Two days ago I heard a loud, "SQUEE! Bock bock bock bock." from our back yard. Two (Flicker) woodpeckers were fighting in the branches of a maple, our chickens standing around foot of the tree seemingly captivated by the spectacle. I assume the cause of the commotion was the tussle finding its way to the ground, startling the chickens.
When I realized what was going on my daughter and I crept outside to watch. The woodpeckers and chickens ignored us as we sat down at the tree. The contenders hopping from branch to branch, diving at each other, dodging, and trying to get an angle on the other. They landed together on the roof of the nearby coop jumped up in the air and locked together in a flurry of feathers. Again the loud, "SQUEEE!" right before they hit the ground, both of them alighting on their feet, one with two of the other's breast feathers in its beak. The apparent victor of the clash exaggeratedly held the feathers above its head and gently placed them on the ground before the two of them zipped away to a power line where they remained for a while, seemingly calm. My daughter recovered the two feathers, both a downy orange quill extending up to a stark black dot, and shared her experience the next morning with her class mates.
Funny I came across this article now, I'll have to share it with her when she returns from school.
I find these animal behavioural studies fascinating.
There is always the risk of personification clouding our understanding, when we observe similarities to human behaviour. But another angle is de-personification of our own behaviour. That seems insightful in all sorts of way.
Certain behaviours, like "war," almost certainly predate cognitive modernity... modern human consciousness. Gwynne Dyer, a historian of war, had some interesting comparisons of humans and chimps. Many interesting similarities.
In any case, the ways that we rationalize our warfare, tribalism and such cannot actually be the reason for war. The warfare predates even our ability to formulate such rationalizations. This has a lot of applicability in our personal lives. Is the reason I did X really Y, or is Y a post fact rationalization?
The warfare predates even our ability to formulate such rationalizations. This has a lot of applicability in our personal lives. Is the reason I did X really Y, or is Y a post fact rationalization
A hypothesis that I find very fascinating is that all consciousness is a post fact process, and that free will and control are illusory.
- the un-conscious processes are fully deterministic.
- all consciousness is a post fact [deterministic] process.
- [thus] free will and control are illusory.
The first thing that jumps out here is: what purpose does consciousness serve in this system?
You have effectively reduced consciousness to the status of the appendix of the psyche: an entirely useless thing with the defining feature of having an entirely erroneous perception of the state of affairs.
Related to that then is the fact of the existence of a boundary between conscious and subconscious content of the psyche.
I assert that your position compels you to hold the very boundary between consciousness and subconsciousness to be "illusory" as well. It is in fact this 'illusion' of 'being' that has driven your ego to pretend to godlike powers such as choice, and will.
>The first thing that jumps out here is: what purpose does consciousness serve in this system
I dont know, but could throw out a few ideas. One is that consciousness is part of a post processing step for memory storage, abstract analysis, or feedback loops. Another possibility is that is an unnecessary artifact or emergent property, more the laryngeal nerve than the appendix of the brain.
>I assert that your position compels you to hold the very boundary between consciousness and subconsciousness to be "illusory" as well.
I don't think that the boundary is illusory as much as arbitrary, from a functional perspective. The Ego is clearly not aware of processing below a certain level, but where that level lies is meaningless to an outside observer.
The biology of consciousness is a funny thing. Brain imaging has been able to detect what decision a person makes up to seven seconds before they are conscious of it [1]. You can perform a hemispherectomy removing half of the brain and people are still conscious.[2] IF the removed half was put in a second body, could it be conscious as well??
As far as I am aware, there is no scientific evidence for free will, and no plausible mechanism is physics.
It is noteworthy that the defining aspect of human experience in your model is an "unnecessary artifact".
The issue is not the precise boundary between unconscious and conscious mind, the point is that there is, in fact, such a boundary. You dream, do you not?
What you fail to address is what 'function' would require this otherwise inexplicable asymmetric partion of mind. Why this asymmetry? Why this duality?
Your principle error, imo, is that you simply assert that un- and sub-conscious psychological action is deterministic. You, nor anyone else for that matter, has any basis for making this determination. "We can't explain it so it doesn't exist". All we have observed in some experiments is that psychological signals that engender action occur before the conscious mind 'thinks' it has made a decision. To choose to label one's own mind's actions "deterministic" in that modality is merely an assumption. The simpler view is that one's 'self' has both unconcious and conscious aspects. This continuity does not require any assumptions; it seems self evident that 'it' is a unified 'thing'.
It is entirely irrelevant what physics has to say, today, about consciousness. Physics is having rather significant problems addressing a coherent, unified, treatment of simple matter, nevermind self-conscious minds. I think it is both prudent and rational to have a bit of humility in terms of what we actually know and understand, as a species.
[p.s. in context my OP, to be precise: I assert that it is "my unconscious self that has made a decision; my conscious mind becomes of aware of my decision, and a bit of continuity theater of the mind make my ego think it is the one that made my decision." It is an error to confuse 'ego' for the 'self'.]
I suspect sometimes that this could be correct, but I find the host/Symbian model more predictive and useful.
Host- a bright, hairless human animal, otherwise minding his own business.
Symbiant- the "imaginary friend" imaginary viewpoint cultivated through the process of inculturation, put in control of the human by the process of inculturatiion, essentially an information based construct
"control yourself" and other linguistic and experiencial artifacts point to the existance of two distinct entities, a controller and a controllee.
I think this is a distinct matter, addressing the 'agency' of 'choice'. Above we're considering if 'choice' is illusory, as claimed. Choice presents a problem for proponents of 'mind/consciousness is a side-effect of a brain' school of thought.
while you make an interesting point at the end, that framing seems to be jumping the gun (something you rightfully warned against in relation to deterministic vs random, downthread).
political conflict is much more complex and has many more gradations than just peace or war. on the "elephant queen" documentary, the narrator noted that the bulls rarely ever fight, but rather, upon meeting have a quick "discussion" whereby the lower status bull defers to the higher status bull and then they share some food to cement the relationship (not unlike a lot of human interactions). war is rare because it's so costly, no matter the pre- or post-hoc justification.
just yesterday, i watch 3 hawks in the skies over my LA neighborhood (where hawks are rarely seen in the middle of the day). it seemed like 2 of them were chasing an interloper away, but it could just as well have been them hanging out for awhile on the prevailing winds and then deciding to go somewhere else after a bit. it's hard to know what's going on with a few minutes of observation. it was quite interesting to watch nevertheless!
also, the issue with personification (which we tend to be overly concerned about) is not that we see our own behaviors in other animals, but that we become certain about the cause and effect for those other animals.
> the ways that we rationalize our warfare, tribalism and such cannot actually be the reason for war
It can. War is just using violence to get what you want or need. It is not something special. Animals being violent do not prove anything about our reasons for war.
that war is such an essential characteristic to categorize it as a precognitive process. politics, as progenitor to war, is the jockeying of position for constrained resources, which seems to me to be the more discriminating, if less provocative, framing. politics pervades life, war not so much.
This comment presupposes that we know more about consciousness and what beings are conscious than I think is justified. Also what beings are capable of rationalizations.
To put it in more poetic terms (Leonard Cohen's), I think free will is overrated. We very often act because because we are compelled to act, or not to act.
Back to the original topic or bird warfare... What I mean is that whatever compels (or maybe convinces) woodpeckers to warfare may be similar to what compels or convinces humans to do the same thing. If not birds, chimps.
The debate about free will are poetic in nature, imo. It's a matter of what we call things and how feel about them. Less so about what things are.
Not GP, but my understanding is that free will is weak, not strong. You can suppress a desire to eat a donut (requires willpower) but can't prevent the thought/desire from arising on its own when presented with the stimulus.
Similarly, we can suppress the desire to go to war after a provocation. However, we can't choose to not feel furious, at least for an instant.
Thoughts and feeling tend to arise on their own, and free will is about whether we accept or reject them.
What makes you decide you want to surprise the desire to eat the donut? Is that free will or was that impulse also determined from other stimulus such as body shaming, underlying health problems or financial hardship preventing one from impulse buying?
I do think if you unravel how every decision is made and the origins behind those opinions then you ultimately end up with every reaction being a result of either biology or circumstance.
Most decisions are made with emotional compute, influenced by biology, past experience, and present psychological state.
At the same time, being mindful and observing those emotions (predicted pleasure from the flavor, predicted guilt...) does interrupt that emotional processing and allow a "decision" to be reached in a completely different way.
Free will may only exist subjectively, but mindfulness does free the self from the emotional decision-making of the monkey brain.
But you’ve also cited that emotions are the result of stimulus. Both hunger and anger (in the examples you’ve given) are the result of conditions external to ones free will.
The positive spin on this is if we are going to apply a software development mindset to free will then you can also argue that the value of software isn’t its sentience but it’s usefulness. For example computer games don’t need sophisticated AI to be enjoyable. So however we argue the definition of free will, that shouldn’t take anything away from the experience of life.
Free will is itself still just an electrochemical process running in a physical brain. It's subjectively real, but the inputs that drive that subjective feeling are still either deterministic or random.
"either deterministic or random" is a possibly dangerous dichotomy.
Some things are neither determined nor random, in the "arbitrary" sense of the term. A child that grows up in a musical household is more likely to become a musician. That's neither random nor determined.
In populations, or over repeated instances, these can resolve to near deterministic results. At the individual level, they are more random seeming.
Don't know about the danger in there, but what else would you want to add to the mix besides determinism and randomness? I don't know of anything else that could possibly have any influence, unless you want to go supernatural.
I share the sentiment of the parent with regards to "either deterministic or random" sounding off to me.
I wanted to propose "stochastic" as a better term, but apparently "random" and "stochastic" are synonyms. [1]
What it comes down to is that "random" to me has a connotation of arbitrary, unpredictable. Whereas "stochastic" to me suggests a deterministic process with random influences.
So maybe the sentiment is better expressed as making sure it is clear that deterministic and random are the two extremes of a continuum, rather than an either/or distinction.
That is what I meant, which is why I said "in the arbitrary sense."
I think our language is lacking here. In technical terms, neither random nor stochastic imply evenly distributed. In casual conversation, "random" does.
"Emergent" may be a better term for what I meant. Randomness (in the casual sense) is an ingredient in a stochastic process leading to non-random, even effectively deterministic results.
The comment I was replying to:
"the inputs that drive that subjective feeling are still either deterministic or random."
The ingredients which lead someone to suddenly sing a son apropos of nothing (seemingly random/arbitrary) are the same as those leading someone to pull their finger away from a flame... seemingly deterministic.
Why not reduce it further? Everything is matter or energy, and the entire universe can be reduced to quantum/chemical/kinetic processes.
I don't disagree with you, but I find more subjective meaning in the difference between normal cognition and metacognition, compared to viewing the system up close.
I like the idea of hitting people who say we have no free will. I tried it once, but it's counter-productive for discussion. Subject was more occupied with the fact of hitting him than with continuing discusussion if my action should have consequences or not (no free will = I didn't do it out of my own will, so why should I suffer consequences).
> Similarly, if a person is walking around punching people due to a combination of random and deterministic factors (no free will), do you ignore them?
I will ask why they are punching people and might join if cause is valid. I'm not yet convinced if we have free will or not, whole concept looks a little meaningless when you look at it too closely.
I think it is largely a philosophical question, but it does have some cultural ramifications. For example, it can change how most people think about and punish crimes.
No, he was totally stumped, did not speak with me that evening and later said that he still doesn't know why I hit him. We were drunk at the time and philosophical discussions between drunk people are rarely valuable in my experience.
All meaningful choices are driven by motives. What makes life interesting is that, pressured by unpredictable stimuli from the outside world, we can understand ourselves better and find new ways to move toward our goals. The control we have over our destiny comes from our ability to adapt and grow that way, not from the fact that our brain can somehow flip random coins.
The answer to this possibly ill-posed question about "free will" doesn't need to make us gloomy; it doesn't need to have any bearing on how we feel about our life.
At first I didn’t understand what the motivation for such complex social behaviour, and risk taking. But then they explained the acorn larders. Large static depositories of food wealth.
This makes me think of humanity and the organisation of large societies, and war, that appears to be associated with the development of agriculture.
So I suppose that fighting over a scarce resource is the natural state of almost every form of life.
War, then, is a logical result of complex social structures. The more static and wealthy the resource the more pitched the battles.
I would imagine nomadic cultures to have less cause for war. At least until they clash over a resource. Or, their mode of resource gathering incorporates piracy of other groups wealth. I’m thinking of peoples like the Vikings, the Spartans [0], or IIRC the Comanche. Usually becuase there is pressure to do so. As in Sparta where their arable land was insufficient to support their population.
I enjoy being reminded that we don't know everything. This isn't like dark matter/gravitational waves/relativity level stuff but it shows me that there are still many many layers of things happening that no one notices. It just takes careful observation.
Around twenty years ago my dearly departed father had a multi-year war with an acorn woodpecker. The little pecker liked to hide its nuts under my dad's roof shingles. Those birds are outstandingly persistent and after a while and enough nuts they would pry up the shingles. Maybe a quarter of the shingles on one side were affected at most. About once a year my dad would go out on the steep roof and repair it.
After a few years of that he got fed up and shot the bird with a bb gun. He didn't find a corpse but didn't see it again. And that shot apparently solved the problem. It must've been just that one bird.
I have a bird feeder in my small back garden. Sometimes there is a lot of activity - mainly chickadees, finches and goldfinches competing for the feeder perches. When this happens, a hummingbird often shows up and seems to just be watching the activity. (I don't have a hummingbird feeder). I have no idea why it does this.
It must be really interesting for the hummingbirds considering the metabolic cost. Unlike some other birds they have to eat almost constantly to maintain body weight.
From what I can tell, this is intraspecies competition.
In Southern Africa, we have a situation whereby not all woodpecker species can peck the holes from start to end.
The ones who start the holes look similar to the ones in the article, but they are black, white and yellow with red flecks [1]. Then there is a smaller orange, white and black one that either steals the former's nest or uses an old hole, after which it proceeds to do some interior decoration and expansion. This rather fashionable bird is also the emblem of the University of Johannesburg. [2] [3]
There are some other woodpecker species, but these two are quite common in places where I have lived and although I am not an ethologist, I believe the comment about their interaction is accurate. The Crested Barbet is somewhat bigger than the Hoopoe, so it would be interesting to know the full picture behind their symbiosis.
I’ve always love seeing both of those birds in my garden. The barbet, with his squat sturdy frame and bright colours, especially.
I’ve never read about their interaction though, and neither of links that you’ve provided appear to explicitly connect the two species. All I know, and can find, is that they both like to nest in holes in trees. Do you have any info to backup this story?
I could find that the Bennet's Woodpecker does have the behaviour of re-using or stealing holes. On Wikipedia it's only very briefly mentioned, but the large Robertson's book may have something on it. [1]
Still looking for more information on what kind of holes the Hoopoe uses or makes; perhaps I was rather thinking of the Bennet's.
These birds are so much fun to watch! We have oaks in our yard, and there’s a telephone pole out back that seems to be their primary base of operations. There is always a group of them sitting on the top of the pole. They will fly off to the trees and then regroup at the pole to “chat” for a bit before flying off again. This will keep happening all day.
> "... when a bird’s death creates a vacancy in prime territory, the battle to fill it breaks out within minutes, and faraway onlookers can arrive in less than an hour."
makes it seem to me that they wish to be the close onlookers. but
> "Acorn woodpeckers are known to recognize relationships outside their own groups"
agrees with the idea that they're learning, if not actual tactics, at least what the potential oppositional coalitions may be, and likely gauging their strengths.
I wonder if they're sophisticated enough to manage the Stanleys' deferred approach to ensuring one is a member of the winning coalition?
> "Lord Thomas Stanley and Sir William Stanley also brought a force to the battlefield, but held back while they decided which side it would be most advantageous to support."
For those of us curious about the range of animal behavior (and possibly cognition), I recommend “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” from Frans de Waal. Beautiful read.
When I realized what was going on my daughter and I crept outside to watch. The woodpeckers and chickens ignored us as we sat down at the tree. The contenders hopping from branch to branch, diving at each other, dodging, and trying to get an angle on the other. They landed together on the roof of the nearby coop jumped up in the air and locked together in a flurry of feathers. Again the loud, "SQUEEE!" right before they hit the ground, both of them alighting on their feet, one with two of the other's breast feathers in its beak. The apparent victor of the clash exaggeratedly held the feathers above its head and gently placed them on the ground before the two of them zipped away to a power line where they remained for a while, seemingly calm. My daughter recovered the two feathers, both a downy orange quill extending up to a stark black dot, and shared her experience the next morning with her class mates.
Funny I came across this article now, I'll have to share it with her when she returns from school.