I thought meat that was frozen still decomposed, just at a much slower rate.
Found a link…
http://www.tis-gdv.de/tis_e/ware/fleisch/gefroren/gefroren.htm
So if it’s under -62C, it will keep indefinitely, but above that there is still a degradation over time.
Big difference. A chess playing program is only good at playing chess. Further it is not creative in its approach as a human is but rather relies on a brute force approach of evaluating all positions (or as many as it is able) and relying on a set of rules someone else gave it to make decisions. It cannot go beyond or outside of the boundaries given it.
Maybe not necessarily but I read it as self awareness. I am not one of those people who seem to take the stance that only humans are self aware and that everything else is little more than nifty automatons. Anyone who has lived with a dog, for instance, can not help but come to the conclusion that the dog is possessed of a full range of emotions and most certainly is self aware.
If you read up on Corvid intelligence you will see they are nearly (or maybe even more) intelligent than a dog. Admittedly such calls are difficult to make so take it with a largish grain of salt but nevertheless stories of their intelligence abound. You may want to call such stories anecdotal but there are a helluva lot of them not to mention they are a well studied species. Stories of their cleverness reach back through recorded history.
Here is one I vaguely remember. Some ravens were circling a rabbit overhead. One raven had landed near the rabbit and was distracting it. Another raven went and found a hawk and annoyed it till the hawk chased the raven. The raven led the hawk towards the rabbit where the hawk decided to attack. As the hawk started in for the rabbit the raven on the ground jumped up and down to really distract the rabbit. Another raven flew between the rabbit and the hawk so the rabbit wouldn’t spot it. It worked and the hawk got the rabbit. The group of ravens then descended and ran off the hawk and claimed the rabbit for themselves.
I find it impossible to see how a non-self aware entity could pull of such a complex stunt I just described. Each raven needs to work cooperatively and understand its role in the scheme. If it had no sense of “me” and “buddies” and “hawk” and “rabbits that run” such a series is difficult to imagine happening. Corvids (and some other avian species) are complex problem solvers able to process wholly new situations and come up with novel solutions. They use tools, work cooperatively, will coopt other species to do work for them, play and show concern for others of their species (or perhaps “family” but even me as a city dweller experienced that one first hand) and even concern for entirely other species if they view them as part of their family.
In short, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is probably a duck. If these birds exhibit such complex behaviors and “emotions” they probably are possessed of those rather than merely being a pimped version of a flea.
(Haven’t read to the bottom of the page yet) But I wanted to say, since you have the disk, watch the “making-of” documentary. I think it’s better than the March of the Penguins feature - not so cinematic, but more realistic. YMMV.
National Geographic had a wonderful article on this very subject a few months ago.
Well, the responses of human men and women differ signifcantly. Can we now argue that men and women experience love so differently that it shouldn’t be called the same thing?
Studies have shown that the sensation we call “love” is accompanied by releases of oxytocin and dopamine in the brain. The same thing happens to a chimpanzee mother when she holds her infant. Do you think her brain, so similar to ours, interprets these chemicals differently than we do? Is it impossible that she’s feeling tenderness just like a human mother looking at her baby?
All it takes is a chemical and a receptor. The creature doesn’t have to have the ability to get all philosphical about it.
No. The adaptions seem to be in social animals only. As I said, a creature with no social behavior or no parenting duties would have no reason to feel emotional attatchment, so evolution would not have favored those who had the trait.
No, I freely admit I can prove very little of this. You’re right when you say there’s been little study on this which I blame in a small part to the resistance of some people who won’t even consider entertaining the notion of animals having emotions. I actually had one person say it was “insulting” to humans to imply that animal mothers may, too, love their babies. Some people jealously guard what they feel puts Man on a pedastal, away from the savage beasts.
I’ve been looking for the chimp chemical brain study and not finding it (there’s a lot of cognitive/emotional studies on brains and the word “primate” doesn’t seem to filter them out.) I know it’s out there, though. IIRC, the National Geographic article cited it. I’ll see if I can find my copy.
I never said that they did. In fact, I said several times that emotions appear to be adaptions found only in social creatures.
Oh, pish-posh. I’m completely uninterested in the philosophical niceties. One can’t be afraid of scienc stripping away the veil of mystery and exposing something for what it really is, or you become like an old lady I once knew of who decried the space program because you shouldn’t pierce the Heavens which is “God’s domain.”
Just because emotions are bio-chemical in nature doesn’t mean they’re worthless. Knowing that my heart beats faster and I recieve pleasure from my husband’s kiss because of oxytocin flooding my receptors doesn’t make kissing him any less fun.
shrug I thought it was interesting. It certainly wouldn’t be the first Dope thread to end up talking about something only vaguely related to the OP. I sort of like these spreading discussions.
Of course we are more evolved than animals. I haven’t been arguing otherwise. Of course our society is far more complex, and of course our emotional lives are far more intricate. I haven’t been saying the contrary.
Well, hell, humans did that for thousands of years. We only stopped it recently. It was called “exposure.” Some cultures still do it. What you’re talking about is social construction, not the base emotion.
Then why do you keep posting this in GQ?
I don’t think that’s right. If it was, then why do the little buggers have to walk so far to get to their breeding grounds? After all, that trek begins well before the deep winter freeze. And if I remember rightly, covers 70 some miles. Surely the Antarctic ice pack doesn’t expand/retreat anywhere near 70 miles every year.
You seem to have missed the point. Building on your statements like the one just above, in which you say that “[A]ll it takes is a chemical and a receptor”, then by definition if I grew tissues with those receptors and the chemicals to bind to them in a petri dish, then the contents of the petri dish would be capable of “love”. Clearly, defining love as nothing but a chemical and a receptor is simply too reductionist to be useful as a definition.
Then you might consider not presenting your opinions as though they were facts and arguing about it with others.
I don’t see how you can possibly justify the first sentence here at all. I don’t doubt that you’ve met people who express those statements. There are a whole lot of stupid people in the world. But the implication that psychology and cognitive science are fields run by those stupid people pushing their agenda of stupidity strikes me as highly unlikely; people get into such fields of study precisely because they want to understand the workings of the mind, and it certainly wouldn’t make sense from a scientific perspective to decide that the human mind is somehow utterly unique and not subject to investigation. Further, psychology and cognitive science do lots of exploration of animals’ behaviors and brains. But within psychology there is less focus on finding the ultimate source of a phenomenon, and cognitive science has generally focused little on emotions until recently; previously, it was considered more important to understand human thought and reasoning. That’s simply the result of historical trends in the field - it has nothing to do with preserving some untenable belief that animal brains are somehow entirely unlike human brains.
No, you said that about love. You specifically said that animals need to be driven by emotions and feelings to act; you did not limit that to social creatures (nor would that be particularly sensible - if a social creature needs to be able to feel hunger in order to eat, why doesn’t a non-social creature?) And what about simple social creatures like ants and bees? Do they feel love? Does the queen then spend her life mourning her now-dead drone lover?
Nonsense. Your insistence that other people are somehow unwilling to face up to the truth is becoming extremely insulting, when I have explicitly stated that I generally agree with your materialist perspective, and have limited my argument to logical grounds. I have made no statement whatsoever suggesting that we are not “meant” to understand these things or anything else of the sort. There is no reason for you to bring that up in a reply to me. It’s insulting to me to suggest that you have somehow divined my “hidden agenda” - particularly when it’s an agenda that stands in opposition to exploration of the world. And it suggests that you have not read and paid attention to the actual arguments I’ve made.
I don’t care at all about that. You’re the one who keeps bringing up philosophical issues. I’m just pointing out the logical problems in your argument.
No, we’re not. You seem to have a serious misunderstanding of evolutionary theory.
Look, I’m not just pulling this stuff out of my ass. I’m making what I consider to be reasonable assertions based on what I know about animal behavior. I can’t help that studies haven’t been done.
I could post a lot of stuff by researchers who claim that they have observed behavior which, to them, proves that animals have emotions, but even the most dedicated researcher can skew anecdotal data. I’d love to give you hard science, but it ain’t there for me to give.
That said, what little animal brain chemical studies have been done combined with the findings of research on animal behavior suggests to me that social animals do have at least rudimentary emotions.
Personally, I think it’s a bit more far-fetched to believe that humans are the only creatures that developed them, and developed them relatively recently in our evolutionary history, too.
Is this thread about love or about dead penguins?
Sort of like if a tree falls in the forrest and there’s no one to hear . . . You need a brain attatched to those receptors in order for the data to mean anything.
Hmm. I thought that’s what this board was all about. I present my interpretation of the data, you present yours.
I said it was my opinon that *small *part of the lack of research was due to philosphical resistance. No, I don’t think there’s a roomful of people dissing the notion-- I think it’s that a lot of times, it doesn’t even occur to them to do it because they don’t think lower animals would have much to teach them in comparison with, say, chimps.
However, I think there is some latent resistance to the concepts. Jane Goodall was criticized roundly in her early years as a researcher for using emotional terms when describing the behavior of the primates she was studying.
Bee and ant societies are something entirely different. Insects lack the brains necessary for the cognitive functions involved with emotions, even on a simple level.
I shouldn’t have compared it to eating because it was bound to cause this confusion.
You said:
How was I supposed to take it? I’m talking about receptors and oxytocin and you’re talking about the “meaning” of love. Of course I took it as an objection to “lifting the veil” for fear of cheapening a grand notion.
How am I bringing up philosophical issues? All I keep saying is that “love” is a chemically induced sensation of which animal brains seem capable.
Oh, for crying out loud-- it’s an expression.
Translation: I’m pulling this stuff out of my ass.
I have special dislike for people who deliberately use a falsified meaning of a common word to advance arguments that they couldn’t possible win if they stuck to the meaning everybody else uses. Lib used to do this all the time and look how he wound up.
Your usage of the word “love” when you mean “instinctual emotional reaction” is not a reasonable assertion; it is not justified by any psychology or brain chemistry; and it fails to take into account the weighted connotations the word has in our society. (Again, Lib used to use the word “god” in exactly this fashion.)
No matter how long your responses get, they fail to disguise the fact that you have nothing to support them except that you get the warm fuzzies by thinking of animal behavior in terms of love, while the notion that humans are similar animals with similar tropic responses leaves you cold. If a dog were to light up chemical pathways in its brain for the person that feeds and houses it, that does not mean that the dog is in love with its owner. It may possibly be an emotional response, and it certainly is a chemical response, but those are areas which overlap in a multi-dimensional grid, not one and the same.
And you’re saying it in GQ, which is supposed to be fact-based. Assertions using personal definitions of words do not belong here. If you have a theory you want to discuss, there are many places to run with it, including IMHO or GD. (Here’s another list of places you may find allied spirits.) But since you admit you can’t prove any of this, and you’re hijacking somebody else’s thread to begin with, you shouldn’t be arguing this here.
Right. And penguins have brains that are rather small and different from our own. Hence my skepticism.
Perhaps you didn’t notice what forum we’re in, then.
Well, I’m sorry, but I frankly think that you must not be very familiar with current work in these fields if you feel that way. Animal models have been used for human behavior in psychology and cognitive science for decades.
Right. So clearly it’s not safe to assume that any social creature must have emotions comparable to our own. Thus the question becomes how to determine what creatures have brains complex enough to have that cognitive capacity. I don’t know much about penguins. But I wouldn’t take it for granted that they do.
I’m talking about the fact that chemicals alone are not love - that is, not unless you’re willing to view an entire brain inside a living creature as a chemical reaction. You were boiling down emotion to a combination of chemical and receptor, and I was arguing that that’s logically untenable. You have to have the cognitive equipment to feel anything. And it’s not safe to assume, a priori, that penguins do.
You may not be aware of this, but this is still a complex philosophical question. Lots of very intelligent people who have studied and contemplated these matters much more seriously than you and I don’t believe in a strictly materialistic world. In fact, there still is no real scientific explanation for qualia, or for what my cognitive science textbook called “first person ontology”. It’s a mistake to dismiss that essential feeling of “me” or the way we perceive and feel about things as nothing but chemicals and electrical signals, because we, as yet, have no understanding of how chemicals and electrical signals could possibly add up to such a thing. These are matters of philosophy, and while you are obviously committed to one point of view, it would be prudent to wait to dismiss all other perspectives until the perspective you and I share has been more thoroughly proven.
Perhaps not a useful one, then.
Your warning is duly noted.
No, I do mean “love.” The chemical output a human mother looking at her infant is the same as that of a chimp’s. I don’t see a concrete reason to say that identical chemical reactions must represent two different things.
I didn’t realize that statements like “this emotion causes a mother to care more dilligently for its offspring” could be considered warm and fuzzy. And I don’t know where you got the idea that I don’t agree with the idea that human emotions are similar to that of animals. It’s what I’ve been saying all along.
If two people say they are in love with someone and go get their brains scanned by that MRI and both show a virtually idenitcal response when they think of the person they love, why shouldn’t we say that they’re likely experiencing the same feeling/sensation? They may have various levels of complexity attatched to the notion, but they’re likely feeling slightly euphoric, excited, nervous, etc.-- all of the qualities we describe as the sensation of “love.”
When my dog dances at the sight of me coming through the door, her eyes shining and her tail beating frantically back and forth, I would describe what I’m seeing as “joy.” Likely, if we scanned her brain, we would see a very similar pattern to that displayed by a human greeting a loved one. (Well, maybe not so much excitement.) If the two brain-patterns which accompany “joy” are the same, why shouldn’t we say that both creatures are likely experiencing the same sensation?
We have questions on theoretical physics and what-would-happen-if-I-did-this questions all the time, which can only be answered by looking at what sort of scientific data exists and making suppositions based on it. In my case, that means taking a study of human and primate chemical responses and other animal behavior researchers and forming what I believe to be a reasoned supposition.
That said, I apolgoize to anyone offended by my continued answering of rebuttals. I will say no more.
Your warning is duly noted.
No, I do mean “love.” The chemical output a human mother looking at her infant is the same as that of a chimp’s. I don’t see a concrete reason to say that identical chemical reactions must represent two different things.
I didn’t realize that statements like “this emotion causes a mother to care more dilligently for its offspring” could be considered warm and fuzzy. And I don’t know where you got the idea that I don’t agree with the idea that human emotions are similar to that of animals. It’s what I’ve been saying all along.
If two people say they are in love with someone and go get their brains scanned by that MRI and both show a virtually idenitcal response when they think of the person they love, why shouldn’t we say that they’re likely experiencing the same feeling/sensation? They may have various levels of complexity attatched to the notion, but they’re likely feeling slightly euphoric, excited, nervous, etc.-- all of the qualities we describe as the sensation of “love.”
When my dog dances at the sight of me coming through the door, her eyes shining and her tail beating frantically back and forth, I would describe what I’m seeing as “joy.” Likely, if we scanned her brain, we would see a very similar pattern to that displayed by a human greeting a loved one. (Well, maybe not so much excitement.) If the two brain-patterns which accompany “joy” are the same, why shouldn’t we say that both creatures are likely experiencing the same sensation?
We have questions on theoretical physics and what-would-happen-if-I-did-this questions all the time, which can only be answered by looking at what sort of scientific data exists and making suppositions based on it. In my case, that means taking a study of human and primate chemical responses and other animal behavior researchers and forming what I believe to be a reasoned supposition.
That said, I apolgoize to anyone offended by my continued answering of rebuttals. I will say no more.
But that’s what the film claims. I found it hard to believe, too, but I don’t know love from a dead penguin.
Ya gonna argue with Morgan Freeman?
For some of us, the two are the same, and we dare not speak of it.
Since when are the two mutually exclusive? 
I saw that movie, and I don’t recall any claim that penguins “love.” Granted, the general appeal of the movie was clearly anthropomorphic, which I agree was probably intentionally induced.
But in any case, couldn’t animals evolve to attach themselves to one another? It’s not really love, but might serve the survival of the species.
Right you are, me. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
And once the meat is picked over, the feathers will blow away, the bones will disarticulate and dessicate, be broken from trampling, scattered by wind and reduced to tiny pieces that continue to crumble. Thus is the way of all flesh.
So, to answer the OP: No.
Or as the saying goes: “Many are cold, but few are frozen.”