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The Limits of Instinct
Topic Started: Aug 9 2011, 12:15 PM (766 Views)
Empyreon
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Are you plausible?

Is there any scientific basis for that? I mean, it's a fascinating idea, and I'd love to explore it further, but can it be done with biology as we understand it?
Edited by Empyreon, Aug 11 2011, 02:47 AM.
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food for thought
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lamna
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I don't think so, but that's that's point of this topic.

I think they could have important info imprinted, but not memories from parents. Unless maybe if their brains were linked at some point?
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Are nipples or genitals necessary, lamna?
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Ànraich
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Aug 9 2011, 10:27 PM
Well, we know from bees and ants that a high degree of communication and coordination is possible through instinct. Most survival and instinctive behaviors are instinctual, but if we're thinking of basing sapience on purely instinctive neurology I think that would be a stretch. Part of the neurological quantum leap of sapience is adaptability, the ability to learn new behaviors in order to manipulate circumstances and thus ensure survival. Can innovation be instinctual?

What were some of the specifics on wild turkey instinct?
The real question is whether or not there's even a difference between instinct and sapience. We look at them as two separate things, but we don't exactly have an unbiased point of view, now do we? Do we humans do the things we do because we choose to, or because instinct drives us to? Could we even tell the difference?

The way I see it, intelligence is just as much a tool for predators as claws and fangs. Yea it has proven to have other benefits; but so do claws and fangs. I find myself wondering how my dog can be so stupid as to eat the same plant that makes her sick over and over and not realize it's the plant making her sick. For a human, this is common sense; if a plant makes you sick once you shouldn't risk eating it again, let alone every day. But what's the difference between me and my dog? My dog is intelligent; she knows her name is Annie, she gets a treat every time she comes inside, and that I go outside when I have cigarettes in my hand. What does this have to do with anything? Well, every time I come upstairs with cigarettes, she runs straight to the door. She goes outside, and when I'm done I call her name. When she hears her name, she comes to the door so she can go in and get a treat. Now she figured all this out on her own; by observing me she learned she could follow me when I go outside for ten minutes and get a treat. She learned the correlation between me and cigarettes, cigarettes and outside, outside and inside, and inside and treat. Not only that, she put them together in a meaningful manner to plan a future course of action. And yet, she doesn't learn that eating some plants will make her sick (and no, it isn't grass she's eating to induce vomiting).

I don't think it's that we're more intelligent than animals, I think it's that we're more conscious than they are. We can apply intelligence in ways they simply never think of, and indeed could never think of. What animal considers the consequences of its actions hundreds to thousands of years after it will be dead?
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seascorpion
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One area of animal cognition I am fascinated about has to be cephalopod intelligence. They're the only invertebrates that have been shown playing and using complex tools. For example,the Humboldt squid has a complex (or at least very different) communication system of using the colours and tones of it's body to help cooperate with other Humboldt squids while hunting shoals of fish and krill. Making it (arguably) the most intelligent invertebrate.
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lamna
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Compelling idea Parasky, and I think that's part of it, after all ape's hands are very similar to ours, yet are comparatively clumsy and apes are very smart but they are not as dexterous as us. But I still think we are just more intelligent as well.

Cephalopods are pretty smart, for invertebrates but they are no geniuses. Though they do have a relevance to this topic, as far as I know reproduction is fatal for most of them, so they would have to go by instinct.
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Zoroaster
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on the subject of "instinct" - my favourite microbial parasite, toxoplasmosis does an "override" on rodent's instincts to avoid the urine of felines, overidden the point of a reversal, a fascination with feline urine and faeces....

I reckon toxoplasmosis is way cooler than those fungi that zombify then kill ants and other bugs
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Are you plausible?

Parasky
 
The real question is whether or not there's even a difference between instinct and sapience.

So far as I understand it, instinct is essentially actions or fixed behavior that isn't based on rational, conscious thought. This includes such things as reflexes, which are actions that aren't processed through the brain, and fixed action patterns. If your theory insists upon the common nature of instinct and sapience then you at least have to recognize the difference of degrees. Instinct could arguably be seen as ubiquitous in multicellular life, whereas sapience requires more complex organs to generate. You can either call humans more intelligent than dogs, or you can say that our difference isn't intelligence but consciousness, in which case you have to show that a dog can in fact learn about poisonous plants just as well as a human without consciousness as a tool. Are there any studies that determine levels of intelligence among different animals?
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Zoroaster
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there are all sorts of behavioural studies of animal intelligence...

I read excerpts of a few in a Steven J Gould essay... Steven gets upset with the notion of "superiority" - e.g. superiority of placental mammals over monotremes (in all things, including intelligence).

His research gleaned from two different studies showed that echidna are possibly more "intelligent" than cats (felis catus)... I might dig up the essay and summarize some of it on here if I can get around to it.

But there's a fair bit of controversy and subjectivity in this topic - especially behavioural evolution or whatever it's called...
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Are you plausible?

Yeah, I think it's that subjectivity that we're really going to have to wrestle with in this discussion.
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