Perhaps the list is trying to tell us something. Let's go offline
from here on instead of onlist.
But my response is that:
-we have settled the issue of anthropopathy by agreeing there is
no avoiding it - we will have to live with it because we project our subjective
anthropomorphs onto our experiences. There is no point in belaboring that
which can't be advanced just now.
-if we stop the anthropopathy, there will be little to relate
the experience to others.
TJ: And this takes us back to my first comment. We can attribute
ontologies to people, because we can ask them about their commitment or lack of
it to all or part of those ontologies. I cannot see that attributing ontologies
to flies (with or without scare quotes) is anything more than fantasy.
I disagree, for the same reasons. When you ask someone a
question, you have no way of knowing if the answer that person gives is
reliable, any more than the fruit fly, which chooses a behavior as a function
of the stimulus.
But I think any framework that helps you conceptualize knowledge,
and iterate in the discovery cycle, can be very helpful, but if hurtful, can be
inhibited. Keep the working knowledge (what matches reality) and archive the
nonworking knowledge.
Even when the conceptualizations and consequent knowledge are incorrect,
but useful and not hurtful, they should be considered objectively as knowledge
chunks. Any conceptualization is itself fantasy, but intended by its fantasizer
to describe reality.
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper,
Rich Cooper,
Chief Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics Corporation
MetaSemantics AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
From: Thomas Johnston
[mailto:tmj44p@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2015 1:16 PM
To: Rich Cooper; '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Fruit fly emotions mimic human emotions -
ontology discovery possible?
The forum just kicked out my
last response as "spam". This is happening, to me at least, about
once out of every twenty emails to this forum. It is irritating.
But apparently, my last
response did make it in. It's the one dated today, 4:07 pm.
On Wednesday, May 20, 2015 4:07
PM, Thomas Johnston <tmj44p@xxxxxxx> wrote:
what
about forming an ontology by exploring the fly's behaviors and emotions?
I
thought you had agreed that we can't attribute anything as human-like as
emotions to flies, and that doing so is anthropomorphizing. I know you've
denied the charge, but in reviewing what you've written, it seems to me that
you're waffling.
As you might note, that still is basing observations of emotional
behavior on the psychological filter of the observer. I don't see a way
around that fact at this point, ...
Yes, I do note it. My way
around it is that I'd continue the research, but stop the misleading talk
about fly emotions.
From that table, over
generations of many flies, you could retrieve, for any given fly, the entire
fly life cycle, and all the eventful and uneventful observations of that fly
throughout the life cycle.
From
that set of eventful (stimulated) responses, you could calculate the dwell time
of each "emotion", which they claim has a true dwell time - you don't
get over emotional stimuli immediately whether you are human or fly.
Well,
even with the scare quotes, I sense anthropomorphizing rearing its head again.
Either we're talking about fly emotions, or we're not. Also, see One - Four
below.
They
also measure adaptations to repeated stimuli, and other fun things. If
the trace doesn't show a set of characteristics (like dwell time) that are
"similar" to the human dwell times for those emotions, I suppose they
have to fudge the figures or reobserve until the damn flies behave.
First: even if similar dwell times were discovered, all that that
would show is the extensional equivalence of average response times to
purportedly equivalent stimuli involving identical neurochemicals.
Second: due to the wide divergence of flies and humans on the
evolutionary tree, the assumption that identical neurochemicals play similar
roles in flies and humans is, I think, a very risky one.
Third: I think it would be difficult to establish what are
"equivalent stimuli" for flies and humans.
Fourth: human emotions are more clearly identified, in the current
science, with macro-level structures in the brain than with neurochemistry,
particularly with the thalamus and amydgala. (My reference here, aside from
scattered articles in non-academic journals, is Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self
(2002).) So if flies don't have those two neural structures, similar
neurochemistry does not encourage me to hypothesize emotions in flies.
But given that table, couldn't
some motivated researcher also group together the set of all responses to any
given stimulus, review the probability density spectrum of that group, and
discover other distinctions that can be made among the groups so formed?
I
don't see how any amount of mathematics can make a silk purse out of a sow's
ear.
From that database of fly
objects and events, I believe an ontology could be fashioned that explains the
responsive behavior of fruit flies to the various stimuli, with observations,
classifications, experiments, and theories.
I
believe you could see the patterns in the statistics of the observations you
made. I don't believe you could see emotions, or any other parts of an ontology.
And
this takes us back to my first comment. We can attribute ontologies to people,
because we can ask them about their commitment or lack of it to all or part of
those ontologies. I cannot see that attributing ontologies to flies (with or
without scare quotes) is anything more than fantasy.
That
is the scientific discovery process in bare naked expose. Each of those
four processes leads to one aspect of discovery. Each contributes
information to others, and uses information from others, to improve the
discovered model hiding in the database.
To be
blunt (with no intention to be derogatory), that is indeed the scientific
process, at the level of applied rather than theoretical science. Theoretical
physicists still debate the Copenhagen vs. the "hidden variables" vs.
the many-worlds interpretation. Applied quantum physicists, when caught
wondering about such things, are told to "Shut up and calculate!"
(mentioned by Jim Al-Khalili in Quantum: a Guide for the Perplexed). The point
being that those working in applied science are not in general very concerned
with theory, or with conceptual clarity. They just want to find an interesting
(fundable) project, and go at it!
I'd be
very surprised to find any ontological content behind their use of the word
"emotion".
On Wednesday, May 20, 2015 2:33
PM, Rich Cooper <metasemantics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Then what about forming an
ontology by exploring the fly's behaviors and emotions? If we list in a
table each row of columns including fly ID, stimulus ID, each fly
behavioral response ID, and the quantified chemical spectrum ID
of that fly resulting from the stimulus, we would have a table of all the
samples in columns like
(fly, stimulus,
response, spectrum, stamp).
The empty stimulus (ID=-1) is
interpreted as doing nothing to stimulate the fly, while each stimulus instance
has characterizations in other tables also indexed by stimulus ID. So
filtering the set of all data points can be used to group together patterns of
behavior.
From that table, over
generations of many flies, you could retrieve, for any given fly, the entire
fly life cycle, and all the eventful and uneventful observations of that fly
throughout the life cycle.
From that set of eventful
(stimulated) responses, you could calculate the dwell time of each
"emotion", which they claim has a true dwell time - you don't get
over emotional stimuli immediately whether you are human or fly.
They also measure adaptations
to repeated stimuli, and other fun things. If the trace doesn't show a
set of characteristics (like dwell time) that are "similar" to the
human dwell times for those emotions, I suppose they have to fudge the figures
or reobserve until the damn flies behave.
But given that table,
couldn't some motivated researcher also group together the set of all responses
to any given stimulus, review the probability density spectrum of that group,
and discover other distinctions that can be made among the groups so
formed?
That sounds like a factory
shop floor work flow program I once wrote which "knew" by the barcode
scan sequence and ID which work order was being performed by which employee on
which resource with what inventory at what time, when that process ends, and
how long the various segments of time for each product ID match the factory
min, max, average and count? Rank employees by productivity, customers by
value, products by margin, activities against outsources, and all kinds of
valuable operational data for factories. The same approach could be taken
for the flies given the table of fluent fly events.
From that database of fly
objects and events, I believe an ontology could be fashioned that explains the
responsive behavior of fruit flies to the various stimuli, with observations,
classifications, experiments, and theories.
That is the scientific
discovery process in bare naked expose. Each of those four processes
leads to one aspect of discovery. Each contributes information to others,
and uses information from others, to improve the discovered model hiding in the
database.
Error! Filename not
specified.
All of that, from database
through ontology formulation, is described in my patent, the 7,209,923, which
is located here:
http://www.patent2pdf.com/pdf/07209923.pdf
Chief Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics Corporation
MetaSemantics AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
From:
Thomas Johnston [mailto:tmj44p@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2015 10:50 AM
To: Rich Cooper; '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Fruit fly emotions mimic human emotions -
ontology discovery possible?
I think you're right. Sometimes
the way to make progress in science is to play hunches, to jump in somewhere
and swim around. And so I should have taken "emotional
neurochemicals" in the sense of "neurochemicals that, in the human
brain, are involved in emotion", and as nothing more than that.
However, at that stage of
research, it's probably a little too early to talk about insect ontology, isn't
it?
(Although I believe that
serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine are involved in cognitive processes as
well. Dopamine, especially, is implicated in neurological diseases like
Parkinson's, which involve cognitive impairment.)
I have no direct references
for Kandel's work. He did write an interesting article in ScAm several decades
ago, and I see his work mentioned frequently.
One reason I cited The Brain:
a Very Short Introduction, is that in spite of reading quite a few explanations
of Kandel's findings, I never understood what was going on until I read The
Brain (see esp. pp.90-101).
In it, O'Shea explains
neurochemical stimuli at synapses send second and third messenger chemicals
back to the cell nucleus where they trigger the release of RNA strands that
build specific proteins that alter neuroanatomy, prompting physical changes
which strengthen the chemical discharge at the original synapses, and forming
additional synaptic connections with the target neurons. Thus explaining how
short-term memory (a state of excited neurons) can be translated into long-term
memory (structural changes in the brain).
BTW, don't take this brief
description (correct as it is) to indicate any serious knowledge of
neurophysiology on my part. I don't have any.
BTW2, fruit flies probably
aren't prey for Venus fly traps. Those plants snap shut on their prey only when
three of their hairs are tripped over, within a short period of time, by an
insect wandering around inside the plant. I think fruit flies would be too
small to do that. Also, insect-eating plants exist in swampy areas, which
probably don't support fruits of any sort, because the soil is so nutrient-poor
(leading to the evolution of plants that eat insects to get the nutrients they
need).
On Wednesday, May 20, 2015
12:02 PM, Rich Cooper <metasemantics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
TJ: 1. How
would the Cal Tech scientists know what the basic "emotional
neurochemicals" are? That would depend on knowing what fruit fly behavior
resulted from what emotions.
From their publications I've
read, they are using the same biochemicals known to have function in the human
brain - Dopamine, Epinephrine, Norepinephrine, and the others known to be
associated with human emotional expressions.
As you might note, that still
is basing observations of emotional behavior on the psychological filter of the
observer. I don't see a way around that fact at this point, but as deeper
knowledge is gained from experiments (those we can't do on people who might
object), the researchers might expand their list of biochemicals through the
usual discovery process, like the one I described in my '923 about unstructured
text interpretation.
TJ: Also,
my word-play on Venus fly traps was intended to make a serious point. On what
grounds would the Cal Tech scientists interpret fruit fly behavior, but not
interpret Venus fly trap behavior, as mediated by "emotional
chemicals"?
On funding grounds; they are
only studying fruit flies for now. Venus fly traps will have to await a
new project with funding for them. But if the fruit fly has relationships
with Venus fly traps, it might show up when the fruit fly is exposed to them
but not eaten.
TJ: If
it's the assumption that neurons are required for emotions, then what about the
famous neurons in the snail Aplysia, the study of which led to Eric Kandel's receiving
the Nobel prize?
I didn't see that explicit
assumption in their work (neurons required for emotion), but it seems that both
neurons and neurochemicals would be involved in any physiological action that so
strongly affects the body as emotions do.
What is an Aplysia? Do
you have references to the Eric Kandel work? That sounds like a good
reference. I found the following paragraph on wiki at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aplysia_gill_and_siphon_withdrawal_reflex
Wiki: Nonassociative learning
is a change of the behavior of an animal due to an experience from specific
kinds of stimuli. In contrast to associative learning the behavioral change is
not caused by the animals learning that a particular temporal association
occurs between the stimuli. There are three different forms of nonassociative
learning examined in Aplysia: habituation, dishabituation and
sensitization. Eric Kandel and colleagues were the first to demonstrate that
Aplysia californica is capable of displaying both habituation and
dishabituation.[1]
Habituation in Aplysia
californica is when a stimulus is repeatedly presented to an animal and there
is a progressive decrease in response to that particular stimulus.[1]
Dishabituation in Aplysia
californica is when the animal is presented to another novel stimulus and a
partial or complete restoration of a habituated response occurs.[1]
Sensitization in Aplysia
californica is the increase of a response due to the presentation of a novel,
often noxious, stimulus.
A deeper response than that
would be useful if you think it bears on the issue. But the problem of
essential attribution of emotions is something I can't see any way around at
this point. Can you?
TJ: When
Aplysia withdraws from a stimulus, are the neurochemicals involved
"emotional neurochemicals"? If the Cal Tech scientists said they are,
wouldn't they be guilty of your charge of anthropomorphizing? And if that is
true, aren't they already guilty of that charge by doing research on the
"emotional neurochemicals" of Drosophilia?
Yes, the Cal Techies would
certainly be anthropomorphizing, and yes, they are already guilty of such
behavior on this project. But can you suggest an alternative that is
within reasonable research budgets for opening up neurological research into
emotions, short of trying to track all the millions of active chemicals in the
brain? Given the very limited state of knowledge in this area, and the
vast amount of missing knowledge in front of us, it seems a reasonable next
step. But yes, the knowledge gained will be extremely inexact and
filtered by the researchers' biases. We have to live with that for
now.
Thanks for the O'Shea
reference. I found a PDF here in case anyone else is interested:
http://zung.zetamu.net/Library/Education/Education_Neuroscience/OShea_Brain_2006.pdf
Chief Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics Corporation
MetaSemantics AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
From:
Thomas Johnston [mailto:tmj44p@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2015 8:24 AM
To: Rich Cooper; '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Fruit fly emotions mimic human emotions -
ontology discovery possible?
Your questions and comments
are very much to the point. My response, in brief, is this:
1. How would the Cal Tech
scientists know what the basic "emotional neurochemicals" are? That
would depend on knowing what fruit fly behavior resulted from what emotions.
And, as you said:
That depends on the
observer's interpretation. Why would flying indicate anything
emotional? You are anthropomorphizing flying with human-interpreting
events.
Indeed. Why would any fruit
fly behavior indicate the presence of "emotional neurochemicals"?
That's my point. It isn't me, but the Cal Tech scientists, who appear to be
"anthropomorphizing flying with human-interpreting events".
Also, my word-play on Venus
fly traps was intended to make a serious point. On what grounds would the Cal
Tech scientists interpret fruit fly behavior, but not interpret Venus fly trap
behavior, as mediated by "emotional chemicals"?
If it's the assumption that neurons
are required for emotions, then what about the famous neurons in the snail
Aplysia, the study of which led to Eric Kandel's receiving the Nobel prize?
When Aplysia withdraws from a stimulus, are the neurochemicals involved
"emotional neurochemicals"? If the Cal Tech scientists said they are,
wouldn't they be guilty of your charge of anthropomorphizing? And if that is
true, aren't they already guilty of that charge by doing research on the
"emotional neurochemicals" of Drosophilia?
For a very good short
introduction to these neurological issues, I highly recommend:
Michael O'Shea. The Brain: a
Very Short Introduction (2005).
2. "Draining the concept
of concept of meaning" simply means being willing to attribute concept
possession on the basis of very little evidence. What meaning the concept of
concept has, that could be drained away, is evidenced in the immense body of
literature in philosophy of mind. One might best begin looking up topics like
"concepts", "theories of meaning" and "mental representation",
not to mention "externalism" and "internalism", and the
connectionist vs. representationalist debate between, among others, Paul
Churchland and Jerry Fodor.
The Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are open sources, and
both are peer-reviewed. But in getting started, the IEP is usually best, with
the SEP for a deeper dive.
On Wednesday, May 20, 2015
10:44 AM, Rich Cooper <metasemantics@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Thanks for your comments:
TJ: I
don't know how we could derive ontological categories from observations of
fruit files, even from observations correlated with identifiable patterns of
stimuli in identifiable regions of the fly's brain (something, anyway, which I
doubt can be reliably done).
If a fruit fly flies off in
one direction, is it flying towards a desired object (a mate, food) or away
from a feared object (a bird, any other large moving object)? If it is flying
towards a mate, that's how we would describe what it's doing. But in what sense
does the fly itself have the concept of a mate?
That depends on the
observer's interpretation. Why would flying indicate anything
emotional? You are anthropomorphizing flying with human-interpreting
events. The real value of the Cal Tech work is in having access to the
fly's central emotional neurons, which are hypothesized to be in a tiny area of
the brain. So the "meaning" of a stimulus is only organized in
the fly brain, not in the observer brain. The "meaning" of any
stimulus depends on the fly, not on the observer. The observer's
attribution of meaning is simply wrong. Get the basic emotional
neurochemicals first, then hypothesize an emotional reason that fits with the
fly's actions after the stimulus is presented.
TJ: If we drain the concept
of concept of enough meaning, than any pattern of behavior could be said to
manifest the use of a concept in making a judgment (the judgment to carry out
that behavior). And the concept we attribute, in those attenuated cases, will
be very much a product of our own interpretative prejudices. The fruit fly
ontology we come up with will be more or less an Alice in Wonderland ontology.
And if we drain the concept
of concept of enough meaning to attribute concepts (ontological categories) to
fruit flies, then I think it's not a very big step beyond that to attribute
desire and hunger to Venus fly traps!
How does one "drain the
concept of meaning"? I don't understand your statement. Could
you please elaborate on how that is possible given that the "meaning"
is in the fruit fly, not in the observer. The observer's attributed
"meaning" would be completely unrecognizable to the fruit fly.
Chief Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics Corporation
MetaSemantics AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Thomas
Johnston
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2015 7:06 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Fruit fly emotions mimic human emotions -
ontology discovery possible?
I don't know how we could
derive ontological categories from observations of fruit files, even from
observations correlated with identifiable patterns of stimuli in identifiable
regions of the fly's brain (something, anyway, which I doubt can be reliably
done).
If a fruit fly flies off in
one direction, is it flying towards a desired object (a mate, food) or away
from a feared object (a bird, any other large moving object)? If it is flying
towards a mate, that's how we would describe what it's doing. But in what sense
does the fly itself have the concept of a mate?
If we drain the concept of
concept of enough meaning, than any pattern of behavior could be said to
manifest the use of a concept in making a judgement (the judgement to carry out
that behavior). And the concept we attribute, in those attenuated cases, will
be very much a product of our own interpretative prejudices. The fruit fly
ontology we come up with will be more or less an Alice in Wonderland ontology.
And if we drain the concept
of concept of enough meaning to attribute concepts (ontological categories) to
fruit flies, then I think it's not a very big step beyond that to attribute
desire and hunger to Venus fly traps!
On Tuesday, May 19, 2015
12:02 PM, John F Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 5/18/2015 7:44 PM, Rich
Cooper wrote:
> I am interested in the emotions, their interrelationships,
> and math models of how they work in a library of situations.
There have been many, many such models over the centuries.
For a model developed by the psychologist David Matsumoto and
applied to "human intelligence", see
http://www.humintell.com/macroexpressions-microexpressions-and-subtle-expressions/
That page has 7 sample faces that express his "universal facial
expressions of emotion": Happy, Surprise, Contempt, Sadness, Anger,
Disgust, and Fear. It also cites some publications that describe
applications of that classification.
> I am looking for an algorithm that could, with sizeable numbers
> of fruit flies, and sizeable numbers of situations experimentally
> simulated to the flies, elicit the ontology of the fruit fly's
> response CLASS TYPEs through observing the behavior of the fruit flies.
I got that message from your previous note.
JFS
> Don't expect a "unified theory" based on a simple combination
> of features or components.
RC
> But do use a simple framework of combinations of the common
> components to explore the emotion space.
Philosophers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists
have devoted many person-millennia to exploring the "emotion space"
with a huge number of simple and complex frameworks.
If anybody comes up with a really good combination, I would express
something between Happy and Surprise. But I'm not holding my breath.
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