How teaching molecules to think is revealing what a 'mind' is(newscientist.com) |
How teaching molecules to think is revealing what a 'mind' is(newscientist.com) |
That said, the article is still worth a read.
Hyperbolic attention grabbing headline followed by appeal to authority, appeal to authority, appeal to authority, counter opinion appeal to authority that the previous appeal to authority might all be wrong.
So wide reaching and all over the place, the reader and can pick from the menu on what point they want to use as confirmation of what they already believe to be true. Then the article can be cited in a type of scientistic, mostly wrong, gossip.
IMO a complete waste of time.
That's the new New Scientist entire. The mag is now pap for non-scientists.
The PTSD analogy is intuitively appealing but also somewhat off. You say “even with the stimulus gone, the physiological reaction remains,” but PTSD is better characterized by impaired extinction and stimulus generalization (too many things become triggers), not by the response persisting in the total absence of any triggering stimulus. The difficulty of treating PTSD has as much to do with how the fear memory is consolidated and how extinction learning fails to transfer across contexts as it does with the simple involuntary nature of the response.
Helping a friend with cPTSD and this is so true! It’s such a hard thing to overcome. By helping I mean I’m helping pay for counseling and therapy not that I’m doing it cuz I’m hella unqualified.
Exactly that is not what the experiment is about because we all know that dogs will quickly learn the connection between bell and food as dogs are easy to teach new tricks.
If you replace 'dogs' with 'humans', it becomes an empty phrase: "It showed that humans process information from their environment and use it to make predictions" - we all know that.
The groundbreaking part of the experiment was that it showed there are responses which are not part of the conscious mind and which are not willingly controllable by the conscious mind. The dog did not 'decide' to produce saliva.
The experiment was done with a dog because obviously you wont find humans willing to undergo surgery to have the saliva come out of the cheeks instead of into the mouth.
One has to forget about the dog and mentally replace it with a human: now the observation that the human connects the bell with the food is shallow. But the conditioned saliva reflex remains and can't be suppressed - and that is a remarkable insight. It works both with negative and positive stimuli. The latter one being a recipe for a long-lasting happy relationship ;)
It’s not a new discovery if something better has already been in use for 50+ years.
Am I missing something here?
Clearly you feel strongly about this. Unfortunately, a non-AI search for "prescott lecky" and "pavlov" really reveals very little support for this claim, to the point where your comment is actually the 5th result.
So ... got links?
Quite a special scifi novel that starts like this. Quite grounded at the beginning, but it then evolves into body horror and later becomes quite abstract.
Someone shoot me please
You know what, fine, be that way if you must.
Wait ... our brains are composed of molecules, and we think with our brains. That makes it a question of scale or organization, not principle.
This may sound kind of woo-woo, but many people are asking that question -- where do we draw the line between thinking and simple biological existence?
One idea is something called panpsychism, the idea that all matter is conscious, and our brains are only a very concentrated form. Easy to say, not so easy to prove -- but certainly the simplest explanation. In this connection, remember Occam's razor.
Philosophers describe consciousness as their "hard problem" -- what is it? Not just what it is, but where is it located, or not located. At the moment we know next to nothing about this question, even what kind of question to ask.
Consider the octopus -- it has islands of brain cells scattered around its body, and if you cut off an octopus arm, the arm will try to crawl back toward the ... umm ... rest of the octopus. Weird but true. Seeing this, one must ask where to draw the line between brain and body, between neurology and physiology.
The reason? The mind is not part of nature, and scientific theories must refer to some aspect of the natural world. If we were to accept the mind as science, then in fairness we would have to accept religion, philosophy and similar non-corporeal entities as science. So far we've resisted efforts to do that.
Some may object that psychology studies the mind, and experimental psychology is widely accepted as science. That's true -- there's plenty of science in psychology, some of it very good. But the many scientists in psychology study something that cannot itself be regarded as a basis for scientific theory.
This means psychology can do science, but it cannot be science. It's the same with astrology, a favorite undergraduate science topic by students learning statistical methods. But only the seriously confused will mistake an astrology study, however well-designed, for proof that astrology is a scientific theory.
People have the right to use the word "science" any way they please. So the only reality check is an educated observer. The fact that New Scientist has the title it does, and publishes the articles it does, stands as proof that there aren't nearly enough educated observers.
Anthropology?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/agentive
AI "agents" don't have "agency". They do what you want at your every whim (or at least they never say no). That's a slave.
That is, a falling rock is not an agent, because its movement is fully determined by its weight, its shape, the type of atmosphere, and the spacetime curvature. An amoeba in free-fall is likewise not an agent, for the same reasons. But an amoeba in a liquid environment is an agent, because its motion is determined to at least some extent by things like information it is sensing about where food might be available, and perhaps even by some simple form of memory and computation that leads it to seek where food may have been available in the past.
Slavery does not imply lack of agency.
One need not be anti-intellectual to find the state of reporting to be difficult to deal with and not wanting to read it. In addition to the GP’s complaint; journalists of any ilk also tend to conflate editorializing with reporting. You see this all the way from pop science to NYTimes to Fox News and yes even the Economist.
A question is whether the more fact based reporting of the early-mid 20th Century is the exception to the tendency of Yellow journalism that existed before and seems to exist now.
Are you a child? Software has no judgement and no sense of ethics. It's code, not a person.
Yes, and agents are also slaves—entities bound to your word and unable to act in their own right without your say so. These are the same concepts.
Sure, in a pedantic sense that lisn't meaningful to anyone. LLMs very much are slaves. The agent part doesn't matter.
The framing that Pavlov’s key insight was about “responses which are not part of the conscious mind” is historically a bit anachronistic. Pavlov was a physiologist, not a psychologist. He wasn’t primarily making claims about consciousness vs. unconsciousness. He was mapping the mechanics of reflexes and their modification. The conscious/unconscious framing is more of a later psychological interpretation layered on top. Pavlov himself was pretty hostile to mentalistic language and would probably have objected to framing his work in terms of what the “conscious mind” does or doesn’t control.
The claim about surgery is also a bit misleading as a reason for using dogs. Pavlov used dogs because he was a digestive physiologist studying gastric secretion. The surgical fistula was created so he could measure salivation precisely, not because the experiment required it conceptually. You could (and people later did) study conditioned physiological responses in humans through things like galvanic skin response, heart rate changes, and eye-blink conditioning, none of which require surgery.
So you have a legitimate complaint about a shallow reading of Pavlov, but you’re building their correction on some inaccuracies of your own, and you keep asserting the “can’t be suppressed” point which is the weakest part of your argument.
That's... interesting. How did they know that? Did they interview the dogs and ask them if they actively and consciously decide to produce saliva? Did they ask the dogs to try to surpass the reflex and the dogs failed to do it? Is "dogs have human-like conscious mind" even a scientific consensus?
> The key discovery is that there is a physiological reaction which cannot be suppressed anymore consciously.
My opposing theories are
1. dogs don't have conscious minds that are similar to humans' so the whole experiment can't be extrapolated to humans
or
2. dogs can suppress it consciously if they really want, like we can suppress the 'hanger reflex', it's just we don't have a way to tell dogs to do that
I really don't know how Pavlov experiment nullified these theories, and if it did, why "training animals to do circus tricks" didn't. Are we sure 'doing circus tricks' is equal to consciousness, and how?
> Did they interview the dogs and ask them if they actively and consciously decide to produce saliva? > Is "dogs have human-like conscious mind" even a scientific consensus?
That's exactly the point - once you have understood the significance of the experiment you understand that it is not important:
A veteran with PTSD can have a surge in adrenaline, heart rate, and cortisol when hearing a car backfiring but he can not suppress it.
Whether the dog was conscious or not about the salivation is completely and utterly irrelevant. In 1907 this was for the first time evidence of a mind-body connection not being accessible to the consciousness. Seriously, forget about the dog. This is all proven beyond any doubt for conscious humans. Nobody cares about what the dog felt.
Associative learning was already known at that time which in its simple form is just circus tricks. The experiment extended this to physiological responses which are not accessible to consciousness in humans.
It’s about transference of an innate stimulus response mechanic which can be transferred to another stimulus if paired in quick succession of the original stimulus, thereby eliciting the same response.
It says absolutely nothing about this being conscious or not, or impossible to suppress.