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Travel diary, days 28-36
The mind is a weird thing. For some reason, a week or so ago I just completely stopped worrying about the "what should I do with my life" issue, and got back to the old "well, I'll just find whatever to do" mindset I had previously. Weird. Ah well, I'm not complaining. Also, while I frequently keep feeling terribly homesick, the realization that it's been over a third suddenly made me feel like I don't want to leave this place. Gah.
The end of last week was busy, as most people were scrambling to write conference presentations to submit to ECAP10 before the deadline passed. I, too, managed to get something submitted, basically a shortened and rewritten version of the article that I currently have under review for Minds & Machines. (I contacted them about whether it'd be okay for them to also submit a copy to a conference, and they said it was fine.) Now I'm kinda ambivalent about whether I want M&M to accept my paper or not, for I realized that there's a lot of expanding and rewriting that I could do on the original article that I submitted... I also started working on a paper on the complexity of human values, but realized I wouldn't have the time to finish that in time for the submission deadline. I do intend to expand that to a longer paper, though.
I've been doing pretty well on the "personal projects" and "helping others" parts of my personal goals, but haven't really gotten anything done on the "personal growth and education" part. But I finally got around doing more of that yesterday, when I was again helping Eliezer with his writing. We've determined that for as long as I can still say that I've read everything he's written that day, it's fine if I do various other stuff while watching him write. So while there, I started doing what I've been wanting to do for a long time, but never got around: reading the latest articles from various scientific journals. To make sure I actually remember what they say, I also decided to briefly write down and summarize their contents. I only actually got one article summarized (about the comparative study of cognition; the summary is at the end of this post, in case anyone's interested), for the second article was interesting enough that I started hunting through its references and wasn't patient enough to stop to write a summary. With some luck, I should be able to put the time at Eliezer's to maximal use: both help him write, and make myself read up on the stuff I should've been reading up on for a while now. On the topic of helping Eliezer, yesterday he told me that half of what's been written in the book manuscript so far has been with me present. That was kinda cool, and also a little surprising - I hadn't realized we'd already gotten that much written.
Starting tomorrow, I'll start doing an interview series profiling various people in the house. So far I've only been talking about myself, briefly mentioning various other people. I figure that my readers would be interested in knowing the kinds of people that I'm living with. First up is an interview of Alicorn, a long-time Less Wrong poster. If there's anything in particular you folks want to know about the people here, leave a comment and I'll make sure to include that question in my interviews.
Below's the summary of that article I managed to read yesterday.
Towards a bottom-up perspective on animal and human cognition
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 14, Issue 5, May 2010, Pages 201-207. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2010.03.003
Research into comparative cognitive research, that is research that compares the cognition of humans and animals, has been dominated by a ”top-down” perspective. By this, the authors mean that people have concentrated on making either-or distinctions: does animal species X possess a theory of mind, or does it not? Does species Y show signs of altruism, or does it not? In particular, this has lead to sharp animal-human distinctions that set the study of cognition apart from the smooth animal-human continuum that can be found in the study of anatomy, genetics, development and neuroscience.
In contrast, ”bottom-up” perspectives on comparative cognition concentrate their analysis not on the perceived end result, but the systems behind it. As an example, the authors present a bottom-up approach from three different fields:
Memory and planning. It has so far been claimed that remembering specific personal experiences and using them to plan future is a uniquely human trait, with animals merely using stored information to react to present stimuli or anticipate the immediate future. Yet brain imagining indicates that the same neural machinery that is used for recalling the past is also recruited for make plans for the future. Birds that seem to have episodic memories also seem to be capable of future planning. Other studies imply that rats also have some of the same brain machinery and capabilities. Therefore, instead of viewing episodic memory and future orientation as advanced processes limited to humans, they should be considered as part of the general mental machinery that is found to varying degrees in a large variety of species.
Imitation. Primate imitation has been a controversial subject, with some studies demonstrating that primates were capable of learning by imitation, others that they were not. However, now seems that primate imitation proceeds via a process where the primate brain maps the other actor's behavior to its own body. If a human carries out the process to be imitated, the species barrier makes the mapping process harder and may cause it to fail. Exposed to models of their own species, chimpanzees reliably and faithfully imitate tool use, foraging techniques and arbitrary action sequences. Humans show activation of the same neural areas during imitation of novel behavior. Mirror neurons have also been found in birds, suggesting that the evolution of these systems can be traced back to the common ancestor of birds and mammals.
Prosocial behavior. It's been questioned to what degree animals other than humans show ”true” altruism, defined as altruism without obvious advantages for the actor. From that perspective, aid to offspring or kin doesn't qualify (helps spread the actor's genes), and any chance of reciprocal altruism also disqualifies the behavior. Yet while these distinctions are relevant in considering the evolution of the behavior, they can hardly be the actual drivers of the animal's behavior unless it can be assumed to know about genes or the expect future benefits. Studies have shown that apes tend to spontaneously assist both humans and other apes, without altering their behavior dependent on the availability of rewards. It also seems that there is widespread empathy prevalent in mammals. For instance, humans will subconsciously mimic the facial expressions of other people they see, the mental state running from body to body. ”Emotional contagion” has been demonstrated in mice and is being studied in humans and other animals. If empathy is the primary mechanism of altruistic behavior in response to another's distress, then the cognitively demanding assumption of helping resting on cost-benefit analyses needs to be abandoned.