Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
> 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!
>
The book seems good enough so far. Got me interested in feedback control
systems and their complexification across taxa. He teased me with a shout
out to Piaget’s behavioral driven evolution, but kinda shifts from Papa
Jean’s favored Baldwin effect. Tomasello could have really fucked up for me
in how he addresses MacLean’s obsolete triune brain schema.

He says: “In terms of brain bases for these new motivational mechanisms,
classic views attribute to reptiles a completely nonemotional reptilian
brain that lacks a limbic system, which contrasts with the emotional brain
of mammals (P. MacLean, 1990). Modern research now downplays the
differences between reptilian and mammalian brains (e.g., Naumann et al.,
2015), but it is still the case that the “limbic system” (however that is
now conceptualized) seems to play a more important role in mammalian than
in reptilian behavior.” From The Evolution of Agency

He cites this interesting article that starts off showing a von Baerian
divergence from a shared Bauplan over the Haeckelian mode of MacLean’s
version of the “reptile brain”:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)00218-3

The article cites Sagan rather than MacLean, starts off pretty good then
loses the plot for me. Is there still a so-called reptile brain then or a
basal amniote brain at least that mammals and great apes complexify a bit?

Above Tomasello puts “limbic system” in requisite square quotes. His book
seems more a look at behavioral systems than neuroanatomy and its function,
so I don’t know how much Tomasello is aware of Joe LeDoux’s arguments
against a coherent limbic system, which he kinda deconstructed out of
existence. Limbic systems and triune brains belong in the dustbin.

Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
>
[snip]
>
> 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).
>
>
> So I guess what I'd like to see is if one can define each agency level
> rigorously enough to predict behavior from it, potentially find neural
> correlates, and come up with new behavioral experiments to test specific
> aspects of the proposed inner workings, and/or accurately predict the
> performance of as-yet-untested species in such experiments based on
> their presumed agency type.
>
He uses squirrels as stand-ins for early mammals to contrast with lizards
(reptiles). One thing that caught my mind was that mammals might
“prevision” error. He later talks of a squirrel presented with a goal of
going from the current branch to another branch and simulated the leap vs
whether to just take the route of walking back toward the tree center and
then out to the other branch. This part seems to capture Popper’s dictum
that through error elimination ideas may die in our stead:

“It has imagined (in a kind of off-line perception) what would happen in
the situation if it leaped for the branch, and what would happen if it
walked down and around, comparing the two options in a process of mental
trial and error in which failure is not fatal but informative.”

So the squirrel mentally falsified the leap?

*Hemidactylus* <ecphoric@allspamis.invalid> wrote:
> Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:
>> 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!
>>
> The book seems good enough so far. Got me interested in feedback control
> systems and their complexification across taxa. He teased me with a shout
> out to Piaget’s behavioral driven evolution, but kinda shifts from Papa
> Jean’s favored Baldwin effect. Tomasello could have really fucked up for me
> in how he addresses MacLean’s obsolete triune brain schema.
>
> He says: “In terms of brain bases for these new motivational mechanisms,
> classic views attribute to reptiles a completely nonemotional reptilian
> brain that lacks a limbic system, which contrasts with the emotional brain
> of mammals (P. MacLean, 1990). Modern research now downplays the
> differences between reptilian and mammalian brains (e.g., Naumann et al.,
> 2015), but it is still the case that the “limbic system” (however that is
> now conceptualized) seems to play a more important role in mammalian than
> in reptilian behavior.” From The Evolution of Agency
>
> He cites this interesting article that starts off showing a von Baerian
> divergence from a shared Bauplan over the Haeckelian mode of MacLean’s
> version of the “reptile brain”:
> https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)00218-3
>
> The article cites Sagan rather than MacLean, starts off pretty good then
> loses the plot for me. Is there still a so-called reptile brain then or a
> basal amniote brain at least that mammals and great apes complexify a bit?
>
> Above Tomasello puts “limbic system” in requisite square quotes. His book
> seems more a look at behavioral systems than neuroanatomy and its function,
> so I don’t know how much Tomasello is aware of Joe LeDoux’s arguments
> against a coherent limbic system, which he kinda deconstructed out of
> existence. Limbic systems and triune brains belong in the dustbin.
>
>
Hmmm…, given Evan MacLean is cited several times by Tomasello, I’m not too
sure what to make of this:
https://academictree.org/psych/peopleinfo.php?pid=7955

Which indicates Evan MacLean to be Paul MacLean’s actual grandson?
Interesting.

And:
https://academictree.org/psych/peopleinfo.php?pid=7956

Note Tomasello.

And here Evan is noted for advisory role pertaining to the Paul D MacLean
Award:
https://dogs.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/people/CVs/MacLean_CV.pdf