I never really understand why people argue about whether animals have emotions. Of course they do. Emotions come from our most primal instincts, and it stands to reason that at least other mammals would have them.
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I never really understand why people argue about whether animals have emotions. Of course they do. Emotions come from our most primal instincts, and it stands to reason that at least other mammals would have them.
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Originally Posted by SnSstealth
Well... i dont meant that the animals havent emotions. Only that we cant know for sure how they feel, with their animal minds, their emotions. Note that im speaking of the subjective experience of the emotion.Quote:
Originally Posted by khronik
Is the same problem, how can i be sure that i see, lets say, the green color the same way any of you do? I see a color that was said to me that was called "green". And everybody else sees also this color, and calls it "green". But my question is how can i be sure that the "feeling" of green, that undescritible (does this word exist?) sensation my brain "feels" when it sees the green, the subjective perception of it is the same?
Or in other words, if i were able to enter other persons mind, to see the world as they see, does the green would look like the same as it looks like for me? Or, what i call green other person would see as blue, but call it green (cause they learned that color was called green)?
Thats what i mean about the animals emotions. I dont doubt they feel. But i still think its questionable to think they feel it like we do.
I don't Know if it has been mention, I'm Ambidextrous {using both hands with equal ease}, So I use both sides of my Brain, Where Right Handed people us there Left-side Brain, &^<> or Left Handed peolpe use Right-side Brain:cool::wtf::wtf::D:D
That's My 2-Cent's,/`~`\/`~`\/`~:smokin::smokin:
I've already covered this. Generally most people do perceive or feel things the same way.Quote:
Originally Posted by Coelho
People who have their perceptions mixed up or their senses. For instance. They may see the color green. The color green to us is the color green. But to them when they see the color green they may feel fear, joy, or see the number 2. This neurological condition is called synesthesia.
Animals have a hypothalamus and a limbic system just like we do. Studies show that the same/similar areas of the brain are responsive to different emotions with the secretion of the GnRH hormone as the animals go through their emotions.
With that said, I can no better perceive an animals sense of fear than I know what fear feels like to you. Earlier you stated that we can only perceive animals feelings from the outside. This is not true. We can see this in a lab environment as well. If you were saying the average Joe Shmoe at home can't truely tell then I suppose you're right.
Point being, Animals have emotions due to higher level brain functions in the hypothalamus/limbic system. Plants do not have this ability.
you seem to have forgotten to mention the part that it was in an old bomb shelter and the results were inconsistent. So they moved the expierement outside with NEW sensors and did not get any results.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kbrandon
Grant said the most convincing evidence to support the myth came from the same organization that he was a member of.
Seems to me that there is room to be biased and in science and discovery you have to be a neutral party.
Really the results were inconclusive at best. I would not trust mythbusters to conduct a complex expierement to determine if a plant has feelings. There's more to it than measuring needles on a polygraph.
Remember it's just a TV show, and with all things on TV it's meant for our entertainment.
i agree with coelho about the color thing, infact its a thought that ive had floating around, and have tried to explain whilst high, and failed, and tried to explain while sober, and failed, and decided i will continue to think it. I agree i mean, i see a color ive been told is blue, and you see the same object, and call it blue, but who says what i consider blue if i were you would look like what blue looks like to me, what if your blue was my purple, we will never know, and the attempts to use science in the form of the radioactive spectrum doesnt work because the colors still look that way to you, and youve associated the name of that color to the color that you see, and accept that the world looks that way. As far as anyone knows, when i see the world it is really inverted from you, but i still call the sun yellow, and the grass green.
As far as I've seen, there is very little evidence suggesting our that brains are quantum computers or that quantum entanglement explains intuition, etc.
The human species is an adaptation of genetic material that already existed on this planet. We are great apes. As such, our brain physiology is quite similar to chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans (we share many of the same structures and layout). Our brains even function in the same ways (studies have revealed that ape brains react to intent and not simply the immediate environment in front of them). Apes can be taught a lexicon of over 200 symbols and form correct sentences with them. One of the main differences showing up in recent studies is the unique human ability to use the brain as a tool for planning the future. Apes can complete complex mazes more quickly than humans, which demonstrates an ability to grasp the concept, hold the idea in one's mind, navigate the maze (plan the future), and then make the connection between all these activities and actually, finally, draw the sequence. This kind of test shows that ape brains have the capacity to form complexity, all the pieces are there, they simply don't use them, the dots haven't been connected yet in their genes. This is a helpful perspective when trying to understand the power of the human brain.
One must understand that we humans are, above all else, genetic material. As with any organic, living entity, it is the utmost important imperative of survival that drives us. Our minds are capable of great intellectual feats, to be sure, but our instincts are rooted in survival. Your muscles are powerful enough to tear themselves apart from bone, thus temporarily destroying themselves. Your brain unconsciously regulates the appropriateness of varying degrees of force. In a life-threatening situation, survival instincts dictate that harm in the now to preserve future life is more important than that temporary, possibly crippling, risk. Most people aren't aware that they can lift as much as a trained athlete, but only under the right circumstances. This is because muscles are designed to store energy at all times, so there is always a reserve to call upon in times of need.
The brain is compartmentalized for specialization. While everyone shares a similar structure responsible for things as speech and counting, no two brains are identical in physical locations of where these processes occur. In tests done on brain surgeries of conscious individuals, and attempts to map areas of the brain, it has been found that the location for, say, being able to speak a thought will be millimeters or even centimeters away from where your or my brain handles such a function. In fact, it has been found that the brain devotes specific physical regions to nothing more than storing categories of things; there is an area for storing lists of "tools" and a physically separate area for storing lists of "flowers," and in no two people is the map of these locations identical. Obviously, a large portion of our brain is devoted to labeling things into categories and storing those relationships for later. We are good at picking out patterns and shapes from random noise to the extend that we see faces in almost anything. We look for, even crave, patterns.
The brain can control what we feel, in terms of sensations (obviously). Pain suppression is a prime example. Individuals whose profession demands a higher pain tolerance train their minds and bodies to be able to cope with higher levels of pain, to the extent that an average person would faint upon such intensity. Athletes are good examples. The physical process by which this is accomplished is understood: chemicals controllers that the brain uses can bind to receptors in the body, thus blocking pain signals from being successfully transmitted the entire length of ones nervous system into the brain, thus being dulled or not registered at all. Separate nervous systems control the unconscious and the conscious efforts of our minds, so that it is possible to both survive and perform mathematical calculations, and why breath and heart rate are not mentally tasking endeavors.
Of course, this tricking of the system can go both ways. One can see this clearly in the phenomena of phantom limbs. When someone suffers a loss of, say, a hand, the brain can deal with that loss in multiple ways: when it stops receiving feedback from that part of the body it will either "accept" the loss and block further attempts to register input from that region of the brain associated with that region of the body, or remap a new body part to the old region of the brain (so that if one were to touch your left leg, it could potentially be remapped in a way that, had you lost your right hand, your brain would interpret the touch on the left leg as having come from the right hand, and in effect cause you to still feel the full experiences of the limb that no longer exists), or finally occasionally cause severe pains that seem to emanate from the lost limb when in fact there is nothing physical to cause the pain. Each of these cases is a result of how the brain ends up dealing with that specific loss of input, and as you can imagine phantom limb pain is quite terrible, as no amount of physical efforts will ease the problem.
However, recent studies have found that if one can see one's own brain activity in real time on a screen, if shown what areas are responsible for what actions, one can consciously reduce the activity of that part of the brain, thus curing as much as 50% of the pain (50% also happens to be the standard amount of pain physical medications can reduce). Just by seeing your brain in real time, you can change how it behaves.
The idea that we use significantly less than our available brain mass is a confirmed falsehood. Yes, mental growth is a process of pruning unused skills and expanding useful skills. Very young children, for example, under the age of 6 months show an ability to recognize individual faces of apes. However, since almost all interaction with other animals in our daily lives involved humans, the brain always drops connections leading to facial recognition beyond our species. It simply isn't useful, but the capability exists. Even scientists who devote a lifetime to studying these animals cannot reach the level of recognition all of us have at one point in our lives. What we use the most is strengthened, and what we use the least is pruned. But the beauty of the brain is that, if one chooses to, many areas can be re-strengthened or expanded even if you've neglected them (a writer becoming a mathematician, for example).
This leads to interesting results: because the brain so completely controls the rest of our body, and how we perform in any task, one can strengthen one's body's ability to perform a physical task by doing nothing more than thinking about it. By thinking about an activity, the brain is using the pathways laid out for everything involved in that activity, including musculature control. One can actually slightly improve one's muscle mass by mental thought alone. Athletes who consistently visualize tasks that are difficult for them more quickly master those tasks. Mental exercises have, as a result, become increasingly incorporated into professional athletes' training. This is also how meditation can be used to control bodily functions normally below our conscious control such as heart rate.
We can know things about our brain in relation to time and other species, based on the evolution of this organ and comparisons to other animals with similar structures. Certain emotions, like fear and revulsion, are handled in older parts of our brain, suggesting that these base emotions were all we had at one time, and that as the brain developed new areas formed to handle an increasing scope of emotions. So we can say definitively whether or not other animals have emotions, because other animals haven't evolved the complexities of our brain, but they have enough structure to recognize the most base of survival instincts such as fear. Emotions are a part of the survival toolkit, and we're not alone in that regard.
Prodigies and those who are exceedingly talented in specific areas are still somewhat of a mystery. Van Gogh was thought to have a form of epilepsy that gave him frontal lobe seizures, the result being a more vivid interpretation of visual data input, causing him to create unique pieces of art. What do Nathan Haselbauer (IQ of 162, founder of the International High IQ Society) and Albert Einstein have in common? Both their brains are slightly smaller than average. IIRC, Recent studies have suggested that potentially as much as 50% of "intelligence" is inherited.
In the absence of stimuli, one's brain typically strives to create it. The brain is a processing facility for input, and without input it seeks out data to process. That is why in recent years we have begun to understand the true cruelty and detriment to a person that solitary isolation can bring (it is used as punishment in dealing with prisoners, etc). It can easily cause permanent mental damage, and in fact has been demonstrated to do so.
Also, recent evidence suggests that boredom is a result of an inability to concentrate. And one of the genes responsible for speech in humans has been linked to motor function in mice.
As far as comparing AI to human intelligence, one must remember that ours is the only intelligence we are aware of. As such, it is the goal of the field of AI to create a digital/computer version of our own intelligence. There really isn't much to compare, except in how poorly current AI is compared to our own capacity.
By the way, there is a $1,000,000.000 prize "to anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event." (Challenge Info - James Randi Educational Foundation) Not needing the money or not being interested in collecting money is not an excuse for those who claim paranormal powers to not take this challenge - one can easily win the money and donate it to any charity afterwards. That fairly easily rules out "psychic abilities" until proven otherwise.
There is an autistic woman who "thinks like a cow." (BBC - Science & Nature - Horizon)
As far as things being in the eye of the beholder... well. First, the goal of modern science is to create reproducible results. If I do something, get a result, ask someone else on the other side of the world to do the same thing, and they get the same result, and we keep doing this until we find that the result is universal for everyone... we've reliably created a way to define what happens as a result to a certain event or stimulus. One can argue that exactly everything is completely absurd on the basis that every human experience is inductive reasoning, but it is a framework inconducive to forward thought. Beauty, however, is a scientific formula. We are genetically predisposed to find symmetry beautiful, and this has been proven. That's why models typically have extreme symmetry (which is rare in nature). Doesn't necessarily imply every one of us has the same tastes, just that tastes can be genetic (which is obvious; rarely do people decide to switch to a diet of raw sand).
There are no nerve endings in the brain to sense pain, etc. You are experiencing the brain's capacity for imagination when "feeling" it under the influence of cannabis.
The color argument is simple: what is "blue" to me and to you are the same if our brains were trained to label the same eye/brain reaction to that wavelength of light in our childhood the same way and if neither of us has abnormally formed eyes (in the sense of random genetic mutation). The wavelengths of colors are very specific, so that unless you have radically different eyes from the rest of the species, you will sense the same kind of visual input as someone else with standard equipment would. It's all about the structure of the eye! The label of something isn't terribly important; what's in a name? The subjectivity of it is simply that we might use different labels for the same thing. And our eyes invert images of the outside world from "upside down" to "rightside up" as the data travels through the eye. To see things upside down is to see how they really are. An evolutionary fluke flipped it for us, possibly randomly, possibly because it allowed us to better cope with the world (although it is quite unnerving to see things upside down, research has shown that one's brain can easily adapt and consider it the norm in very little time, a few days, and that afterwards to see things normally is equally initially disorienting).
Because emotions are so integrated into our consciousness via their use as an evolutionary survival skill it is possible to form extremely strong connections between discrete stimuli (not talking about synesthesia, just the natural ability of our brain to produce extremely strong feelings), so that a person can experience synesthesia without the involuntary neurological condition. It is because our brains function so thoroughly through labeling and categorizing that it is rare on average, and why it is easily experienced under the influence of various mind-altering substances which bypass the natural flow of the brain and thus transcend the categorical barriers. That was a very McKenna-esque thing for me to say. :P
By the way, I watch way too many documentaries. I can list them if anyone is interested in recent brain research.
if we use 10 percent of our brains imagine if u can use 100% of our brains. i think psychics use maybe 15 or more thats why there psychic, because maybe they use more percents of there brains. maybe the smartest man or god uses 100% of his brain...sorry if that was hard to read or understnad im bakes right now lol
The Straight Dope: Do we really use only 10 percent of our brains?
According to this, using 100% of your brain would result in a grand mal seizure, which is where all your neurons fire at once.
By the way, I thought I'd mention that of all the genes we have in our bodies, a full third of them are expressed in our brains. Our minds are clearly influenced a great deal by our genetic profiles.