares for the others.

But do they communicate linguistically? There’s some evidence for it. Dolphins tend to stay within their own pods, and may have trouble understanding “foreign” dolphins. In studies done on dolphins near Scotland, individuals appear to have names; or at least, other dolphins use specific and unique whistles only in the presence of certain other dolphins, as if calling them by name. Unlike any other animal besides humans, dolphins exhibit a great tendency to take turns when vocalizing – making their communications sound like a conversation.

There have also been very basic linguistic studies of dolphin sound patterns. According to some studies, dolphin sounds follow the same basic patterns of all human-based language, from Morse code to Chinese. Though we cannot understand what they’re saying, it’s not beyond the bounds to state that dolphins may indeed have language, though it’s certainly a language unlike any we know today.

http://www.dolphins-world.com/Dolphin_Language.html
(bolded mine, note: not a scientific study, don't know the author, but summarizes a nature show or two I've seen)

Anyway, my point being that if these findings are accurate, then apeiron's demands might be met by Dolphins:

The animal sense of self would be the completely subjective emboddied form. The point about humans is that we carry around in our heads a second "objective" view of ourselves - the view that society would have of our actions and our existence. Our every emboddied response or impulse is being run through that secondary layer of ideas that is socially evolved.

apeiron

Feb19-11, 01:48 PM

Anyway, my point being that if these findings are accurate, then apeiron's demands might be met by Dolphins:

I think not. Proper researchers, like Louis Herman at Hawaii's Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, have spent years attempting to teach dolphins to communicate. Like apes, you can get to the level of grammatical fluency of a two year old, but it never takes off like it does in humans. Their brains just aren't wired for speech as we know it.

Dolphins are of course smart and sociable and so have sophisticated calls. But that article you linked to is little over the top.

Pythagorean

Feb19-11, 06:19 PM

I think not. Proper researchers, like Louis Herman at Hawaii's Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, have spent years attempting to teach dolphins to communicate. Like apes, you can get to the level of grammatical fluency of a two year old, but it never takes off like it does in humans. Their brains just aren't wired for speech as we know it.

Dolphins are of course smart and sociable and so have sophisticated calls. But that article you linked to is little over the top.

Was there a particular claim you wanted to refute from the article?

Animal Communication: Do Dolphins Have Names?
Robert A. Barton
Volume 16, Issue 15, 8 August 2006, Pages R598-R599

Also, recognize from Barton's article...

Although it may be tempting to jump to the most cognitively remarkable and anthropomorphic interpretations consistent with the data, further careful experiments together with objective interpretations of their implications will be paramount.

.. that my point is only that the question deserves more investigation. I'm aware of my tendency to view things anthropomorphically, but on the other side I'm aware that we all share an ancestor.

Also, from you're own reference, Louis Herman:

"Comperehension of sentences by bottlenosed dolphins"
Cognition
Volume 16, Issue 2, March 1984, Pages 129-219

The comprehension approach used was a radical departure from the emphasis on language production in studies of the linguistic abilities of apes; the result obtained offer the first convincing evidence of the ability of animals to process both semantic and syntactic features of sentences. The ability of the dolphins to utilize both their visual and acoustic modalities in these tasks underscored the amodal dependency of the sentence understanding skill.

apeiron

Feb19-11, 11:41 PM

Was there a particular claim you wanted to refute from the article?

Sorry, where is the bit which says dolphins have a sociocultural sense of self because they have grammatically-structured symbolic speech (rather than being social animals with sophisticated calls)?

Math Is Hard

Feb20-11, 12:26 AM

Sorry, where is the bit which says dolphins have a sociocultural sense of self because they have grammatically-structured symbolic speech (rather than being social animals with sophisticated calls)?

What does it mean to have a sociocultural sense of self? Does it mean you introspect about your role in a group? About the roles of others in your group?

Pythagorean

Feb20-11, 12:58 AM

Sorry, where is the bit which says dolphins have a sociocultural sense of self because they have grammatically-structured symbolic speech (rather than being social animals with sophisticated calls)?

I asked you what claim you wanted to refute from the article. Is this response a distraction, a delay, or some sort of cryptic Socratic wisdom? Because I've already addressed this point, which I'll reiterate:

I explicitly questioned whether:

b) the evidence shows that the "because" in your distraction question is worth investigating
c) there is strong evidence for the statements on either side of the "because".

So now I'm confused as to the nature of your question

your counter to b) was:

Louis Herman at Hawaii's Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory, have spent years attempting to teach dolphins to communicate. Like apes, you can get to the level of grammatical fluency of a two year old, but it never takes off like it does in humans. Their brains just aren't wired for speech as we know it.

Which I found insufficient as a proof, especially with:

"but it never takes off like it does in humans" (a quantitative statement, where we're discussing quality has no bearing on the discussion).

and:

"Their brains just aren't wired for speech as we know it."

Which is not a rebuttal at all, since you qualified it with "as we know it", which is the point I've made.

apeiron

Feb20-11, 12:59 AM

What does it mean to have a sociocultural sense of self? Does it mean you introspect about your role in a group? About the roles of others in your group?

It means you step back to see yourself as a self. You have debates about your actions, weighing your personal wants against social constraints. Self-regulation, impulse control, conscience, rebellion, all that kind of stuff.

The Vygotskean view is that language upgrades all mental faculties. So animals recognise, but humans also recollect. Animals anticipate, humans imagine. Animals think, humans also reason. Animals feel, humans have socialised emotions (scripts such as loyalty, bravery, respect). And so on.

The key difference is animals are driven by external contexts. They respond intelligently to the world as it is happening. Or in response only to very simple internal drives/feelings like hunger, lust, lethagy.

Humans can carry around language-encoded and socially evolved contexts. We apply this extra set of constraints "at all times". We are reacting also to inner ideas, independent of what is going on around us.

Psychologists often call this "voluntary" behaviour. Vygotsky explains the mechanism by which humans can act as selves, rather than just simply react as selves.

apeiron

Feb20-11, 01:12 AM

I asked you what claim you wanted to refute from the article.

You are not making any sense. You asked if you had answered my question, and quoted a passage...

The animal sense of self would be the completely subjective emboddied form. The point about humans is that we carry around in our heads a second "objective" view of ourselves - the view that society would have of our actions and our existence. Our every emboddied response or impulse is being run through that secondary layer of ideas that is socially evolved.

So again, what about the dolphin papers addresses that passage?

And what is it that you are really trying to argue?

That dolphins have speech....of a sort that does not add that extra level of sociocultural evolution and control over mentality that humans enjoy?

Or that dolphins have a human-like mentality...even though they don't have human-type explosive fluency?

My confusion has only been compounded because the caution of your second reference directly contradicted the breezy assurance of the first...

Do these results resolve the controversy over signature whistles? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that there should now be no doubt that dolphins produce individually distinctive whistles that others recognize; but no, in the sense that the cognitive significance of these whistles remains highly uncertain. Janik et al. [8] suggest that signature whistles may be an example of referential communication, the use of a stereotyped signal to refer to things or individuals. This would imply that dolphins, like humans, have names. It is important to be clear, however, that this has not yet been demonstrated. There is a danger of slippage, evident in media coverage of this study (for example, see http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/4750471.stm) between accepting that dolphins can recognize and copy one another’s whistles, and the notion that they are using these calls to refer to individuals, either themselves or others.

SolidGold

Feb20-11, 04:03 AM

OK You win. "This Phd guy said it". (Not to mention that the first article was about learning, the visual pathway, and memory and the second article the psychologist explicitly stated that she wasn't sure that monkeys knew we had minds or thoughts) So who is concluding this exactly? And, again, how does this demonstrate the error in Socially-mediated views on psychology?....

How does this demonstrate the error in socially mediated views on psychology? You demonstrated it in your post I quoted.

The first guy, who is accredited, said that this provides some evidence that monkeys can introspect. He came to this conclusion by studying the actual brain.

In the discover magazine, the girl is also accredited by a socially mediated institution, and although perceiving behavior that fitted the empirical definition of "introspect", said she wasn't sure monkeys knew we had minds or thoughts.

However, they obviously they had to not only introspect, which was required for the logical reasoning of their actions, but also had to use empathy to calculate how the guy being stole from would react (or feel) if he was to witness the theft. So they had to introspect on OUR feelings. It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that all feelings are thoughts as well.

It kind of shows how educated people are so locked into this "static" perception of reality as Paulo Freire called it, which is defined only by what they are told, by perceptions that are constructed FOR them by educators, and failing to use their brains to trust or create their own perceptions. It is a very narrow filter that completely disregards one's obvious perceptions.

Pythagorean

Feb20-11, 07:08 AM

@apeiron

There's no "breezy assurance". I quoted the same exact sentiments from the first paper and have pointed out twice now that it's worth investigating (meaning it's an unanswered question). The second caution you quoted is equivalent:

"but no, in the sense that the cognitive significance of these whistles remains highly uncertain"

Which has been my point from the start "How do we know other animals don't..."

You, on the other hand, seem to be claiming that you already know the answer based on the fact that we can't get them past two-year old human thinking. I don't see how that is an argument, since we don't expect the dolphins biosocial evolution to be the same as ours.

I'm also confused that you recently used this as an argument to support your seemingly anthropocentric stance:

"[dolphin] brains just aren't wired for speech as we know it." (1)

But before were using the argument that primate brains are all practically identical when indicating the social component:

"But generally the findings, in my view, show that there is surprisingly little that is different about human brain architecture." (2)

So my question here is that based on your social motivation for (2) how can you really get behind (1) and suddenly drop the social motivation that seems to be the basis of your stance?

(by the way, I am agreeing with (1) since you've qualified "as we know it" from because "as we know it" is the whole problem with trying to make judgments about phenomenology. The only reason we're comfortable doing that with other humans is because of our similarities, our "as we know it".)

Lievo

Feb20-11, 07:59 AM

Vygotskean view (...) animals are driven by external contexts. They respond (...) in response only to very simple internal drives/feelings like hunger, lust, lethagy.
Oh boy... Let me make an analogy. Descartes' philosophy of mind is interesting, but it would be ridiculous to defend his view about animals spirits and pineal gland, isn't it?

Vygotsky's views might also be interesting, I don't know, but it would definitly be not a reason to defend any single words he said. If I was trying to attack him, as JDstupi turned to believe, it would have been easy to emphasized this outdated view that animals are driven by external context only.

I did not because this view is clearly ridiculous, because assessing it would have been as unfair as attacking Descartes' animal spirits, and most of all because I thought nobody would pretend it's anything but a must-be-forgoten view. But you apeiron seem to defend it, and even to consider it's at the heart of Vygotsky philosophy. Is it really what you think?

JDStupi

Feb20-11, 11:18 AM

Lievo, Solid gold. I appreciate that you guys are now saying that you are not looking to shoot down the whole thing, nor accept it all. I would be willing to (though I haven't read enough about it) admit that lower animals have some sense of introspection. That said, I don't think it completely discredits all of the Vygotsky perspective. Is it a coincidence that those animals that are highly sociable exhibit the properties closes to what we call a human "self"? Other aspects of the existence of human inner speech wouldn't be completely discredited by new findings about the behavior of chimps. I think that you should (I don't have the time right now) see if you can google Vygotsky's experiments/perspective on ego-centric speech and then you may see where he is coming from. I'm not saying we should follow him like a bible, I just think the social perspective on certain ways of human thought seems as though it could be a promising research direction.

apeiron

Feb20-11, 12:47 PM

apeiron

Feb20-11, 01:09 PM

Oh boy... Let me make an analogy. Descartes' philosophy of mind is interesting, but it would be ridiculous to defend his view about animals spirits and pineal gland, isn't it?

Vygotsky's views might also be interesting, I don't know, but it would definitly be not a reason to defend any single words he said. If I was trying to attack him, as JDstupi turned to believe, it would have been easy to emphasized this outdated view that animals are driven by external context only.

I did not because this view is clearly ridiculous, because assessing it would have been as unfair as attacking Descartes' animal spirits, and most of all because I thought nobody would pretend it's anything but a must-be-forgoten view. But you apeiron seem to defend it, and even to consider it's at the heart of Vygotsky philosophy. Is it really what you think?

So an attack that "isn't an attack" that means you can again dodge supplying actual arguments and sources? :zzz:

What do you think the chimps are sitting there thinking about as they laze in the sun an hour after doing the experimenter's test. Tell us something believable and not clearly ridiculous, like that they are mulling over their performance and tactics in the lack of an external context to trigger any thoughts.

Lievo

Feb20-11, 02:55 PM

I will take that as a yes :rolleyes:

Pythagorean

Feb20-11, 06:45 PM

I can't follow your points here at all.

That's become apparent over the last couple posts. I'm not going to rearrange the words again. You have a preconception in your mind of what my argument is and you keep projecting it on to me (history repeats itself). I'll leave you to keep arguing with an imaginary me since it doesn't require my presence.

fuzzyfelt

Feb21-11, 11:09 AM

Just because it was in the news today and seemed on topic-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9401000/9401945.stm

JDStupi

Feb21-11, 02:21 PM

apeiron

Feb21-11, 04:32 PM

Just because it was in the news today and seemed on topic-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9401000/9401945.stm

Again, demonstrating animals responding intelligently to a current context is not the same as an animal being able to have an inner life of private rumination, reacting to imagined scenarios, recreating past experiences, etc. It is this "off-line" thinking that needs a supra-neurological mechanism like structured speech and the habits of thought that structured speech allows.

Pythagorean

Feb21-11, 09:18 PM

*Speculation alert*. The studies that seem to indicate that certain primates can have at least some level of self-awareness are certainly interesting. Possibly Vygotsky's ideas of language being the root of self-awareness in general can be correlated as a special case of some type of social function. Such that a certain amount of social interaction is necessary in order for animals to develop some sense of self-awareness, but the language capacities of humans have allowed us to develop a whole new level of self-awareness and inner control. Now language is no longer the sole root (not that I"m claiming this was Vygotsky's intent) of human awareness, but rather related to the more genealogically fundamental social functions.

Dolphin, Human, and Elephant brain complexity is higher than non-human primate complexity. They also happen to be very social animals. That doesn't mean that they all have higher self-awareness, but it makes them good candidates for study (nothing says they DON'T have self-awareness, either). The elephant brain appears, by some measures, to be more complex than the human brain. We can't hook these animals up to an fmri and ask them how they're day went.

The first problem is that its very difficult to infer conscious experience from an animal that's not like you (it's often difficult enough between humans as it is).

I wouldn't expect Dolphin and Elephant consciousness to be an analog of human consciousness, but I have no doubts that behaviorally they heavily influence each other through non-survival social mechanisms (play time, specifically, which serves as art & science time for dolphins: that is, they engage in creative behavior, like making different bubble cascade shapes, then following them up and echo-locating on them to examine their work. They play with each other and other humans, even want to save humans.

Elephants have a complex signaling language, they exhibit tool use (and alteration), and play time.

That's already interesting enough. I'm not sure what dolphin motivation for saving humans is, I've never heard an evolutionary or biological explanation.

Anyway, the point is that there's apparently fine line between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism. I'm not saying that dolphins think like humans, I'm saying we have a tendency to think we're special or unique in terms of our experience, but we really have no way to judge that until we can get our bearings on our own experience.

Up to just a decade or so ago, we though humans that didn't move weren't self-aware. My ancestors thought people with dark skin weren't self-aware. We've done a lot of harm with this kind of ideology.

So this is an area that deserves more research, in my opinion.

By the way, I harbor no illusions:
http://www.doublex.com/blog/oystersgarter/dark-secrets-dolphins-dont-want-you-know

disregardthat

Feb21-11, 09:25 PM

The first problem is that its very difficult to infer conscious experience from an animal that's not like you (it's often difficult enough between humans as it is).

How is it even possible to infer conscious experience, how is it testable? I assume you mean subjective experience. To me it seems all we do is testing what characterizes conscious experience by assumptions of what this may be (and our assumptions may be all correct) and inferring with respect to these assumptions, but I think it is a major and unfounded conceptual leap to infer conscious experience per se.

Pythagorean

Feb21-11, 09:46 PM

How is it even possible to infer conscious experience, how is it testable? I assume you mean subjective experience. To me it seems all we do is testing what characterizes conscious experience by assumptions of what this may be (and our assumptions may be all correct) and inferring with respect to these assumptions, but I think it is a major and unfounded conceptual leap to infer conscious experience per se.

inferring is all we can do precisely because it's not testable.

infer: Deduce or conclude (information) from evidence and reasoning rather than from explicit statements.

With humans, we speak their language so we can ask them how they feel and make inferences. We don't even understand the language of other higher mammals, so our inference is reduced to behavioral observations (which is all we do with humans, too, but since we understand language we don't think of it that way, we can "relate" from our own personal experiences with humans).

fuzzyfelt

Feb22-11, 11:22 AM

disregardthat

Feb23-11, 12:15 PM

inferring is all we can do precisely because it's not testable.

infer: Deduce or conclude (information) from evidence and reasoning rather than from explicit statements.

With humans, we speak their language so we can ask them how they feel and make inferences. We don't even understand the language of other higher mammals, so our inference is reduced to behavioral observations (which is all we do with humans, too, but since we understand language we don't think of it that way, we can "relate" from our own personal experiences with humans).

My point was that it is not even testable, so it makes the "inference" much less justifiable! My question was: How do we deduce that there is subjective consciousness? There is nothing in language that justifies us to infer subjective consciousness, which was what I was talking about.

Pythagorean

Feb24-11, 06:18 AM

My point was that it is not even testable, so it makes the "inference" much less justifiable! My question was: How do we deduce that there is subjective consciousness? There is nothing in language that justifies us to infer subjective consciousness, which was what I was talking about.

Because your dead in the water other wise, you might as well never talk about it. I think it's safe for me to infer you're conscious, for instance, despite not having the most rigorous evidence.

ConradDJ

Feb24-11, 06:26 AM

How is it even possible to infer conscious experience, how is it testable? ... I think it is a major and unfounded conceptual leap to infer conscious experience per se.

I agree entirely... and of course at the age when we're first learning to communicate with others, we're way too young to "infer" anything about anything. But we're preprogrammed biologically to reach for a certain kind of connection with the people around us -- specifically, a kind that can gradually open up a communications channel and develop into language. The "idea" that other people have their own subjective points of view is built into the structure of human language at its base.. so long before our brains are capable of reflecting on ideas, this "assumption" is already there.

Human consciousness is based on a tacit understanding that others are also conscious... because we only learn to be "conscious" in a human sense by talking to ourselves, taking over the methods we learn for communicating with others and making them reflexive.

Apeiron -- I don't know Vygotsky well enough to know whether this is his perspective as well. Do you think he would describe the basis of language differently?

To me, what’s most remarkable about linguistic communication is that it manages to create a bridge between different people’s subjective universes, creating a very robust illusion that we all live together in the same objective world. By “illusion” I don’t mean that it’s untrue – I mean that we all grow up believing it, despite the fact that none of us will ever experience the world except from our own subjective viewpoint.

We imagine the objective world around us, just as we imagine that the people around us (and animals too) have their own internal mental viewpoints. It’s not “inference” that supports this – it’s just that imagining the world this way works very well for us, makes us able to function as human beings.

So although we often think of human “communication” as basically about exchanging information, at a deeper level what’s going on is a connection of mutual imagining, between two radically distinct universes of experience. But (if our minds are operating normally), it’s only when we grow up and learn to think at a very abstract level that we discover how radically separate our own universe of consciousness really is.

Pythagorean

Feb24-11, 06:55 AM

To me, what’s most remarkable about linguistic communication is that it manages to create a bridge between different people’s subjective universes, creating a very robust illusion that we all live together in the same objective world. By “illusion” I don’t mean that it’s untrue – I mean that we all grow up believing it, despite the fact that none of us will ever experience the world except from our own subjective viewpoint.

This, I think, can be explained by Vygotsky's ideas. We're somehow born with the "illusion" (and it may as well be an illusion when we're young and it's more-or-less a reflex; mirror neurons for instance. My 14 month old will practice "talking" on the "phone" but I don't think she really has any idea what she's doing. I stuck my tongue out at her when she was an hour old, and she stuck her tongue out back... the well known Meltzoff experiment).

But whether or not it's really an illusion that we're cohesive, we make the illusion a sort of reality by believing it, embracing it, and practicing it. Then setting up a forum and having discussions about it.

Biologically, though, we are quite cohesive through pheromones on a totally unconscious level (human alpha females entraining their beta friend's menstral periods, males messing up the sync; sexual attraction).

fuzzyfelt

Feb24-11, 09:36 AM

Again, demonstrating animals responding intelligently to a current context is not the same as an animal being able to have an inner life of private rumination, reacting to imagined scenarios, recreating past experiences, etc. It is this "off-line" thinking that needs a supra-neurological mechanism like structured speech and the habits of thought that structured speech allows.

I should have put this week’s BBC news article about macaques displaying thoughts about thoughts in the “Metarepresent” thread with an OP which interests me more, but this thread seemed to involve more discussions about animal cognition.

Just reiterating what I’d said in that thread, I don’t see evidence here that there is a uniquely human self-awareness and I don’t see evidence (that if there is), that it is caused by language.

But briefly, the example of the chimps is about complex trains of thought scaffolded by the immediate situation.
What would be thoughts about thoughts in the human language scaffolded sense would be if a chimp went off and later that afternoon was known to be sitting there, thinking over the tactics it employed, perhaps cursing a wrong decision, considering what might work better next time - then drifting off into daydream fantasies about a pretty bonobo he saw, etc.

However, (I’m trying to decipher the ideas, so correct me if I do so incorrectly ) it has been claimed that not only should animals possess complex trains of thought, but these should be isolated from anything that may be interpreted as external assistance and thus not the correct method, somehow, (for example, immediate situations) to display a (purported) higher consciousness.

It could seem species-centric to expect animals show that they have arrived at the same displays as humans of this purported higher consciousness, by the same means.
Memory test – (Perhaps non-humans think so quickly that any ruminations occur in unnoticeable time :))
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVlJv7ZkvGA&feature=related

The reliance upon this scaffolding also seems a bit circular- that this purported higher consciousness is defined by human language, which defines this purported higher consciousness, and so on. This could just render this higher consciousness meaningless aside from being human language. So it suffices to say humans have a human language and to leave it at that.

Instead, other descriptions of this higher consciousness have been used. How have “thoughts about thoughts”, “thinking over the tactics it employed, perhaps cursing a wrong decision, considering what might work better next time,” “the introspective abilities “(- “which are the product of sociocultural learning”) not been displayed?

The link I gave was about thoughts about thoughts.

Is there a suggestion that various primates, dolphins and elephants (and, according to Jimmy Snyder, not Jimmy Snyder, ever:) http://www.physicsforums.com/showthr...=471841&page=3
post #48) only have bodily self-awareness when looking at a mirror, but not at other times? How does the mirror represent an assisted scaffold?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-pc_M2qI74&feature=related

The Vygotskean view is that language upgrades all mental faculties. So animals recognise, but humans also recollect. Animals anticipate, humans imagine. Animals think, humans also reason. Animals feel, humans have socialised emotions (scripts such as loyalty, bravery, respect). And so on.

I’ll provide some examples that for consideration-
Here, about animal imagination-

A vivid doggy dream
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bcl7NJj0yY

And the suggestion of chimp imagination –
Chimpanzees “make dolls (of small dead animals) and play and carry them for long lengths of time; in Bos-sou, Guinea, they capture live hyraxes for amusement.”
(The Cultured Chimpanzee
Reflections on Cultural Primatology
By W. C. McGrew
Miami University)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40753694/ns/technology_and_science-science/

The seemingly goal-less “waterfall dance”, where a chimpanzee leaves the group in a kind of trance beside the waterfall, running around it and even endangering itself, the “rain dance”, “fire dance”, rolling rocks in ponds becoming excited by the splashes, fire and sunset watching.

Regarding non-human ability to reflect, chimpanzees mourn the loss of dead relatives, individuals even falling into depression, and at times losing the will to live. There is an example of a well, young male chimp loosing the will to live, eventually dying. ( Goodall, J. Garen, personal communication, 2009).

http://scienceblogs.com/primatediaries/2009/10/chimpanzees_mourn_the_death_of.php

From a different angle, is there no "higher consciousness" in those who haven't learnt a language?

http://wn.com/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

“Deaf children signers in Nicaragua systematized their language with almost no access to adults who spoke a fully developed language.”
And how were the children able to create a language with syntax?
More specifically, this sort of thing interests me.

that the invention of symbolic language.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science...2&searchtype=a

And, by the way, is this

the too rapid emergence of symbolic culture in sapiens

referring to Stephen Jay Gould’s ideas here?

disregardthat

Feb24-11, 11:12 AM

Because your dead in the water other wise, you might as well never talk about it. I think it's safe for me to infer you're conscious, for instance, despite not having the most rigorous evidence.

Do you really think that "we are dead in the water other wise" is a valid justification for inferring subjective consciousness? We might very well talk about it, only acknowledging it as an operational assumption for which we might possibly provide proper justification in the future. Isn't this an effective approach in any case?

The problem is not that the evidence is non-rigorous, but that the evidence is not evidence at all. What is it evidence for? We have already agreed that it is not testable. You don't infer that I am conscious, you assume it and it works well.

apeiron

Feb24-11, 03:20 PM

Apeiron -- I don't know Vygotsky well enough to know whether this is his perspective as well. Do you think he would describe the basis of language differently?

This particular point about self-consciousness being implicit even in personal pronouns - being taught to say "I want" - is perhaps even more strongly stressed by GH Mead's symbolic interactionism. But yes, it is definitely part of Vygotsky's broad picture.

It is worth noting that Vygotsky worked with a team of psychologists (as well as the world-reknown neurologist AR Luria), that these guys did study children's development, and that they also applied their findings in educational and clinical settings. But Vygotsky died young and Stalin suppressed his budding school. All the knowledge was lost until really the 1980s.

To me, it is another illustration of how haphazard science is, especially when we get to the soft sciences like psychology.

Vygotsky met with early quick approval because he could frame his approach as Marxist - emphasising the socially constructed or collective origins of the human mind. But then he fell foul of the regime (he was Jewish I think, some other party psychologist had the ear of the bosses, I forget the full story).

Meanwhile, around the world, other accounts were competing for academic favour. You had of course Freud and that little fast growing story of psychic development (a rehash of Plato's tripartide soul in fact). You had then Piaget's structuralism which went down well with the academic educationalists (because it had easy experiments and made a lot of good sense). And then Watson's behaviourism (Watson was an advertising guy!) which was based on another good Russian's work, Pavlov and his salivating dogs, and had the brutal reductionist atomism (simple actions chained together by conditioning) that was very appealing to the anglo-saxon turn of mind.

So you could say that different cultures produced the different kinds of models of the mind that you might have expected. That is how socially-shaped our thinking is!

Vygotsky goes down really well in some countries, like Holland and Canada in my experience, but is not liked at all in others.

In the late 80s/early 90s, Vygotskeanism really started to take off in the West. The translations were becoming available. New experiments were happening. I remember the psychology shelf at London's university bookshop suddenly having a whole section devoted.

But then, along came evolutionary psychology as a huge academic bandwagon. It was back to genetic determinism. The model that anglo-saxon culture wants to believe in found a new vehicle - behaviourism, and then cognitive psychology, having been rather dismal busts.

So this OP was a demand about "where is the evidence?". There is of course ample evidence if you are willing to look (it is scattered I agree). But really, as I see it, the story is about the failure of psychology to be able to push back the weight of people's prejudices.

It is basic to modern western culture that humans are a certain way - autonomous selves rather than created beings - and so the game becomes to find a way to give scientific support to that key cultural myth.

The science cannot win because even if it does have good evidence to offer, people's eyes refuse to see it.

apeiron

Feb24-11, 03:53 PM

So it suffices to say humans have a human language and to leave it at that.

You mention a whole array of research and views, all of which I am familiar with. I agree it is hard to pin down the difference that language makes because animals are generally more intelligent, there is more going on in their heads, then generally given credit.

There was a pendulum swing. Most early cultures were animistic - even the winds, the trees, the planets, were thought to have souls or minds. Then along came Western philosophy (church-influenced scholasticism) that wanted to make instead a sharp divide between brute animal and touched-by-the-divine humans. Thus the kind of views espoused by Decartes (who Lievo so amusingly accused me of supporting! When Vico, Hobbes and Locke would have been the more obvious reference).

Anyway we went the other way too far with the "dumb animals" and animal behaviourists have been steadily rowing the boat back with their more careful experiments.

But there is still clearly a difference, and language is clearly the reason. So how to talk about that difference simply so it does not denigrate the animal mind, and yet also does justice to the actual difference?

One quick way is to say animals are stuck in the present tense, whereas through the structuring power of language, we have the other tenses of thought available to us. We have the past tense, the future tense, etc.

Animals can of course anticipate - but that is a present tense brain activity. In fact, the best theory of awareness, of how the brain is designed, is as an anticipatory machine. That is what brains are for (not to percieve, or to feel, but to evaluate the potential for action).

But still, naked animal awareness is locked into intelligent reactions about the moment. Yes, it could be current pangs of thirst that set off a long trek by an elephant to a long-remembered water hole. But that is still present tense driven.

Future tense driven would be the elephant thinking that tomorrow it is going to be feeling thirsty, even if it isn't right now, and deciding it will set off for that waterhole a day early.

So you see why all the evidence that animals can have mental search images, or make judgements of relative certainty, or recognised their images in mirrors, are not facts against the Vygotskean approach? They are all present tense thinking. The structure of the thought is in the context, in the current circumstances.

It is when the structure of our thoughts becomes essentially free of current circumstances that it becomes human level thinking.

And don't forget the sociocultural aspect. Once thinking is free in this fashion, thoughts can be passed around the group. They can be handed down over generations (being polished and perfected as ideas in the process). So it is also the fact that humans can become loaded with a software of culturally-evolved thoughts.

We are all thinking the distilled wisdom of several thousand years of our cultures. Everything educated in your head once went through other heads. Now which animals can say this is possible for them?

Lievo

Feb24-11, 04:15 PM

So this OP was a demand about "where is the evidence?". There is of course ample evidence
The fantom evidences. There are all around us, but you can't cite a single one. :redface:

apeiron

Feb24-11, 04:35 PM

The fantom evidences. There are all around us, but you can't cite a single one. :redface:

So you keep saying, even though you know I responded to your PM with two articles with comprehensive references.

You have yet to make any response to the simple query I posed you about your chimp example. (And that is on top of repeated similar failures all along the line).

I have yet to see you demonstrate any academic competence in the subject under discussion. Whereas I have published books on this translated into several languages, reviewed in Nature and American Scientist, etc, etc.

Lievo

Feb24-11, 05:10 PM

So you keep saying, even though you know I responded to your PM with two articles with comprehensive references.
As I said earlier, several times, you did not provided any specific reference to any evidence adressing any of the claims you pretended were evidence-based.

You have yet to make any response to the simple query I posed you about your chimp example. (And that is on top of repeated similar failures all along the line).
That will of course wait until you start answering the topic of this thread, or stop pretending you did.

I have published books on this translated into several languages, reviewed in Nature and American Scientist, etc, etc.
Wow. I'm quite impressed, etc, etc. Did you ever talk to Chalmer in person?

apeiron

Feb24-11, 07:56 PM

Wow. I'm quite impressed, etc, etc. Did you ever talk to Chalmer in person?

Yes, of course. And I then had a several year dialogue with him about our contrasting views (although that was before I really got into the systems view of causality which deals with hard problem issues so much better).

Pythagorean

Feb24-11, 08:57 PM

Do you really think that "we are dead in the water other wise" is a valid justification for inferring subjective consciousness? We might very well talk about it, only acknowledging it as an operational assumption for which we might possibly provide proper justification in the future. Isn't this an effective approach in any case?

The problem is not that the evidence is non-rigorous, but that the evidence is not evidence at all. What is it evidence for? We have already agreed that it is not testable. You don't infer that I am conscious, you assume it and it works well.

Look, I don't know if you didn't know what 'infer' meant and now you're saving face or what, but all of the comlpaints you're making are the exact reason the word 'infer' is used in cognitive sciences.

Yes, you're dead in the water because the whole point of invoking 'infer' is you can only rely on logic and behavioral observations. In other words, we might as well be talking about our religious practices if we're not using logic in this discussion. If you're not inferring, you're making things up on the spot. Why would you do that to us? Are you a troll? I don't think so, I think you were just mistaken.

Maybe this will help:

deduce: reason by deduction; establish by deduction

generalize: draw from specific cases for more general cases

deduce: conclude by reasoning; in logic

guess: guess correctly; solve by guessing; "He guessed the right number of beans in the jar and won the prize"

understand: believe to be the case; "I understand you have no previous experience?"
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=infer

disregardthat

Feb24-11, 09:06 PM

Look, I don't know if you didn't know what 'infer' meant and now you're saving face or what, but all of the comlpaints you're making are the exact reason the word 'infer' is used in cognitive sciences.

Yes, you're dead in the water because the whole point of invoking 'infer' is you can only rely on logic and behavioral observations. In other words, we might as well be talking about our religious practices if we're not using logic in this discussion. If you're not inferring, you're making things up on the spot. Why would you do that to us? Are you a troll? I don't think so, I think you were just mistaken.

Maybe this will help:

What are you talking about? I meant infer as in deduce all along. In addition I pointed this out after you asked me the first time. Why do you keep referring to the dictionary, and why do you think I'm trying to save face? My point here seems to have been understood by CondradJ (and I agree with him, I think his post is insightful), so what makes you think I'm a troll? See, my point is that there is no method of verifying and testing whether a creature actually have subjective experience. So I believe we must admit that we are talking on the basis of an operational assumption that subjective experience (as opposed to the behavioral aspect of it) is caused by the physics of the brain, though I believe no direct causal link have been shown to exist.

fuzzyfelt

Feb25-11, 06:44 AM

present tense

I was having trouble with my links, and I think the ones that were about human language and symbolism, rather than just animals, may not have worked. I’ll try to fix them. I was interested in the mention that symbolism occured too rapidly.

I think I addressed some issues with tense in the last post, for example, it would seem chimps entering a period of quiet mourning with subdued behaviour shows an awareness of the past. http://scienceblogs.com/primatediaries/2009/10/chimpanzees_mourn_the_death_of.php Nonetheless, I’m happy to agree that human languages seem useful for forward planning.

ConradDJ

Feb25-11, 07:05 AM

But whether or not it's really an illusion that we're cohesive, we make the illusion a sort of reality by believing it, embracing it, and practicing it.

Thank you, that’s exactly my point. Communication between humans is very obviously a reality... and it’s therefore too easy to it take for granted, without understanding what a unique and remarkable thing it is, the kind of connection we imagine into being between two subjective minds. I tried to discuss this awhile back in another thread (http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=334249).

Just reiterating what I’d said in that thread, I don’t see evidence here that there is a uniquely human self-awareness and I don’t see evidence (that if there is), that it is caused by language.

I think this must reflect a prejudice about what “uniquely human self-awareness” means. And that’s the problem I have with discussions of “consciousness” – people seem to have very unclear notions about what “it” is, which leads them to ask whether other animals “have it” or not.

I don’t know how it could be more obvious that there is something unique about our species and that it’s connected with how we use language. But if you want to use “language” or “self-awareness” to describe what other animals do too, I have no issue with that.

What’s unique about life is not that it somehow “transcends” the laws of physics – it’s that it has evolved through a very long history that gradually made organisms utterly different from non-living things. It’s the same with human beings, in comparison with other primates. I don’t know why it surprises anyone to find precursors in other primates of almost anything we humans do. And I don’t understand this as an argument against human “uniqueness”.

The reliance upon this scaffolding also seems a bit circular- that this purported higher consciousness is defined by human language, which defines this purported higher consciousness, and so on. This could just render this higher consciousness meaningless aside from being human language. So it suffices to say humans have a human language and to leave it at that.

This is sensible – except for “leave it at that”. We should certainly drop the talk of “higher consciousness”, which means nothing specific – but we have a long way to go in appreciating what it means to “have a human language”.

I think examples of “human-like” primate behavior are very interesting and will play a significant role in understanding human evolution. But there’s an implicit “either/or” that makes no sense to me – either primates are like humans, or they’re not.

ConradDJ

Feb25-11, 07:18 AM

One quick way is to say animals are stuck in the present tense, whereas through the structuring power of language, we have the other tenses of thought available to us. We have the past tense, the future tense, etc.

Animals can of course anticipate - but that is a present tense brain activity. In fact, the best theory of awareness, of how the brain is designed, is as an anticipatory machine. That is what brains are for (not to percieve, or to feel, but to evaluate the potential for action).

But still, naked animal awareness is locked into intelligent reactions about the moment. Yes, it could be current pangs of thirst that set off a long trek by an elephant to a long-remembered water hole. But that is still present tense driven.

Apeiron -- Thanks, I appreciate the background on Vygotsky, and the broad perspective you bring to this.

I'm sorry I have to get off to work and can't go further now, but I completely agree with you on the point above. What we humans have evolved through talking is a shared mental picture of reality that goes far, far beyond the "here and now" that comprises the world of other animals. If anything, we tend to get stuck living in that projected "real world," preoccupied with it, and often have a hard time getting back into real-time existence.

And we have a hard time realizing how different that is, i.e. the world of moment-to-moment experience. We've done a great job learning to talk about and conceptualize reality... not so, yet, with the world in present time.

fuzzyfelt

Feb25-11, 09:02 AM

I think this must reflect a prejudice about what “uniquely human self-awareness” means.

Why do you think my comment "must reflect a predjudice"?

I think what actually happens when we communicate is profoundly complex. It depends on the fact that each of us has our own internal, imaginary world we’ve been developing all our lives – our “conscious mind” – a world no one else will ever experience.

This is from the locked thread you started and linked to, thoughts and "facts" without evidence.

I don’t know how it could be more obvious that there is something unique about our speciesand that it’s connected with how we use language.

It could be more obvious if you provided evidence that language causes something unique about our species.
But if you want to use “language” or “self-awareness” to describe what other animals do too, I have no issue with that.

So, you have no issue with ascribing “uniquely human” qualities to animals. (!)

This is sensible – except for “leave it at that”. We should certainly drop the talk of “higher consciousness”, which means nothing specific – but we have a long way to go in appreciating what it means to “have a human language”.

I think examples of “human-like” primate behavior are very interesting and will play a significant role in understanding human evolution. But there’s an implicit “either/or” that makes no sense to me – either primates are like humans, or they’re not.

Yes, by saying “leave it at that”, I meant, as you agree, to drop the talk of “higher consciousness”. However you keep discussing, higher consciousness caused by language, or, something uniquely human connected to language.

Pythagorean

Feb25-11, 06:42 PM

What are you talking about? I meant infer as in deduce all along. In addition I pointed this out after you asked me the first time. Why do you keep referring to the dictionary, and why do you think I'm trying to save face? My point here seems to have been understood by CondradJ (and I agree with him, I think his post is insightful), so what makes you think I'm a troll? See, my point is that there is no method of verifying and testing whether a creature actually have subjective experience. So I believe we must admit that we are talking on the basis of an operational assumption that subjective experience (as opposed to the behavioral aspect of it) is caused by the physics of the brain, though I believe no direct causal link have been shown to exist.

yet, you and Conrad (and myself) continue to use deduction for discussion in this thread precisely because you can't use induction.

Once again, deduction starts from theory:

http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/dedind.php

So you see, this is exactly what we're doing (starting with Vygotsky's theory)

Furthermore, whenever cognitive scientists talk about "inferring" they're talking exactly about all your complaints. They say things like:

"there is no method of verifying and testing whether a creature actually have subjective experience"

"we must admit that we are talking on the basis of an operational assumption"

Of course no causal link has been shown to exist in other creatures. But you can prove to yourself that a causal link exists by messing with your own brain chemistry and monitoring the subjective results. They're really quite obvious, and CONSISTENT with the same chemistry manipulations (drug addiction, brain meds, etc)

I said that I don't think you're a troll, I think you're mistaken.

apeiron

Feb25-11, 08:01 PM

I think I addressed some issues with tense in the last post, for example, it would seem chimps entering a period of quiet mourning with subdued behaviour shows an awareness of the past. http://scienceblogs.com/primatediaries/2009/10/chimpanzees_mourn_the_death_of.php

Again I would view this as present tense thinking, because an absence can be just as significance to consciousness as a presence.

A trivial example. If a humming fridge suddenly shuts off, it is the absence of that drone which makes you pay attention. This by the way is part of the evidence that you anticipate your perceptual world and so can ignore most everything, only responding strongly, with attention and thoughts, to unexpected change.

Anyway, we also all know how the absence of a loved one can nag in situations where "they should be there". So really the examples of chimps mourning fit the explanation of present tense thinking. If a tribe mate is lying dead, that is going to be "a salient absence". The dead chimp is not responding as normal, to say the least. And even for some time later, even with no corpse in sight, that absence will be salient. There will be a lack of that troop mate in every context where that troop mate would have been expected, so everyday routine life becomes itself the constant current reminder.

ConradDJ

Feb26-11, 07:11 AM

Again I would view this as present tense thinking...

I'll try to clarify this point, which I think is basic to the "uniqueness" of us humans.

First, whatever the differences between human and animal experience of the world, of course all experience is in present time. And it's always conditioned by past experience, and is always anticipatory.

What humans have that animals lack is a highly detailed and structured mental picture of the world beyond the present moment, that we learn to construct in language, when we're very young. We have names for things and ways of describing them. As soon as you put something into words, you've taken it out of present time and located it in this quasi-permanent, evolving picture of the world you maintain in your head. That language-based picture lets you scan over your past experiences and consider things other people have told you about, it lets you make plans for specific dates far in the future. And think about what may be happening today on the other side of the world.

I think this is one of the two fundamental functions of language, to enable this shared construction of an imagined "real world" that we use to guide our present-time behavior, and that we're constantly updating when we talk with each other and with ourselves. The other basic function being to create the bridge of "mutual imagining" between people, by which this language-software reproduces itself from one human brain to another.

The OP asks for evidence... for that you could point to most anything in the human world – drugstores, for example. The fact that my cat sometimes chews on a plant is a precursor of the drugstore, which makes the stores no less “uniquely human”. Now can we “prove” that drugstores are a result of language? To me this example only shows that the question is not well-posed.

The real problem here is that we take human language so much for granted that it’s very difficult to appreciate what it is, basically, and what it does. My sense is that it’s much deeper than words, grammar and syntax – it’s a unique kind of communications software that’s managed to reproduce itself in one brain after another over thousands of generations. And you and I, as “conscious minds”, are self-updating run-time structures created by this brain-software.

In general, I’m definitely in favor of scientific evidence. But before we can ask for evidence pro and con, we need to be able to imagine a hypothesis and state it clearly. And when it comes to the function of language in relation to consciousness, I just don’t think we’re there yet. But to me, this is really what “philosophy” is about – i.e. this “pre-scientific” stage of learning to focus on and conceptualize aspects of our existence that we’ve previously taken for granted.

disregardthat

Feb26-11, 08:35 AM

yet, you and Conrad (and myself) continue to use deduction for discussion in this thread precisely because you can't use induction.

Once again, deduction starts from theory:

http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/dedind.php

So you see, this is exactly what we're doing (starting with Vygotsky's theory)

Furthermore, whenever cognitive scientists talk about "inferring" they're talking exactly about all your complaints. They say things like:

"there is no method of verifying and testing whether a creature actually have subjective experience"

"we must admit that we are talking on the basis of an operational assumption"

Of course no causal link has been shown to exist in other creatures. But you can prove to yourself that a causal link exists by messing with your own brain chemistry and monitoring the subjective results. They're really quite obvious, and CONSISTENT with the same chemistry manipulations (drug addiction, brain meds, etc)

I said that I don't think you're a troll, I think you're mistaken.

All right, as long as you agree with

"there is no method of verifying and testing whether a creature actually have subjective experience"

"we must admit that we are talking on the basis of an operational assumption"

then it's pretty much settled, I have nothing more to say. My point was nothing more than that.

fuzzyfelt

Feb26-11, 12:08 PM

I think this must reflect a prejudice about what “uniquely human self-awareness” means.

Now can we “prove” that drugstores are a result of language? To me this example only shows that the question is not well-posed.

The real problem here is that we take human language so much for granted that it’s very difficult to appreciate what it is, basically, and what it does. My sense is that it’s much deeper than words, grammar and syntax – it’s a unique kind of communications software that’s managed to reproduce itself in one brain after another over thousands of generations. And you and I, as “conscious minds”, are self-updating run-time structures created by this brain-software.

But before we can ask for evidence pro and con, we need to be able to imagine a hypothesis and state it clearly. And when it comes to the function of language in relation to consciousness, I just don’t think we’re there yet.

Despite what you say, claiming something you are unable to verify is verifiable is erroneous. Attacking me and the question of the op doesn’t mitigate the error, it compounds it.

What evidences support or contredict Vygotsky's philosophy of mind? .

fuzzyfelt

Feb26-11, 12:09 PM

Again I would view this as present tense thinking, because an absence can be just as significance to consciousness as a presence.

A trivial example. If a humming fridge suddenly shuts off, it is the absence of that drone which makes you pay attention. This by the way is part of the evidence that you anticipate your perceptual world and so can ignore most everything, only responding strongly, with attention and thoughts, to unexpected change.

Anyway, we also all know how the absence of a loved one can nag in situations where "they should be there". So really the examples of chimps mourning fit the explanation of present tense thinking. If a tribe mate is lying dead, that is going to be "a salient absence". The dead chimp is not responding as normal, to say the least. And even for some time later, even with no corpse in sight, that absence will be salient. There will be a lack of that troop mate in every context where that troop mate would have been expected, so everyday routine life becomes itself the constant current reminder.

Ok, firstly, maybe I’ll discuss symbolism elsewhere. :)

Secondly, I find that an interesting idea: not present memories, but absence in the present.

Thirdly, I think this works now.
http://wn.com/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

What of the past memories of the woman free from syntactic language?

apeiron

Feb26-11, 01:31 PM

What of the past memories of the woman free from syntactic language?

One youtube case is not enough to make judgements. But if you review the full literature on deaf signing, there is plenty of evidence for the Vygotskean position, such as that fluent signers think in signs (they make slips of the hand errors instead of slips of the tongue), or that Victorian era deaf/mutes (with no signing culture) appeared more like animals.

Oliver Sacks wrote a good book, Seeing Voices, on this. The Wild Boy of Aveyron is another good one.

(BTW, there was rudimentary syntax in the lady. She was still having to express one "word" at a time, first son, then gone away. And in a logical order. She followed the same object-verb phrasing to describe the going away of each family member. She was also vocalising, which raises questions of when she went deaf, or if she was completely deaf (something that is rarer than you think). So evidence either for or against a Vygotskean position needs to be carefully considered.)

fuzzyfelt

Feb26-11, 04:15 PM

One youtube case is not enough to make judgements...

(BTW, there was rudimentary syntax in the lady. She was still having to express one "word" at a time, first son, then gone away. And in a logical order. She followed the same object-verb phrasing to describe the going away of each family member. She was also vocalising, which raises questions of when she went deaf, or if she was completely deaf (something that is rarer than you think). So evidence either for or against a Vygotskean position needs to be carefully considered.)

Sure. Your familiarity didn't extend as far as a not working youtube line ( at the time), my fault, I understand.:)
I actually don't know much about PBS, but the linguists involved are well credentialed, etc.

Kegl, Judy, Ann Senghas & Marie Coppola. 1999. Creation through contact: Sign
language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua. In Michel
DeGraff (ed.), Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization,
Diachrony, and Development, 179–237. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Interesting, and thanks, I'll look at your recommendations.

Pythagorean

Feb27-11, 04:03 PM

(article)

Self-Doubting Monkeys Know What They Don’t Know:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2011/02/22/self-doubting-monkeys-know-what-they-dont-know/

Lievo

Feb27-11, 06:59 PM

I'll try to clarify this point, which I think is basic to the "uniqueness" of us humans.

First (...) What humans have that animals lack is a (...) mental picture of the world beyond the present moment (...) The other basic function being to create the bridge of "mutual imagining" between people, by which this language-software reproduces itself from one human brain to another.
Ok interesting. But I don't see why you say these particular claims could not be evidence-based or contredict by evidence. All you need for first claim is evidence that animal can't think about their past experience, and for second claim that language is not spontaneous. Don't you agree this? (take care I think evidences exist against both). If not, what is the kind of evidence that would convinced you one way or the other?

The OP asks for evidence... for that you could point to most anything in the human world – drugstores, for example. The fact that my cat sometimes chews on a plant is a precursor of the drugstore, which makes the stores no less “uniquely human”. Now can we “prove” that drugstores are a result of language? To me this example only shows that the question is not well-posed.
To me that only shows that this example is badly choosen. I don't think you're trying to build a straw man but look, there are three possibilities in my view: a claim is based on evidences, it is not but could in theory if not in practice now, or neither.

If you think that it's the latter case, then to me the claim is useless. Or usefull for poetry or your own sense of aethetic or whatever, but nothing usefull to understand reality and help me deciding how to do my job. Some philosophies of mind are of this kind. I'm of course interested in the formers, and I just don't know yet where to fit Vytgostky in this framework.

claiming something you are unable to verify is verifiable is erroneous.
Erroneous is for the first time you do it. I'm not sure that's the exact word for >5th occurences.

if you review the full literature on deaf signing, there is plenty of evidence for the Vygotskean position :mad:

apeiron

Feb28-11, 12:54 AM

Ok interesting. :mad:

But Lievo, you have yet to make a single point of any substance here. Your first example fell flat on its face. You do not appear to have any personal expertise in the subject. So why should anyone believe your doubts, no matter how sincerely held?

If I am wrong and you are familiar with the deaf literature, then I would expect to hear some kind of argument in return. Emoticons don't really count as an argument do they. :smile:

apeiron

Feb28-11, 01:05 AM

(article)

Self-Doubting Monkeys Know What They Don’t Know:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2011/02/22/self-doubting-monkeys-know-what-they-dont-know/

Same paradigm as presented earlier in the thread. And really, what is the difference from any animal's ability to respond appropriately to ambiguous stimuli?

See coyote metacognition for example...

In addition, coyotes were able to differentiate among the activity of different humans based on their association with negative, neutral, or positive threat levels, even in the presence of confounding visual and olfactory cues. They remembered these associations even after one month. This study is the first that provides evidence suggesting that canids gather and interpret complex information for cognitive inference about threat level associated with access to food.

http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1240&context=etd

Pythagorean

Feb28-11, 01:43 AM

Same paradigm as presented earlier in the thread. And really, what is the difference from any animal's ability to respond appropriately to ambiguous stimuli

Nothing! In this very behavioralistic view, why are human behaviors any different from an animal's ability to respond appropriately to ambiguous stimuli?

apeiron

Feb28-11, 04:01 AM

Nothing! In this very behavioralistic view, why are human behaviors any different from an animal's ability to respond appropriately to ambiguous stimuli?

Coyote's don't go to church, cover their private bits from modesty, celebrate their birthdays. Or any of the unlimited other things that make humans distinctive. So what exactly are you arguing here? It is unclear.

Animals and humans share a lot. And then there are the differences. Mind science has to account for both the similarity and the difference. So what's your theory? (Vygotsky at least had one, and gathered evidence for it).

ConradDJ

Feb28-11, 07:14 AM

What humans have that animals lack is a highly detailed and structured mental picture of the world beyond the present moment, that we learn to construct in language, when we're very young...

The other basic function being to create the bridge of "mutual imagining" between people, by which this language-software reproduces itself from one human brain to another.

Ok interesting. But I don't see why you say these particular claims could not be evidence-based or contradict by evidence. All you need for first claim is evidence that animal can't think about their past experience, and for second claim that language is not spontaneous.

... there are three possibilities in my view: a claim is based on evidences, it is not but could in theory if not in practice now, or neither.

I get your point of view, but I don’t agree with it. Even in the sciences, I think it’s short-sighted to reduce thinking to “claims” that one argues pro or contra based on “evidence”. Because the claims first of all have to be imagined and put into clear language, and also because what’s “evident” to some folks is not so to others. So behind the argumentation are imagined constructions of the world in each of our heads, that we for the most part take for granted.

Once there’s a claim on the table, we may find we don’t know the right answer, but at least we’re aware there’s a question there. But when we take something for granted, it’s not yet accessible for questioning. There’s no direct way to investigate it. What you can do, which is what I was trying to do in the posts above, is to describe something we’re all familiar with in a somewhat unfamiliar way... to try to bring into focus something that hasn’t before been clearly seen or put into words.

I can well understand that a hard-headed, non-nonsense sort of person would have no patience for this kind of intuitive process. You want translate my description into something like “animals can’t think about their past experience” so you can classify it as right or wrong. Or “language is not spontaneous.” I can easily imagine arguing either side of ambiguous “claims” like these – but I can’t imagine that it would lead to any new insight.

My personal sense of the matter is that our clear-minded intellectual mode of consciousness is by nature peculiarly blind to its own emotional and linguistic foundations. It wants clear-cut issues and demonstrations... and there are of course many fields of study where the basics are well-established and this kind of thinking can make important progress. The study of human consciousness and its precursors is not one of those fields, at the present time. It’s a field where “claims” tend to be poorly defined or articulated, where very basic factors like the function of language have not been thought through. Take for instance Derek Bickerton's Language and Species, which argues that the function of language is almost exclusively representational, and that its use for communication is entirely secondary. Here we have a completely unnecessary "either/or" argued with chapters full of evidence. This hardly seems like progress to me, but I certainly recognize there are those who disagree.

It’s not that empirical evidence is irrelevant or uninteresting, in this context. But in my personal opinion, we’re fooling ourselves if we think we’re ready to prove something one way or the other about the difference between animal and human awareness. IMHO, we don’t yet have the conceptual language we need to articulate clearly what’s at issue here – i.e. what the distinctiveness of human evolution has been about. And that’s where the work needs to be done, in this field. Please note, this is stated as a well-considered personal opinion, not as fact.

Pythagorean

Mar1-11, 12:43 AM

... don't go to church, cover their private bits from modesty, celebrate their birthdays...

...all of which are examples of responding ambiguously to appropriate stimuli.

So what's your theory?

What would having my own theory make a difference? I'm still learning what the observations are and what theories have already been developed (and whether or not they were successful). I feel no itch to jump on any particular viewpoint yet, because then I'll only see the observations in a skewed way.

I have been exposed to several of the perspectives (behavioral, humanistic, cognitive, biological). Behavioralism is the safest (just write down what you see) but it's also the least satisfactory for questions bout consciousness. So we have to invoke one of the other perspectives to interpret behavior and we've already opened the floodgate of our own subjective contamination.

This is not an easy task to take one view or the other. Not for me, anyway. I'm still not sure anybody really knows what they're talking about when it comes to "consciousness". Once you start narrowing the subject down to specific cognitive traits/behaviors then it becomes more tangible.

Lievo

Mar1-11, 09:33 PM

I get your point of view, but I don’t agree with it.
I'm not sure to get yours. Are you saying as a matter of principle that a philosophy of mind can be interesting even if it will never lead to any experimental predictions, or are you saying that Vytgotsky's theory is not ready yet to make predictions but could in some distant future?

If it's the former, yeah let's agree to disagree. But if it's the latter, I have no problem of principle with that -that just means I should wait for the philosophers to figure out what can be.

Remember that I started this thread on behalf of some claims that there were already evidences supporting some claims. Of course I've now came to conclude that's bull, but will certainly not put that on Vytgostky himself... he of course didn't choose himself how he will be promoted 85 years later :redface:

The study of human consciousness and its precursors is not one of those fields, at the present time
I would disagree, but that's maybe for another time/thread.

IMHO, we don’t yet have the conceptual language we need to articulate clearly what’s at issue here
I could say that for the hard problem of consciousness. Maybe I'm wrong too.

apeiron

Mar2-11, 05:02 AM

Remember that I started this thread on behalf of some claims that there were already evidences supporting some claims. Of course I've now came to conclude that's bull, but will certainly not put that on Vytgostky himself... he of course didn't choose himself how he will be promoted 85 years later :redface:

What I remember is that you started the thread with a demonstration that you did not even understand the theory. Because you put forward an example about apes that was not a challenge. So until you are competent with regards to the nature of the hypothesis, worrying about the evidence seems a triffle redundant. But you have been directed towards both theory and evidence anyway.

Pythagorean

May2-11, 02:12 PM

Another point to Vygotsky:

The finding contradicts the common understanding that word-order develops in accordance with a set of universal rules, applicable to all languages. Researchers have concluded that languages do not primarily follow innate rules of language processing in the brain. Rather, sentence structure is determined by the historical context in which a language develops.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110414065107.htm

apeiron

May2-11, 04:29 PM

Another point to Vygotsky:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110414065107.htm

To be fair, Vygotsky would not require grammatical structure to be a cultural habit rather than genetically hardwired. His position only requires that the habits of thought which create the higher human functions are encoded by language and evolved socioculturally.

The real problem with a hard Chomskian position is that because it requires genetic hardwiring, this does not fit with either the available paleo or neuro evidence. Language arose too fast in human history, and there is too little evidence of a syntax template in the brain's architecture, and so a more soft-wired position seems necessary.

What is actually universal in languages is not word order but an idea - the idea of a sentence that involves the three components of a subject/verb/object, a linear causal tale of who did what to whom. This is what ties every language together. Subject, verb and object can come in any order, but these three components act as a mental template that breaks reality into crisp causal statements.

Yet it is in turn still unknown how the brain could be hard-wired, or even just "language-ready", to see the world in terms of subject/verb/object relationships. Again, it makes no real difference to the Vygotskean story whether this universal structure is hard, soft or un-wired (and completely learnt and handed down as a cultural habit). But it is an important research question in its own right.

As an aside, given all the Heidegger talk, it is worth noting that the inauthentic view seems in fact fundamental to humans in this regard. Language clearly objectifies the subject, the doer, along with the doings and the done-to (the verbs and the objects). It already lifts us out of any local particular notion of the subject, the active agent, the effective cause, and forces us into a generic or objective stance where we are just an example of such a locus of agency, the cause that produces the effects.

The open question is whether animals also have some kind of proto-objectification and cause and effect thinking wired in. I would expect this to be so as the neural architecture of apes is so similar.

This is then why you need an explanatory mechanism such as Pattee's epistemic cut to explain how brains that are basically the same can with just a little tweaking start to operate at a whole new level.

In animals, syntax and semantics would all be jumbled together in unstructured fashion. In humans, they have become crisply divided into "a universal language generator" (even if the template is more cultural than neurological) and a vocabulary (syllables coding for ideas and impressions).