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Finger Prince

Stoner Sloth posted:

good points - also makes me wonder about some of the chemoautotrophic bacteria or archaea that live on deep sea vents or deep underground or bacteria that 'breathes' uranium or iron that gets all they need from rock - what strange time does a thing that lives entirely separate from the cycle of the sun keep?

You mean shift workers?

# ¿ Jan 5, 2020 15:48

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 15:20

Finger Prince

I just can't stop thinking about beavers.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2020 13:35

Finger Prince

Ok so beavers right? They do this whole thing where they dam a stream to flood a depression, then they build a lodge in the middle which provides shelter and protection from predators. Then when the winter hits, which they did all this in advance of, and their pond freezes over with a thick enough layer of ice, they go and make a hole in the dam and drain the pond, so they have an ice roof over plentiful pond tubers which they can eat at peace with direct access from their lodge without having to dig through tons of snow to get at.
They select a plot, they prepare the land, they build a structure, they build another completely different purpose structure, then selectively damage the first structure, in order to have an supply of food and protection throughout the long winter.
Also they let muskrats chill with them in the lodge, like pets? Nobody knows.
Now they could be doing this entirely by some rote autonomous script hardwired in their little beaver brains with no conscious thought, forethought, planning, externalization, or abstract thinking, etc.
But when we build a shed, we do all those things, because we're human and different from beavers.
So you could say, it's convergent evolution, and advanced construction techniques evolved in humans through their use of human consciousness, and in beavers through some unknown beaver mechanism that isn't anything like human consciousness or whatever.

OK but how about this - maybe we can build a shed the same way a beaver builds a lodge, we just couch our methods in concepts of advanced cognition in a circular justification of our methods.
Like, I build the shed because I have these particular human cognition abilities that other things don't have. The proof of these cognition abilities is I built this shed, and I couldn't have done that without them.
But what if we built the shed because that's just what animal brains do, and we aren't really any different from any other thing that employs advanced construction techniques, we just think we are.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2020 15:07

Finger Prince

Goons Are Great posted:

That's a very good point, yes, I think there's a lot of potential overlap here and questioning our cognitive abilities by offering the possibility that we, as well, are just doing the same stuff beavers do is fair game, especially given that we humans tend to be very good at building up mental illusions and believing them afterwards.

My point that our perspective might be so entirely different to those of, say, beavers, is not because we are special or super good, but because of how oddly different we as primates seem to act and, from the homo sapiens view, think, compared to other animals. I think it's not entirely off-base to assume that every biological order, family, genera or even species has their own special way of perception, specifically built from ground up to fit their biological needs.

For example, primates have this apparently inherent need for social structure, complex interaction, a seemingly biological requirement for social hierarchy and yet, an insane focus on the individual good. This goes for macaques who have "noble families" that train soldiers to protect them and enforce their will among the others in their local community, baboons who plan raids and something close to ape wars with other tribes to steal resources and even slaves and humans who, as the first neurological reaction upon seeing someone else, check if the other human is a threat to them. Babies have a natural aversion towards foreign male humans up to a certain age, probably because primates are the kings when it comes to murdering each others infants in order to establish or demolish ranks. These are biological observations that we can see for our species and close relatives and that are fundamentally different in other animals.

Dogs love us intensively and with passion, they won't take revenge for bad stuff, they seemingly won't ever hate their owners even if they are treating them terribly - at worse they get insanely scared as they lose their basis of life. That might be because wolves seem to think in packs and belonging to a pack, supporting it no matter what and loving those who are part of it is so vital, that it seems to overrule emotional reactions we would expect from a human perspective given certain situations.
Cats, on the other hand, do not have this social structure of packs and since our cats at home are basically just tiny tigers, they are very independent and do not at all do what you want them to do just because you happen to exist. Yet, they are very capable of showing emotions, have a lot of interest in you and love you and other animals.

I'm taking these simplified examples to illustrate the possibility that the way animals form social structures might be a hint to how their minds work, too. I think that it is possible that given how we are able to observe these structures we may get a hint into what matters for their thinking the most - be it the pack, their family, their food, the dams they build or the way they organize themselves (or not at all). This makes every single animal family special in its own way, sometimes related to each other, sometimes not at all and this, while certainly sharing specfic structures due to similar evolution, might have impact on the question of subjectivity and consciousness, as well. That is, of course, assuming that these things are part of the evolutionary process at all, which may be entirely wrong as well, as it already implies a ton of other stuff. That's the stuff I like to explore though.

The separation of animals into class, order, family, genus, species is completely human abstraction, and while based (now) on scientific concepts like differences in DNA, it doesn't account for things like, for example, lions who live in close social groups and commit infanticide just like primates, and in that respect aren't like housecats at all, despite being closer related in DNA. Why would a lion's brain functions responsible for social interaction and murder be significantly different from and ape's or wolf's? Their brains are made of the same matter.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2020 16:06

Finger Prince

Manifisto posted:

still, I will bring up a point that one might or might not think significant. I know I read this somewhere and it might be that one guy again. the animal world is filled with remarkable examples of individual or cooperative feats of this type, solutions that a single human would be unlikely to come up with (although they might if they had access to computers letting them simulate millions of years of evolutionary pressures, and since the computer is a human invented tool I would credit the win to human intelligence). the "unique" feature of human intelligence, according to this line of thought, is not how it performs at any one thing but how amazingly generalist it is. humans can employ the same (well, analogous) planning techniques for building a shed to build a space station, design a currency system, write a book, found a religion, move a mountain, generate electricity, bring water into a desert, well you get the point. I am sure beavers can do other things but I feel like I can say with great confidence that their engineering skills are pretty limited to a few specific tasks that are closely related to their survival. they're not suddenly going to start quarrying rocks if they can't find trees, for example.

So, one thing that really makes us different in these regards is tool usage. Now, you can argue chicken and egg wrt excellent hand-eye coordination, opposable digits, fine motor skills and tool usage evolution, but it's tool usage that allows all these things. We use rocks to build because we can use tools to form rocks. We use rebar because we use tools to melt and form metal to reinforce concrete, which we made by using tools. But we also use sticks to reinforce mud just like beavers do, when we haven't got access concrete and steel. We may have even learned the technique from observing animals (actually I think a lot of what we know and do as humans, and attribute to being human, we learned from observing other animals). And what's a space station but mud and sticks in space only made from fiber reinforced plastic and metal?
So, tools, and the ability to observe and learn from others, and language so we can teach ourselves the things we learned. Other things as well (longetiviety, social structure, etc). What I'm trying to say is, the human approach uses the same ingredients as other animals use, and just the way we put them together results in what we do and how we live and survive. We don't have anything exclusively ours or different from other animals, we just combine it differently to suit our needs just as a wolf or an octopus combines them to suit their needs.
And I know we aren't really talking about this, or dancing around so we don't, but my whole point is to counter the idea of human exceptionalism. You point to examples of exceptionalism like building space stations, etc., despite the fact that most humans cannot accomplish these feats any more than a beaver or a bee can. An elephant can teach its family group how to clear a path through the woods and find water in drout and find food when there isn't any, just like a human can. And if an elephant had the means (tool usage, physical adaptation, etc.), and the need, and the desire, over the course of hundreds of thousands of generations, I don't see why they couldn't build a space station either.

Sorry if this is rambling I'm at work and also ramble.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2020 17:36

Finger Prince

Manifisto posted:

hmm I realize my line of argument may sound a bit inconsistent and perhaps it is. I sm having an issue with the word "exceptionalism." If that is meant normatively, than no I don't subscribe to it.
philosophically I think human cognition leads to suffering in the Buddhist sense, although it also enables compassion which I do think is normatively good, but not necessarily enough to counterbalance the suffering. it also leads to poo poo like climate change which is bad imo. it might allow us to colonize other planets which I can't even pass judgment on in the abstract.

but if we're talking purely empirically rather than normatively, then I guess I do believe human cognition is special, or at least arguably so. other types of cognition can be special in other ways, maybe better ways.

I feel unequipped to make nuanced distinctions between kind and extent. natural language appears to be unique and powerful, but can you characterize it as merely "x behavior we see in many animals, on steroids?" sure ok maybe maybe not. regardless of whether human abilities are a different "kind" or "extent" than other animals, the upshot odd that we cam do things on the world that ate appatently utterly unlike any other species. I call that special, keeping in mind special does not imply good.

the point about what individual humans can or cannot do strikes me as a little arbitrary. many of our abilities depend on cooperation, which is both collective and individual. if we weren't individually wired to cooperate we couldn't do it. I have no problem attributing achievements to "humanity" even if neither I nor any human could do it alone from scratch. likewise if a flock of parrots built a space station iI would credit parrots with that facility.

I think I see what you mean. Also sometimes what I'm arguing gets confused or confusing because, as a total layman in this, I haven't applied the kind of intellectual rigor to my thinking that say a researcher would have. So it gets a bit mushy.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2020 18:55

Finger Prince

Mr. Dick posted:

The qualitative difference comes down mostly to communication and tool use, it's a folksy truism, but it totally holds. It's not two special things, it's two pretty regular things in conjunction (being on land and not in the water, Mr. Dick believes, helps too and is why whales or octopuses don't rules the world) . What it means is that it only takes one smart person to figure something out once. We don't need to reinvent the wheel every time we want to dig for termites, fish a treat out of a bottle or have a realization that the speed of light a:)exists and b:)is a constant. Add writing to the mix and the one thing we truly excel at as a species, bullshitting, and the one thing we excel at as individuals of that species, figuring poo poo out, attain a sort of easily transmissible, lasting status as a physical object.

While Mr. Dick has no theory as to the differentiation, or matter of degrees, tool use and building and agriculture and breeding and all the other praxis kind of poo poo that separate man and dickman from the animals that do the same praxis kind of poo poo, but goddamnit, we are not living in the beeocine.

Also, you are right, we should reinvigorate the philosophy thread, or move it literally anywhere else on the forums where it will get more traffic.

Thanks Mr. Dick, for being able to say clearly what I was trying to say earlier.
Especially about octopi, because poo poo if they lived longer than 4 years we would be living in the octopocene. We still might, so we'd better get eating them before they turn their freaky eyes on us.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2020 02:30

Finger Prince

Bwee posted:

I am a circadian neuroscientist who studies the brain's biological clock and how it generates circadian (~24 h) rhythms in behavior and physiology. currently i am looking at the neural circuits connecting the clock to hormone production

That's awesome. As an until fairly recently lifetime shift worker, you're doing very important work! Imo if you're going to work night shifts you need to understand exactly how it affects your body and what you can do to mitigate the worst of it. It's funny how easily you can fool your own body, but the damage is still being done.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2020 12:46

Finger Prince

Bwee posted:

What would you like to know?

Absolutely, shift work is really really bad for you. Massively increased risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease. A major cause is that your body clocks (in your liver or heart or kidneys or whatever) are misaligned with one another and your brain clock can't synchronize them with one another because time in the outside world keeps changing

Yup, I had to stop. There may still be occasions when I have to, but my body was telling me I don't have a choice here. I'm pretty healthy aside from my high BP but that wasn't being helped either. For me, surviving shift work was about controlling light cycles more than anything. Once I could get melatonin, that helped too, and thankfully its really easy to wean off of when you don't need to take them. I read a bunch of stuff when I was starting my career, including a neurochemistry book I signed out of the library that I barely understood, but helped greatly in helping to understand how that all fit in the puzzle. Before I could get melatonin in pill form, diet played a role with tryptophan (5-htp) containing foods combined with carbs to slow the digestion of the amino acid and allow my body time to synthesize its own melatonin.
But the right light exposure is super super important if you're going to try fooling your body into thinking its night when it's not and day when it's not. Phillips do a blue light box which is awesome, and an alarm clock that dims orange and lights up orange to simulate sunrise/sunset that is also really good. They seem to be the only big company that's putting money into research of light therapy.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2020 03:14

Finger Prince

This is interesting. The interaction of a high sodium diet, high blood pressure, and shift work is like a 3 way chicken and egg thing that I wouldn't expect concrete answers to any time soon, but given that I studiously try to avoid the first to mitigate the second that's partially a result of the third, well anyway its pretty interesting.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-sodium-biological-clock-mice.html

# ¿ Jul 9, 2020 17:03

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# ¿ May 18, 2024 15:20

Finger Prince

It just says sodium actives the part of the brain that controls the circadian rhythm at a time of day it isn't scheduled to be active, but it doesn't say whether active means time to go to sleep or time to be awake? Or time to be in whatever mode the light is telling us?

E- skimming the abstract, looks like it triggers physiological changes associated with preparation for sleep.

Finger Prince fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Jul 9, 2020

# ¿ Jul 9, 2020 17:21

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