“nothing besides the laws of nature are needed to explain intelligence”
http://www.insidescience.org/content/physicist-proposes-new-way-think-about-intelligence/987
Excuse my caps but THE ONLY THEORY OF COGNITION THAT DOES NOT NEED TO BE REVISED…..is NDT. Emotion makes organisms feel just as if they are gravitationally and electromagnetically charged particles of consciousness (through the interplay of the Central Nervous and the Enteric Nervous System, i.e. the systems of balance relative to the systems of hunger). In this way the behavior of animals will immutably subscribe to the laws of physics. LEARNING IS EVOLUTION, it is not cognitive problem solving. Animals don’t learn by way of reinforcement, the mind of the animal learns the same way the body of the animal evolves, by participating in the flow of emotion. Animals learn by moving their bodies to affect how objects of attraction MAKE THEM FEEL. Complex social structures and patterns of behavior are manifestations of the principles of emotion, i.e. the physics of energy, not intellectual abstract reasoning as all of modern behaviorism THINKS it to be as they interpret their various experiments. Learning is an auto-tuning/biofeedback (i.e. a balance relative to hunger) phenomenon. Animals are striving and choosing to increase the amount of flow they FEEL. This improves the configurations, from how they configure their bodies in order to MOVE better, to how they configure their social structures in order to FEEL better.
Emotion becoming Unresolved Emotion on its way to becoming Resolved Emotion (E–>UE–RE), captures the energy of disorder, (i.e. the friction generated) when organisms make contact with the environment. It then converts this into information, STRESS. This is why stress changes the way one feels TOWARDS OTHER BEINGS. The stress of Unresolved Emotion experienced by way of resistance isn’t apprehended neutrally and then made sense of according to an abstract intellectual logic (such as survival or reproductive strategies or of personal advantage). Rather, involuntarily, by way of the deepest autonomic architecture of the body/mind, stress changes how an animal feels toward other living beings. These feelings drive evolution.
To see the principles of emotion playing out in complex behavior, such as problem solving, one must adopt an immediate-moment manner of analysis. One must learn to factor TIME out of what they are observing so that they can discern the various emotional polarities being adopted as animals change their behavior over Time.
E–>UE–>RE is the principle of emotional conductivity. Through this progression objects of resistance are imported into the configuration in order to improve the flow so that the configuration can persist over time. The simple statement of E–>UE–>RE is consistent with this new research as well as being consistent with all the other principles of physics, most importantly the Constructal law.
“The new research proposes that entropy is directly connected to intelligent behavior. [The paper] is basically an attempt to describe intelligence as a fundamentally thermodynamic process,” said Wissner-Gross.”“Entropica’s [the software program] intelligent behavior emerges from the “physical process of trying to capture as many future histories as possible,” said Wissner-Gross. Future histories represent the complete set of possible future outcomes available to a system at any given moment.”
Emotion is a calculus of motion. Stress is the capturing of resistance that once physically internalized and embodied as a feeling, thereafter serves as a modeling system so that an underlying feeling of movement that was converted into stress through the experience of resistance, can be recapitulated by making contact with other organisms. By aligning and synchronizing with others by way of stress as a counterbalancing “emotional mass,” Unresolved Emotion is converted into “as many future histories as possible” and this information is STORED AS EMOTIONAL BONDS WITH OTHERS. Hence, starlings flock to resolve their unresolved emotion, wolves hunt to resolve their unresolved emotion, all animals do what they do in order to resolve unresolved emotion. Their behavior isn’t shaped by the material consequences of their actions, but by the intangible of emotional movement experienced during their actions. They are computing the future. (This is why a behavior can result in an intelligent (i.e. adaptive) outcome without any cognitive understanding of consequences on the part of the individual animal. It just knows how it feels, and its feelings are indeed an intelligent response to how their environment changes—i.e. evolves—over Time.)
The principle of emotional conductivity configures nature and all its inanimate and animate processes as one contiguous flow system, i.e. a network consciousness. The network, i.e. nature as a whole, thus computes future possibilities. Nature evolves as-a-whole so as to mine potential energy, not as a system of disconnected parts in competition with each other over limited resources. Darwin is right about evolution, “we are all netted” but natural selection is not driven by too many offspring competing over too little resources. Rather it is driven by potential energy, an “absential,” (something not present but nevertheless the organizing principle of that which is present.) Organisms do not vary at random, they vary according to an emotional charge and they vary in their emotional capacity to process this charge into an improvement of a configuration.
“The researchers suggest that intelligent behavior stems from the impulse to seize control of future events in the environment. This is the exact opposite of the classic science-fiction scenario in which computers or robots become intelligent, then set their sights on taking over the world.”
In other words, animals didn’t evolve from random influences to be intelligent so that their minds are then able to problem solve. Problem solving is a function of physics which then continued to evolve into higher mental cognitive processes according to the same laws of physics by which they became sentient in the first place.
{Why is such a discussion of the utmost relevance to raising and training a dog? Because dogs, like all animals, are designed to absorb stress in response to resistance and as the means of overcoming resistance so as to improve the configuration. Due to this organization of the animal mind, in certain contexts praise decreases a feeling of flow, whereas corrections can increase a feeling of flow, a phenomenon not articulated or understood in the current behavioral paradigm because it would see it as a paradox. (This btw is why infrequent reinforcements are more powerful than regularly administered reinforcements because a pattern of infrequency incites a state of conflict that then triggers stress and thereby increases the feeling of flow. On the other hand if the organism is already in a state of conflict so that its stress is already triggered, such as a dog hunting for a bomb, or lost person, or drugs, then predictable reinforcements increase feeling of flow.) Furthermore, understanding the E–>UE–>RE phenomenon allows us a new way of understanding all other phenomena of behavior such as personality, sexuality and social structure. As an owner the benefit of knowing this is that one will not take a dog’s behavior PERSONALLY and this will make it possible to see the underlying flow architecture so that this can be directly tapped into to solve learning and behavioral problems. Keep On Pushing!}
This is great stuff, Kevin!