Monday, October 22, 2007
Vendramini, Dawkins and Evolution
Vendramini teems and the catch-phrase life/dinner race
Vendramini has written several papers to support his theory of teems, mainly he maintains that everything is an emotion. I strongly disagree with this idea, as I believe that emotion is something that must be “produced”. In order to make this easy to understand I have developed the term “informational environment”. It means that every organism lives in some kind of environment. This environment “broadcasts” signals. Some signals are relevant for the particular organism and some are not, they are neutral. In order to produce emotion some signal must repeat many times. There are many examples in real life that according to my understanding support this idea.
Consider car driving. When a person sits for the first time in a car, usually he drives pretty slowly. This is because the brain of the driver is tries to process all the information that is rushing against him, of course, seen relatively, as he is rushing against the objects in his environment. His brain is not skilled in processing information at higher speed than the speed of walking or maximally running, which is maximally some 36kmh. therefore new drivers will hardly exceed this speed as it is the maximum speed at which their brain is capable of processing information.
When our driver gets more practice in driving he even might drive on German autobahns at speeds over 200kmh. But it takes some time to learn this, brain must get used to this speed of environmental information coming to his eyes.
This can be at least partially explained when we realize that brain has part that are specialized at processing different information and also it stores responses to environmental signals. If a car driver would always use cognitive logic when coming to an intersection he would be a miserable driver and most probably he would cause plenty of accidents and he might himself not last too long. If on the other hand such driver can learn how to store his previous decisions at certain driving situations and just only use the prefabricated response to it, he would be pretty good driver.
It seems that this has already been prepared by evolution; it seems that human brain can do both tasks. It can solve hard logical problems using one part specialized at this process and if the same or really much similar situation occurs many times the response will be automatically restored in a different part of the brain where all or just some prefabricated algorithms of proper adaptive behavior are stored and can be easily used within several ms.
Emotions that means prefabricated reactions, responses to some signal from the informational environment of some organism and many repetitions of the same signal are needed to produce unified response.
We can see this principle anywhere where we learn some response that is normally not needed in normal human life. Basketball, ice-hockey, tennis, car driving, foreign languages, mother tongue are all examples of many repetitions producing automatic response, emotional response, that is started and carried out automatically without too much energy being spent on preparing the response. Actually there was a lot energy used for prefabricating this automatic response, but it is the logic of repletion. If some signal repeats many times then the organism reacts in such a way that it “recognizes” the necessity of automatic emotional response as more energy saving than always spend energy to solve the same problem anew.
This principle of saving energy can be traced all over the whole evolution as well as the notion of many repetitions being needed to produce prefabricated response to some environmental signal. Actually, Dawkins writes about it in his book “The extended phenotype”. He describes this case of saving energy in two examples. One is the famous life/dinner race between a fox and a rabbit, rabbit runs for his life, fox only for his dinner, so it is enough when rabbit is only a tiny bit faster or can run few seconds longer in the high speed and it is enough to escape because fox is not running for his life, only for his dinner it will give up when the energy needed for catching the rabbit is too high, so even the fox is saving energy.
I believe that this brings us to a point where predators might be always a bit slower than their prey. In such a case they would be able to catch only single pieces of their favorite prey species that are not capable of escaping, that means that are in a way sick. This would in turn mean that predators actually clean the genetic pool of their prey species. In some kind of organism that have developed certain level of altruism, of taking care of their weak colleagues, it can be dangerous, as the weak individual slows down also the strong and capable individuals and makes them so to possible prey for predators too. Most probably this happens from time to time.
I would like to finish this short paper with just only two remarks. One should try to show that Vendramini believes in his teem theory because he is a film director, he works with actors and they as well as he work with emotions. It appears to him that everything is emotion, but this is not correct, emotion is an automatic response to some triggering signal. But this algorithm must be first produced, and it is produced only by a certain number of repetitions of particular signal broadcasted from the environment and constantly the same reaction of the organism, and this happened so many times that there was a necessity to make this response automatic to save energy needed to “think” always about the correct response.
The second is aimed at Dawkins and all other biologists who always speak of time needed for an organism to adapt. I object to this wording, it is not time that is needed , it is the number of repetitions, which I turn of course consumes some time, but time is not the decisive factor, the number of repetitions is. Dawkins once uses the word frequency that might be interpreted as the number of repetitions in time, but he uses that extremely seldom and does not emphasize this factor. I believe that this is wrong; I think that not the time is important but the number of repetitions. Actually we may understand this when we observe the generations of different species. They are differently long some flies have a generation of one , two or three days only whereas human generation is about 25 years
This difference in generation time might be explained by the amount of signals one particular species can accept, process and how many signals are needed for survival. If only few a short life is ok, if too many a long life will be needed. This has just struck me right now so I am not sure whether it is right, though it appears correct.
Vendramini has written several papers to support his theory of teems, mainly he maintains that everything is an emotion. I strongly disagree with this idea, as I believe that emotion is something that must be “produced”. In order to make this easy to understand I have developed the term “informational environment”. It means that every organism lives in some kind of environment. This environment “broadcasts” signals. Some signals are relevant for the particular organism and some are not, they are neutral. In order to produce emotion some signal must repeat many times. There are many examples in real life that according to my understanding support this idea.
Consider car driving. When a person sits for the first time in a car, usually he drives pretty slowly. This is because the brain of the driver is tries to process all the information that is rushing against him, of course, seen relatively, as he is rushing against the objects in his environment. His brain is not skilled in processing information at higher speed than the speed of walking or maximally running, which is maximally some 36kmh. therefore new drivers will hardly exceed this speed as it is the maximum speed at which their brain is capable of processing information.
When our driver gets more practice in driving he even might drive on German autobahns at speeds over 200kmh. But it takes some time to learn this, brain must get used to this speed of environmental information coming to his eyes.
This can be at least partially explained when we realize that brain has part that are specialized at processing different information and also it stores responses to environmental signals. If a car driver would always use cognitive logic when coming to an intersection he would be a miserable driver and most probably he would cause plenty of accidents and he might himself not last too long. If on the other hand such driver can learn how to store his previous decisions at certain driving situations and just only use the prefabricated response to it, he would be pretty good driver.
It seems that this has already been prepared by evolution; it seems that human brain can do both tasks. It can solve hard logical problems using one part specialized at this process and if the same or really much similar situation occurs many times the response will be automatically restored in a different part of the brain where all or just some prefabricated algorithms of proper adaptive behavior are stored and can be easily used within several ms.
Emotions that means prefabricated reactions, responses to some signal from the informational environment of some organism and many repetitions of the same signal are needed to produce unified response.
We can see this principle anywhere where we learn some response that is normally not needed in normal human life. Basketball, ice-hockey, tennis, car driving, foreign languages, mother tongue are all examples of many repetitions producing automatic response, emotional response, that is started and carried out automatically without too much energy being spent on preparing the response. Actually there was a lot energy used for prefabricating this automatic response, but it is the logic of repletion. If some signal repeats many times then the organism reacts in such a way that it “recognizes” the necessity of automatic emotional response as more energy saving than always spend energy to solve the same problem anew.
This principle of saving energy can be traced all over the whole evolution as well as the notion of many repetitions being needed to produce prefabricated response to some environmental signal. Actually, Dawkins writes about it in his book “The extended phenotype”. He describes this case of saving energy in two examples. One is the famous life/dinner race between a fox and a rabbit, rabbit runs for his life, fox only for his dinner, so it is enough when rabbit is only a tiny bit faster or can run few seconds longer in the high speed and it is enough to escape because fox is not running for his life, only for his dinner it will give up when the energy needed for catching the rabbit is too high, so even the fox is saving energy.
I believe that this brings us to a point where predators might be always a bit slower than their prey. In such a case they would be able to catch only single pieces of their favorite prey species that are not capable of escaping, that means that are in a way sick. This would in turn mean that predators actually clean the genetic pool of their prey species. In some kind of organism that have developed certain level of altruism, of taking care of their weak colleagues, it can be dangerous, as the weak individual slows down also the strong and capable individuals and makes them so to possible prey for predators too. Most probably this happens from time to time.
I would like to finish this short paper with just only two remarks. One should try to show that Vendramini believes in his teem theory because he is a film director, he works with actors and they as well as he work with emotions. It appears to him that everything is emotion, but this is not correct, emotion is an automatic response to some triggering signal. But this algorithm must be first produced, and it is produced only by a certain number of repetitions of particular signal broadcasted from the environment and constantly the same reaction of the organism, and this happened so many times that there was a necessity to make this response automatic to save energy needed to “think” always about the correct response.
The second is aimed at Dawkins and all other biologists who always speak of time needed for an organism to adapt. I object to this wording, it is not time that is needed , it is the number of repetitions, which I turn of course consumes some time, but time is not the decisive factor, the number of repetitions is. Dawkins once uses the word frequency that might be interpreted as the number of repetitions in time, but he uses that extremely seldom and does not emphasize this factor. I believe that this is wrong; I think that not the time is important but the number of repetitions. Actually we may understand this when we observe the generations of different species. They are differently long some flies have a generation of one , two or three days only whereas human generation is about 25 years
This difference in generation time might be explained by the amount of signals one particular species can accept, process and how many signals are needed for survival. If only few a short life is ok, if too many a long life will be needed. This has just struck me right now so I am not sure whether it is right, though it appears correct.