Hi Marcus,
Your answer is useful to me because it so exemplifies the paradox that Eric and I feel we are dealing with here. Please see larding, below. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2016 8:37 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Subjectivity, intimacy, experience “That set up has the benefit, among other things, of making the question you raise a clearly scientifically tractable issue. There should be no difference in how we go about trying to answer the question "what is iron" or "what is gorilla" or "what is the rate of sea level rise" and how we go about answering the question "what is hunger." [NST==>So, I take what follows to be an answer to this question, right?<==nst] Starve/feed an animal and watch what hormones are released and what axons fire.. A predictive model of detailed physiology that also predicts feeding/rest behavior and that maintains energy balance and generalizes across the species explains hunger. Other outgoing connections from the hypothalamus to other areas are strings worth pulling, but if activity in those parts of the brain aren’t predictive of feeding behavior they are a result of hunger and not hunger itself. [NST==>So, I take it that from this last sentence, in red, you would define hunger as a pattern of activity in the brain that is predictive of feeding behavior, right. But not all feeding behavior, right? Only feeding behavior that is preceded by deprivation? What if you got feeding behavior that was not preceded by deprivation. What if you got deprivation, and the rat never ate: --it just wandered around the food filled cage looking restless and unhappy. What if all your variables didn’t cluster as the concept “hunger” seems to demand? This is I think what Eric is driving at. Before we begin research on the causes and correlates of “hunger”, we have a prior question of what hunger IS. By going to the physiological level immediately, we head that discussion off. Hunger is either, some sort of pattern of relation between food, food-related circumstances, etc., and food orientation, search, and consumption behavior, OR the cause of such a pattern. It can’t be both, on pain of circularity. If hunger is the pattern, than the physiology is the cause of the pattern. If the physiology is the cause, then we have to know of what systematic observation it is the effect. Until we have established what those relationships are, we have nothing to explain, do we, except a rather vague concept derived from our own cultural notions of “hunger”? There is a wonderful old example of hydra that consumes some other teensy creature for its nematocysts … little stinging cells that the hydra deploys on the outside of its body. The hydra behaves exactly like a creature that has a “hunger” for nematocysts. It attacks its nematocyst prey when it needs them, stops when it has “enough.” But the nematocysts play no role in the metabolism of the hydra. It captures other pray to feed in the ordinary sense. Is this a hunger? In many animals, the elements of prey orientation, search, chase, attack, immobilization, opening the prey, consumption and or storage, etc., don’t line up in the way that the vernacular concept of hunger demands. To return to humans, and self-perception, for a moment, one of the family of variables that would seem to need to cluster with deprivation, and food getting activity is what we behaviorists call “self-report” : in this case, the answer to the question, “Are you hungry?” But like many self-report variables, hunger self-report measures do not necessarily cluster all that well with other presumptively measures of “hunger”, whatever we might decide it to be. So, it becomes a real empirical question to ask what, in God’s name, the subject is speaking to when he answers the question, “Are you hungry?”. I am sorry if this answer is inadequate. It’s certainly inadequately proofread. I know I got myself into this, but everything else is suffering and I have to get myself out. So forgive me if I now let it slide for a while. All the best, Nick <==nst] Marcus
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