Androids, Zombies and Brains

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Rudy Garns

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Category:Science | Tags:androids, zombies, brains, consciousness, mind, evolution, philosophy

Created:on 2008-06-19 | Updated:about 20 hours ago

A collection of bookmarks for my course Androids, Zombies and Brain (or Philosophy of Mind).

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Colour, is it in the brain?

"Language requires the coordination of perceptually grounded categories with a socially-negotiated set of shared linguistic conventions to express them; i.e. language is based on shared groups of meanings that arise from our perceptual interaction with the external world and the way in which we convey that relationship to other human beings. Deacon’s opinion is that neurological predispositions and socio-ecological constraints sponsored the development and evolution of language, and that the subsequent feedback system gave rise to a complex coevolution of the two. Founded neurological determinism within evolutionary and socio-ecological boundaries drives the core of his argument." « Neuroanthropology

Tags: color, vision, evolution, language, Deacon, azb about 20 hours ago -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromneuroanthropology.net
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Ability to use symbols appeared 35 million years ago?

"Humans are sometimes said to be distinguished as "The Symbolic Species." A Research Highlights note in Nature point to the work of Addessi et al., who show that capuchin monkeys, who diverged from the human lineage ~35 million years ago, can be trained to use and assign value to tokens (symbols) for different items of food." (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)

Tags: primates, language, evolution, azb on 2008-09-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

more frommindblog.dericbownds.net
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In Dealing With Death, Are Animals Just Like Us or Pretty Much Unaware?

"Yes, we’re a lot like other primates, particularly the great apes, with whom we have more than 98 percent of our genes in common. Yet elaborate displays of apparent maternal grief like Gana’s may reveal less about our shared awareness of death than our shared impulse to act as though it didn’t exist." - NYTimes.com

Tags: primates, death, mortality, azb on 2008-09-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com
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The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain

The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain:
A Review of two contrastive views (Pinker & Deacon).
(Printed 2001 in Grazer Linguistische Studien GLS 55, 1-20)
Ken Ramshøj Christensen
Department of English, University of Aarhus

Tags: Deacon, pinker, language, brain, evolution on 2008-09-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.hum.au.dk
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The Evolution of Phenotypic Plasticity Through the Baldwin Effect

Noesis VI: Article 4

Tags: Baldwin, evolution on 2008-09-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.chass.utoronto.ca
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Baldwinian evolution

Stevan harnad

Tags: Baldwin, evolution, azb on 2008-09-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromusers.ecs.soton.ac.uk
- what is evolving, gradually or quickly (depending on
  
  where and what kind of genome we start with) is not the wings or the
  
  fins, but the ability to learn certain specific things that give an
  
  adaptive advantage, such as swimming or speaking
- we CAN pass on an inherited tendency to ACQUIRE certain traits
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The Baldwin Effect and its Significance

Kim Sterelney. The Baldwin Effect and Its Significance: A Review of Bruce Weber and David Depew (eds) Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered; MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass 2003, pp x, 341.

Tags: Baldwin, evolution, development, azb on 2008-09-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.victoria.ac.nz
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Baldwin effect

08.31.2008 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tags: Baldwin, evolution on 2008-09-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromen.wikipedia.org
- a feedback loop operates whereby a dairy culture increases the selective advantage from this genetic trait, while the average population genotype increases the collective rewards of a dairy culture.
- Selected offspring would tend to have an increased capacity for learning new skills rather than being confined to genetically coded, relatively fixed abilities. In effect, it places emphasis on the fact that the sustained behavior of a species or group can shape the evolution of that species.
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The Baldwin Effect, if it ever occurs, works as follows

"The Baldwin effect occurs, if it ever does, when a biological trait becomes innate as a result of first being learned. Suppose that some trait is initially absent from a population of organisms. Then a number of organisms succeed in learning the trait. There will be a Baldwin effect if this period of learning leads to the trait becoming innate throughout the population." David Papineau

Tags: Baldwin, evolution on 2008-09-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.kcl.ac.uk
- The Baldwin effect occurs, if it ever does, when a
  biological trait becomes innate as a result of first being learned. Suppose that some trait is initially absent
  from a population of organisms. Then a
  number of organisms succeed in learning the trait. There will be a Baldwin effect if this period of learning leads
  to the trait becoming innate throughout the population.
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Talking Heads

"Our brains are well suited for language. But how did they get that way." Calvin's review of Deacon in the NYRB

Tags: Calvin, Deacon, language, evolution, azb, Baldwin on 2008-09-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.nytimes.com
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William H. Calvinreview of T. W. Deacon's THE SYMBOLIC SPECIES (1997)

NYT

Tags: deacon, language, evolution, Calvin on 2008-08-31 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwilliamcalvin.com
- the nonlanguage task of remembering who owes what to whom sets you
  up for understanding structured sentences. They carry over into linguistic argument structure (those
  word categories involving actors, recipients, beneficiaries, and so forth), which provide major clues
  to understanding a story-like sentence about who did what to whom.
- But selection favoring
  language need not be via the success of language per se
- "The Baldwinian perspective suggests...
  that the first stone tools were manufactured by australopithecines, and that the transition to Homo was
  in part a consequence rather than the cause.... The large brains, stone tools, reduction in dentition,
  better opposability of thumb and fingers, and more complete bipedality found in post-australopithecine hominids are the physical echoes of a threshold already crossed [in behavior]....
  Another way to look at this is to say that many of the physical traits that distinguish modern human
  bodies and brains were ultimately caused by ideas shared down the generations."
- The Baldwin effect allows unrecorded tweaking from flexible behavior to secondarily drag
  along relevant genes ("recipe items") in the long run; it's Darwinian but at one remove. Thus relevant
  gene combinations "fill in" behind the behavioral advance.
- a slow convergence in copying errors toward written
  recipes with a combination of ingredients, amounts, times, temperatures, and assembly procedures
  that -- with some common-sense tweaking -- will satisfy "good taste."
- flexibility during life (learning and creativity) eventually helps to reward genetic variations
  leading in a similar functional direction. This form-follows-function principle has been known for a
  century but it's still poorly appreciated.
- This pattern-hunger doesn't require even average intelligence, nor is it limited to speech. Deaf children can do the
  same four levels of pattern discovery by observing body movements -- but only if they are immersed
  in a fluent sign-language environment, and equally early in the first few years of life.
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Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species | john hawks weblog

Deacon's position is that the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language. So for him, explaining the evolution of language (and the brain features that support it) explains much of interest about humans.

Tags: deacon, evolution, language, azb on 2008-08-31 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromjohnhawks.net
- Deacon has told a story that makes sense, but there is no strong empirical evidence that supports this view as opposed to other possible ideas about language evolution.
- What is essential in terms of human evolution is the overall expansion of the neocortex, and much less so the relative sizes of different parts, although the changes in relative extent in the parietal association areas and some specifically language-related features such as Broca's area may be even more important.
- But Deacon argues that Universal Grammar is unnecessary. In his view, innate assumptions are not the only way to create learning biases that enable the acquisition of grammar rules. Biases in learning might instead stem from the constraints that young children typically face in interpreting speech. In his view, children ignore many of the details of syntactic relations in their initial attempts to interpret speech. Using a top-down approach, they focus on those elements that are readily understood and later fill in the details.
- symbols are logically connected to other symbols in an interlocking set of relationships.
- grammatical organization
- innate features of the brain
- when behaviors like symbol use or language fall within the range of some individuals in the population, the rest of the population may well be able to learn them. As the population changes behaviorally to learn these skills, natural selection can begin to act on the genetic variation that may be related to them, either because the genes underly the behaviors themselves or the ability to learn the behaviors.
- The second approach is that of Steve Pinker, who basically takes Chomsky at face value--namely, that there is an innate brain capacity for learning natural languages--and claims that language function itself was the target of selection.
- the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities. But also intrinsic to Chomsky is the idea that the neural underpinnings of language were not themselves selected for their function in language but instead for some other function.
- the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language
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Links to Consciousness: Consciousness Links « Neuroanthropology

Tags: azb, brain, consciousness on 2008-08-26 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromneuroanthropology.net
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Damasio, A. (2003) "Feelings of Emotion and the Self"

Damasio, A. (2003) "Feelings of Emotion and the Self," Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1001, 253-261.

Tags: damasio, emotions, brains, self, AZB on 2008-08-19 -All Annotations (0) -About

more frompeterasaro.org
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Open Questions: Robotics

Tags: robots, azb, AI on 2008-08-19 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.openquestions.com
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Thinking About Thinking

Preview of an article by Howard Gardner from The New York Review of Books, October 9, 1997

Tags: mithen, evolution, mind, azb on 2008-08-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.nybooks.com
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Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange

By Harold Kalant, Werner Kalow, Steven Pinker, Reply by Stephen Jay Gould
In response to Darwinian Fundamentalism (June 12, 1997) - The New York Review of Books

Tags: psychology, evolution, azb on 2008-08-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.nybooks.com
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'The Prehistory of the Mind': An Exchange

By Merlin Donald, Steven Mithen, Reply by Howard Gardner
In response to Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange (October 9, 1997) - The New York Review of Books

Tags: Mithen, evolution, mind, brains, azb on 2008-08-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.nybooks.com
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Language as an Emergent Function: Some Radical Neurological and Evolutionary Implications (pdf)

Language is a spontaneously evolved emergent adaptation, not a formal computational system. Its structure does not derive from either innate or social instruction but rather self-organization and selection. Its quasi-universal features emerge from the int

Tags: deacon, langauge, evolution, azb, emergence on 2008-08-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromsymbolicspecies.com
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The Aesthetic Faculty (pdf)

Article by Terrence Deacon

Tags: deacon, evolution, language, azb on 2008-08-17 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromsymbolicspecies.com

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Androids, Zombies and Brains

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