September 16, 17, 2013 “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Excerpts from On Being an Octopus by Peter Godfrey-Smith, “The Boston Review” 6/3/13 “… In these studies chimps or monkeys first learn to play simplified video games, moving virtual objects by using a joystick, trackball, or another controller, trying to get certain objects to meet or collide and, in some cases, trying to get other objects to avoid collision. They then perform tasks of these kinds while another “distracter”object moves on the screen in similar ways to the object they are controlling. The objects then freeze and the chimps’ second task—the one the experiment is set up to study—is to indicate which object was moving under their control. In a 2011 study by Takaaki Kaneko and Masaki Tomonaga, chimps did well on a task of this kind. They guided an object toward a moving target and then picked it out from a distracter whose motions were those of an object that had been guided by a chimp on an earlier trial. It’s reasonable to wonder if chimps are a special case here, but Justin Couchman has done a related series of experiments on rhesus monkeys. Couchman’s experiment had the monkeys doing a harder task than the chimps were faced with, and one of his four monkeys clearly mastered it. Every report of this kind I have read raises interesting further puzzles. Kaneko and Tomonaga ran an additional experiment in which the chimps were controlling neither icon as it moved. Instead they were watching a recording of an entire earlier trial. Moving the trackball had no effect on any object. As expected, the chimps did better at choosing the right object when they were actually controlling it. But surprisingly, they did not do too badly—performed better than chance—even when neither object was under their control. How is this possible? What does it even mean to get the “right” answer when neither object is being controlled? The “right” object was the one that had been controlled in the earlier trial when it was recorded. The object being controlled at that time will tend to follow the target more closely than the object that had been a distracter in that trial. This difference in apparent goal-directedness might lead the chimps to be more inclined to choose that object. Given this, it is important that the chimps made better choices when they had real control of one of the objects. The experiments certainly tell against the idea that awareness of agency is beyond all non-human animals…. Some philosophers working within a broadly materialist framework are opposed to asking questions about “what it’s like” to have a particular kind of mind. They regard this way of setting up the issues as misguided.” And this in a sense is where it all began, for Eek, some months ago when Eek hadn’t even been considered, that is, the Septimus circumstances hadn’t arisen, with a worry that something wasn’t quite right with the overall state of science, which, consciously or unconsciously was what, finally he, whoever he was then, trusted as the Authority, this despite the occasional Sheldrakean quibble, and rats showing up on opening day of the market in 19th century Paris, it was this and that, Hawking kicking the can down the road, Brian Greene going all multiverse whimsical and Lee Smolin blowing the whistle. And of course the urgency and the fear weren’t yet there and the looking for something to say or how to say it and the accidental Amazonian comments. And the phone call, can’t forget the phone call which explains specifically the above deleted squids and mysterious chimps and interesting how it all connects and connects and keeps on connecting. And breaking apart and breaking apart and breaking. How is this possible? What does it even mean…? Indeed.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 05:43:18 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015