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Rudy Garns

Can Animals Think? - 0 views

www.time.com/...0,8816,978023,00.html

animals mind thinking

shared by Rudy Garns on 07 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 07 Aug 10
     
    Since antiquity, philosophers have argued that higher mental abilities -- in short, thinking and language -- are the great divide separating humans from other species. The lesser creatures, Rene Descartes contended in 1637, are little more than automatons, sleepwalking through life without a mote of self- awareness. The French thinker found it inconceivable that an animal might have the ability to "use words or signs, putting them together as we do." Charles Darwin delivered an unsettling blow to this doctrine a century ago when he asserted that humans were linked by common ancestry to the rest of the animal kingdom. Darwinism raised a series of tantalizing questions for future generations: If other vertebrates are similar to humans in blood and bone, should they not share other characteristics, including intelligence? More specifically, did the earliest humanlike creatures, who split from the ancestors they shared with apes between 5 million and 7 million years ago, already possess a primitive ability to form plans, manipulate symbols, plot mischief and express sentiments?
Rudy Garns

Great Apes Think Ahead: Conclusive Evidence Of Advanced Planning Capacities - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...080618114602.htm

azb intelligence planning primates

shared by Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08
     
    Osvath et al. Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and orangutan (Pongo abelii) forethought: self-control and pre-experience in the face of future tool use. Animal Cognition, 2008 DOI: 10.1007/s10071-008-0157-0
Rudy Garns

Revenge of the Zombies (Larry Houser) - 0 views

members.aol.com/...zombies.html

azb consciousness zombies

shared by Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08
     
    "I have a plan. Other zombies -- good (qualia eating) zombies -- can battle their evil (behavior eating) cousins to a standoff. Perhaps even defeat them. Familiar zombies and supersmart zombies resist disqualefication, making the world safe, again, for materialism. Behavioristic materialism. Alas for functionalism, good zombies still eat programs. Alas for identity theory, all zombies -- every B movie fan knows -- eat brains."
Rudy Garns

Neuroscience: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain w/ Terrence Deacon - 0 views

www.childrenofthecode.org/...deacon.htm

azb brains deacon evolution language

shared by Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08 - Cached
  • We suspected that the areas in human brains where we find language connections would be quite different in monkey brains. The surprise was that, as far as we could tell, the plan was the same plan. The way these areas were connected, even areas that we identified as language areas, or the correspondent areas in monkeys, had the same kinds of connections.
  • embryology changes over the course of evolution and that changes the resultant
  • self organization. A lot of the information that goes into building brains is not actually there in the genes. It’s sort of cooked up or whipped up on the fly as brains develop. So, if one is to explain how a very complicated organ like the brain actually evolved, changed it’s function to be able to do something like language, one has to understand it through this very complicated prism of self organization and a kind of mini-evolution process that goes on as brains develop in which cells essentially compete with each other for nutrients.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Language has changed the environments in which brains have evolved.
  • I think that the connections are different because the brain is bigger and because not all parts expanded at the same rate.
  • We undoubtedly passed through not maybe one stage of what you might call a proto language but probably many proto languages, many forms of this linguistic symbolic communication system over the course of our evolution, all of them leaving somewhat of a trace.
  • I think clearly early language-like behavior had to involve much less vocalization because the brains that preceded us, mammal brains, are not well suited to organizing sound in precise, discrete and rapidly produced learned sequences.
  • I look at us as an African ape that’s been tweaked just enough to be able to do this radically unnatural kind of activity: language.
  • It turns out that very likely our ancestors, the australopithecines, and of course before them, had, like other mammals, a relatively disconnected control of the larynx and even of the tongue, to some extent. By that I mean that there was probably not much voluntary control over vocalization and certainly not at the level at which you could stop and start it on a dime, so to speak, with very little effort associated with it. 
  • Rudy Garns on 30 Aug 08
     
    The following interview with Dr. Terrence Deacon was conducted at the studios of KCSM (PBS) Television in San Mateo, California on September 5, 2003.
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