/sci/ - Science & Math

If a word ends with -ism, it belongs in /lit/, not /sci/.
Thanks.

>>2641594

your brain is like a computer.
instincts are functions that are preprogrammed on your hard drive (brain).

Why is this hard to believe?

On the contrary, instincts explain everything. Why can human babies learn language? Instinct. Why do we shun cheats and praise altruists? Instincts. Why do you fail so hard at life? Instincts.

>>2641603
>scientism

>>2641605

Is a fallacy scientists may be prone to, but it is not itself science. Also, I have found far more non-scientists practice scientism than do scientists (anecdotal evidence, YMMV).

>>2641594
A better term would perhaps be "intrinsic motivation", or "behavioural, biological predisposition"

>>2641602
>you're brain is like a computer

billions and billions of fucks

>>2641602
Can you design a sex and plug it into a brain ?

How,.

Except that human instinct is quite well studied and do apply to our general behaviour. Many of us just try to resist/ignore it due to our sociatal moralism founded by religions

>>2641604
The behaviours that facilitate the learning of language might be innately motivated, but a baby-in-a-box does not learn language.

http://ilabs.washington.edu/kuhl/research.html

>>2641614
>how
Through genetic mutation and sexual selection

>>2641613
>>2641614
wat?

>>2641621
You're response is tautological.

Is sex on the brain a computer? What does it compute. Link to your sources where the whole process is described in detail.

Also, you don't even know how a neuron works, but you talk about the brain as a computer. How stupid are you?

http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2011/02/neurons-signals-axons.html

>>2641620

A baby in a box doesn't learn that fire is hot, either. Just because you have the capacity for something, does not mean you automatically do it.

The notion of instinct is a little like the notion of species. An outdated category made up to describe observable phenomena. It does not explain these phenomenas, and can even contradict or obscure the explanation in certain cases.

Cats play with stuff. Humans play with stuff. The only innate point in these behaviours is the ability to feel excitement/amusement. Is that instinct ? Playing with a bit of string, or with a computer, is a learned behavior.

>>2641782

True in general, but in cognitive science an instinct has a more clearly defined status as an evolutionarily adaptive mental organ. Thus, we have an 'organ' for language learning, making 'language' a human instinct (tho of course the individual acquisition of language is learned, merely facilitated hugely by the presence of a dedicated 'organ'), but no organ for building skyscrapers, making architecture a purely learned activity, as opposed to partially learned / partially instinctive.

>>2641838
I don't understand the distinction you make between language and architecture. Both are learned abilities, using preexistent mental capacities.
I would suppose that architecture is a little more restricted application of an organ that allow us to design three dimensional stuff, with the facultative help of some organ for aesthetics (that also intervenes in the use of language).
Are instincts just the term for the abilities that are not subdivisions of more general ones ?

>>2641747
which was sort of my point

>>2641895

Well, architecture was just an example and yes, we have a 3d-visual/verbal 'worksheet' organ that is used for such activities. The reason I say language is an instinct while writing (for instance) is not, is that language is the original purpose of a dedicated mental organ that is ALSO used as the agent for processing learned behavior (such as literacy). It's a matter of degrees of separation, the difference between what a tool is "for" and what other uses it can be put to.

>>2641922
how is writing not language?
And what are these "dedicated mental organs" you speak of?

>>2641922
So instincts are intellectual functions that were most important in the evolutionnary development of our brains ?

That's far from the original sense of the term.

>>2641954

Writing is not language in the same way that painting is not imagination. Mental organs include such things as the language acquisition device, or the organ responsible for identifying faces. They are areas of the brain, often non-contiguous, that respond to certain stimuli and that have evolved as the result of evolutionary pressures over the entire course of our human and pre-human history. AFAIK, they were originally postulated by experimental psychologists, later confirmed by neuroscientists, and now are the main object of study of the interdisciplinary science of cognition.

>>2641982

Well, there has been some degree of semantic drift with regards to most of the terms used in science. Compare what a modern physicist understands by "an atom" with what was originally intended by the ancients who came up with the term.

>>2641991
I see.
I'd stay and argue with you all, but i'm going to bed.


I'll leave with this

In the days of John Bowlby, this was considered as characteristics of instinctive behaviour:
a. it follows a recognisably similar and predictable pattern in almost all members of a species (or all members of one sex)
b. it is not a simple response to a single stimulus but a sequence of behavior that usually runs a predictable cource
c. certain of its usual consequences are of obvious value in contributing to the perservation of an individual or the continuity of a species
d. many examples of it develop even when all the ordinary opportunities for learning it are exiguous or absent
-Bowlby (1969)

a. says for it to be an instinct, it must be universal, i.e. independent of social context.
b. says that it is not a simple reflex, but a more complex chain of events, triggered by some stimuli
c. says that instincts must have some evolutionary benefit, obvious or obfuscated, and must follow evolutionary logic.
d. says that instincts must present themselves even if there have been no prior stimuli

Ethologist sometimes use the term "fixed behavioural patterns", and Bowlby later differentiate what he calls instinctive behaviour, from what he calls goal-corrected behaviour.

Today, this is a bit dated as, as >>2641997 says, there is semantic drift over time, but still, the core remains. Very little of what we can call instincts are present after the earliest phases of childhood. Our nervous system reorganizes several times through ontogeny, and even after, building layers of complexity. In the end most of our behaviour that once were instinctual, is complex and goal-corrected.
However, some basic, things remain; fight or flight, fear of the unknown, spiders, darkness, heights, the need for social interactions with other human beings, etc.

>>2642086
> more complex chain of events
*more complex chain of actions

>>2642086

Interesting if true. I'll read up on this Bowlby chap. Enjoy your brief (and hopefully transient) annihilation of the will.