Hello all,

Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?

I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind of
blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for the
first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is plain
wrong and if so on what.

I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might if
motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

On 2024-04-05 11:13:02 +0000, Arkalen said:

> Tomasello

--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 37 years; mainly
in England until 1987.

On 2024-04-05 11:13:02 +0000, Arkalen said:

> Hello all,
>
> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>
> I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
> of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
> think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
> though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for
> the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is
> plain wrong and if so on what.
>
>
> I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might if
> motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
> someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

If you go to Amazon you'll see that quite a few people have read it
(but not me). The reviews I have read are positive.

--
athel cb : Biochemical Evolution, Garland Science, 2016

On 4/5/24 4:13 AM, Arkalen wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>
> I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind of
> blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
> think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
> though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for the
> first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is plain
> wrong and if so on what.
>
>
> I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might if
> motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
> someone else might actually have read it and have takes.
>
I for one would be interested in a summary.

On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:
> On 4/5/24 4:13 AM, Arkalen wrote:
>> Hello all,
>>
>> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>>
>> I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
>> of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
>> think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
>> though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for
>> the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is
>> plain wrong and if so on what.
>>
>>
>> I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
>> if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
>> someone else might actually have read it and have takes.
>>
> I for one would be interested in a summary.
>

Maybe really short to start with:

Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move the
goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the goal
is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.

He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification of
agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).

The levels he describes are:

* no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
beyond its immediate environment

* first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,
resting, etc) and their behavior will depend not just on their immediate
environment but also on what their goal is at any given time. They'll
have hardwired behaviors that are deployed to meet the goal according to
the above described feedback loop, with a global inhibition mechanism
that can shut everything down in response to danger.

* second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of goal-seeking
feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to not just achieve
a goal, but achieve it in the best way possible. Includes the ability to
mentally stage potential behaviors, anticipate their outcomes and then
pick which will work best. Also much finer inhibition abilities, able to
inhibit one behavior and switch to another in service of the same goal
instead of the global shutdown of lizards. And the ability to generate
new behaviors instead of the earlier hardwiring.

* third level - great apes. I can never remember quite what this one
does so I had to re-skim a bit but basically it's an extra layer
monitoring & controlling the mammalian decision-making one that results
in higher-level reasoning, including controlling not only how to achieve
a goal but which goal to seek to achieve (thus resolving cases where
goals conflict), understanding other's decisions, and understanding
causality - not only the basic mammalian "if I do this, that will
happen" but "if this happens *in general*, that will happen".

* fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret sauce"
is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great apes that
are also able to function as parts of a collective goal-seeking agent
that uses the same basic "goal-perception-behavior-perception" feedback
loop as all other agency. This means simultaneously modelling different
kinds of agent - the "self" agent analogous to great apes (what are your
personal interests) but also the "role" agent (what is your job as a
member of the group) and the collective agent (what are the group's
goals), as well as the "self" agency & "role" agency of collaborators.
This also implies/explains moral dilemmas: whereas other animals only
ever need to worry about one agents' goals (themselves), humans need at
every point to decide whether they'll behave in service of their
personal goals, or those of a group they're part of and if so which one
(the immediate task-oriented team? Their family? Their tribe?).

[Tomasello doesn't mention (but I immediately thought of) how a species
with an innate sense of collective agency where said agency was both
greater than any single individual but also analogous to their own
agentic self might rationalize that sentiment...]

He proposes this happened in two steps, the evolution of pairwise
collaboration somewhere in the hominid lineage, and the evolution of
full group agency in direct Homo sapiens ancestors, with the development
of strong cultural variation & norms that provide a kind internal
regulation to the collective agent and allow collaboration between
strangers that share a culture. He also proposes actual group selection
acting at this point, with groups with strong collaborative cultures
outcompeting others.

[this meshes beautifully with the "social cohesion signalling"
hypothesis for the evolution of music btw]

[another aside - he doesn't say this but it occurs to me that "arbitrary
cultural variation + collaboration" seems like it could drive the
evolution of universal computation (so children can learn whatever 100%
arbitrary cultural baggage is required to function in their band) as
well as truth-seeking (the only grounding on which one *could* base
collaboration in the face of arbitrary cultural variation), which is
kind of the core of what we think of as "our intelligence"]

He proposes the driver of the evolution of each of these layers is a
kind of unpredictability in the organism's environment. Animals that
live in very stable environments can rely on hardwired behaviors that
change at the speed of evolution. Early vertebrates would have been
hunters that had to quickly adapt to also-evolving prey and
agency/goal-seeking would have allowed that. Early mammals were social
animals that were in competition not only with the prey but with their
peers; an extra control layer to optimize behaviors would give them an
edge. Early great apes that foraged for fruit would have had even higher
competition for this resource that's concentrated in isolated patches
with few access points.

OK maybe that didn't end up that short ;) I hope I didn't mess it up too
badly given it was mostly from memory, but that's basically it.

On 4/5/24 2:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:
> On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 4/5/24 4:13 AM, Arkalen wrote:
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>>>
>>> I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
>>> of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how
>>> I think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not
>>> sure though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things
>>> for the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the
>>> book is plain wrong and if so on what.
>>>
>>>
>>> I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
>>> if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough
>>> that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.
>>>
>> I for one would be interested in a summary.
>>
>
> Maybe really short to start with:
>
> Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
> that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
> whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move the
> goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the goal
> is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
>
>
> He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification of
> agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
> monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
> human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
> lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
> would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
> of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
>
> The levels he describes are:
>
> * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
> stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
> danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
> beyond its immediate environment
>
>
> * first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
> lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,
> resting, etc) and their behavior will depend not just on their immediate
> environment but also on what their goal is at any given time. They'll
> have hardwired behaviors that are deployed to meet the goal according to
> the above described feedback loop, with a global inhibition mechanism
> that can shut everything down in response to danger.
>
>
> * second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of goal-seeking
> feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to not just achieve
> a goal, but achieve it in the best way possible. Includes the ability to
> mentally stage potential behaviors, anticipate their outcomes and then
> pick which will work best. Also much finer inhibition abilities, able to
> inhibit one behavior and switch to another in service of the same goal
> instead of the global shutdown of lizards. And the ability to generate
> new behaviors instead of the earlier hardwiring.
>
>
> * third level - great apes. I can never remember quite what this one
> does so I had to re-skim a bit but basically it's an extra layer
> monitoring & controlling the mammalian decision-making one that results
> in higher-level reasoning, including controlling not only how to achieve
> a goal but which goal to seek to achieve (thus resolving cases where
> goals conflict), understanding other's decisions, and understanding
> causality - not only the basic mammalian "if I do this, that will
> happen" but "if this happens *in general*, that will happen".
>
>
> * fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret sauce"
> is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great apes that
> are also able to function as parts of a collective goal-seeking agent
> that uses the same basic "goal-perception-behavior-perception" feedback
> loop as all other agency. This means simultaneously modelling different
> kinds of agent - the "self" agent analogous to great apes (what are your
> personal interests) but also the "role" agent (what is your job as a
> member of the group) and the collective agent (what are the group's
> goals), as well as the "self" agency & "role" agency of collaborators.
> This also implies/explains moral dilemmas: whereas other animals only
> ever need to worry about one agents' goals (themselves), humans need at
> every point to decide whether they'll behave in service of their
> personal goals, or those of a group they're part of and if so which one
> (the immediate task-oriented team? Their family? Their tribe?).
>
> [Tomasello doesn't mention (but I immediately thought of) how a species
> with an innate sense of collective agency where said agency was both
> greater than any single individual but also analogous to their own
> agentic self might rationalize that sentiment...]
>
>
> He proposes this happened in two steps, the evolution of pairwise
> collaboration somewhere in the hominid lineage, and the evolution of
> full group agency in direct Homo sapiens ancestors, with the development
> of strong cultural variation & norms that provide a kind internal
> regulation to the collective agent and allow collaboration between
> strangers that share a culture. He also proposes actual group selection
> acting at this point, with groups with strong collaborative cultures
> outcompeting others.
>
> [this meshes beautifully with the "social cohesion signalling"
> hypothesis for the evolution of music btw]
>
> [another aside - he doesn't say this but it occurs to me that "arbitrary
> cultural variation + collaboration" seems like it could drive the
> evolution of universal computation (so children can learn whatever 100%
> arbitrary cultural baggage is required to function in their band) as
> well as truth-seeking (the only grounding on which one *could* base
> collaboration in the face of arbitrary cultural variation), which is
> kind of the core of what we think of as "our intelligence"]
>
>
>
> He proposes the driver of the evolution of each of these layers is a
> kind of unpredictability in the organism's environment. Animals that
> live in very stable environments can rely on hardwired behaviors that
> change at the speed of evolution. Early vertebrates would have been
> hunters that had to quickly adapt to also-evolving prey and
> agency/goal-seeking would have allowed that. Early mammals were social
> animals that were in competition not only with the prey but with their
> peers; an extra control layer to optimize behaviors would give them an
> edge. Early great apes that foraged for fruit would have had even higher
> competition for this resource that's concentrated in isolated patches
> with few access points.
>
>
> OK maybe that didn't end up that short ;) I hope I didn't mess it up too
> badly given it was mostly from memory, but that's basically it.
>
Thanks for that. Sounds interesting. My greatest immediate apprehension
is that it would take a truly huge amount of experimental and
observational evidence to test the various aspects of the scenario, and
I wonder how much of it has already been done.

On 06/04/2024 04:15, John Harshman wrote:
> On 4/5/24 2:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:
>> On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:
>>> On 4/5/24 4:13 AM, Arkalen wrote:
>>>> Hello all,
>>>>
>>>> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>>>>
>>>> I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that
>>>> kind of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still
>>>> impacts how I think about human consciousness and social living. I'm
>>>> still not sure though how much of that is just being dazzled, or
>>>> reading things for the first time that are actually already
>>>> well-known, or if the book is plain wrong and if so on what.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
>>>> if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough
>>>> that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.
>>>>
>>> I for one would be interested in a summary.
>>>
>>
>> Maybe really short to start with:
>>
>> Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
>> that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
>> whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move
>> the goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the
>> goal is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
>>
>>
>> He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification
>> of agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
>> monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
>> human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
>> lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
>> would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
>> of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
>>
>> The levels he describes are:
>>
>> * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
>> stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
>> danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
>> beyond its immediate environment
>>
>>
>> * first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
>> lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,
>> resting, etc) and their behavior will depend not just on their
>> immediate environment but also on what their goal is at any given
>> time. They'll have hardwired behaviors that are deployed to meet the
>> goal according to the above described feedback loop, with a global
>> inhibition mechanism that can shut everything down in response to danger.
>>
>>
>> * second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of
>> goal-seeking feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to
>> not just achieve a goal, but achieve it in the best way possible.
>> Includes the ability to mentally stage potential behaviors, anticipate
>> their outcomes and then pick which will work best. Also much finer
>> inhibition abilities, able to inhibit one behavior and switch to
>> another in service of the same goal instead of the global shutdown of
>> lizards. And the ability to generate new behaviors instead of the
>> earlier hardwiring.
>>
>>
>> * third level - great apes. I can never remember quite what this one
>> does so I had to re-skim a bit but basically it's an extra layer
>> monitoring & controlling the mammalian decision-making one that
>> results in higher-level reasoning, including controlling not only how
>> to achieve a goal but which goal to seek to achieve (thus resolving
>> cases where goals conflict), understanding other's decisions, and
>> understanding causality - not only the basic mammalian "if I do this,
>> that will happen" but "if this happens *in general*, that will happen".
>>
>>
>> * fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret
>> sauce" is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great
>> apes that are also able to function as parts of a collective
>> goal-seeking agent that uses the same basic
>> "goal-perception-behavior-perception" feedback loop as all other
>> agency. This means simultaneously modelling different kinds of agent -
>> the "self" agent analogous to great apes (what are your personal
>> interests) but also the "role" agent (what is your job as a member of
>> the group) and the collective agent (what are the group's goals), as
>> well as the "self" agency & "role" agency of collaborators. This also
>> implies/explains moral dilemmas: whereas other animals only ever need
>> to worry about one agents' goals (themselves), humans need at every
>> point to decide whether they'll behave in service of their personal
>> goals, or those of a group they're part of and if so which one (the
>> immediate task-oriented team? Their family? Their tribe?).
>>
>> [Tomasello doesn't mention (but I immediately thought of) how a
>> species with an innate sense of collective agency where said agency
>> was both greater than any single individual but also analogous to
>> their own agentic self might rationalize that sentiment...]
>>
>>
>> He proposes this happened in two steps, the evolution of pairwise
>> collaboration somewhere in the hominid lineage, and the evolution of
>> full group agency in direct Homo sapiens ancestors, with the
>> development of strong cultural variation & norms that provide a kind
>> internal regulation to the collective agent and allow collaboration
>> between strangers that share a culture. He also proposes actual group
>> selection acting at this point, with groups with strong collaborative
>> cultures outcompeting others.
>>
>> [this meshes beautifully with the "social cohesion signalling"
>> hypothesis for the evolution of music btw]
>>
>> [another aside - he doesn't say this but it occurs to me that
>> "arbitrary cultural variation + collaboration" seems like it could
>> drive the evolution of universal computation (so children can learn
>> whatever 100% arbitrary cultural baggage is required to function in
>> their band) as well as truth-seeking (the only grounding on which one
>> *could* base collaboration in the face of arbitrary cultural
>> variation), which is kind of the core of what we think of as "our
>> intelligence"]
>>
>>
>>
>> He proposes the driver of the evolution of each of these layers is a
>> kind of unpredictability in the organism's environment. Animals that
>> live in very stable environments can rely on hardwired behaviors that
>> change at the speed of evolution. Early vertebrates would have been
>> hunters that had to quickly adapt to also-evolving prey and
>> agency/goal-seeking would have allowed that. Early mammals were social
>> animals that were in competition not only with the prey but with their
>> peers; an extra control layer to optimize behaviors would give them an
>> edge. Early great apes that foraged for fruit would have had even
>> higher competition for this resource that's concentrated in isolated
>> patches with few access points.
>>
>>
>> OK maybe that didn't end up that short ;) I hope I didn't mess it up
>> too badly given it was mostly from memory, but that's basically it.
>>
> Thanks for that. Sounds interesting. My greatest immediate apprehension
> is that it would take a truly huge amount of experimental and
> observational evidence to test the various aspects of the scenario, and
> I wonder how much of it has already been done.
>

In terms of the cognitive abilities every specific claim in the book is
backed by experimental evidence on model organisms that seems to hold
up, especially at the lower levels. But as you say it's wide-ranging
enough that it does ask more than that.

I think my own concern, that was crystallized a bit going over the
summary and confronting once again just how hard it is for me to
remember various bits, is to what extent this framework is a solid
hypothesis that generates predictions as opposed to a superficially
satisfying but empty rephrasing of what's already known. (which wouldn't
prevent it being a good read insofar as it's read by someone who doesn't
already know it - I didn't know how different we are from chimpanzees in
terms of cooperative attitudes for example).

Arkalen wrote:

> Hello all,

hello too! It's so nice to have you back!!

> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?

> I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind of
> blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
> think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
> though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for the
> first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is plain
> wrong and if so on what.

I haven't read this one (but on the reading list now), I knew his work
mainly from the debate he had with Chomsky, and his rejection of the
idea of an innate universal grammar in favour of a social learning
model. I thought at the time that while the idea of shared intentionality
was very appealing and plausible, and explains a lot, on its own
I could not see how it overcomes the "poverty of the stimulus problem"
(but this was ages ago that I read it tbh)

What I also found really interesting, for my day job, was his discussion
on third-party punishment (which he claims is uniquely human)

> I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might if
> motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
> someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

John Harshman wrote:

> On 4/5/24 2:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:
>> On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:
>>> On 4/5/24 4:13 AM, Arkalen wrote:
>>>> Hello all,
>>>>
>>>> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>> Maybe really short to start with:
>>
>> Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
>> that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
>> whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move the
>> goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the goal
>> is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
>>
>>
>> He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification of
>> agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
>> monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
>> human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
>> lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
>> would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
>> of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
>>
>> The levels he describes are:
>>
>> * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
>> stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
>> danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
>> beyond its immediate environment
. . .
>> * first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
>> lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,
. . .
>> * second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of goal-seeking
>> feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to not just achieve
. . .

>> * fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret sauce"
>> is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great apes that
more snipping
> Thanks for that. Sounds interesting. My greatest immediate apprehension
> is that it would take a truly huge amount of experimental and
> observational evidence to test the various aspects of the scenario, and
> I wonder how much of it has already been done.

Seems to me that it's very anthropocentrically biased.
The suggestion that nemotodes don't have goals as described is odd.
They seek food, seek mating.
Hell, bacteria have goal seeking behavior in terms of seeking food,
or fleeing toxins via chemotaxis. Just because we understand some
of these things in terms of simpler biochemistry means what?

We can induce mating behavior in sea slugs with peptide hormones,
or they can induce those hormones themselves through other pathways.

It seems an attempt to over-emphasize the use of central nervous
system control which downgrounds gut level control or other physiological
control schemes as inferior. But why? Again, smells anthropocentric.
We can recall that many significant neuropeptide hormones stem from
what were first gut peptide hormones. Is there some innate advantage
across all life to relocating control systems?

Sure, it's worked out well for those who currently have done so, but
it seems to be working well in those creatures who haven't.

It would be curious to simply test these ideas with observations
of ants. A botanist who studies complex communities might also
have some interesting commentary.

On Fri, 5 Apr 2024 13:13:02 +0200, Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:

>Hello all,
>
>Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>
>I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind of
>blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
>think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
>though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for the
>first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is plain
>wrong and if so on what.
>
>
>I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might if
>motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
>someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

Since you mention him, there are several Youtube videos from Michael
Tomasello.

The following is an 18-minute podcast where he discusses the following
questions:

When do young children begin to cooperate and show signs of fairness?
How does a shared experience influence a child’s behaviour towards an
adult? Why has our tendency towards cooperation not kept up with the
development of our social society?

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7OXawQhjas>

The following is an hour long lecture by Michael Tomasello about his
book "Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny" and the evolution of
co-operation in humans:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNbeleWvXyQ>

--
To know less than we don't know is the nature of most knowledge

On 4/5/2024 4:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:
> On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:
>> On 4/5/24 4:13 AM, Arkalen wrote:
>>> Hello all,
>>>
>>> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>>>
>>> I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
>>> of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how
>>> I think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not
>>> sure though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things
>>> for the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the
>>> book is plain wrong and if so on what.
>>>
>>>
>>> I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
>>> if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough
>>> that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.
>>>
>> I for one would be interested in a summary.
>>
>
> Maybe really short to start with:
>
> Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
> that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
> whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move the
> goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the goal
> is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
>
>
> He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification of
> agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
> monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
> human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
> lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
> would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
> of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
>
> The levels he describes are:
>
> * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
> stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
> danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
> beyond its immediate environment

You have to go back to single celled microbes to have "no agency", and
then it would be trying to define what you are talking about. If you
want to define agency as something that requires a brain and that type
of decision making, you can do that, but that is just an extension of
what organisms were doing before they had brains. Take a simple
behavior undertaken by bacteria. There is something called the SOS
response. A bacterium finds itself in an unfavorable environment, a
physiological response is started that results in genetic mutations
occurring faster than normal. The bacterium does this because it
obviously has worked to improve the individuals situation at a high
enough frequency that the bacterial lineage survives as a population.

Bacteria can use their flagellum to move to better environments, and
they have sensors and decision making apparatus in terms of changing
direction and moving towards that better environment. Nematodes have a
more sophisticated system to do the same thing. Humans have an even
more sophisticated system to do the same thing. Chimps and humans have
group agency, they can form hunting parties more sophisticated than wolf
packs and lion prides, but wolf packs and lion prides still have less
sophisticated group agency. Have you watched Planet Earth on the BBC
channel? They show group agency among sea creatures. Sea snakes and
fish cooperate in order to be more successful in hunting prey. They
also show octopus and fish cooperating in order to hunt prey. They show
group agency among fur seals to trap fish, and they show dolphins and
whales cooperating with each other to be more efficient predators.

Agency just seems to have levels of being able to interact with the
environment. It is a general aspect of life because organisms that can
do it have an obvious advantage. Life has evolved more sophisticated
means to interact with the environment, and it has resulted in what we
call consciousness.

Ron Okimoto

>
>
> * first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
> lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,
> resting, etc) and their behavior will depend not just on their immediate
> environment but also on what their goal is at any given time. They'll
> have hardwired behaviors that are deployed to meet the goal according to
> the above described feedback loop, with a global inhibition mechanism
> that can shut everything down in response to danger.
>
>
> * second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of goal-seeking
> feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to not just achieve
> a goal, but achieve it in the best way possible. Includes the ability to
> mentally stage potential behaviors, anticipate their outcomes and then
> pick which will work best. Also much finer inhibition abilities, able to
> inhibit one behavior and switch to another in service of the same goal
> instead of the global shutdown of lizards. And the ability to generate
> new behaviors instead of the earlier hardwiring.
>
>
> * third level - great apes. I can never remember quite what this one
> does so I had to re-skim a bit but basically it's an extra layer
> monitoring & controlling the mammalian decision-making one that results
> in higher-level reasoning, including controlling not only how to achieve
> a goal but which goal to seek to achieve (thus resolving cases where
> goals conflict), understanding other's decisions, and understanding
> causality - not only the basic mammalian "if I do this, that will
> happen" but "if this happens *in general*, that will happen".
>
>
> * fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret sauce"
> is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great apes that
> are also able to function as parts of a collective goal-seeking agent
> that uses the same basic "goal-perception-behavior-perception" feedback
> loop as all other agency. This means simultaneously modelling different
> kinds of agent - the "self" agent analogous to great apes (what are your
> personal interests) but also the "role" agent (what is your job as a
> member of the group) and the collective agent (what are the group's
> goals), as well as the "self" agency & "role" agency of collaborators.
> This also implies/explains moral dilemmas: whereas other animals only
> ever need to worry about one agents' goals (themselves), humans need at
> every point to decide whether they'll behave in service of their
> personal goals, or those of a group they're part of and if so which one
> (the immediate task-oriented team? Their family? Their tribe?).
>
> [Tomasello doesn't mention (but I immediately thought of) how a species
> with an innate sense of collective agency where said agency was both
> greater than any single individual but also analogous to their own
> agentic self might rationalize that sentiment...]
>
>
> He proposes this happened in two steps, the evolution of pairwise
> collaboration somewhere in the hominid lineage, and the evolution of
> full group agency in direct Homo sapiens ancestors, with the development
> of strong cultural variation & norms that provide a kind internal
> regulation to the collective agent and allow collaboration between
> strangers that share a culture. He also proposes actual group selection
> acting at this point, with groups with strong collaborative cultures
> outcompeting others.
>
> [this meshes beautifully with the "social cohesion signalling"
> hypothesis for the evolution of music btw]
>
> [another aside - he doesn't say this but it occurs to me that "arbitrary
> cultural variation + collaboration" seems like it could drive the
> evolution of universal computation (so children can learn whatever 100%
> arbitrary cultural baggage is required to function in their band) as
> well as truth-seeking (the only grounding on which one *could* base
> collaboration in the face of arbitrary cultural variation), which is
> kind of the core of what we think of as "our intelligence"]
>
>
>
> He proposes the driver of the evolution of each of these layers is a
> kind of unpredictability in the organism's environment. Animals that
> live in very stable environments can rely on hardwired behaviors that
> change at the speed of evolution. Early vertebrates would have been
> hunters that had to quickly adapt to also-evolving prey and
> agency/goal-seeking would have allowed that. Early mammals were social
> animals that were in competition not only with the prey but with their
> peers; an extra control layer to optimize behaviors would give them an
> edge. Early great apes that foraged for fruit would have had even higher
> competition for this resource that's concentrated in isolated patches
> with few access points.
>
>
> OK maybe that didn't end up that short ;) I hope I didn't mess it up too
> badly given it was mostly from memory, but that's basically it.
>

Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> writes:

> Maybe really short to start with:
>
> Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
> that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
> whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move
> the goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the
> goal is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.

If we substitute the ultimate goal, which is to survive, instead of
various means to an end type goals, then agency becomes life. But...

>
>
> He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification
> of agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
> monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
> human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
> lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
> would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
> of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
>
> The levels he describes are:
>
> * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
> stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
> danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
> beyond its immediate environment

The robot lawnmower doesn't plan either. Although some planning went
into making it no doubt. I think the animal does have a goal here, which
is to survive, and behaviours like eating and avoiding are a means to
that goal.

Some animals have not progressed to more complexity. In fact I don't
think it is necessarily progress, it depends on whether it achieves the
goal. There are still bacteria for example, doing quite well without the
complexity of the human brain.

On 06/04/2024 13:14, LDagget wrote:
> John Harshman wrote:
>
>> On 4/5/24 2:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:
>>> On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:
>>>> On 4/5/24 4:13 AM, Arkalen wrote:
>>>>> Hello all,
>>>>>
>>>>> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>
>>> Maybe really short to start with:
>>>
>>> Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
>>> that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
>>> whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move
>>> the goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the
>>> goal is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
>>>
>>>
>>> He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification
>>> of agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
>>> monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
>>> human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
>>> lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
>>> would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various
>>> levels of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
>>>
>>> The levels he describes are:
>>>
>>> * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
>>> stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
>>> danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
>>> beyond its immediate environment
> . . .
>>> * first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
>>> lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,
> . . .
>>> * second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of
>>> goal-seeking feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to
>>> not just achieve
>  . . .
>
>
>>> * fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret
>>> sauce" is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great
>>> apes that
> more snipping
>> Thanks for that. Sounds interesting. My greatest immediate
>> apprehension is that it would take a truly huge amount of experimental
>> and observational evidence to test the various aspects of the
>> scenario, and I wonder how much of it has already been done.
>
> Seems to me that it's very anthropocentrically biased.
> The suggestion that nemotodes don't have goals as described is odd.
> They seek food, seek mating. Hell, bacteria have goal seeking behavior
> in terms of seeking food,
> or fleeing toxins via chemotaxis. Just because we understand some
> of these things in terms of simpler biochemistry means what?

The word "agency" can mean many things and the book is clearly about
defining a specific set of phenomena; the fact the word "agency" is used
by other people to mean something different doesn't impact the substance
of the argument, at most it could make one question the wisdom of the
vocabulary choices.

Here the difference he proposes between organisms with and without
"agency" isn't that we know the biochemistry in one case and not in the
other, it's a specific claim about how they function and how many
degrees of freedom the individual organism has with respect to their
evolutionary hardwiring.

He defines a "feedback-control system" for agency that has the following
features:

- a goal
- behavior(s) suitable to reaching the goal
- perception that verifies whether the goal is achieved
- a feedback loop between them to repeat the behavior until the goal is
achieved

The thing is, living things don't *have* to function with this kind of
organization. You could have an organism that chemotaxes towards
nutrients & absorbs all it encounters and chemotaxes away from toxins or
chemicals associated with predators/bad environments and reproduces once
it's reached a certain size, and evolutionarily speaking that's a
perfectly cromulent organism; if it can survive and spread this way it
will. Insofar as it has the "goal" of eating or breeding or avoiding
predators however that goal is evolution's goal more than the
individual's. The nature of the goal and the specific behaviors it
engages in to meet it change over the generations via evolutionary
processes. Insofar as there is a feedback loop between perception and
behavior that optimizes things towards the goal, the "perception" is
"how does this organism interact with its environment" and the feedback
loop is "is this organism reproductively successful".

But if you have a living thing that *does* have this kind of
organization then "goals" have a different definition for it.
"Evolution" still has the "goal" of it eating but the way this is
behaviorally implemented means the individual itself can be described as
having this goal in a completely different sense, that manifests
differently. You can even get differences between "evolution's goals"
and "the individual's goals" - usually not with eating but for example
you can have goal-driven animals evolve the drive to have sex, although
from an evolutionary point of view the actual goal is reproduction.

Now whether these different behavioral organizations actually occur in
different animals the way the book claims is a different question but it
seems a reasonable claim to me. Although it's true he is a bit ambiguous
about nematodes; here is his discussion of them after introducing early
animal filter-feeders as an example of the former [disclaimer: I said
"nematodes", it's actually C elegans which may well not be a nematode at
all in which case my bad]:

"Not only do the chemosensory neurons detect either good or bad things
and 'signal' the motor neurons to produce bodily contractions that
propel the organism either forward or away from those things, but C
elegans also uses the rate at which it is ingesting food, typically
bacteria, to detect the location of richer and less rich clumps (Scholtz
et al., 2017). Moreover, if a behavior such as forward movement brings a
bad result (e.g., a noxious chemical), the creature can perform one of
two actions to move away (Hart, 2006). C. elegans finds its food by
moving around in its environment actively, sometimes even learning the
location of food in novel environments after several encounters (Qin &
Wheeler, 2007).

The behavior of C. elegans would thus seem to be organized in a more
complex manner than that of unicellular organisms. The have different
mechanisms for sensing things in the world and acting in response.
Classically, the function of a nervous system is to connect separate
mechanisms of perception and action, and ganglia are seats of this
integration, so it would seem that the separate mechanisms of perception
and action are integrated in C. elegans (and also, by inference, in
early bilaterians). However, it is unlikely that there is also a
comparison with some kind of internal goal to create direction: their
locomotion is mostly random or stimulus driven (Scholz et al., 2017).
And these organisms do not seem to exhibit anything that we would want
to call behavioral control: they do not inhibit or otherwise control
action execution, and what they learn is simply the location toward
which to direct their hardwired movements. It is thus unlikely that
early bilaterians, as modeled by C. elegans, were goal-directed,
decision-making agents, only animate actors."

>
> We can induce mating behavior in sea slugs with peptide hormones,
> or they can induce those hormones themselves through other pathways.
>
> It seems an attempt to over-emphasize the use of central nervous system
> control which downgrounds gut level control or other physiological
> control schemes as inferior. But why?

"Inferior" is your take, not the book's. The book is also razor-focused
on behavior, only mentioning nervous systems in the context of
describing behavior. You could claim that the author betrays an
illegitimate preference for central nervous systems in their choice of
model animals; that lizards have much higher behavioral flexibility than
C. elegans and also have a much more complex brain which makes it look
like the two are associated but the author could have described the
exact same behavioral differences using sea slugs instead of lizards.

I'm guessing that this claim would be incorrect though, and that central
nervous systems are in fact associated with higher behavioral
complexity. It seems like you might disagree ?

> Again, smells anthropocentric.
> We can recall that many significant neuropeptide hormones stem from
> what were first gut peptide hormones. Is there some innate advantage
> across all life to relocating control systems?

On 06/04/2024 16:51, Richmond wrote:
> Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> writes:
>
>> Maybe really short to start with:
>>
>> Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
>> that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
>> whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move
>> the goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the
>> goal is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
>
> If we substitute the ultimate goal, which is to survive, instead of
> various means to an end type goals, then agency becomes life. But...
>
>>
>>
>> He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification
>> of agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
>> monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
>> human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
>> lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
>> would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
>> of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
>>
>> The levels he describes are:
>>
>> * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
>> stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
>> danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
>> beyond its immediate environment
>
> The robot lawnmower doesn't plan either. Although some planning went
> into making it no doubt. I think the animal does have a goal here, which
> is to survive, and behaviours like eating and avoiding are a means to
> that goal.

Yes, "plan" was bad word choice on my part because by Tomasello's own
classification "planning" would be a level 2 type of agency at least,
and he wouldn't describe lizards (the exemplar for "goal-directed
agents") as doing it either. I don't have a single-word alternative
though. Maybe I could have said "doesn't flexibly direct/inhibit its
behaviors to meet specific goals that change over time".

>
> Some animals have not progressed to more complexity. In fact I don't
> think it is necessarily progress, it depends on whether it achieves the
> goal. There are still bacteria for example, doing quite well without the
> complexity of the human brain.
>

It is a rather annoying feature of discussing the evolutionary history
of any highly derived trait (and ten times worse when the trait is
highly derived *in humans*), that it will necessarily involve going
through the history of a lineage with that trait looking at how it
progressively got more derived in that lineage. And if any version of
that trait can be found in extant organisms, those organisms will be
used as illustrative examples.

This *looks* like framing evolution as an inherent progression along
this trait with organisms that have a less-derived versions seeming
"less evolved". But it's not. I mean, it *can* be, but a person who
fully believes that evolution isn't about universal progression, that
every modern animal is equally evolved, that no extant adaptation is
better than another because the fact they exist means they promote the
survival of the species they're in and that's the only standard for
"goodness" that's relevant to evolution... will still, in the specific
context of discussing the historical evolution of some highly-derived
trait, end up discussing it in these terms. All they can do is add
caveats to make it clear what it is they're doing. Tomasello does.

On 06/04/2024 16:15, RonO wrote:
> On 4/5/2024 4:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:
>> On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:
>>> On 4/5/24 4:13 AM, Arkalen wrote:
>>>> Hello all,
>>>>
>>>> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>>>>
>>>> I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that
>>>> kind of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still
>>>> impacts how I think about human consciousness and social living. I'm
>>>> still not sure though how much of that is just being dazzled, or
>>>> reading things for the first time that are actually already
>>>> well-known, or if the book is plain wrong and if so on what.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
>>>> if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough
>>>> that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.
>>>>
>>> I for one would be interested in a summary.
>>>
>>
>> Maybe really short to start with:
>>
>> Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
>> that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
>> whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move
>> the goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the
>> goal is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
>>
>>
>> He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification
>> of agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
>> monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
>> human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
>> lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
>> would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
>> of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
>>
>> The levels he describes are:
>>
>> * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
>> stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
>> danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
>> beyond its immediate environment
>
> You have to go back to single celled microbes to have "no agency", and
> then it would be trying to define what you are talking about.

Yes. Doing so is the book's point.

>  If you
> want to define agency as something that requires a brain and that type
> of decision making, you can do that, but that is just an extension of
> what organisms were doing before they had brains.

The book doesn't define agency as requiring brains, it defines it as a
specific type of behavioral organization. It admittedly takes it so much
for granted that this organization requires a brain that it doesn't even
mention it (that I recall), but it's really not relevant to the book's
argument.

After all the book itself says the kinds of agency it discusses evolved
convergently in different lineages. If we showed some brainless creature
displays the kind of internal organization & resulting behavioral
complexity characteristic of one of the kinds of agency defined in the
book, the fact it doesn't have a brain wouldn't matter at all. If it had
the kind of internal organization without the types of behavior
Tomasello associates with them or vice-versa, that would indeed go
against his thesis.

>  Take a simple
> behavior undertaken by bacteria.  There is something called the SOS
> response.  A bacterium finds itself in an unfavorable environment, a
> physiological response is started that results in genetic mutations
> occurring faster than normal.  The bacterium does this because it
> obviously has worked to improve the individuals situation at a high
> enough frequency that the bacterial lineage survives as a population.
>
> Bacteria can use their flagellum to move to better environments, and
> they have sensors and decision making apparatus in terms of changing
> direction and moving towards that better environment.  Nematodes have a
> more sophisticated system to do the same thing.  Humans have an even
> more sophisticated system to do the same thing.  Chimps and humans have
> group agency, they can form hunting parties more sophisticated than wolf
> packs and lion prides, but wolf packs and lion prides still have less
> sophisticated group agency.  Have you watched Planet Earth on the BBC
> channel?  They show group agency among sea creatures.  Sea snakes and
> fish cooperate in order to be more successful in hunting prey.  They
> also show octopus and fish cooperating in order to hunt prey.  They show
> group agency among fur seals to trap fish, and they show dolphins and
> whales cooperating with each other to be more efficient predators.
>
> Agency just seems to have levels of being able to interact with the
> environment.  It is a general aspect of life because organisms that can
> do it have an obvious advantage.  Life has evolved more sophisticated
> means to interact with the environment, and it has resulted in what we
> call consciousness.
>
> Ron Okimoto

Yes, and the book presents a specific classification of those levels,
arguing it corresponds to specific kinds of internal organization that
result in specific behavioral patterns. I can't really tell if you
disagree with the book (or my summary of it at least) and think what you
just wrote is a refutation of it, or if you agree with it but think what
you just wrote is a better way of describing the system than the book's.

Arkalen

/snip

Arkalen wrote:

> On 06/04/2024 13:14, LDagget wrote:
>> John Harshman wrote:
>>
>>> On 4/5/24 2:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:
>>>> On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:
>
big snip
> Are you aware of this paper on a hypothesis for the evolution of neurons
> ? It's possible you do as it does include a link between digestive
> molecules and neurotransmitters.

> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12461

> As for an advantage to using nervous systems for control systems an
> obvious one seems to be the ability to link up different functions of
> the organisms in arbitrary ways instead of function-constrained ones. I
> don't think hormonal systems can do that as flexibly but I'm happy to be
> proved wrong ("can induce mating behavior with hormones" definitely
> isn't sufficient).

apologies for the huge snip but your excellent post remains elsewhere.
Part of the reason for the snip is the system I'm using is poor at
handling large posts. I also am disinclined towards many interposed
comments. And in particular, I haven't read the book, you have, so
my further comments get too meta. Suffice that your points are well
taken and I won't quibble (more) without having read the book.

Beyond that, I looked into the cite above. Haven't read it but will.
Glanced through the refs, most are past the time I paid much attention
to the gut/brain connection. I did note a ref to a paper I plan to
look up. It could help me catch up.
Kaelberer, M. M., & Bohorquez, D. V. (2018).
The now and then of gut-brain signaling.
Brain Research,1693, 192–196.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2018.03.027

Thanks for the leads.

As a final thought, that he considered ants might induce me to read
the book. My knowledge there is at best superficial but I like them
as a model organism to decode chemical _effectors_ of behavior.

On Sat, 6 Apr 2024 18:41:37 +0200, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me>:

Just a comment; While I'm in no way competent in this field
and can't discuss it coherently, I'm enjoying the "food for
thought" immensely. Thanks!

>On 06/04/2024 13:14, LDagget wrote:
>> John Harshman wrote:
>>
>>> On 4/5/24 2:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:
>>>> On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:
>>>>> On 4/5/24 4:13 AM, Arkalen wrote:
>>>>>> Hello all,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>>
>>>> Maybe really short to start with:
>>>>
>>>> Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
>>>> that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
>>>> whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move
>>>> the goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the
>>>> goal is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification
>>>> of agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
>>>> monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
>>>> human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
>>>> lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
>>>> would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various
>>>> levels of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
>>>>
>>>> The levels he describes are:
>>>>
>>>> * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
>>>> stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
>>>> danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
>>>> beyond its immediate environment
>> . . .
>>>> * first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
>>>> lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,
>> . . .
>>>> * second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of
>>>> goal-seeking feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to
>>>> not just achieve
>>  . . .
>>
>>
>>>> * fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret
>>>> sauce" is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great
>>>> apes that
>> more snipping
>>> Thanks for that. Sounds interesting. My greatest immediate
>>> apprehension is that it would take a truly huge amount of experimental
>>> and observational evidence to test the various aspects of the
>>> scenario, and I wonder how much of it has already been done.
>>
>> Seems to me that it's very anthropocentrically biased.
>> The suggestion that nemotodes don't have goals as described is odd.
>> They seek food, seek mating. Hell, bacteria have goal seeking behavior
>> in terms of seeking food,
>> or fleeing toxins via chemotaxis. Just because we understand some
>> of these things in terms of simpler biochemistry means what?
>
>The word "agency" can mean many things and the book is clearly about
>defining a specific set of phenomena; the fact the word "agency" is used
>by other people to mean something different doesn't impact the substance
>of the argument, at most it could make one question the wisdom of the
>vocabulary choices.
>
>Here the difference he proposes between organisms with and without
>"agency" isn't that we know the biochemistry in one case and not in the
>other, it's a specific claim about how they function and how many
>degrees of freedom the individual organism has with respect to their
>evolutionary hardwiring.
>
>
>He defines a "feedback-control system" for agency that has the following
>features:
>
>- a goal
>- behavior(s) suitable to reaching the goal
>- perception that verifies whether the goal is achieved
>- a feedback loop between them to repeat the behavior until the goal is
>achieved
>
>
>The thing is, living things don't *have* to function with this kind of
>organization. You could have an organism that chemotaxes towards
>nutrients & absorbs all it encounters and chemotaxes away from toxins or
>chemicals associated with predators/bad environments and reproduces once
>it's reached a certain size, and evolutionarily speaking that's a
>perfectly cromulent organism; if it can survive and spread this way it
>will. Insofar as it has the "goal" of eating or breeding or avoiding
>predators however that goal is evolution's goal more than the
>individual's. The nature of the goal and the specific behaviors it
>engages in to meet it change over the generations via evolutionary
>processes. Insofar as there is a feedback loop between perception and
>behavior that optimizes things towards the goal, the "perception" is
>"how does this organism interact with its environment" and the feedback
>loop is "is this organism reproductively successful".
>
>
>But if you have a living thing that *does* have this kind of
>organization then "goals" have a different definition for it.
>"Evolution" still has the "goal" of it eating but the way this is
>behaviorally implemented means the individual itself can be described as
>having this goal in a completely different sense, that manifests
>differently. You can even get differences between "evolution's goals"
>and "the individual's goals" - usually not with eating but for example
>you can have goal-driven animals evolve the drive to have sex, although
>from an evolutionary point of view the actual goal is reproduction.
>
>
>Now whether these different behavioral organizations actually occur in
>different animals the way the book claims is a different question but it
>seems a reasonable claim to me. Although it's true he is a bit ambiguous
>about nematodes; here is his discussion of them after introducing early
>animal filter-feeders as an example of the former [disclaimer: I said
>"nematodes", it's actually C elegans which may well not be a nematode at
>all in which case my bad]:
>
>"Not only do the chemosensory neurons detect either good or bad things
>and 'signal' the motor neurons to produce bodily contractions that
>propel the organism either forward or away from those things, but C
>elegans also uses the rate at which it is ingesting food, typically
>bacteria, to detect the location of richer and less rich clumps (Scholtz
>et al., 2017). Moreover, if a behavior such as forward movement brings a
>bad result (e.g., a noxious chemical), the creature can perform one of
>two actions to move away (Hart, 2006). C. elegans finds its food by
>moving around in its environment actively, sometimes even learning the
>location of food in novel environments after several encounters (Qin &
>Wheeler, 2007).
>
>The behavior of C. elegans would thus seem to be organized in a more
>complex manner than that of unicellular organisms. The have different
>mechanisms for sensing things in the world and acting in response.
>Classically, the function of a nervous system is to connect separate
>mechanisms of perception and action, and ganglia are seats of this
>integration, so it would seem that the separate mechanisms of perception
>and action are integrated in C. elegans (and also, by inference, in
>early bilaterians). However, it is unlikely that there is also a
>comparison with some kind of internal goal to create direction: their
>locomotion is mostly random or stimulus driven (Scholz et al., 2017).
>And these organisms do not seem to exhibit anything that we would want
>to call behavioral control: they do not inhibit or otherwise control
>action execution, and what they learn is simply the location toward
>which to direct their hardwired movements. It is thus unlikely that
>early bilaterians, as modeled by C. elegans, were goal-directed,
>decision-making agents, only animate actors."
>
>
>>
>> We can induce mating behavior in sea slugs with peptide hormones,
>> or they can induce those hormones themselves through other pathways.
>>
>> It seems an attempt to over-emphasize the use of central nervous system
>> control which downgrounds gut level control or other physiological
>> control schemes as inferior. But why?
>
>"Inferior" is your take, not the book's. The book is also razor-focused
>on behavior, only mentioning nervous systems in the context of
>describing behavior. You could claim that the author betrays an
>illegitimate preference for central nervous systems in their choice of
>model animals; that lizards have much higher behavioral flexibility than
>C. elegans and also have a much more complex brain which makes it look
>like the two are associated but the author could have described the
>exact same behavioral differences using sea slugs instead of lizards.
>
>
>I'm guessing that this claim would be incorrect though, and that central
>nervous systems are in fact associated with higher behavioral
>complexity. It seems like you might disagree ?
>
>
>> Again, smells anthropocentric.
>> We can recall that many significant neuropeptide hormones stem from
>> what were first gut peptide hormones. Is there some innate advantage
>> across all life to relocating control systems?
>
>Are you aware of this paper on a hypothesis for the evolution of neurons
>? It's possible you do as it does include a link between digestive
>molecules and neurotransmitters.
>
>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12461
>
>As for an advantage to using nervous systems for control systems an
>obvious one seems to be the ability to link up different functions of
>the organisms in arbitrary ways instead of function-constrained ones. I
>don't think hormonal systems can do that as flexibly but I'm happy to be
>proved wrong ("can induce mating behavior with hormones" definitely
>isn't sufficient).
>
>
>> Sure, it's worked out well for those who currently have done so, but
>> it seems to be working well in those creatures who haven't.
>
>To a first approximation anything any species does works well by virtue
>of that species existing. "Working well" isn't the standard. This book
>looks at behavioral complexity/flexibility. It doesn't cast judgement on
>different kinds of behavioral organization being good or bad, it
>discusses what they are.
>
>> It would be curious to simply test these ideas with observations
>> of ants. A botanist who studies complex communities might also
>> have some interesting commentary.
>>
>
>Tomasello thinks ants and other social insects are also goal-directed
>agents, it's one of the examples of potential convergent evolution of
>the trait he mentions. Interestingly, that suggests he thinks other
>insects aren't. I think it's a subject that would definitely merit
>developing and challenging but it's not done in the book.
--

Bob Casanova wrote:

> Just a comment; While I'm in no way competent in this field

Nor any other, for that matter.

> and can't discuss it coherently

You're lucky if you manage to pee without staining your
socks yellow.

> I'm enjoying the "food for thought" immensely.

Two of the collective's alters walk into a bar, bob
casanova and some other alter, where they see a dog
off in the corner, licking its balls.

Other alter: "I wish I could do that!"

Bob casanova alter: "Me too, but I'm afraid he'd
bite me."

Naledi is a fraud, btw. Everything "Reported" about
them is fake.

--
https://jtem.tumblr.com/tagged/The%20Book%20of%20JTEM/page/5

On 4/6/2024 12:44 PM, Arkalen wrote:
> On 06/04/2024 16:15, RonO wrote:
>> On 4/5/2024 4:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:
>>> On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:
>>>> On 4/5/24 4:13 AM, Arkalen wrote:
>>>>> Hello all,
>>>>>
>>>>> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>>>>>
>>>>> I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that
>>>>> kind of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still
>>>>> impacts how I think about human consciousness and social living.
>>>>> I'm still not sure though how much of that is just being dazzled,
>>>>> or reading things for the first time that are actually already
>>>>> well-known, or if the book is plain wrong and if so on what.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still
>>>>> might if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long
>>>>> enough that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.
>>>>>
>>>> I for one would be interested in a summary.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Maybe really short to start with:
>>>
>>> Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
>>> that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
>>> whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move
>>> the goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the
>>> goal is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
>>>
>>>
>>> He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification
>>> of agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
>>> monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
>>> human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
>>> lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
>>> would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various
>>> levels of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
>>>
>>> The levels he describes are:
>>>
>>> * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
>>> stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
>>> danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
>>> beyond its immediate environment
>>
>> You have to go back to single celled microbes to have "no agency", and
>> then it would be trying to define what you are talking about.
>
> Yes. Doing so is the book's point.
>
>>   If you want to define agency as something that requires a brain and
>> that type of decision making, you can do that, but that is just an
>> extension of what organisms were doing before they had brains.
>
> The book doesn't define agency as requiring brains, it defines it as a
> specific type of behavioral organization. It admittedly takes it so much
> for granted that this organization requires a brain that it doesn't even
> mention it (that I recall), but it's really not relevant to the book's
> argument.
>
> After all the book itself says the kinds of agency it discusses evolved
> convergently in different lineages. If we showed some brainless creature
> displays the kind of internal organization & resulting behavioral
> complexity characteristic of one of the kinds of agency defined in the
> book, the fact it doesn't have a brain wouldn't matter at all. If it had
> the kind of internal organization without the types of behavior
> Tomasello associates with them or vice-versa, that would indeed go
> against his thesis.
>
>>   Take a simple behavior undertaken by bacteria.  There is something
>> called the SOS response.  A bacterium finds itself in an unfavorable
>> environment, a physiological response is started that results in
>> genetic mutations occurring faster than normal.  The bacterium does
>> this because it obviously has worked to improve the individuals
>> situation at a high enough frequency that the bacterial lineage
>> survives as a population.
>>
>> Bacteria can use their flagellum to move to better environments, and
>> they have sensors and decision making apparatus in terms of changing
>> direction and moving towards that better environment.  Nematodes have
>> a more sophisticated system to do the same thing.  Humans have an even
>> more sophisticated system to do the same thing.  Chimps and humans
>> have group agency, they can form hunting parties more sophisticated
>> than wolf packs and lion prides, but wolf packs and lion prides still
>> have less sophisticated group agency.  Have you watched Planet Earth
>> on the BBC channel?  They show group agency among sea creatures.  Sea
>> snakes and fish cooperate in order to be more successful in hunting
>> prey.  They also show octopus and fish cooperating in order to hunt
>> prey.  They show group agency among fur seals to trap fish, and they
>> show dolphins and whales cooperating with each other to be more
>> efficient predators.
>>
>> Agency just seems to have levels of being able to interact with the
>> environment.  It is a general aspect of life because organisms that
>> can do it have an obvious advantage.  Life has evolved more
>> sophisticated means to interact with the environment, and it has
>> resulted in what we call consciousness.
>>
>> Ron Okimoto
>
>
> Yes, and the book presents a specific classification of those levels,
> arguing it corresponds to specific kinds of internal organization that
> result in specific behavioral patterns. I can't really tell if you
> disagree with the book (or my summary of it at least) and think what you
> just wrote is a refutation of it, or if you agree with it but think what
> you just wrote is a better way of describing the system than the book's.

I disagreed with your statement that nematodes had no agency, and I
outlined what the book needed to consider about how life works in terms
of dealing with the environment we find ourselves in.

It sounds like the book understand this, and is dealing with forms
cognition involved after lifeforms evolved nervous systems. Nervous
systems only allowed more sophisticated interactions with the environment.

Ron Okimoto
>
>
> Arkalen
>
> /snip
>

On 06/04/2024 19:46, LDagget wrote:
> Arkalen wrote:
>
>> On 06/04/2024 13:14, LDagget wrote:
>>> John Harshman wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 4/5/24 2:13 PM, Arkalen wrote:
>>>>> On 05/04/2024 16:02, John Harshman wrote:
>>
> big snip
>> Are you aware of this paper on a hypothesis for the evolution of
>> neurons ? It's possible you do as it does include a link between
>> digestive molecules and neurotransmitters.
>
>> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12461
>
>> As for an advantage to using nervous systems for control systems an
>> obvious one seems to be the ability to link up different functions of
>> the organisms in arbitrary ways instead of function-constrained ones.
>> I don't think hormonal systems can do that as flexibly but I'm happy
>> to be proved wrong ("can induce mating behavior with hormones"
>> definitely isn't sufficient).
>
>
> apologies for the huge snip but your excellent post remains elsewhere.

No apologies needed but thank you for the compliment :)

> Part of the reason for the snip is the system I'm using is poor at
> handling large posts. I also am disinclined towards many interposed
> comments. And in particular, I haven't read the book, you have, so
> my further comments get too meta. Suffice that your points are well
> taken and I won't quibble (more) without having read the book.
>
> Beyond that, I looked into the cite above. Haven't read it but will.
> Glanced through the refs, most are past the time I paid much attention
> to the gut/brain connection. I did note a ref to a paper I plan to
> look up. It could help me catch up. Kaelberer, M. M., & Bohorquez, D. V.
> (2018). The now and then of gut-brain signaling.
> Brain Research,1693, 192–196.
> https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2018.03.027
>
> Thanks for the leads.

I thought the paper was super-interesting, it proposed the following
hypothesis for the initial evolution of neurons:

- Early animals like Dickinsonia moved around bacterial mats digesting
the substrate; if they ran into each other nothing prevented them
climbing onto each other & digesting the other animal instead; this
induced an incentive to detect each other's presence, maybe also a
predator/prey split where some sought out & others avoided that presence

- One way they could detect each other is via bioelectrical fields. All
cells generate & are sensitive to electrical fields, you'd just need to
couple a movement response. It would be super close-range but better
than nothing

- At the very edge of the detection sensitivity you'd get an
intermittent signal, and a second layer of electricity-sensitive cells
reacting to the intermittency of that signal from the first would extend
the range

- Prey in general tend to be subject to a trade-off in the sensitivity
to their escape response that depends on how rich a nutrient patch is:
escape too late and they risk being eaten but escape too soon and they
sacrifice their own chance to eat.

- Thus you could have a coupling between motility, electricity-sensitive
cells and also the ventral digestive cells detecting bacterial proteins

--> These would be the ancestors of perception, processing, action
potentials & neurotransmitters

The beauty of this hypothesis is that it really does seem to bootstrap
neurons: in modern neurons the electrical and chemical interactions are
pure intermediates between other modes of perception and action but in
this scenario they'd have started out as the direct modes of perception.

>
> As a final thought, that he considered ants might induce me to read
> the book. My knowledge there is at best superficial but I like them
> as a model organism to decode chemical _effectors_ of behavior.
>

I don't want to discourage you from reading the book but I don't want to
mislead you either, he mentions ants mostly to explain he won't talk
about them, and like I said he doesn't get into the details of how
behavior is implemented chemically or neurally at all.

Richmond wrote:
> Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> writes:
>
>> Maybe really short to start with:
>>
>> Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
>> that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
>> whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move
>> the goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the
>> goal is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
>
> If we substitute the ultimate goal, which is to survive, instead of
> various means to an end type goals, then agency becomes life. But...

I believe most biologists would argue that the ultimate goal is not
survival but reproduction. The two are not at all identical. Just look
at the feeding behavior of male mayflies.

Chris

>
>>
>>
>> He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification
>> of agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
>> monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
>> human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
>> lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
>> would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
>> of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
>>
>> The levels he describes are:
>>
>> * no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
>> stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
>> danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
>> beyond its immediate environment
>
> The robot lawnmower doesn't plan either. Although some planning went
> into making it no doubt. I think the animal does have a goal here, which
> is to survive, and behaviours like eating and avoiding are a means to
> that goal.
>
> Some animals have not progressed to more complexity. In fact I don't
> think it is necessarily progress, it depends on whether it achieves the
> goal. There are still bacteria for example, doing quite well without the
> complexity of the human brain.
>

Chris Thompson <the_thompsons@earthlink.net> writes:

> I believe most biologists would argue that the ultimate goal is not
> survival but reproduction. The two are not at all identical. Just look
> at the feeding behavior of male mayflies.
>

OK, survival of the genes then?

Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
>
[snip]
>
> Here the difference he proposes between organisms with and without
> "agency" isn't that we know the biochemistry in one case and not in the
> other, it's a specific claim about how they function and how many
> degrees of freedom the individual organism has with respect to their
> evolutionary hardwiring.
>
Degrees of freedom is one notion Dennett explores to bootstrap “free will”.

>
> He defines a "feedback-control system" for agency that has the following
> features:
>
> - a goal
> - behavior(s) suitable to reaching the goal
> - perception that verifies whether the goal is achieved
> - a feedback loop between them to repeat the behavior until the goal is
> achieved
>
>
> The thing is, living things don't *have* to function with this kind of
> organization. You could have an organism that chemotaxes towards
> nutrients & absorbs all it encounters and chemotaxes away from toxins or
> chemicals associated with predators/bad environments and reproduces once
> it's reached a certain size, and evolutionarily speaking that's a
> perfectly cromulent organism; if it can survive and spread this way it
> will. Insofar as it has the "goal" of eating or breeding or avoiding
> predators however that goal is evolution's goal more than the
> individual's. The nature of the goal and the specific behaviors it
> engages in to meet it change over the generations via evolutionary
> processes. Insofar as there is a feedback loop between perception and
> behavior that optimizes things towards the goal, the "perception" is
> "how does this organism interact with its environment" and the feedback
> loop is "is this organism reproductively successful".
>
>
> But if you have a living thing that *does* have this kind of
> organization then "goals" have a different definition for it.
> "Evolution" still has the "goal" of it eating but the way this is
> behaviorally implemented means the individual itself can be described as
> having this goal in a completely different sense, that manifests
> differently. You can even get differences between "evolution's goals"
> and "the individual's goals" - usually not with eating but for example
> you can have goal-driven animals evolve the drive to have sex, although
> from an evolutionary point of view the actual goal is reproduction.
>
Hmmm, is this evolution’s goal stemming from Tomasello himself? Not liking
the idea of evolution having goals. First the outcome of evolution itself
can stem from several factors, selection being one. Given drift, neutral
evolution, and the prevalence of junk DNA in humans and other organisms,
evolution seems too happenstance for goals. Goal directed evolution is the
stuff of orthogenesis or omega point. Complexity of human brains or
evolution of complexity itself if I recall Gould on this is a drunkard’s
walk constrained against a lower boundary.

That said teleology should be watered down to teleonomy (Mayr) or apparent
goal direction in organisms due to their “programming” and is an outcome
not a target. One needs to differentiate also between the proximal focus
and distal (ultimate) when looking at evolutionary outcomes. Proximate
causation happens at the level of physiology and so called “goals” obtain
here as organisms negotiate their environment for food and such. Failures
resulting in reduced reproductive output will “reprogram” future
generations away from those failures.

Said reprogramming may result in long term trends over generational time,
but that trending (eg- cognitive complexity) cannot be interpreted as an
evolutionary goal as trends can result in devastating dead ends especially
if the ecological context or fitness landscape shifts dramatically.

Sure humans and octopods have converged upon cognitive complexity, but so
many other species haven’t.

And this is where adaptive evolution is being considered. I dare say most
evolution is not adaptive.

[snip rest]

On 07/04/2024 15:51, *Hemidactylus* wrote:
> Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
>>
> [snip]
>>
>> Here the difference he proposes between organisms with and without
>> "agency" isn't that we know the biochemistry in one case and not in the
>> other, it's a specific claim about how they function and how many
>> degrees of freedom the individual organism has with respect to their
>> evolutionary hardwiring.
>>
> Degrees of freedom is one notion Dennett explores to bootstrap “free will”.
>
>>
>> He defines a "feedback-control system" for agency that has the following
>> features:
>>
>> - a goal
>> - behavior(s) suitable to reaching the goal
>> - perception that verifies whether the goal is achieved
>> - a feedback loop between them to repeat the behavior until the goal is
>> achieved
>>
>>
>> The thing is, living things don't *have* to function with this kind of
>> organization. You could have an organism that chemotaxes towards
>> nutrients & absorbs all it encounters and chemotaxes away from toxins or
>> chemicals associated with predators/bad environments and reproduces once
>> it's reached a certain size, and evolutionarily speaking that's a
>> perfectly cromulent organism; if it can survive and spread this way it
>> will. Insofar as it has the "goal" of eating or breeding or avoiding
>> predators however that goal is evolution's goal more than the
>> individual's. The nature of the goal and the specific behaviors it
>> engages in to meet it change over the generations via evolutionary
>> processes. Insofar as there is a feedback loop between perception and
>> behavior that optimizes things towards the goal, the "perception" is
>> "how does this organism interact with its environment" and the feedback
>> loop is "is this organism reproductively successful".
>>
>>
>> But if you have a living thing that *does* have this kind of
>> organization then "goals" have a different definition for it.
>> "Evolution" still has the "goal" of it eating but the way this is
>> behaviorally implemented means the individual itself can be described as
>> having this goal in a completely different sense, that manifests
>> differently. You can even get differences between "evolution's goals"
>> and "the individual's goals" - usually not with eating but for example
>> you can have goal-driven animals evolve the drive to have sex, although
>> from an evolutionary point of view the actual goal is reproduction.
>>
> Hmmm, is this evolution’s goal stemming from Tomasello himself?

It doesn't *not* stem from him :p Let's say I'm pretty sure he uses the
same metaphor phrased in a similar way somewhere in the book but I'm not
certain and I'm not going to check so I feel bad implicating him in my
phrasing choices.

> Not liking
> the idea of evolution having goals. First the outcome of evolution itself
> can stem from several factors, selection being one. Given drift, neutral
> evolution, and the prevalence of junk DNA in humans and other organisms,
> evolution seems too happenstance for goals. Goal directed evolution is the
> stuff of orthogenesis or omega point. Complexity of human brains or
> evolution of complexity itself if I recall Gould on this is a drunkard’s
> walk constrained against a lower boundary.

Honestly on reflection I agree that "evolution" having "goals" might be
a bad metaphor here, although maybe not for the same reasons as you.
First I want to narrow things down to *adaptations*, because those are
what we're talking about here. The book fully assumes the cognitive
mechanisms it discusses are adaptations, an assumption I think is
reasonable but whether it is or not, it's normal for the book to use
language and make arguments that make sense for adaptations even if not
all evolved traits are adaptations and that language wouldn't work for
those that aren't.

With that out of the way I've fully moved away from Dawkins' idea we
should avoid notions of "purpose" with respect to adaptations and talk
about "appearance of purpose" instead. I think it confuses more than it
clarifies in most cases. I think it makes more sense to redefine
"purpose" (and "function", "design" etc) in a way that covers both
evolved adaptations and human engineering, because their underlying
commonalities justify it. For example the way selective pressures for
flight lead a wing to have the structure it does justify thinking of it
as "for flying" the same way an airplane wing is and in a way a rock
isn't "for having the precise shape it happens to have". There is an
interplay between the structure suiting the thing to a function because
the function was causally involved in making the structure that's common
to both evolutionary adaptations and human design and accounts for the
superficial similarities.

That kind of reasoning is why I wasn't bothered about talking about
evolution metaphorically having a "goal" but I'm still rethinking that
choice somewhat because I'm not confident the metaphor worked. Like, I
explained how "purpose" can be redefined based on commonalities between
how adaptation and human design work but in this context we're talking
about the "goals" of a system called "agency" that was defined a
specific way in the book, and I'm not sure "evolution" can be massaged
into that definition even for a metaphor. This bit here was very much my
attempt to do so:

>> Insofar as there is a feedback loop between perception and
>> behavior that optimizes things towards the goal, the "perception" is
>> "how does this organism interact with its environment" and the
>> feedback loop is "is this organism reproductively successful".

but the more I think of it the less confident I am that it worked.
Evolution doesn't do loops!

I definitely don't want to say something like "bacteria seem to have
goals but definitely don't and goal-directed agents do have goals,
ignore the appearance of a commonality as it is pure illusion" because I
don't think it's pure illusion, there's got to be a good way to account
for why one looks like the other and express it simply.

(other than "the division Tomasello proposes isn't a thing at all" of
course, which I don't buy)

>
> That said teleology should be watered down to teleonomy (Mayr) or apparent
> goal direction in organisms due to their “programming” and is an outcome
> not a target. One needs to differentiate also between the proximal focus
> and distal (ultimate) when looking at evolutionary outcomes. Proximate
> causation happens at the level of physiology and so called “goals” obtain
> here as organisms negotiate their environment for food and such. Failures
> resulting in reduced reproductive output will “reprogram” future
> generations away from those failures.
>
> Said reprogramming may result in long term trends over generational time,
> but that trending (eg- cognitive complexity) cannot be interpreted as an
> evolutionary goal as trends can result in devastating dead ends especially
> if the ecological context or fitness landscape shifts dramatically.

Long-term trends in evolutionary change is definitely not what I meant
by "evolutionary goal".

OK I've thought on it a bit and I think I've figured out what I meant;
turns out it's very similar to the "purpose" thing after all. You'll
tell me if it makes sense, and if so, whether you can think of a pithy
way of saying it.

1) When/why do we think systems have goals? When there it behaves in
ways that yield a certain outcome, and the behaviors seem optimized so
that this outcome will happen. As if the outcome caused the behavior and
not just the other way around.

2) Humans have a whole cognitive system where this is indeed the case,
with internal representations of the desired outcome, different possible
behaviors, what outcomes they might lead to, and processing to ensure
the behavior that's actually displayed leads to the desired outcome.

3) Tomasello describes his basic "feedback-control system" as a system
where this is also the case, with an internal representation of the goal
and control over whether (and which) behaviors are displayed depending
on whether (and until) the outcome is achieved. He even argues that this
is the minimal possible system that can be goal-seeking like this.

4) Bacteria (Tomasello would argue; I'm interested in counter-arguments)
do NOT have such a feedback-control system. They do not flexibly adjust
their behavior according to whether their perceptions match up to some
internal representation of a goal.

On 06/04/2024 11:53, Burkhard wrote:
> Arkalen wrote:
>
>> Hello all,
>
> hello too! It's so nice to have you back!!

Thanks :)

>> Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
>
>> I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
>> of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
>> think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
>> though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for
>> the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is
>> plain wrong and if so on what.
>
> I haven't read this one (but on the reading list now), I knew his work
> mainly from the debate he had with Chomsky, and his rejection of the
> idea of an innate universal grammar in favour of a social learning
> model. I thought at the time that while the idea of shared intentionality
> was very appealing and plausible, and explains a lot, on its own
> I could not see how it overcomes the "poverty of the stimulus problem"
> (but this was ages ago that I read it tbh)
> What I also found really interesting, for my day job,  was his discussion
> on third-party punishment (which he claims is uniquely human)
>

Was that debate live/recorded or written ? I'd be interested in seeing
it. I'm honestly surprised to hear he was rejecting innate universal
grammar in favor of social learning because I'd have thought the first
is a more logical outgrowth from what he presents "The Evolution of
Agency". For example I'm pretty sure he presents aspects of human
cooperation like basic altruism, coordinating via eye movements and
pointing etc as specific adaptations we have and chimpanzees don't or
much less so. I'd have thought "innate universal grammar" fit
comfortably in there. But I'm also not familiar enough with the debate
to be sure all the terms mean what I think they mean.

That reminds me though, I was thinking about the issues of teaching
animals language shortly after reading the book and this hypothesis kind
of fits with that too. Plenty of animals seem fine associating symbols
with things and expressing themselves that way but the resulting speech
lacks pronouns ("Koko want birkin bag; jealousy professor" not "I want a
birkin bag; you're jealous") and differentiating things like actor/acted
upon (we know Koko wants the birkin bag because the opposite doesn't
make sense but she could have ordered those words any which way to
express that meaning, with no way of lifting the ambiguity if context
didn't allow us to guess who's doing what).

And those differences seem pretty critical to the task of *coordinating
roles within a collaboration*. There's really no way to disambiguate
[Sally/John/Timmy/Jane/get groceries/pick up/mow/pool/lawn] into "I'll
get the groceries & you'll pick up Timmy at the pool, Jane can mow the
lawn" without true grammar!

>
>> I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
>> if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
>> someone else might actually have read it and have takes.
>