haldane — ethology
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just came across this quote:
“it is difficult to be sure how a rabbit feels at any time. Indeed many rabbits make no serious attempt to cooperate with scientists” (Haldane 1932). How do ethologists get past this issue? Is the bias against an interior "consciousness" simply pique because with rabbits, "what we have here is a failure to communicate." [Cool Hand Luke] davew - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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Good question, Dave. I have a lot of experience with rabbits and with dogs. I find the sense of a relationship with dogs immensely greater. Of course, I was shooting at the rabbits at ages 10-16. Maybe they didn't want a relationship with me. But I've also had more congenial interactions with rabbits. My impression is that their highest priorities are eating and eliminating. Dogs love to play, be scratched and petted. They get anxious when their people leave and ecstatic when they return. I could go on. I feel confident that dogs have a richer inner life than rabbits. Nick, for example, will say that you can not experience the inner life of "an other" because the only thing observable is its/her/his behavior even to itself. Unless he's changed his mind he doesn't think inner lives exist. A position that I think he has embraced is the idea that a person infers his own feelings by observing his own behaviors. I asked him recently what *is* that observer and he hasn't answered yet. Nick, I apologize for picking on you but you are the only one I know who has taken that position. Besides Laird. Please correct me if I have misrepresented your views. Frank --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 7:27 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote: just came across this quote: - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ |
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Hi, Frank, Well I cannot say that you have “steelmanned” me, to use a local term of art. See Larding below: N Nicholas Thompson Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology Clark University https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/ From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly Good question, Dave. I have a lot of experience with rabbits and with dogs. I find the sense of a relationship with dogs immensely greater. Of course, I was shooting at the rabbits at ages 10-16. Maybe they didn't want a relationship with me. But I've also had more congenial interactions with rabbits. My impression is that their highest priorities are eating and eliminating. Dogs love to play, be scratched and petted. They get anxious when their people leave and ecstatic when they return. I could go on. I feel confident that dogs have a richer inner life than rabbits. Nick, for example, will say that you can not experience the inner life of "an other" because the only thing observable is its/her/his behavior even to itself. [NST===>i.e., there is nothing that constitutes the inner life of an organism<===nst] TUnless he's changed his mind he doesn't think inner lives exist. [NST===>Well, unless one understands “inner life” in some way quite different from your understanding, say, for instance, the sense in which Glen offered it, some weeks back. <===nst] A position that I think he has embraced is the idea that a person infers his own feelings by observing his own behaviors. I asked him recently what *is* that observer and he hasn't answered yet. [NST===>I acknowledge that there is a stream of experience, that all experiences are experiences of other experiences, and the experience of “me” is just another experience, on a par with my experiences of you, or the rabbit. <===nst] I Nick, I apologize for picking on you but you are the only one I know who has taken that position. Besides Laird. [NST===>Even Laird waffled. There’s Eric Charles, of course. <===nst] Please correct me if I have misrepresented your views. [NST===>I suspect that proper philosophers would say I shouldn’t make existence claims; I should only claim that there is nothing of which we speak when we speak of it. Or to speak of it as “inner” is oxymoronic. Or, there is something that we are talking about, but it is not in any useful sense, “inner”. Or, that as most people deploy it, it is simply obscurantist, distractionary blather. You know, one of those things. <===nst] Frank --- On Tue, Jun 30, 2020, 7:27 PM Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:
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As usually, there's a couple of layers to this discussion, and a lot of it is about language. Let's start with a few assumptions that I hope are not very controversial: 1) Our ways of talking about psychology mostly suck, being on par with what folk-language was regarding physics or chemistry during the time before, or right around, when those sciences were first emerging. 2) Nevertheless there IS something that people are referring to with the sucky language. (This is a William James-esqu spirit.) Where does that leave us? Well, we MUST acknowledge that there is SOMETHING Frank is talking about when he says the inner life of a dog is greater than the inner life of a rabbit. We also want to consider seriously (without a priori accepting) that whatever he is talking about regarding the inner-life-of-a-dog is similar-or-identical to whatever he is talking about regarding his-own-inner-life. At that point, there are a few questions: 1) What the hell is it that he is responding to, when drawing conclusions about the inner life of other critters? 2) What the hell is it that he is responding to, when drawing conclusions about his own inner life. 3) To what extent is he responding to the same thing in both cases? 4) Given the standard implications of the word "inner", to what extent is it useful (vs. counterproductive) for those pursuing a science of psychology, to let that word describe the things we are talking about? An initial sketch of the answers to those questions is as follows: 1) When referring to the inner-life-of-the-rabbit or of-the-dog, Frank is responding to some higher-order complexity in their behavior. That higher-order pattern is poorly specified now, but it could be well specified in the future, following a very large volume of relatively standard experiments. That is the type of thing a serious field doing cumulative research could be expected to pump out over a few decades. 2) We must acknowledge that it is much harder to be a priori certain what Frank is referring to when talking about his-own-inner-life. 3) At some point, when doing science, you got to pick an idea and run with it a bit. Nick (and I) are running with the idea that the thing-responded-to is very similar (perhaps identical) in the above situations. And it isn't arbitrary, we have good reasons. Others are running with the more traditional (Cartesian) idea that the thing-responded-to in the above cases are of fundamentally different quality. 4) Whether you want to roll with Nick (and I) or with Frank, the word "inner" starts to seem pretty iffy. If you are rolling with Nick (and I) there is nothing "inner" about the thing being responded to. The thing being responded to has many causes, including legitimately inner/inside-the-organism causes, but there is a fundamental confusions between description and explanation that needs to be untangled, and talk of "inner life" is interfering with that progress. If you are rolling with Frank, you can talk about your own inner life without caveat, but you (should) have to be clear when-dealing-with-others that all talk of inner-life is speculation based on outer-life; and whenever you see someone not making that distinction, you should agree (with Nick and I) that the language is confusing the issue. ----------- Eric P. Charles, Ph.D. Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist American University - Adjunct Instructor On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 11:46 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:
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