That said, the article is still worth a read.
Hyperbolic attention grabbing headline followed by appeal to authority, appeal to authority, appeal to authority, counter opinion appeal to authority that the previous appeal to authority might all be wrong.
So wide reaching and all over the place, the reader and can pick from the menu on what point they want to use as confirmation of what they already believe to be true. Then the article can be cited in a type of scientistic, mostly wrong, gossip.
IMO a complete waste of time.
That's the new New Scientist entire. The mag is now pap for non-scientists.
The PTSD analogy is intuitively appealing but also somewhat off. You say “even with the stimulus gone, the physiological reaction remains,” but PTSD is better characterized by impaired extinction and stimulus generalization (too many things become triggers), not by the response persisting in the total absence of any triggering stimulus. The difficulty of treating PTSD has as much to do with how the fear memory is consolidated and how extinction learning fails to transfer across contexts as it does with the simple involuntary nature of the response.
Helping a friend with cPTSD and this is so true! It’s such a hard thing to overcome. By helping I mean I’m helping pay for counseling and therapy not that I’m doing it cuz I’m hella unqualified.
Exactly that is not what the experiment is about because we all know that dogs will quickly learn the connection between bell and food as dogs are easy to teach new tricks.
If you replace 'dogs' with 'humans', it becomes an empty phrase: "It showed that humans process information from their environment and use it to make predictions" - we all know that.
The groundbreaking part of the experiment was that it showed there are responses which are not part of the conscious mind and which are not willingly controllable by the conscious mind. The dog did not 'decide' to produce saliva.
The experiment was done with a dog because obviously you wont find humans willing to undergo surgery to have the saliva come out of the cheeks instead of into the mouth.
One has to forget about the dog and mentally replace it with a human: now the observation that the human connects the bell with the food is shallow. But the conditioned saliva reflex remains and can't be suppressed - and that is a remarkable insight. It works both with negative and positive stimuli. The latter one being a recipe for a long-lasting happy relationship ;)
It’s not a new discovery if something better has already been in use for 50+ years.
Am I missing something here?
Clearly you feel strongly about this. Unfortunately, a non-AI search for "prescott lecky" and "pavlov" really reveals very little support for this claim, to the point where your comment is actually the 5th result.
So ... got links?
Quite a special scifi novel that starts like this. Quite grounded at the beginning, but it then evolves into body horror and later becomes quite abstract.
Someone shoot me please
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/agentive
AI "agents" don't have "agency". They do what you want at your every whim (or at least they never say no). That's a slave.
That is, a falling rock is not an agent, because its movement is fully determined by its weight, its shape, the type of atmosphere, and the spacetime curvature. An amoeba in free-fall is likewise not an agent, for the same reasons. But an amoeba in a liquid environment is an agent, because its motion is determined to at least some extent by things like information it is sensing about where food might be available, and perhaps even by some simple form of memory and computation that leads it to seek where food may have been available in the past.
Slavery does not imply lack of agency.
You know what, fine, be that way if you must.
Wait ... our brains are composed of molecules, and we think with our brains. That makes it a question of scale or organization, not principle.
This may sound kind of woo-woo, but many people are asking that question -- where do we draw the line between thinking and simple biological existence?
One idea is something called panpsychism, the idea that all matter is conscious, and our brains are only a very concentrated form. Easy to say, not so easy to prove -- but certainly the simplest explanation. In this connection, remember Occam's razor.
Philosophers describe consciousness as their "hard problem" -- what is it? Not just what it is, but where is it located, or not located. At the moment we know next to nothing about this question, even what kind of question to ask.
Consider the octopus -- it has islands of brain cells scattered around its body, and if you cut off an octopus arm, the arm will try to crawl back toward the ... umm ... rest of the octopus. Weird but true. Seeing this, one must ask where to draw the line between brain and body, between neurology and physiology.
The reason? The mind is not part of nature, and scientific theories must refer to some aspect of the natural world. If we were to accept the mind as science, then in fairness we would have to accept religion, philosophy and similar non-corporeal entities as science. So far we've resisted efforts to do that.
Some may object that psychology studies the mind, and experimental psychology is widely accepted as science. That's true -- there's plenty of science in psychology, some of it very good. But the many scientists in psychology study something that cannot itself be regarded as a basis for scientific theory.
This means psychology can do science, but it cannot be science. It's the same with astrology, a favorite undergraduate science topic by students learning statistical methods. But only the seriously confused will mistake an astrology study, however well-designed, for proof that astrology is a scientific theory.
People have the right to use the word "science" any way they please. So the only reality check is an educated observer. The fact that New Scientist has the title it does, and publishes the articles it does, stands as proof that there aren't nearly enough educated observers.
Anthropology?
