Tags / 23 quotes from 12 sources
#animals
Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart)
Dragonflies fooled by polarized light
Donald Hoffman relates the following example about dragonflies to illustrate the idea that biological perception does not report the truth about the world: Many dragonflies, for instance, lay their eggs in water. For millions of years, their visual systems have guided them to…
Introducing Artificial Intelligence (Henry Brighton and Howard Selina)
The frog and the fly
Maturana and Varela illustrate this point by first presenting a juicy fly to the top-left area of the frog’s field of view.
Rotating the frog's eye
Next, they sever part of the frog’s eye, such that the whole eye can be rotated by 180 degrees.
A frog's eye is not a camera
Importantly, the frog will persist with this behaviour. It will never adapt its behaviour in light of the unsuccessful attempts to capture the fly. The moral of the story is that a frog’s eye does not act as a camera supplying information to the frog’s planning module, which…
La Formica Zen (italian Edition) ( )
Il cuore di un uomo e gli animali
Puoi conoscere il cuore di un uomo già dal modo in cui egli tratta gli animali. Immanuel Kant
Medieval Semiotics (meier-oeser, Stephan)
Augustine divides the sign into natural signs and given signs
Augustine divides the sign into the two main classes of natural signs (signa naturalia) and given signs (signa data). “Natural signs are those which, apart from any intention or desire of using them as signs, do yet lead to the knowledge of something else”,[8] as, for example…
Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle)
Descartes denies that animals have minds
If every mind is a spiritual or mental substance, and if minds are indestructible, then it seems that if animals have minds, every animal has an immortal soul. But if it turns out that every dog, cat, mouse, flea, and grasshopper has an immortal soul, then, to put it mildly…
How I know my dog is conscious
I think the answer is that the basis on which I am confident that my dog is conscious and has a specific content to his consciousness is not simply that his behavior is appropriate, but that I can see that the causal underpinnings of the behavior are relatively similar to mine…
The charge of neuronal chauvinism
One slightly more technical objection that really did concern the identity theorists and indeed eventually forced a modification in their views was the accusation of “neuronal chauvinism.”16 If the claim of the identity theorists was that every pain is identical with a certain…
What is it like to be a bat
One of the earliest well-known arguments against functionalist types of materialism was advanced in an article by Thomas Nagel called, “What It Is Like to Be a Bat?”1 According to Nagel, the really difficult part of the mind-body problem is the problem of consciousness. Suppose…
Osx Dictionary
throng |THrôNG, THräNG
throng |THrôNG, THräNG| noun a large, densely packed crowd of people or animals: he pushed his way through the throng | a throng of birds. verb [ with obj. ] (of a crowd) fill or be present in (a place or area): a crowd thronged the station | the streets are thronged with…
Shantaram (gregory David Roberts)
Eating cows without hurting them
To ensure the unflagging progress of the ox, Kishan beat the animal fiercely and often. The stick rose and fell with a resounding smack at regular intervals of minutes. The rhythm of those heavy blows was punctuated by sharp jabs at the animal’s flanks with the nail attached to…
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R. Covey)
Self-awareness is uniquely human
Think about the mood you are now in. Can you identify it? What are you feeling? How would you describe your present mental state? Now think for a minute about how your mind is working. Is it quick and alert? Do you sense that you are torn between doing this mental exercise and…
We can write new programs for ourselves
because of our unique human endowments, we can write new programs for ourselves totally apart from our instincts and training. This is why an animal’s capacity is relatively limited and man’s is unlimited. But if we live like animals, out of our own instincts and conditioning…
The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray)
Becoming one with the midges
By now it must have been more than two hours into the trip, and I was slumped against the beech looking upward into the tree canopy, idly watching the midges darting to and fro in the shafts of sunlight. How much energy they put into something so futile! There’s no real…
The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
God likes to play hide-and-seek
“God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the…
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Minimal self and autobiographical self
Different theorists use different descriptions, but most distinguish between what is variously called a ‘minimal’, ‘core’ or ‘implicit’ self and the ‘extended’ or ‘autobiographical’ self.8 The minimal self is the most primitive kind of self-awareness. Any creature which is able…
Animal memory as learned response
In contrast, most, if not all, animal memory is simply a form of learned response. Your dog remembers you in that it recognises you as its pack leader, but it is very unlikely that it fondly recalls past walks, as you do. That difference is a core part of what enables you to…
Foresight and the autobiographical self
As well as hindsight, foresight is a characteristic part of autobiographical selves. We can plan ahead with incomparably more sophistication than even the most cognitively advanced primates. Chimpanzees can at best anticipate only a few steps ahead;…
What neuroscientists agree on about the self
It would be misleading to suggest that neuroscientists speak with one voice on the self, but all the leading people in the field do seem to agree on a few key fundamentals: that higher functions of self build on and incorporate lower ones; that there is no part of the brain at…
Person is a functional category
That principle is that ‘person’ is not a biological category, but a functional one. Any creature, or even machine, that has the conscious capacities of a person is a person, irrespective of its species. That is why we recognise as people characters in science-fiction films who…
The Clever Hans effect
In the early twentieth century, one called Clever Hans appeared to be able to do some basic arithmetic, repeatedly and reliably tapping his hoof the same number of times as the right answer to a sum set for him to solve. When investigated, it was discovered that Hans was…
Zack De La Rocha - Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
Vegetarianism
De la Rocha became a vegetarian as a teenager,[8] stating in 1989: "I think vegetarianism is really great, and I stand really strongly behind it...I think that an animal goes through a lot of pain in the whole cycle of death in the slaughterhouse; just living to be killed...I…