Any female here?

[Sparky415]

Orange legos? we are getting quite a few members who wanna steal our legos.

Sent from Ash forum mobile

Lego is just for us Ash, they got Asimo to play with 

[Neil]

...  By realizing that our sensory systems only receive a finite range of information, it means that logically, there are things in the universe we might never be able to know, or perhaps even exist (dark matter anyone?), because of the limitations of our physical/biological form. ...

This I don't get. Humans have a long history of making stuff that widens what we can sense.  We may not be able to sense a magnetic field but we can build a compass.

In related news... http://www.xkcd.com/1037/  You get a different comic depending on your geography, browser, window size ... 

[mvyrmnd]

What about a Lego Swiss Army Knife 

(Image removed from quote.)
(Image removed from quote.)
Made with Lego Bionicle: Swiss Army Knife

I want one!

[ducttapetech]

What about a Lego Swiss Army Knife 

(Image removed from quote.)
(Image removed from quote.)
Made with Lego Bionicle: Swiss Army Knife

I want one!

Should be easy to mod too.

[J-sews]

What about a Lego Swiss Army Knife 

(Image removed from quote.)
(Image removed from quote.)
Made with Lego Bionicle: Swiss Army Knife

I want one!

Should be easy to mod too.

Love that they worked the swiss cross into the handle too

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

...  By realizing that our sensory systems only receive a finite range of information, it means that logically, there are things in the universe we might never be able to know, or perhaps even exist (dark matter anyone?), because of the limitations of our physical/biological form. ...

This I don't get. Humans have a long history of making stuff that widens what we can sense.  We may not be able to sense a magnetic field but we can build a compass.

But that's not sensing it.  It's an abstraction based on our definition of what we design it to do.  We make inferences about something we can't see, touch, feel, hear, etc. based on the behavior of the instrument, that's all. 

Our sensation is of the behavior of the instrument, not the phenomenon we assume the instrument is measuring.  And that's what we have to do, make inferences about it, as we can't ever know for certain that it's measuring what we think it's measuring.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume correctly pointed out that we can't ever observe a cause itself directly in the world.  We can only observe antecedents and their resulting consequents.  We must infer that something is happening between the two events that relates one to the other.  So when he was smacking billiard balls into one another in his study, there wasn't anything other than the two billiard balls involved.  Now, he erroneously assumed that because he could not observe a cause in and of itself, separate from the objects involved in a causal sequence, there was not such thing as causality. 

However, another Scottish philosopher, Thomas Reid, correctly observed that we must and do infer that the two events are causally related, and we naturally assume there is something going on that we can't directly experience ourselves.  Now days, for this kind of situation, we call those things "force", and "inertia", and so on. 

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant subsequently postulated that causality is a function of cognition.  Our minds are structured in such a way that we naturally make connections between spatially and temporally contiguous events and we understand that contiguity as "causation".  Evolutionary psychologist hypothesized there should be some kind of physiological function in the brain for this, and cognitive neurophysiologists have confirmed we have a set of functions in the brain where different sets of neurons working together process the temporal relationships between perceptual events and work to associate those events.  So we sort of have a "causation perception" function built into the brain.  It's very similar to the way that visual motion perception works actually. 

The way this cashes out in the sciences in general is the use of models.  In quantum physics, we can't directly observe the structure of an atom, the exclusion principle makes that true by definition.  So what we do is use analogy and metaphor with things we can directly observe and experience, such as seeing the planets move across the sky so they seem to move around the Earth, and we use that observation to structure our understanding of the atom.  Thus we get what is commonly called the "solar system" model of the atom.  I'm glossing over a lot of specific details in the argument here, but I think you'll get the idea.

We see this kind of thing on a small scale, and I admit this is an imperfect example, by comparing languages and seeing there are words in one language that express an idea for which there is no corresponding idea in another language.  The best known example of this is the German word "zeitgeist".  In German it means (or so I'm told, I am a native American English speaker) 'spirit of the times'.  But we have no single corresponding word in English for that.  Translated literally, it would mean 'time ghost', but that's not what it means in German.

So basically, because we have to infer any knowledge that is not directly observable, that means there's stuff out there that we might never be able to understand, let alone even know it exists, because of the limitations of the function of our physiology and sensory apparatus. 

[Lynn LeFey]

Let me try maybe a few examples of things outside our senses.
Try this:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/06/080612-spider-webs.html

Certain spiders weave their webs with changing patterns in them; patterns visible to their prey, but not to the human eye.

Likewise, many creatures that live in the ocean can see into the UV portion of the spectrum. Since water blocks light from most efficiently on shorter wavelengths, the deeper in water you go, the more red, yellow, green, and finally blue/indigo/violet. Red gets filtered out very quickly. I did a SCUBA dive into 35 feet of very slightly murky water, and it was all green. Everything on the lake bottom was dull brown, until I shined my dive light on it. Then the full spectrum visible to humans was shown.

Or, maybe imagine a world the way a dog senses it. Dogs can sometimes navigate across long distances just by smell. This is a sense that humans have, but in an extremely truncated form.

Or imagine the vast networks of chemical paths laid down by ants. You can watch ants following paths, but you can't see why.

We know about gravity, but we are not attuned to it well enough to feel the difference from the moon, that causes tidal shifts. We can't sense the radio spectrum without machines.

Everything that falls outside our ability to sense doesn't 'exist' to us. There is a great deal of reality that we are simply ignorant of, for lack of the senses to experience it. Even when we make a machine that CAN sense it, we then have to translate that information into a form our senses can take in (usually visual or auditory).

As a thought on the compass... Humans can have one, and they can check it, and use it to navigate. Geese have a built-in compass, an iron deposit (which if I recall correctly is in the base of their bill). They don't 'check' north, they literally feel it's pull.

EDIT: Also, that is an AWESOME lego knife.

[Steinar]

I turn my back five minutes and I'm totally out of sync with the entire thread. Cool!

Well, I have hardly any social antennae (is that the correct English idiom?), so I'll just barge in with my now outside context questions to Heinz and Lynn anyway:

[...] Since the brain can process information about its own processing, basically, that processing can then feedback and affect processing in other ways, in other areas, and so on.  So that is where the causal efficacy of consciousness comes from.

I find this argument both elegant and compelling.

[...] I think that the phenomenon of consciousness isn't that highly localizable to one part of the brain, but that it's a distributed function that depends on the total overall patterns of activity produced in the brain.

I think this resonates well with a very interesting study which was made on classroom participation and lecture quality when (university level) classes were given in the lecturer's and (most of) the student's second language. (This may sound strange to a native speaker of English, but for “the rest of us” it is a very common problem.) The result was both quality of the lectures and student participation was markedly worsened, but neither the lecturer nor the students noticed. They were so busy juggling both a second language and the subject that they didn't notice they did a worse job with the subject. The study was German, btw.

Not exactly the same thing, but my pattern recognizer was triggered.

I also think there is a powerful interactive component to it as well, based on the social nature of our species, and the effect that's had on our evolutionary history.  (Social forces can place selective evolutionary pressures on us just as well as purely mechanical and consequential environmental factors.)  I think an essential component of consciousness is that it takes place between individuals in a social context.  Of course, this is essentially an unanswerable question, because we have no way of knowing if someone who would never have any social experiences, any language learning and so on, would possess consciousness.

It is at least no reasonable doubt that human intelligences is closely linked to the human as a social species. Also, I ascribe to the idea that e.g. language is a tool we use to help us think, in a similar manner mathematics is “only” a tool, though language is more closely linked to being human at all. Therefore I suspect a human without language, has a very different take on the world. We all think without going through the hoops of constructing sentences and choosing words, but language lends structure which helps us move forward, and of course share our thinking. (I guess someone may pipe up and say it's quite common to use language without thinking as well...  )

But, in sum, that's my take on it.  Consciousness is a product of both the complexity of the brain causing the development of highly recursive feedback processing mechanisms (70% of all neurons in the brain talk to other neurons in the brain, and only about 30% actually send signals to or receive them from the body), and that this process has also been shaped by our social nature and the effect that social nature has had on our evolutionary history.  In short, we've selected ourselves to have consciousness to facilitate social cooperation and productivity, as it also increases our survival as a species. 

“The slick talker gets all the girls/boys.”

[...] Because of this, I don't think we'll ever be able to scientifically quantify consciousness or its contents and qualitative experiences.  The best we'll be able to do is produce a very high degree of correlation between brain function and what looks like conscious and intentional behavior, which we've already done a pretty good job with.  Consciousness, because of its very nature, being subjective, transitory, and ephemeral, means we'll never be able to have a truly quantitative and scientific theory of consciousness.

Now we're speeding out in the areas of the question of what is knowable, Gödel's completeness theorem and all that jazz, and I can only say what I usually say “We may or may not be able to know something, but we won't know till we try anyway.” I think we will be able to run a self-aware computer long before we really understand how its self-awareness works. We understand electrochemistry pretty well, there is no need for any new ground-breaking theories to, as a an extreme example, brute force simulate a brain, electron by electron, and feed it with a simulated outside world. To actually understand how and why this electronic brain thinks, well, that requires this quantitative theory of consciousness which may or may not be possible, but I have no reason at all to suspect is around any nearby corner...

[...]
Earlier attempts to compare the mind to technology were a great deal further off than comparing it to a computer. They are both collections of electronic connections. I'm not certain with current computer tech we'll ever be able to emulate human brains. The limitations of binary alone pose a problem. My understanding is that neurons aren't 'on' or 'off', but more offer various levels of resistance. You could convert that roughly to multiple bits, for instance saying a byte might represent a single synaptic connection. But that leaves you getting not quite what the brain does. I understand some people can hear the difference between the digitized version of music on a CD and from an analogue LP, as an example of that difference. But all of this sort of comes down to 'close enough', where mathematicians can argue that .999999999=1.

I think I disagree somewhat here. In the end everything you or I see, feel or think boils down to movement of electrical charge, which in its nature is an integer number of electron charges. There is no fundamental rule of nature which is in the way of simply simulating a brain, electron by electron, ion pump by ion pump, as I opined above. Modelling neurons as simple switches is a faulty model, I agree, since they simply don't work like that, but we are (theoretically) capable of simulating the exact workings of a neuron with a machine manipulating bits, since the world we experience is made of a finite number of atoms.

The failing of computers in emulating human thinking is, I think, two-fold. First, they don't have the ability to perceive the world the way we do, and second, they do not have the physiological drives that we do. The word 'orange' is just a collection of symbols to a computer. To a human, it's a collection of symbols, that gets you a connection to an entire database of sensory
input. It connects to visuals in color, dimpling, and a long line of oranges we've seen in our lives. It connects to our memories of smell, taste, texture, memories of a spray of mist from the skin of the orange squirting in our eyes, and the joy of eating them. For a computer, the word has a definition. For a human, the word is just a gateway into our knowledge of the item as  experienced. As omnivores, oranges give us nutrition, and vitamins; things we as organic life crave. We WANT them. That want, powered by biological needs, is something a computer does not know, and honestly, I don't think could ever be taught.

Again, we could (theoretically speaking) “grow” some sort of a brain as a software simulation. Perhaps an insect brain as an early exercise? That brain would have no way of knowing the world around it was tailored input. Generating the input would be easier than it sounds, since the actual bandwidth of the brain is pretty low (relatively speaking), when measuring the incoming data rate for all the neural lines into the brain. It is our consciousness which “fools” us into believing we sense more efficiently than we actually, e.g. consider the very narrow field of sharp vision for a human vs our own feeling of visual acuity. Also, we wouldn't be limited to run the simulation in real-time, the simulated cricket brain could just as well live through its subjective day in a real-life year as a real-life day.

[...] If the human mind is a massively powerful computer used to take sensory input and produce decisions based (in theory) on keeping the organism alive and to motivate it to procreate, then getting a computer to 'think' kind of seems like it'd have to be forced into a situation where it was required to perform the same task. As I'd rather not have Cylon overlords, I suggest we not try.

Well... I for one welcome our new robotic overl... Oops, sorry.

[Steinar]

[...]

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant subsequently postulated that causality is a function of cognition.  Our minds are structured in such a way that we naturally make connections between spatially and temporally contiguous events and we understand that contiguity as "causation".  Evolutionary psychologist hypothesized there should be some kind of physiological function in the brain for this, and cognitive neurophysiologists have confirmed we have a set of functions in the brain where different sets of neurons working together process the temporal relationships between perceptual events and work to associate those events.  So we sort of have a "causation perception" function built into the brain.  It's very similar to the way that visual motion perception works actually. 

Which also makes us suspectible to magic thinking. Correlation is not causation, but strictly speaking, we have no way of knowing the difference in the real world.

The way this cashes out in the sciences in general is the use of models.  In quantum physics, we can't directly observe the structure of an atom, the exclusion principle makes that true by definition.  So what we do is use analogy and metaphor with things we can directly observe and experience, such as seeing the planets move across the sky so they seem to move around the Earth, and we use that observation to structure our understanding of the atom.  Thus we get what is commonly called the "solar system" model of the atom.  I'm glossing over a lot of specific details in the argument here, but I think you'll get the idea.

And today, we can actually “photograph” atoms, and what we see is the electron cloud probability distribution predicted from quantum physics. We are living in an incredible epoch of human history!

[Steinar]

[...] Everything that falls outside our ability to sense doesn't 'exist' to us. There is a great deal of reality that we are simply ignorant of, for lack of the senses to experience it. Even when we make a machine that CAN sense it, we then have to translate that information into a form our senses can take in (usually visual or auditory).

This made me think of a crude thought experiment: Imagine that you linked e.g. a compass directly to some borderline arbitrary neural pathway into the brain. At first, the incoming signal would just be an irritant, but after a while, the person would learn to interpret the signal. Would that be a human who “felt” magnetism stronger than a common human, or would it be simply be a weird user interface for a compass? (“You have just switched the heat sensation in your upper left foot for magnetism.”) The latter interpretation is the obvious one, I think, but given the extreme degree of plasticity in neural pathways, I don't immediately see any deep difference between this setup and an animal with a more fine-tuned magnetic sense than our own?

People who get the visual implants, a technology obviously in its infancy, must learn to use them as well, they do not “see” at once.

[Neil]

...  By realizing that our sensory systems only receive a finite range of information, it means that logically, there are things in the universe we might never be able to know, or perhaps even exist (dark matter anyone?), because of the limitations of our physical/biological form. ...

This I don't get. Humans have a long history of making stuff that widens what we can sense.  We may not be able to sense a magnetic field but we can build a compass.

But that's not sensing it.  It's an abstraction based on our definition of what we design it to do.  We make inferences about something we can't see, touch, feel, hear, etc. based on the behavior of the instrument, that's all.  ...

OK I see your point there but I still don't understand how that prevents us discovering something we can not sense. Again there's a long history of discoveries   Sure some are by observing direct effect but are the discoveries made indirectly any less valid?

Kind of splitting things here (but like this thread is any way on a track )but is my "sensing" of a magnetic field via viewing the needle on a compass or the pull on a lode stone any less valid than if I had iron deposits in my skull that let me know the same thing without the compass   If I built a hat with a bunch of hall effect sensors linked to solenoids pressing on my head and wandered around looking silly like that for a few weeks until I no longer really registered the individual pushes as touches but now always knew which way I was facing would that be a more valid "sense" than looking at the compass? 

Oh uh, now I'm thinking about how I could build the hat    I look silly enough as it is!

[ducttapetech]

...  By realizing that our sensory systems only receive a finite range of information, it means that logically, there are things in the universe we might never be able to know, or perhaps even exist (dark matter anyone?), because of the limitations of our physical/biological form. ...

This I don't get. Humans have a long history of making stuff that widens what we can sense.  We may not be able to sense a magnetic field but we can build a compass.

But that's not sensing it.  It's an abstraction based on our definition of what we design it to do.  We make inferences about something we can't see, touch, feel, hear, etc. based on the behavior of the instrument, that's all.  ...

OK I see your point there but I still don't understand how that prevents us discovering something we can not sense. Again there's a long history of discoveries   Sure some are by observing direct effect but are the discoveries made indirectly any less valid?

Kind of splitting things here (but like this thread is any way on a track )but is my "sensing" of a magnetic field via viewing the needle on a compass or the pull on a lode stone any less valid than if I had iron deposits in my skull that let me know the same thing without the compass   If I built a hat with a bunch of hall effect sensors linked to solenoids pressing on my head and wandered around looking silly like that for a few weeks until I no longer really registered the individual pushes as touches but now always knew which way I was facing would that be a more valid "sense" than looking at the compass? 

Oh uh, now I'm thinking about how I could build the hat    I look silly enough as it is!

I am with Neil on this one, we many not truly sense or feel it, but we still know it is there. Magnetic fields, antimatter, gravity and so on.

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

Great follow-ups on my posts guys!  This is great!

I'm too lazy to go to the trouble of making specific quotes, so I'll just make a series of comments aimed at different things each of you have mentioned.

Neil / Steinar: I need to be more specific.  I'm not implying that we can't discover things we can't sense.  Rather, I'm saying that there's no reason not to expect there are things in the universe, world, multiverse, whatever, that we will never discover.  (Of course, if we don't, how would we know?)  Even with the use of technology.  It's not a matter of sensory ability alone, it's a matter of conceptual ability.  I think Einstein said something about 'thinking in 11 dimensions' or something like that and I don't remember exactly with reference to what.  But, my point is that even conceptualizing some things may be literally impossible for us, simply because of the nature of our existence.  Right now, I think dark matter is a good example of this.  We know something is out there that's responsible for most of the behavior we see on a large scale in the universe, but we have no idea what it is.  We've got experiments going that we think might tell us something about it, but we don't know for sure.  The best we can do is make educated guesses.  We may eventually figure it out; I don't know.  But we may not.  Only time will tell.

The solenoid sensing thing is a good point, and one that brings up a valid question.  I'd say to a certain extent it would be a more 'valid' way of sensing your way around, because if you learned to use it to that level of proficiency, you're getting into the domain of implicit knowledge based on neurophysiological adaptation.  Back in the 1940's, Donald Hebb (who granted my senior thesis advisor at Berkeley his PhD) proposed an important theory of learning at the neural level, involving both structural and functional organizational changes at the level of the neuron and groups of neurons.  I won't go into details, but his theory now forms the basis of pretty much all modern cognitive neuroscience.  My point is that learning to use such a device in such a way represents a qualitatively different experience than looking at the direction of the needle on a compass.  Sure, people can get really good at reading a compass, but because of the nature of the device and our interactions with it, I wouldn't say anyone, even an expert orienteer, would be able to interact develop a sense of 'intuition' about what's going on around them by looking at the compass needle.

Steinar: the correlation / causation thing is a good point.  And when you say we have no way of knowing the difference in the world, that's exactly my point.  Because of that disconnect, we are forced to make inferences, even with our own direct sensory experiences.  Our experiences are not of the world itself, but of the interaction of our neural physiology with the world.  But as I said before, that aspect of it is transparent to us, because it wouldn't be very adaptive if it wasn't.  Our nervous system and brain organization evolved to find statistical regularities in the patterns of stimuli we experience in the world.  Most of us in my field now take the viewpoint that the brain has evolved to be sensitive to those patterns and learn them, and there's a whole lot of evidence in many fields, neurophysiology, linguistics, perception, and so on that supports that view.  So in sum, strictly speaking, while correlation is not causation, we evolved to be sensitive to various kinds of statistical regularities in the stimuli experience, and certain kinds of those regularities are what we understand as "causation".

The language thing study you mention isn't one I'm familiar with, but I understand the logic of it.  The implications of it you mention mesh very well with what we know about Hebbian learning.  Second language users don't have the same level of brain adaptation that they do for their first language, and it takes time for that to develop.  From the study of patients with various type of brain damage, trauma, ischemia, infarction, etc., we know we have dedicated modules in the brain for learning and processing language, and that when someone learns a new language, those parts have to 'rewire' themselves, so to speak.  That's why learning additional languages is easiest for young children, because their brains are still going through that process and the additional languages get 'wired in' at the ground level so to speak.

There has been a long running debate in linguistics and psychology about the relationship between thought and language.  The classical position on it is referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  Basically it states that language and thought are the same thing, so we can't think of something we can't talk about.  Research has shown us that's only partly true.  We know there is some conceptual ability that exists separately from language from facts from both psychology, linguistics, and neuropsychology, but it's been difficult to say just what it is, because be definition it can't be described!     Regardless, a 'strong' version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn't really accepted anymore, but a 'weak' form of it is.  Right now the dominant explanation is that language and thought are two different yet overlapping and interacting systems.  Language certainly is a tool of thought, and also helps to structure and organize it, but is not all there is to thinking.

With respect to how our social nature has influenced our development, history, evolution, etc., language is something that's unique to us as a species.  Other species certainly communicate, but not in the same way we do, not in the same abstract and symbolically representational sense that we do.  Lots of studies with teaching chimps and gorillas to use sign languages have shown this.  And, it's been an immensely powerful tool for us as a species, whose importance cannot be overstated.  I'd go so far as to say it's what has made us the dominant species on the planet. 

Another important aspect of language is that mate selection has lead us to be more proficient with language.  Like you said, the slick talker gets the chicks.    That's quite literally true in an evolutionary sense.  In the typical hunter-gatherer gender based division of labor, and because of the high investment in reproduction that women have to make, women are much more reliant on social support and relationships, so social cognition and skills are much more important to them than they are for men.  However, being that social cognition is a valuable trait to human females, their mate selection preferences have lead to men becoming more proficient in social cognition themselves.  And, social interaction is greatly facilitated by language. 

With respect to consciousness, I don't think we're going to have thinking computers any time soon.  We probably will eventually create technology that will allow enough storage capacity and processing to brute force a reasonable simulation of consciousness and intentional behavior, but I think it's a long way off.  But I also think that such a simulation would be qualitatively different than how it works in our brains. 

When I teach intro cognitive psych, when I'm covering stuff like this in class, AI, intelligence, problem solving, etc., I usually get asked a question like what Lynn was joking about... "when are we going to have to worry about bowing down before our robot masters"... etc.  My answer is, not any time soon, if I understand it as well as I think I do.  We need to worry much more about where we're going with genetic technology.  With that, it's much more a case of "when" than "if".  If we're not careful, we'll end up living in a "Gattaca" type of world, or a "Blade Runner" type of world, than we will a "Terminator" type of world.  With AI, "when" vs "if" is still very much in debate, but not for genetic technology. 

Lynn: I think your examples are well made.  I highly recommend a fascinating paper written by the philosopher Thomas Nagel called "What is it like to be a bat?"  Another philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty also takes a similar position.  Their view is simply that if we try to think of what life is like for a bat, (or a dog or an ant for that matter), we can imagine hanging out in barns and belfreys during the day, and flying around at night, squeeking, eating bugs, etc.  But, we're imagining what it would be like for us to be doing what a bat does... we can't ever imagine or experience what it's like for a bat to be doing what a bat does.

Both Nagel and Ponty argue the defining characteristics of consciousness are for one, awareness; two, that it's private and unsharable (in other words completely subjective); and three, that it is qualitative and not quantitative.  In other words, there is something it is like to have a particular experience, and that it relies on the embodiment of that particular situation at that point in time and space.  William James, one of the founders of modern psychology, is the person who created the metaphor of the 'stream' of consciousness.  He said that even if you step into the same stream at the same place you did just a second ago, you can never have exactly the same experience twice, because the second time, the content of the stream has moved on, and there's new water there now, even if all the other conditions are exactly the same as they were before.  This is where Nagel and Ponty come in.  The nature of the scientific method is that it's designed to seek out verifiable information based on publicly observable and reproducible empirical events.  It necessarily leaves the subjective nature of sensory experience behind, because it can't be objectively observed and measured, nor can it be replicated and verified.  So the logic that science uses to find objective truth cannot by definition ever be able to say anything about consciousness, because what makes consciousness what it is, is fundamentally incompatible with the scientific method.

Okay.  It's late, and I need some sleep, so I'm going to end it here for now.  This has been tremendously enjoyable for me, and I hope informative and fun for you guys too.  This is all just brain farting for me really... my classes and lectures are honestly much better organized and written than this! 

Peace all!!!   

[demonoflust]

Wow, I'm sure you can write some good books.

[Lynn LeFey]

So what is the most recent thoughts on what's going on with Synesthesia? Some serious wires crossed there.

Also, on language, and animals use of it... and just because I find it highly amusing and moderately cute... the language of prairie dogs.


It brings up a good point of the problem of cracking the language beyond a certain level, due to lack of context. This is also true for whale and dolphin speech. Having no context, it's really hard to determine what they're saying. For apes and chimps being so nearly related genetically, I think there are many other species with much more evolved language abilities. I'm not suggesting it comes near to the level of abstraction that humans are capable of, but then again, I'm not certain anyone has ever strapped a bottle-nose dolphin into something to read it's brain activity while it's chattering.

I watched a documentary the other day, 'China's Century of Humiliation'...
Hulu - China's Century of Humiliation - Watch the full movie now.
And at one point, it was discussing a definition in an old Chinese dictionary for the English word 'Privacy'. I don't remember it verbatum, but it was something like 'The western pride in the sadness of being alone'.

Words can facilitate thought, or limit it, but at least for me, my 'native language' in my brain is usually a flood of images. It then has to go through a filter, where I have to pick the best words to articulate what my brain wants to communicate. If other people experience this as well, I seem to be more consciously aware of it for some reason, like my linguistic translator is a lazy slob who complains when it has to do its job.

I sort of imagine words like paved paths. There are lots of places in between them, but usually there's a word to get you where you want to go. I personally have no problem 'hopping off the trail', in my thoughts. I suspect some people's 'native language' in their brain likely IS language. And I imagine some of those folks hungrily scour their own and other languages, finding new words, and opening up new avenues of thought. Harder for them to 'walk in the grass' off the trails normally provided by words.

While we're hard wired for language, and develop a new one in the absence of one provided, I'm virtually certain people don't build them in their brains the same way. Two people, speaking the same language, likely have two very different means of developing the linguistic software and database to support it. Sorry for all the IT terminology. It's just the most apt words I have. Oh, the irony.

So... assuming any of that made any kind of sense...

[Threeme2189]

Get back to sharpening your teeth you

 

In a red bikini holding a red swisschamp? That will be sexy.

   or even a black swisschamp and clad in tight leather    or that could be just me 

How about a scale-less swisschamp and wearing... 

 

[Steinar]

I don't have anything of substance to contribute to the current discussion right now (nothing new there ), but I just wanted to say thank you to this community, especially Heinz, user24, Lynn and Neil, for this excellent exchange and generously sharing your perspectives and knowledge. It brought me back to college with excited late night discussions of Big Questions.

 

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

So what is the most recent thoughts on what's going on with Synesthesia? Some serious wires crossed there.

That's exactly what seems to be the case.  Imaging studies have shown there seems to be unusual/abnormal connections between different brain areas in cases of synesthesia.  The terminology involves what's called the 'primary percept', which is the stimulus/perception the person experiences directly in the environment, and the 'induced percept' which is the additional brain activation because of the additional connections.  The most common form is called grapheme-color synesthesia because people tend to see letters as always written in a particular color, regardless of the actual color of ink/pencil the letter is actually written in. 

When I was in grad school at UC Santa Cruz, I had a student who had grapheme-color synesthesia.  She told me that when she was little, one of the ways she learned math was through the color associations of different digits.  She always saw 5 as red and 3 as green, and 8 as orange.  She said she learned that "red + green = orange".  I did a couple of informal experiments with her and found that the Roman numeral "V", which is the same as 5 of course, didn't also produce the induced color percept for her; she could see that "V" was written in blue or red or green very easily.  This has been documented in published research, so it seems to indicate there's something about the actual form of the character, and not its meaning, that is at work here.  That means the mechanisms is probably something lower level in the brain that is hard wired in, rather than learned.

Also, on language, and animals use of it... and just because I find it highly amusing and moderately cute... the language of prairie dogs.


It brings up a good point of the problem of cracking the language beyond a certain level, due to lack of context. This is also true for whale and dolphin speech. Having no context, it's really hard to determine what they're saying. For apes and chimps being so nearly related genetically, I think there are many other species with much more evolved language abilities. I'm not suggesting it comes near to the level of abstraction that humans are capable of, but then again, I'm not certain anyone has ever strapped a bottle-nose dolphin into something to read it's brain activity while it's chattering.

This is very interesting.  It certainly does push the boundaries of what we understand as animal 'language', but linguists have defined language rather anthropocentrically, so that it involves abstractions and representation.  The difference between our language and animal language is that even in the examples given with the prairie dogs, their vocalizations are all descriptive, there's no seeming abstraction in the sense that their vocalizations are referring to immaterial concepts such as things in the past or future, or love, beauty, justice, etc.  Vocalizations in many animals species have been found to be stimulus specific, and based on the info in the video, I'd say the same is true for prairie dogs, especially considering the fact each species seems to speak a different form of their 'language'.  That implies its more of an environmental function of learning than it is something that's hard wired into them the way human language capacity is.

I watched a documentary the other day, 'China's Century of Humiliation'...
Hulu - China's Century of Humiliation - Watch the full movie now.
And at one point, it was discussing a definition in an old Chinese dictionary for the English word 'Privacy'. I don't remember it verbatum, but it was something like 'The western pride in the sadness of being alone'.

Interesting.  Very much an example of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Words can facilitate thought, or limit it, but at least for me, my 'native language' in my brain is usually a flood of images. It then has to go through a filter, where I have to pick the best words to articulate what my brain wants to communicate. If other people experience this as well, I seem to be more consciously aware of it for some reason, like my linguistic translator is a lazy slob who complains when it has to do its job.

This is a lot like what's called the Imageless Thought Controversy in the early years of psychology.  There was a huge and unresolvable debate between a couple of the early psychologists, specifically Wundt and Titchener on one side, and Külpe on the other, about whether or not images were necessary for thought.  Some said yes they were, others said no they weren't.  Needless to say, the issue was never resolved because the basis of the argument was on subjective conscious experience, rather than objective behavioral data.  It eventually lead to the death of introspection in psychology at the hands of John B. Watson.

I sort of imagine words like paved paths. There are lots of places in between them, but usually there's a word to get you where you want to go. I personally have no problem 'hopping off the trail', in my thoughts. I suspect some people's 'native language' in their brain likely IS language. And I imagine some of those folks hungrily scour their own and other languages, finding new words, and opening up new avenues of thought. Harder for them to 'walk in the grass' off the trails normally provided by words.

This is a very apt metaphor.  In psycholinguistics, there's this idea of what's called a "garden path" sentence, because as you read it you're lead to one particular conclusion, only to find at the end of the sentence that the meaning is different, or at least ambiguous.  An example is the sentence "They spy saw the man with binoculars".  The question is, who has the binoculars?  This highlights the built in ambiguity in language; certain things must be glossed over or ignored while other things must be emphasized to make language work.  For example, a baseball cap, sombrero, beret, and a cowboy hat are all examples of the concept of "hat".  But yet they're clearly different objects with very little in common in terms of their features and structure.  Yet, they're all considered the same kind of thing.  In the 1920's and 30's a group of philosophers calling themselves The Vienna Circle tried to formulate a completely specific and unambiguous form of language to use as the basis of all knowledge and science, a movement called Logical Positivism.  They failed tremendously however, because they didn't realize that part of what makes language what it is, is the ambiguity that it has.  In order to be able to say that a cap, sombrero, etc. are all hats, we have to ignore certain differences they have.  Otherwise we'd need a new and different word for each and every individual hat, even ones of the same type.  That's clearly impossible.

While we're hard wired for language, and develop a new one in the absence of one provided, I'm virtually certain people don't build them in their brains the same way. Two people, speaking the same language, likely have two very different means of developing the linguistic software and database to support it. Sorry for all the IT terminology. It's just the most apt words I have. Oh, the irony.

So... assuming any of that made any kind of sense...

No worries on the metaphors... it's how our minds work at a fundamental level in fact.  And you've made a lot of sense!  It's always very productive for me as a teacher to learn more about how other people think about this stuff because it helps me to find ways to explain it and make it clearer and more accessible to my students!    But, the point about spontaneous language is well made.  Communities of deaf children who aren't taught any form of communication spontaneously develop their own pidgin sign languages complete with vocabulary and syntax.  That argues very strongly for the idea we are indeed hard wired for learning language. 

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

I don't have anything of substance to contribute to the current discussion right now (nothing new there ), but I just wanted to say thank you to this community, especially Heinz, user24, Lynn and Neil, for this excellent exchange and generously sharing your perspectives and knowledge. It brought me back to college with excited late night discussions of Big Questions.

 

Glad you find it interesting!  I'm happy to share.

[Lynn LeFey]

Yeah, I've got to say this is one of the more interesting, and least-expected discussions I've seen on the web in some time.

[gustophersmob]

I watched a documentary the other day, 'China's Century of Humiliation'...
Hulu - China's Century of Humiliation - Watch the full movie now.
And at one point, it was discussing a definition in an old Chinese dictionary for the English word 'Privacy'. I don't remember it verbatum, but it was something like 'The western pride in the sadness of being alone'.

I find this interesting.  While I'm an electrical engineer by trade, one of my hobbies is theology.  As an offshoot of this, I've done quite a bit of reading/research about the differing social and cultural norms both in the ancient near east, and some representative cultures today.

This quote illustrates one of the more basic differences between a collectivist culture like China, and more individualist cultures like most modern, western nations.

[Heinz Doofenshmirtz]

I watched a documentary the other day, 'China's Century of Humiliation'...
Hulu - China's Century of Humiliation - Watch the full movie now.
And at one point, it was discussing a definition in an old Chinese dictionary for the English word 'Privacy'. I don't remember it verbatum, but it was something like 'The western pride in the sadness of being alone'.

I find this interesting.  While I'm an electrical engineer by trade, one of my hobbies is theology.  As an offshoot of this, I've done quite a bit of reading/research about the differing social and cultural norms both in the ancient near east, and some representative cultures today.

This quote illustrates one of the more basic differences between a collectivist culture like China, and more individualist cultures like most modern, western nations.

I recently was reading some things about this with respect to perception.  It seems that cultural norms also influence what we focus on in a scene and how we interpret it.  When asked to describe the contents of a fish tank, Japanese people focused more on the setting, the colors, the context, but Americans focused more on the fish themselves, individual objects in the tank, etc.  They also reported different perceptual evaluations of things like the color of the fish and the like, compared to Japanese people.

This is something I hope to look more into.

[user24]

I don't have anything of substance to contribute to the current discussion right now (nothing new there ), but I just wanted to say thank you to this community, especially Heinz, user24, Lynn and Neil, for this excellent exchange and generously sharing your perspectives and knowledge. It brought me back to college with excited late night discussions of Big Questions.

 

Thanks! It's been a fascinating thread, I just wish I had more time to think and chat about this kind of stuff

Yeah, I've got to say this is one of the more interesting, and least-expected discussions I've seen on the web in some time.

Definitely unexpected and interesting