Scientific
investigations and ethical justifications are two different things
and they both relate differently to scientific explanations. In the
former you are using the scientific method to produce an explanation,
in the latter you are using these explanations, as product of the
scientific method , to justify an ethical position.

Usually,
from a sample of a particular behaviour (you’re right in remarking
that these samples are often limited to contemporary occidental
culture, but researchers are aware of that and are expanding the
sample of culture they are investigating, eg. historical records,
isolated tribes, etc.) a scientist try to detect some correlations
and to infer from these regularities some necessary conditions or
process that explains, in part, the particular causal history of
events that led to these behaviours. Admittedly, these various
elements of scientific explanations are use to ethically justify
human behaviours, but using science to ethically justify a behaviour
is not the same thing as using science to explain a behaviour.

]]> http://ignare.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/amalgamating-explanations-and-justifications/feed/ 0 Ignare http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/22/matt-and-attribution-of-intentions-to-particles/ http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/22/matt-and-attribution-of-intentions-to-particles/#comments Sun, 23 Nov 2008 03:56:37 +0000 ignare http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/22/matt-and-attribution-of-intentions-to-particles ]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImY9Xw-af_o&watch_response

Hi again Matt,

I think in this video you get at the core issue that distinguish your ideas from mainstream sciences. Even if your argument seems to imply that your infroming yourself from the recent sciences, in fact, I believe you’re returning to an antique mythological paradigm by metaphorically anthropomorphizing particules since you’re refering to intentionnal causality as explanations for natural phenomenon.

3 Things :

1-Attribution of intentions can be viewed as the results of an evolved Theory of Mind (or Folk Psychology) faculty of our brain that impute mental states to middle-size non-mecanical moving objects for predicting their behaviors.

2- The history of science since Antiquity is grossly the story of remplacing explanations that refers to intentional causality (e.g. Zeus’s anger caused the thunderstorm, God’s will explain the multitude of species) by neo-mecanical(dynamical)explanations. For me the paradigm shift you’re advocating do result from a will to increase our understanding of life but a reactionary obstination motivate by the fact that phenomenological consciouness is not yet explainded by science. Yes, our world is full of intentionnality (attributed by us) but this phenomenal counsciousness is an evolved functions that regulate behavior for optimizing inclusive fitnees not a a-perspectival truth-seeking faculty.

3- You support this weird reactionnary move by saying that modern quantum physics is not Newton physics. But quantum physics is in no way attributing intentions to particules, quite the contrary, quantum physic is actually named quantum MECANICS. Furthermore, I believe these quantum effects that motivate your attribution of intentionnality to particules are happening mainly to level of organisation of the scale of nanometers. (Yes, there are exceptions when we reach extremely low or high level of energy e.g. superconductivit or superfluidity) So, I believe that dynamical systems are still pertinent for explaining interractions happening at the level of organism, or at the level of neurons. For the moment, I don’t know any kinds of molecular or neurological account of the dynamics of the brain that need to refer to some nano-level quantum effect ( I believe Penrose theory of counciouness is not a well accepted view). Again, most of brain scientists view the brain as a dynamical system.

]]> http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/22/matt-and-attribution-of-intentions-to-particles/feed/ 0 Ignare http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/evo-devo/ http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/evo-devo/#comments Sun, 02 Nov 2008 09:39:55 +0000 ignare http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/evo-devo ]]> http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/07/evolution_of_hormone_signaling.php

• Cooption. Add this one to your list of synonyms. First there
  was the term "preadaptation" with its unfortunate teleological
  implications; then Gould & Vrba coined the better term
  "exaptation"; nowadays the magic word you hear most used by
  developmental biologists is "cooption." The idea here is that modules
  get coopted, or used in novel circumstances, to generate new functional
  and morpholical properties.
• Life History Transitions (LHTs) and Life History Evolution (LHE).
  One of the hot topics in evo-devo is a conceptual move, to stop
  regarding adult forms as the target of evolution and instead regard
  species more holistically, as the sum of all of their stages of
  development. A tick, for instance, is more than just the nasty parasite
  that sucks your blood; it may also have distinct and amazingly complex
  life cycles in which it lives in different environments and has
  radically different feeding strategies, and we have to take all of them
  into account in understanding their evolution. Arthur’s Biased Embryos and Evolution is an excellent primer on the importance of life history evolution.
• Model Systems. As a guy who works with a model system, the
  zebrafish, the evo-devo argument against them always makes me a little
  uncomfortable, because they are largely right. Model systems are great
  for plumbing deeply into the details of an organism, but the flaws are
  that model systems are rarely very representative (Danio is a weird little specialized fish, no doubt about it), and that you must at some point explore comparative aspects of their development if you want to discuss evolution.

The lesson the authors are trying to leave us with is that hormone
signaling is a rich field to study within an evolutionary context, and
that the pattern of hormone use tells us a great deal about origins and
mechanisms of evolutionary novelties.

The Modular theory of mind proposed by evolutionary psychology
holds that human brains (and, by extention, behavioral and mental
traits) are composed of a number of specialized, domain-specific adaptations.
That is, the brain is essentially a "Swiss Army knife", with specific
tools designed by evolution to cope with specific problems.
Theoretically and empirically, there are very good reasons for this.

1. The specificity of environmental problems in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.( Devrait pas plutôt dire que : Diversity itself creates opportunities for specialization ?)

2. Successful behavioral/mental adaptation requires facultative responses.

3. The neurophysiology of human mental and behavior traits appears to be quite specific.

Modularity is not to be confused with a lack of a factor of general intelligence.

The
ultimatum game is an experimental economics game in which two parties
interact anonymously and only once, so reciprocation is not an issue.
The first player proposes how to divide a sum of money with the second
party. If the second player rejects this division, neither gets
anything. If the second accepts, the first gets his demand and the
second gets the rest.

In theory a "rational" player should accept whatever is offered when there isn’t a repeated iteration. Reality is different. From The Economist:

…Those
results recorded, Dr Burnham took saliva samples from all the students
and compared the testosterone levels assessed from those samples with
decisions made in the one-round game.

As he describes in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the
responders who rejected a low final offer had an average testosterone
level more than 50% higher than the average of those who accepted.
Five of the seven men with the highest testosterone levels in the study
rejected a $5 ultimate offer but only one of the 19 others made the
same decision.

What does this tell us? That physiological variables which are under biological (and ultimately genetic) control can affect the typical behavior a given individual exhibits, and, that that behavior can vary despite the same inputs across the population. There isn’t any one H. economicus, there are many different ways humans interact and their propensity for a particular strategy might be conditional upon biological parameters.

But
of course this doesn’t mean that a given individual practices a fixed
strategy even for the same inputs over time, just as strategies are
mixed throughout the population so they are often mixed over time for
any given individual. There is both population level and temporal
variation which must be taken into account here; the flat uniform world
of older economic imaginations were painted in shades of gray despite
the multi-colored nature of reality.

Additionally, as I have noted before,
even genetically close groups which are culturally distinct can exhibit
wildly different modal responses to these various experimental economic
games. This suggests that variation is not just extant on the
biological level (e.g., tracking testosterone variation within the
population), but also on the cultural level as the social parameters
shift and reshape the landscape of gene-environment interaction. In
other words, the behavioral economic biases can be likened to norms of
response of particular genotypes in various cultural environments.
Though the median value may shift, the distribution remains the same
(e.g., if a particular individual is high testosterone it is likely
that their response to the ultimatum game in one iteration will always
lay at one end of the distribution across cultures though the range and
shape of the distributions may vary quite a bit).

Reality is
complex. I’m alluding here to the interaction of genetic parameters
with various cultural norms. Additionally, the current work in relation
to various small scale societies where the "nominal" sums offered by
economists is non-trivial implies that analogical reasoning plays a
strong role in determining how the typical individual will respond. It
seems that most peoples don’t conceive of utility maximization, they
simply resort to analogies with transactions in their conventional life
which can be mapped onto the games they are being forced to play. So
there are innate parameters that result in a central tendency as well
as variation, but there are also cultural parameters which modulate the
range and constrain the scale, and, these often express themselves
general intelligence operating through analogical (as opposed to
deductive) reasoning. This turns rationality into a whole new beast altogether, not only is it bounded, it is nearly eviscerated as we understand it.

But why this variation in the first place?
First, I am implying that the conditional responses that an individual
gives has an expectation which is determined in large part by their
genetic inheritance. Imagine for example that the ratio of "aggressive"
to "passive" responses in a given game that an individual gives over
time as a ratio, and that this ratio is placed upon a graph. I suspect
that in many cases you would generate some sort of normal distribution
(you might have to transform it though). There would be a median modal
ratio; there would be those rare players who engage in "fixed"
strategies where they were invariant. In this way you can
re-conceptualize the behaviors documented in experimental economics as
continuous quantitative traits. We know from population genetic theory
that such traits have not been subject to powerful directional selection for long periods of time.
Otherwise, the underlying genetic variation would have been exhausted
as one behavioral morph comes to dominate the population of strategies
(the range of basal testosterone should be very
small and predominantly environmental/non-heritable). The reality of
polymorphism might imply that the "rationality landscape" (to borrow a
term) is characterized by multiple optima. Balancing selective forces
such as frequency dependence and environmental variation might also
result perpetuation of the mix. Layered on top of this evolutionary
biological level is the flux of cultural inputs which serves as the
background environment in which the predispositions develop into
lifelong typical strategies. We’ve come a long way from reciprocal altruism.
]]> http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/modele-explicatif-de-la-variation-des-comportements-incluant-les-interractions-causales-entre-les-differents-niveaux-dorganisations/feed/ 0 Ignare http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/diversite-des-variations-individuelles-causee-par-diversite-des-pression-selective/ http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/diversite-des-variations-individuelles-causee-par-diversite-des-pression-selective/#comments Sun, 02 Nov 2008 09:02:38 +0000 ignare http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/diversite-des-variations-individuelles-causee-par-diversite-des-pression-selective ]]> Certainly there are plenty of human universals. But there are plenty of non-universals. We are familiar with the Red Queen hypothesis in relation to our immune systems. This model arose in large part because of the necessity for constant evolution in the forever war with parasites. If humans are a cultural animal par excellence for whom the flexibility of their behavioral toolkit is essential, should it surprise us if frequency dependent evolutionary dynamics result in a large number of morphs constantly cycling? Perhaps H. sapiens is the Environment of evolutionary adaptedness of H. sapiens ?
]]> http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/diversite-des-variations-individuelles-causee-par-diversite-des-pression-selective/feed/ 0 Ignare http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/david-fitzpatrick-plasticite-cerebrale-developement-visuel/ http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/david-fitzpatrick-plasticite-cerebrale-developement-visuel/#comments Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:27:20 +0000 ignare http://ignare.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/david-fitzpatrick-plasticite-cerebrale-developement-visuel ]]>

In order to determine whether moving visual stimuli
were sufficient to induce the emergence of direction-selective
responses, the animals were exposed to two "training" stimuli
consisting of grating patterns which drifted back and forth across the
visual field perpendicular to the orientation of the grating in
opposite directions. These stimuli were presented to the ferrets for 5
seconds at a time, with intervals of 10 seconds, for a period of 20
minutes. Subsequently, the activity of primary visual cortical neurons
was observed whilst these stimuli were presented again.   

For the first 8-10 hours of visual stimulation after
this motion training, no changes were observed in the functional
properties of visual cortical neurons. Most neurons were highly
responsive to the orientation of the stimuli, but their selectivity to
the direction in which the stimuli moved was very weak. Later on, small
groups of cells with a preference for one of the two training stimuli
began to emerge. With time, these responses progressively increased, so
that each group became highly tuned to one or the other training
stimuli (see above figure). The number of neurons selective for each
orientation was also found to increase with time.

To test whether it was the motion of the training
stimuli that induced these changes in activity, the researchers flashed
identical gratings in the ferrets’ visual fields for brief periods of
time. This "flash training" elicited responses in the same cortical
neurons, but the responses did not increase with time. Gratings which
moved in eight directions that differed from those in the training
elicited little response or none at all. This confirmed that the
observed emergence of orientation selectivity was indeed due to
exposure to the training stimuli.

Closer examination of the responses of individual
pyramidal neurons in layer 2/3 of the cortex revealed that the
preferred direction of motion of each changed over time, so that it
became more like the preferences of its neighbours. Prior to training,
most of the cells exhibited uncertain or moderate orientation
preferences. Upon presentation of the training stimuli, however, the
responses of most neurons became more certain, and the neurons
segregated into small domains with a preference for one direction or
the other.

Other interesting functional changes were also
observed. Some neurons maintained their initial moderate preference for
one direction of movement and later increased their response to it,
while others reversed their orientation preference during training. If,
for example, a neuron was surrounded by cells with a preference for the
opposite direction, it was likely to reverse its own preference so that
it matched that of its neighbours. On the other hand, a neuron
surrounded by others with the same preference was unlikely to change
its own preference during training. This suggests that the functinal
grouping of neurons occurs because of some kind of interaction between
neighbouring cells during motion training.

These experiments show that early experience of
moving visual stimuli has a strong and relatively rapid effect on the
functional properties of neurons in the primary visual cortex.
Initially, the ferret primary visual cortex contains an array of
neurons with weak direction preferences, possibly because of light
entering through the closed eye lids. The two training stimuli used,
which consisted of gratings moving in opposite directions, transformed
this array into two highly ordered columns, each containing neurons
with a highly selective preference for one of the directions of
stimulus motion. The study supports the widely-held belief that sensory
experience is essential for proper visual development, but adds some
fascinating details of how it does so. It also raises the question of
exactly how visual cortical neurons interact with each other during
their selection of direction preference.

Précis of Neuroconstructivism: How the Brain Constructs Cognition

Another important implication is the central role of developmental trajectories in the interpretation
of adult cognition. There is no teleology involved in development; mature, normative cognition is an outcome of development, not a pre-specified target (Thomas & Karmiloff-Smith 2003).

You should google that : "Three Fallacies of Teleology" and read the
little blog article. My level of english is just too poor to continue
the debate, but I believe you’re attributing goal-directed behavior to
things that are not goal-directed.