The subject of intention and action has come up few times, so I thought I’d start a thread.
From my point of view as a cognitive neuroscientist, decision-making (which action to take) is best conceived of as a kind of winner-take-all arm-wrestling competition, in which competing programs (represented as networks of active neurons) of action exert a mutually inhibitory effect on on the other, while each receives excitatory input from various other other networks, each of which in turn are engaged in a kind of subsidiary arm-wrestling match with some networks and a mutually cheer-leading match with others.
The more activation in any one network, the greater the inhibitory effect it has on competing networks, and so the system is, in a technical sense, “chaotic” – two competing programs can be finely balanced at one moment, but once one gets ahead by more than a critical amount, its inhibitory effect on the other increase, reducing its activation and releasing its reciprocal inhibitory control. At this point, activation in the winner rises rapidly towards “execution threshold” – the point at which outflow to the muscles involved in the action are activated.
Of course this is a continuously looping process, and the actions can be as slight as an eye movement, which then brings new input to the decision-making process, or a gross-motor action, which also provide new input, so the decision-making process is constantly informed by new data. However, it is also informed by endogenous processes – processes that trigger activations in networks involved in goal-setting and reward prediction, and established through life-long learning, in which neural firing patterns that result in success become more probable and those that result in failure, or penalty, become less likely.
As the brain’s owner, of course, we call these processes “pondering”, “hesitating”, “deciding”, “exploring”, “testing”, “changing my mind”, “exercising will power”, “considering the long term effects of my actions”, “considering the effect of my actions on someone else”, etc.
Which is exactly what they are. But at a neural level they operate very like evolutionary processes, in which what replicates most successfully (neurally) is most likely to be repeated, and what replicates least successfully is least likely to be repeated. The interesting part is that this “neural Darwinism” takes place prior to actions actually being performed – and often the”winning” program does not actually reach execution threshold, but instead is fed back as input, so that we are able to imagine the results of our actions before we actually execute them, and use that information before actually allowing an action to take place.
That means that we, unlike evolutionary processes, are capable of intentional action. We can simulate the results of potential courses of action, and use those simulated results to inform the decision-making process. This allows us to take shortcuts, and pursue, in actuality, only those courses of action we deem likely to be successful. In contrast, evolution is stuck with trying anything that presents itself as an option, learning by actual, not simulated, errors. It cannot be said, therefore, to exhibit intentional behaviour, and is much slower and less efficient that we are. However, by the same token, it will often explore possibilities that a simulating – intentional – agent would reject, on the grounds that the simulations looked unpromising. As a result, some spectacular solutions are missed.
Which is why evolutionary algorithms are used by intentional designers – us – so that we can, intentionally, use the power of unintentional design to find solutions we ourselves would reject as not sufficiently promising to explore.
Really? I don’t think we really know how extensive the universe is.
Declares Joe, baldly.
Artificial things are “natural” in the broad sense of the term. You can’t be seriously suggesting that mankind is responsible for the origin of life or species, can you?
Non-sequitur. As I said science says it had a beginning.
Artificial things are not natural in that nature did not produce them. And that is what we are talking about so please try to stay focused.
Where did the inspiration come from? Why are they called ‘genetic’?
Already answered:
For all of you so engrossed with evolution-
Engineers have used trial and error for quite some time. Thomas Edison was proud of his “99% perspiration 1% inspiration”- what GAs allow us to do is get rid of the perspiration and have a computer run all the T&E until a suitable solution is found.
The evo-tunnel vision is showing….
And they are called “genetic” only because of evos and their pipe-dreams- no other reason.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/photogalleries/stonehenge/
“Stonehenge Builders’ Village Found” 0_o
No Joe, that didn’t answer what I asked, so I’ll ask again: Where did the inspiration for GAs come from?
Before getting all worked up over design detection, I’d like to see a demonstration that biological design is even possible.
Please explain how the designer knows which 500 bit strings are functional and which are not. that would be a start. You could follow up by showing how the designer knows when to introduce them and how.
I told you- engineering trial and error.
LoL! In what way does that tell us about the intentions of the designer(s) of Stonehenge?
And I’d like to see a demonstration of matter, energy, necessity and chance producing a living organism from non-living matter.
You have no idea how science operates, and it shows.
You don’t understand ‘inspiration’, do you? It’s no the same as ‘why is it needed’, it’s ‘where did the idea come from.’
That’s a bald declaration. Are you suggesting nature began after insects came into existence in order to support your apparent position that they have unnatural origins?
I repeat, they are natural in the broad sense of the word. They are part of the physical world. As you’ve agreed with me further up the thread that intelligent design is a natural biological phenomenon, please stay focused on that use of the word natural.
You don’t understand much of anything, do you? The inspiration would be to do it faster and more efficient using a GA than using the brute force of man-hours.
But if you are trying to say that GAs were inspired by the Intelligent Design of living organisms, then that would be OK by me.
Non-sequitur. As I said science says it had a beginning.
So you are against teaching the “big bang” in science classrooms. Do you know what other cosmology is being taught in science classrooms?
Strange, I never said, thougt nor implied such a thing.
I am still waiting for your evidence that nature produced insects. Why is that?
Artificial things are not natural in that nature did not produce them. And that is what we are talking about so please try to stay focused.
I repeat, we were talking about natural in a specific, not broad, sense of the word.
In a broad sense of the word.
That use doesn’t apply.
No that’s a need, not inspiration. Try again.
LoL! As if YOU get to decide. Try again…
“No, that’s not an inspiration cuz I, Rich, sed it ain’t”
CLUE:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genalg/genalg.html#history
“A brief history of GAs Top
The earliest instances of what might today be called genetic algorithms appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s, programmed on computers by evolutionary biologists who were explicitly seeking to model aspects of natural evolution. It did not occur to any of them that this strategy might be more generally applicable to artificial problems, but that recognition was not long in coming: “Evolutionary computation was definitely in the air in the formative days of the electronic computer” (Mitchell 1996, p.2). By 1962, researchers such as G.E.P. Box, G.J. Friedman, W.W. Bledsoe and H.J. Bremermann had all independently developed evolution-inspired algorithms for function optimization and machine learning, but their work attracted little followup. A more successful development in this area came in 1965, when Ingo Rechenberg, then of the Technical University of Berlin, introduced a technique he called evolution strategy, though it was more similar to hill-climbers than to genetic algorithms. In this technique, there was no population or crossover; one parent was mutated to produce one offspring, and the better of the two was kept and became the parent for the next round of mutation (Haupt and Haupt 1998, p.146). Later versions introduced the idea of a population. Evolution strategies are still employed today by engineers and scientists, especially in Germany.
The next important development in the field came in 1966, when L.J. Fogel, A.J. Owens and M.J. Walsh introduced in America a technique they called evolutionary programming. In this method, candidate solutions to problems were represented as simple finite-state machines; like Rechenberg’s evolution strategy, their algorithm worked by randomly mutating one of these simulated machines and keeping the better of the two (Mitchell 1996, p.2; Goldberg 1989, p.105). Also like evolution strategies, a broader formulation of the evolutionary programming technique is still an area of ongoing research today. However, what was still lacking in both these methodologies was recognition of the importance of crossover.
“
Answered:
But if you are trying to say that GAs were inspired by the Intelligent Design of living organisms, then that would be OK by me.
Answered:
But if you are trying to say that GAs were inspired by the Intelligent Design of living organisms, then that would be OK by me.
Answered:
And they are called “genetic” only because of evos and their pipe-dreams- no other reason.
Joe, you’re attributing to me something I’ve never said.
LoL! It’s the software that runs the blog- I have requested a deletion.
You have personal issues Rich…
Okay, I’ll chose to write you off as serious at this point. Evolutionary biologists use computers to simulate evolutionary mechanisms and achieve fantastic results. But for you, these don’t actually work in the real world. funny how they work for the computer though, eh?
I appreciate you fixing the error. Keep your chins up, old bean!
LoL! They do not apply to biological organisms Rich. No one has applied GAs to show us that a fish can evolve into a terapod. They wouldn’t know where to start.
Nope, the bug still exists.
Still only have the one.
That’s not really what they’re for though, is it? They harness the same creative power (RM) and selective power (NS) we find in nature and achieve great optimization results. The same forces that work so well for natural life also work in the digital domain, which isn’t really suprising.
Perhaps Joe can tell us where a designer would start and how he would go about designing.
Then they ain’t genetic algorithms. As I said evos just call them that because of their pipe-dreams. Even your link supports that.
Except NS doesn’t select, it is the result and NS has nothing to do with optimization.
What natural life? there still isn’t any evidence that nature can produce life- still question-begging, Rich.
A designer would start at the beginning and go about designing in a manner condusive to properly implementing the design.
Selection doesn’t select. Gotcha. Thanks for your insights.
Natural life – life found in nature. Duh.
What all that adds up to is that you’re asking me to present evidence that insects aren’t man-made. That’s easy. They pre-date us.
As for the “big bang”, the expansion of the known world isn’t the same thing as the beginning of nature.
By a couple of days according to Joe’s calendar. 😉
No matter how great a designer you are, no matter how excellent an algorithm creator you are, I’ll bet that you could never come up with an algorithm that could create the wonderful music that those biological organisms known as humans are able to create. Designed things simply don’t have that kind of creativity. Only in evolved things do you see that.
Perhaps not great music, but algorithms can write passable music. Better than most humans and even better than most musicians.
[audio src="http://ersimages.com/ecards/beet2.mp3" /]
[audio src="http://ersimages.com/ecards/invention.mp3" /]
Joe G,
“petrushka” has offered this argument to ID’ists before and it’s a great one that the ID side cannot answer.
Without “prophesy” or some other form of seeing the future, how does the “designer” know what he “specifically” needs?
While “evolution” is almost unrestricted in what it can explore, a designer might miss a “design” by mandating a certain biological “design”.
How does the designer know “what” he has to make?
Is our universe and our futures pre-determined by the designer?
If so can we change our future with “free will”?
If we have the “free will” to change the future, does that mean the designer must follow our lead and change his future designs?
LoL! Again just because you do not understand the concept, don’t blame me.
But it is nice to see that darwin can still fool people..
The Origin of Theoretical Population Genetics (University of Chicago Press, 1971), reissued in 2001 by William Provine:
Thanks for the honesty Will.
It’s a result, Rich…
Nope. Not even close. Try again.
The big-bang pertains to the origin of the universe, ie nature.
Toronto-
You and petrushka just need to focus on your position as the design inference goes right through it.
Nope, not even close- but nice to see your evoTARD tactics are welcome here.
Yes found in nature, duh. But question begging pertaining to produced by nature, duh.
Evolved from what and how did they evolve?
I believe what Joe is caustically and erroneously insisting is that selection isn’t an object; it’s an outcome. He insists this because it appears he’s only ever read one definition of the term “selection” and that he somehow came away thinking that selection is a term that must imply active intent of choice rather than…you know…other common uses of the term such as:
Thus it is quite reasonable for Minnesota to note in a vacation brochure, “you’ll find a wide selection of outdoor activities to choose from!” Does that brochure imply that those activities have already been selected by the someone in the state government, department of natural resources, or the tourism board? Does it mean tourists are obligated to select one of those activities? By Jove, no it doesn’t!
Sorry Joe, but you’re just plain old wrong here. NS doesn’t have to make a specific intentional choice for the use of the term “selection” to be appropriate. The reason the term is if fine is that the nature is setting up a set of parameters (selections) for relative reproductive success.
Sorry you don’t like the use of the term Joe, but there’s nothing inaccurate about it.
The design inference is BS unless you can demonstrate that design is possible.
Most people give up imaginary friends after age five, and Santa Claus by eight or ten.
ID advocates still believe it makes sense to invoke sky fairies to explain stuff. Such belief is touching, but not particularly enlightening.
All the artifacts mentioned by design advocates, from Stonehenge to music, have known designers working with known materials and methods. The objects created exist in their milieu, they can be recognized as products of a particular time, Bach did not write music in the idiom of Stravinsky, and Beethoven did not write in the style of Schoenberg. Styles of design evolve. They stretch boundaries, but they do not leap to isolated islands.
But the designer of life, as seen by ID advocates, can leap 500 bit strings in a single bound, anticipate changes in climate and ecology, and produce protein coding sequences de novo.
All this is so completely void of intellectual value that no sentient adult would bother responding to it if it weren’t being promoted by politicians.
Originally, you asked me for evidence that insects had natural causes. When I pointed out that nature (broad sense) is the only cause known to exist, you insisted on using a definition of nature which is opposed to artificial, which means man made. Insects aren’t artificial. We didn’t make them. So, all observations we can make tell us that they are natural in that restricted sense.
If you want to go back to the other definition of natural, which includes all of the physical world, then all the evidence available to us tells us that physical things like insects have physical causes.
It’s pointless doing what you do so often, which is to point to physical phenomena on this planet, and ask people to support the position that their causes are natural. Physical processes are the only things known to happen here.
You are arguing by analogy, which is not a logically valid form of argument. Nonetheless, analogies can be useful for their insights. However, you seem to have gotten the insight backwards. We can highlight this by taking your general statement above, and changing it to a more specific form. For example:
The problem is why birds evolved in ways that look like airplanes
This statement (as with your original) is both absurdly anachronistic and causally confused. It is clear that bird flight was both an inspiration for, and model for, the development of airplanes. The fact that birds exist undoubtedly had some influence on the origins of airplanes. But the fact that humans engineered an artifact that emulates the iconic behavior of a bird says nothing at all about the origins of birds. To take this further, consider some of the examples you gave: communications systems, artificial intelligence, sensory devices. The use of the words communication, intelligence, and sensory (all biological concepts) in engineering jargon is an explicit acknowledgement of intent to emulate biology through engineering. It should be no wonder then that engineered systems bear close resemblance to biological ones. But again, while biological modes of, say, sensation likely influenced the engineering of sensory devices, the engineering of sensory devices says nothing at all about the origins of biological sensation.
But we don’t even need an explicit connection between a biological model and an engineered derivative to explain similarities. Even if human airplane designers had no knowledge of flying animals, they likely would have arrived at similar designs. That is because given the physical properties of earth and its atmosphere, there are severe constraint on what types of solutions can be had for flying. So no matter what processes might lead to the existence of flying objects, even completely dissimilar processes, the resulting “artifacts” are likely to share some basic common traits given the particular constraints and necessities of physics. Likewise with any other similarities between biological and engineered systems. Therefore, if we posit** that evolutionary processes are capable of producing organisms with a variety of capabilities, then significant parallels between evolutionary products and engineered products, even though they are the outputs of vastly different processes, are not coincidences at all, they are expectations. (**I realize that you disagree with this possibility, but the point is that if you want to refute the possibility you can’t do it by invoking the argument from analogy, since, as I have argued, analogues are entirely consistent with the possibility of evolution).
Oh, and I agree that random chance can’t produce the similarities between evolution and engineering, but then again neither evolution nor engineering are random.
Joe G,
That doesn’t answer the problem of the designer needing to change his plans for the future because we have the “free will” to change the present.
Do we have “free will”?
If we have “free will”, how does the designer react to our changing his future plans?
Joe’s beef about NS from a few years ago:
Yawn. Wrong then, wrong now. Neither Darwin nor any modern evolutionary biologist or teacher insists that nature is making some intentional choice. Nor is such required for NS to be an appropriate label. Nature need only create sets of conditions. If a fire rages through some part of some forest, either set – the one that burned or the one that was untouched – can be accurately referred to as “selected”. There’s nothing inaccurate about such a label.
And you bet your booties that such selection will have some impact on the different rates of offspring across to the two areas. So to insist that NS is a contradiction and/or does nothing is just plain old erroneous.
Where did I say produced by nature?