N.Wells
Posts: 1836
Joined: Oct. 2005
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| Quote (ChemiCat @ Sep. 03 2016,02:53) | | Quote | Well I'm also busy combining flashes of intuition with careful controlled analysis.
Back to work!
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Unfortunately for you, Gaulin, Einstein's intuitions were based on his knowledge of the science involved. Your "intuitions" are based on a twisted interpretation of pseudoscience from the DI.
Throw away your all your assertions and you have nothing to add to cognitive science in your not-a-theory. You do have a poor imitation of Pacman, I will concede that point. However that is also useless to explain what you, alone, consider as 'intelligence'.
A hippocampal insect, really? I suggest you look up how many neurons make up what can be called an insect's brain (Hint; not many). Then try and fit in a hippocampus.
Your God delusion has fried your brain, Gaulin. |
Insect "brains" (specifically, the supraesophageal ganglion) don't have hippocampi (so, as has long been noted in this thread, Gaulin is completely out to lunch in his specific claims - he's modelling something that does not exist!).
Nonetheless, although insect brains are very small, they do have "mushroom bodies" (which assess sensory inputs, especially olfactory information processed and passed on by the antenna lobes). I've mentioned these before, but didn't go into much detail, in the so-far fulfilled hope that Gary would never get round to correcting the funniest part of his arguments. The mushroom bodies are part of the insect brain that are most similar to hippocampi in vertebrates (although the similarities are limited). Mushroom bodies play a strong role in long-term and short-term memory and behavioral complexity. Honeybees have around 340,000 neurons in their "mushroom bodies" (out of about 1 million neurons total, compared to 80 billion neurons for us), which (nonstandardly for insects) include processing of visual signals.
It is especially fascinating that many insects do not change some behaviors much after decapitation. Decapitated horseflies live, run, and copulate while headless; fruit flies do all that and live several days after being decapitated (although headless female fruit flies basically only cooperate in mating when they get raped, since beheaded females don't initiate courting rituals). The male praying mantis, famously, only starts mating after being beheaded. Long-term memory in trained cockroaches does not depend on their retaining their heads. Mating and moving are controlled by the ventral nerve cord, which is not in the head.
People who work on animal intelligence often measure it by how many different behaviors the organism can control (which is a very cool operational definition that leads to more or less reproducible evaluations). Most insects are between 15 and 59 (with bees at the top score, correlating mostly with degrees of social interactions): by comparison, dolphins rank at 123. Standardized for brain size, bees are pretty damn smart.
Insects are very variable, but they do not work very much like his model. A lot of insect behavior is hard-wired, instinctive, but they can also do amazing things. Ants navigate by counting steps and recognizing landscape features. Damselflies can learn to fly through very complex mazes, but (or and?) if you place a bright light underneath them they automatically switch to flying upside down. Gary of course is completely ignorant about everything related to insects, despite the fact that his model is supposed to be an insect ("bug").
Gary's model is nonsense for so many reasons, but one of the funniest aspects of all of this is that he bases ALL of his arguments on a model of something that doesn't even exist (hippocampi in insects). Talk about a lack of ground-truthing!
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