And you are going to be getting some interesting ads for the next week or so.
After all those years this now feels like MPSIMS. Subjective, I know.
Now I am searching for a picture I once saw of three horses mounting each other in a row. They were suppoed to be male, but there is no way to know, I guess. My google-fu is failing me.
And then there was a story I once read about humpback whales that… aw, never mind. Biology is not for the faint hearted.
Even discussing the double-slit experiment is risky these days.
The point was to refute the position that any animal behaviour must be seeking pleasure. That’s demonstrably not the case.
But in terms of your new argument, no I don’t see why a complex behaviour would necessarily entail pleasure-seeking. I also don’t think you’ve addressed the point that evolutionarily-speaking, if an instinct is sufficient to make a male spider approach a female, then die, what selective pressure there would be to also make that encounter pleasurable?
It was kind of a funny story. I was doing a kitchen remodel for a family. The teenager was in there making small talk while I worked on the sink. Out of the kitchen window, we saw a cat jump over the fence. The teen excitedly yelled out, “watch this!”
Sure enough, the family dog ran over and went to work. After it was over, the cat jumped back over the fence. That’s when the kid delivered the punchline - The cat is male. The mom walked in as the laughter was dying down and got quite upset that her son had shared that, apparently it was not an isolated incident.
So I guess neither one was the worse for wear and tear.
Sounds mutual to me.
I think it’s best to think about this by asking what mechanisms are used to implement complex innate behaviors.
There can obviously be an advantage to a more sophisticated behavioral strategy that responds to more inputs. For example - rather than just an instinct to mate whenever possible, only mate when there is sufficient food available and there is no immediate threat from predators. Any behavioral strategy can be hard-wired, in which case the concept of pleasure isn’t involved. But the more complex a strategy becomes, the more “if this, then that” conditions that must arise by random mutation, the longer it will take to evolve by hard-wiring all this logic.
It also takes a long time to evolve a complex brain, but if you already one it’s much quicker to evolve an effective complex behavioral strategy by using cognition and “rewarding” the brain with pleasure if it achieves the desired outcome. All the “if this then that” steps then do not need to be innate. Natural selection specifies only the adaptive outcome with an innate pleasure reward, and the brain then uses the reasoning capacity of its general purpose intelligence to figure out the best way to get to the reward.
I agree entirely.
You are more or less repeating my position back to me, so let me reiterate in case there is some misunderstanding here.
I took exception to the suggestion that the fact that an organism performs some behaviour in itself entails that the organism must find that activity pleasurable.
That doesn’t follow at all.
There’s a whole spectrum between autonomic behaviours, reflex actions, then strongly innate, innate plus occasional discretion and so on all the way up to the complex, deliberative behaviours of sentient organisms.
The more absolute a behaviour needs to be (i.e. “If X then Y”), the less need there is for the organism to find it pleasurable, as the evolutionary path is just to map some input stimuli to some output behaviour. After all, if I am making a robot to follow such an instruction I don’t need to bother to program in ecstasy as it completes its tasks. I just need to program “If X, then Y”.
OTOH if a behaviour is beneficial, but an organism needs to show discretion in when to perform that action, then you need a mechanism like pleasure and pain. Then the organism will seek food, sex, warmth etc but be able to forego food, turn down a less desirable mate, go out in the cold or suffer physical harm, based on a wider context.
And of course there’s a whole spectrum between the two extremes of autonomic and sentient, deliberative choice.
That’s my position. And it should not be controversial at all. I’m really alluding to the most popular description among cognitive neuroscientists today.
You’re still starting from the premise that instinct and pleasure are two different things. And mating isn’t automatic in any animal species: The organism needs to detect the presence of a nearby potential mate, and then to move towards that potential mate, and make contact, and so on, all of which it does by sending signals from its brain to its muscles, just like anything else it does. And there’s some phenomenon going on in its brain that is mediating all of this. The name of that phenomenon is “pleasure”.
Just to clarify (not that I think you don’t understand this, but I think what you said here could be misleading to others) all the behaviors we are talking about are adaptive and innate, including “deliberative” behaviors. The important distinction in animals with sophisticated higher cognition is that complex behavior is usually implemented by an innate association of a pleasure reward with the ultimate adaptive objective (mating, say). Some or all of the details of the complex strategy for how you reach the objective are not innate - they are left to flexible cognition. The entirety of a detailed complex strategy is not usually innately hard-wired, because that takes a long time to evolve and a long time to modify through natural selection if the environment changes.
Sure, but the point I was getting at is that in animals with higher cognition available, there is a good reason to expect that complex behaviors will usually be implemented via the paradigm of attaching a pleasure reward to the objective, because that’s quicker to evolve and more flexible than “hard-wiring” all the complex details.
I agree with what you’re saying here conceptually, and honestly I don’t think you and @Mijin have a different view of what’s going on. I think it may just be a question of terminology with the use of the words “instinct” and “pleasure” and this field is not my specialty so I don’t know what’s technically correct.
I think @Chronos is reserving the term “instinct” for complex behavior that’s mediated via higher cognition, attaching a pleasure reward to the objective. He’s not denying that simpler “hard-wired” behavior that does not follow this paradigm does not exist, he just wouldn’t call that instinct.
Would you describe the process of seeking out food or water as pleasure? Maybe if it’s a bear eating berries, but for animals who risk death to get a drink or their needed calories, the seeking is more likely motivated by thirst or hunger. Which are closer to maddening misery than to pleasure.
My memories of teenage years are that lust was very close to miserable hunger, and that my mating efforts were mostly fueled by lust. Sexual entry was blessed relief from the hunger, and orgasm was, yeah, highly pleasurable.
I don’t think the central point here is to quibble about the precise definition of “pleasure”, and whether that’s the best term. I mean, we could simply define “pleasure” in relative terms, to include the avoidance of negative feelings like the misery of hunger.
The point is that instincts are implemented in our internal mental state by attaching an emotional reward/penalty system to the ultimate adaptive behavioral objectives (such as finding nutrition, mating), while leaving many of the complex contingent details of how best to reach these objectives, and how to compromise between conflicting objectives, to higher cognition.
Bob doesn’t need to be able to outrun the lion to have more minutes on earth.
Hence the need for proper positioning if you want to come out on top.
Of course I am.
Not only because, in general, when we have two concepts we do not start with the assumption that they are identical.
But also because in humans we can see that instinct and pleasure/pain are different things.
For example, as part of my neuroscience degree I worked on eye movement and how humans survey their environment. This is largely instinctive and yet nothing to do with pleasure or pain.
In the context of this discussion, the only complexity that matters is the mapping of stimuli to decision, it’s irrelevant how complex the action itself is.
So again, if a male spider always mates with the first female it encounters, then dies, then there is no evolutionary reason, no selection pressure, for the spider to enjoy that interaction. It’s wholly irrelevant how complex it is to establish “female detected” or perform “mate with female”.
Of course there is, because if the spider doesn’t enjoy it, then it won’t mate with the first female it encounters.
“Pleasure” can be defined as “that which a creature seeks out”. The spider seeks out other spiders to mate with, thus, by that definition, mating with other spiders brings it pleasure. If you’re saying that pleasure isn’t involved, then you must be using some other definition of “pleasure”. What is it? Most of the other definitions I’ve seen are solipsistic, circular, or both.
There’s always one in the crowd… OK, it’s a pack of lions. I saw a (straight) lion pair mating once in Ngorongoro crater. The guide says the male will do it every 15 minutes for several days, sort of like a teenager in paradise. The females not in heat do the hunting for the pack.
Jared Diamond has an interesting book, “Why Is Sex Fun?” which discusses mating strategies. Not that mating seasons are important for animals that have seasonal food supplies and quick development. Birds that can hatch in the spring and fly south by fall, grazing animals that are born able to walk and large enough by fall to survive on their own (in the herd) by winter, etc. With humans, who are going to need 5 years or more to be minimally independent, seasons are not terribly relevant - and we live in a variety of climates, tend to store food, etc. Humans have evolved hidden fertility and the urge to mate 24-7 to encourage bonding, although our intellect allows us to bypass that situation if we choose.
I guess the distinction is - are we talking about instinctual urges like shouting when in pain? We do, but it has minimal value, and can be controlled (there’s the news photo of the Buddhist monk in Vietnam sitting calmly after dousing himself in gasoline and setting it on fire.)
Or instinct on the level of eating? We get urges to eat, and so items like sugar can short-circuit the normal urges, which is to eat and stop when sated - for some.
Or is the urge to mate for the pleasure it gives more of a gratification urge?
That is just an assertion of your position, not an argument. I would have to agree with the premise that instincts = pleasure-seeking in order for this to be meaningful.
It occurs to me anyway, that you’ve already implicitly conceded the point. Because, for several posts you have been drawing a distinction between simple (or “automatic”) and complex behaviours.
But remember: my point is simply that instinct and pleasure-seeking are not necessarily the same thing in all cases. So, as soon as you’re even trying to draw a line between different behaviours, you’re agreeing with me that the concepts are not the same in all cases, otherwise instinct must necessarily entail pleasure-seeking. (Including in the examples I’ve given, that you’ve ignored, such as human eye movements.)
Anyway, go ahead and have the last word. I’m taking a break from forums for a while.
I’m perfectly ok with that definition of pleasure, but obviously only in the context of behaviors that are mediated through subjective conscious experience of something.
Behaviors of organisms that lack a brain presumably don’t (although who knows what a nerve net is capable of). Complex behaviors of cats and dogs and elephants obviously do, or at least it would be perverse to suggest that they don’t, even though we cannot prove what they experience subjectively.
To what extent does spider behavior follow this paradigm? I’d guess to at least some extent, since there’s a strong evolutionary reason to expect it, but I haven’t a clue.