User talk:Snow Rise

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Re: Steven Pinker

Nice GAN, but a quick glance at the article shows you are missing inline sources in many places. Because this is a BLP, I'm concerned that a reviewer might quick fail it. As a rule of thumb, try to have each a citation at the end of each paragraph that supports the text preceding it. If you can't do that, add it at the end of each sentence. Viriditas (talk) 10:17, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Viriditas, thank you for the response. Looking through the article I see your assessment is correct, particularly with regard to the critical "Research and theory" section. My involvement in the article was trivial up to this point, and I would have recommended nomination to another, more-involved, contributor, but looking through the edit history, I couldn't find any one particular stand-out editor, not in recent time anyway; it seems to be one of those cases of a high quality article arising from the efforts of a decent number of collaborators without anyone having taken the lead as to the structure; I'm fairly impressed with it in that regard, which is why I nominated it myself. All of that being said, I do know the man's work and have the resources to attend to the inline citations wanting, though it may take a day or two to collect them. Thanks again for the input! Snow talk 19:05, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the bull by the horns. I hope a reviewer doesn't quick fail it before you get to it. BTW, you've got a transclusion problem with the use of {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost}} in the heading. It's preventing the "edit" button from appearing in these sections, making it impossible for editors to edit each section. Instead, they have to edit the entire page. There are less buggy options available here. Viriditas (talk) 03:17, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

I've called in the Cavalry. Please see User_talk:TParis#Question_about_transclusion_on_a_user_page. Viriditas (talk) 03:31, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Viriditas, thanks so much for elucidating that matter. I noticed the issue arise a few days ago, but haven't had the time for the trial and error or other research to determine which element of the page was causing it. As it happens, I've been meaning to change from the signpost front page template to the talk page posting-by-edition (for easier reference to signpost articles I may wish to revisit), so I might as well just remove it altogether. Nice to have it fixed so easily; I was sure I had an errant bracket somewhere that was going to take half an hour to find in one of the above tables. :) Still, odd that the problem manifested when it did and not previously; I can't account for that, aside from to assume it's something caused by a change to the template itself, but then when the problem first arose, I took a look at other user pages that transclude the signpost in this way and did not see similar problems. Anyway, thanks again for the multiple assists! Snow talk 04:52, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Cognition in non-humans

Hi Snow, Thought I'd drop a line here instead of going further off-topic on the ref desk! I think we'd agree that it's silly to define things as solely human phenomena, only because we lack evidence in other organisms. But I do wonder if "cognition" is not too narrowly defined in our article. To me, it seems that certain aspects of e.g. insect and plant behavior could be considered a type of cognition, especially in the realm of decision making. Why would a plant grow towards the light, or a roach run to the dark? Is it not some type of decision, based on information (or at least stimulus or perception)? Even if we think of it as an "automatic" response, akin to an algorithm, is not the decision still made? There's also some conflation I didn't want to get into, with respect to what an individual "chooses" in a circumstance, vs. what evolution has produced in terms of genetically controlled behavior-- maybe the roach has no will or "choice" in the matter at all. I only have passing knowledge of cognitive science, my forte is more towards math and plant ecology. The bits on physiology and signalling I mentioned today are just a by-product of my endeavors. Anyway, fascinating stuff, hope to see you around the ref desks more! SemanticMantis (talk) 22:52, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

@SemanticMantis:. You make a number of interesting points. As regards the term cognition itself, clearly a large part of the problem is that the term has come to be used in common parlance (albeit infrequently) in a manner that is not-quite consistent with how it is used by those working in most of the cognitive sciences (though, it is a trans-disciplinary field prone to some variation in this regard). In this field cognition very commonly is used to refer to traits particular to, or at least most fully developed in, humans, such a symbolic representation, abstraction, generalization and so-forth, or to the uniquely human way of processing certain types of information which are common to animals but which we parse in a particular fashion (various forms of spatial perception and communication, language especially, for example). In broader usage, cognition often refers to just suggest the application of thought/information processing by organisms broadly, including the mental and "psychological" states of entities that do not enjoy our particular gifts. It's not that researchers in these fields view human mental processes as absolutely distinct from that of other complex organisms (a good deal of work involves trying to contextualize human abilities within the larger collection of mental phenomenon and determine how we evolved from animal precursors in the "cognitive niche") -- it's just a result of the refinement of distinction via terminology. Personally, I'm not at all opposed to distinguishing between the uses in a relevant article or two, but finding the appropriate sources may be a challenge, as would striking on the right wording to delineate the concepts for a broad audience while maintaining accuracy and verifiability of the claims.

The one thing that you point out that a great many questions in this domain hinges upon is the question of mental impetus and choice; as I'm sure you might well guess, choice is a difficult concept for cognitive scientists to tackle and explain (or even define). As you point out, we are all mechanistic beings and subject to the same physical principles of causation, regardless of the complexity of our neurological and psychological make-up. So can any of our actions (overt or mental) be said to be of our own making? This is a question which preoccupies a lot of attention from cognitive scientists (as it has their predecessors in philosophy and other areas of human inquiry for millennia) and no definitive (or even particularly satisfactory) answers have ever been provided. The line between the fuzzy concept of free will and automated response is not at all clear, and, as we see here, in complicates other divisions of mental phenomena. Still, in practical usage, cognition is moving towards a more and more refined definition, at least as regards the word itself. By the way, if you are at all interested in this field of study, even just incidentally, I can recommend some great reading materials that are balanced towards those with an above-average understanding of empirical principles who are nontheless non-experts in the field, which you might enjoy. If you wish to consider some specific edits to articles pertaining to cognition here, I am at your disposal to parse the sources or help in any other fashion. Snow talk 23:57, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification! I understand that abstraction and symbolic thinking are rather unique to primate brains ;) I didn't know 'cognition' was more narrowly defined in cognitive sciences, so it's nice to see that concept clearly laid out. I do generally prefer precision in terms, so what should I call this ability to respond to stimuli in complex manners, perhaps even "choose"? Insects, plants, and maybe even some computer programs are doing something that a star or a rock cannot, right? Perhaps it's just a broad sort of intelligence... SemanticMantis (talk) 00:46, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Well, to be fair, there are contexts in which it is paired with narrowing terms to refer to processes that are common to other animals; for example, visual cognition - the complex suite of tasks accomplished by the brain to make sense of visual data -- and for the most part you don't actually see as much as you think you see; the visual centers of the brain apply a huge number of filters to fill in details using pre-programmed expectations (objects usual orient in such a way, colour and illumination behave in such a way), which visual illusions exploit, but which generally are useful shortcuts that allow us to intuit much more about our visual environment than is provided by the raw incoming information and create a stable, cohesive image from information provided by eyes that are constantly darting this way and that and focusing at all multiple depths and trying to resolve particular objects or other stimuli constantly.

But even something like that which seems like a big area of common ground, often sets us apart from other creatures; compared to most other mammals, most of which move and operate closer to the ground and with greater focus on olfaction, we have far superior sight; we are trichromats, uncommon in mammals, have significant focal range, fine acuity. And most other creatures which have highly refined eyesight are even more different from us in the range stimuli that they process with the photoreceptors and optical organs in themselves, to say nothing of how differently their brains my parse that information and derive useful information from it. Our robust visual suite is thought to be co-oped in many different kinds of conceptual tasks to allow for organization of concepts and associations; certainly it is integral to many mechanical tasks; the lack of those facilities in other animals is a part of the reason they don't understand math and will never be able to read a map. I remember an old paper roughly in this same field that was titled "Do Bats Dream in Sonar?", meant, presumably, to underscore the futility (and fascination) of trying to understand another creature's sensory experience, but you really need not look any farther from than a sense that we, nominally, share in order to find we are experiencing very different worlds in very different ways.

As to what term serves best across species, that's a complicated question. Complicated in that the number of different fields informing upon the question leads to a lot of different potential candidates but then also complicated in that number of different and differentiable processes fall under the broad category of stimulus responses you describe. "Percept" certainly works for many different creatures from humans to bees, but not plants or jellyfish, because the term implies the involvement of a mental construct. Pattern recognition of one form or another, be it from instinctual knowledge or from memory, is a common element of perception that can be said to be shared by a large number of creatures, but only those with a fairly well developed nervous system. A plant might detect the presence of another via some form of chemoreception, but it doesn't "know" the other plant is there; any response it makes is the result of a cascade of alterations in chemical pathways, but at no point is this information translated to a mental construct and compared against others, nor is it capable of creating the variety of behavioural responses found in innervated species. The plant may respond aggressively, but never makes a determination to do so.

But this draws attention to a half-answer to your question; in many contexts it's often easier to just describe an organisms behaviour in relation to a stimuli, rather than getting bogged in efforts to interpret it's perception in terms of subjective and quasi-qualitative assessments, an effort that might ultimately prove fruitless. And I don't mean just at our current levels of understanding; there's a school of thought that suggests that our brains are just not constructed to solve certain types of problems -- that we are lucky enough that certain of the situations our brains were designed to cope with in our evolutionary past happen to correlate to the concepts of problem solving we apply in the sciences and other advanced methods for interpreting the world around us, but that we shouldn't expect these gifts to apply to every question we can conceive of and that questions about certain subjective experiences, just as with the question of just what choice is that we touched upon earlier, may be permanently beyond our understanding, at least with our current brains. If you want a term that is general across all organisms, you may only be able to use such behavioural terms. "Responds" works well in this regard and serves to describe both internalized "passive" phenomena as a human being hearing a musical melody and being reminded of a past experience as well as a situation in which a plant is being overshadowed by a neighbor and this stimulates the production of growth hormone causing it to twist out in a certain direction.

Anyway, I know I've gone into some digressions here; when I'm tired my answers to these sorts of questions tend to be more open-ended than they technically need to be. But then, it's a complex subject as well. The long and the short of it is that I think you can get away with saying any organism can "sense" and "respond" to stimuli, but as to how it processes that information and the concordant response, things get fuzzy and complicated when you try to apply intuitive categories of human perception to other creatures. Indeed, it can sometimes be tricky trying to apply our own subjective labels to other human individuals! Snow talk 04:41, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

Vernacular

I find the insinuation in this edit comment that I perhaps shouldn't be editing the article anyway deeply unhelpful. Kindly engage instead on the article talk page (here). Thank you. 86.141.190.114 (talk) 07:17, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Fyi, I am not in violation of 3RR. 86.141.190.114 (talk) 09:44, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

I must also ask you to follow talk page guidelines and avoid making ad hominem comments on the article talk page (which I find quite patronizing). 86.141.190.114 (talk) 10:04, 4 May 2014 (UTC)