Bag of Worms Yet Words

108. Hormonal Drives Are Objective-Nondimensional

In one of his television shows on dog behavior, The Dog Whisperer, Cesar Milan, commented that little dogs that ferociously take on big dogs don't know they are little. It was a show where a chihuahua attacked pit bulls and put them on the defensive. Indeed, the objective situation was humorous  (since fortunately the pit bulls did not destroy the chihuahua), as the disproportion of intent and capability in the smaller dog was so huge.

Yet the incidence illustrates one of the apparent features of hormonal drives. They are not perceptions. They are not dimensional in their expression. (Objective-dimensional, objective-nondimensional are my made-up terms and concepts.) They do not represent the reality into which they are pushing the animal. Rage (as anger in situations of possible death), lust (as sex in the situation of possible copulation), famishment (so to speak, meaning hunger in situations of possible starvation), for instance, all motivate action without objective regard for the probability of success. The feedback loop from hormonal affect to object target to perception of effect of hormonal action on target is broken at the point of perception. I assume that the animal must act so quickly for survival that it cannot afford to pause, even briefly, for perceptual measurement of the effect of the initial charge, so to speak, on the object. To survive, it must complete the surprise and follow-through with action. To pause is to die.

Now the question is, are hormonal drives ever objective-dimensional?

107. Embodied Mind

Human bodily conformation and motion express conscious mental thoughts about time. Subjects lean forward when thinking about the future and lean back when reflecting on the past. Research done in field of "embodied cognition".

The new study, published in January in the journal Psychological Science, is part of the immensely popular field called embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own.

“How we process information is related not just to our brains but to our entire body,” said Nils B. Jostmann of the University of Amsterdam. “We use every system available to us to come to a conclusion and make sense of what’s going on.”  [Natalie Angier, "Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally," The New York Times, Monday, February 1, 2010. (H/T Instapundit) ]

I thought Cartesian dualism had been demolished a long time ago; why is it news that psychologists pursue something called "embodied cognition"?

 

106. Sensory Filters are First Stage of Mental Abstraction of Reality

See article no. 105.

Sensory filter[s] --> sensory maps --> mental maps [when registered in brain]

The entire process creates an "abstract", meaning "abstracted" representation of the environment of survival value to the organism.

This would be "structuralism".

105. Bees Can Differentiate and Recognize Human Faces

Bees can be trained to recognize human faces. Subjects faces are painted with patterns, which the bees differentiate and associate with particular persons. This capability is presented in the article reporting the research as a matter of training the bees for pattern recognition. We know already that bees can and do construct mental maps to represent features of their environment significant to their major functions, such as finding pollen and finding the hive. So the question is, is this matter of facial pattern recognition different from mental maps construction and recognition. Evolution usually works by adapting old structures with new functions, so we might expect facial recognition to be a matter of mental map construction and retention. Of course, this is just my speculation.

Further speculation. Bees' mental map construction is probably not a mental product at all, in the sense of mental activity that arranges sensory input into a configuration that represents reality. My guess, mental maps are constructed by the sensory system and registered in the brain for memory retention and use. The sensory construction would involve structural properties in the sense organs that filter, perhaps in a sequence of filters, sensory input to create an "abstract" representation of reality in map form.