"The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello

Post by Arkalen
Tomasello

--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 37 years; mainly
in England until 1987.

Athel Cornish-Bowden

2024-04-05 13:37:31 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for
the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is
plain wrong and if so on what.
I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might if
motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

If you go to Amazon you'll see that quite a few people have read it
(but not me). The reviews I have read are positive.

--
athel cb : Biochemical Evolution, Garland Science, 2016

John Harshman

2024-04-05 14:02:20 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind of
blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for the
first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is plain
wrong and if so on what.
I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might if
motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

I for one would be interested in a summary.

Arkalen

2024-04-05 21:13:36 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for
the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is
plain wrong and if so on what.
I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

I for one would be interested in a summary.

Maybe really short to start with:

Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move the
goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the goal
is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.

He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification of
agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).

The levels he describes are:

* no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
beyond its immediate environment

* first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,
resting, etc) and their behavior will depend not just on their immediate
environment but also on what their goal is at any given time. They'll
have hardwired behaviors that are deployed to meet the goal according to
the above described feedback loop, with a global inhibition mechanism
that can shut everything down in response to danger.

* second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of goal-seeking
feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to not just achieve
a goal, but achieve it in the best way possible. Includes the ability to
mentally stage potential behaviors, anticipate their outcomes and then
pick which will work best. Also much finer inhibition abilities, able to
inhibit one behavior and switch to another in service of the same goal
instead of the global shutdown of lizards. And the ability to generate
new behaviors instead of the earlier hardwiring.

* third level - great apes. I can never remember quite what this one
does so I had to re-skim a bit but basically it's an extra layer
monitoring & controlling the mammalian decision-making one that results
in higher-level reasoning, including controlling not only how to achieve
a goal but which goal to seek to achieve (thus resolving cases where
goals conflict), understanding other's decisions, and understanding
causality - not only the basic mammalian "if I do this, that will
happen" but "if this happens *in general*, that will happen".

* fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret sauce"
is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great apes that
are also able to function as parts of a collective goal-seeking agent
that uses the same basic "goal-perception-behavior-perception" feedback
loop as all other agency. This means simultaneously modelling different
kinds of agent - the "self" agent analogous to great apes (what are your
personal interests) but also the "role" agent (what is your job as a
member of the group) and the collective agent (what are the group's
goals), as well as the "self" agency & "role" agency of collaborators.
This also implies/explains moral dilemmas: whereas other animals only
ever need to worry about one agents' goals (themselves), humans need at
every point to decide whether they'll behave in service of their
personal goals, or those of a group they're part of and if so which one
(the immediate task-oriented team? Their family? Their tribe?).

[Tomasello doesn't mention (but I immediately thought of) how a species
with an innate sense of collective agency where said agency was both
greater than any single individual but also analogous to their own
agentic self might rationalize that sentiment...]

He proposes this happened in two steps, the evolution of pairwise
collaboration somewhere in the hominid lineage, and the evolution of
full group agency in direct Homo sapiens ancestors, with the development
of strong cultural variation & norms that provide a kind internal
regulation to the collective agent and allow collaboration between
strangers that share a culture. He also proposes actual group selection
acting at this point, with groups with strong collaborative cultures
outcompeting others.

[this meshes beautifully with the "social cohesion signalling"
hypothesis for the evolution of music btw]

[another aside - he doesn't say this but it occurs to me that "arbitrary
cultural variation + collaboration" seems like it could drive the
evolution of universal computation (so children can learn whatever 100%
arbitrary cultural baggage is required to function in their band) as
well as truth-seeking (the only grounding on which one *could* base
collaboration in the face of arbitrary cultural variation), which is
kind of the core of what we think of as "our intelligence"]

He proposes the driver of the evolution of each of these layers is a
kind of unpredictability in the organism's environment. Animals that
live in very stable environments can rely on hardwired behaviors that
change at the speed of evolution. Early vertebrates would have been
hunters that had to quickly adapt to also-evolving prey and
agency/goal-seeking would have allowed that. Early mammals were social
animals that were in competition not only with the prey but with their
peers; an extra control layer to optimize behaviors would give them an
edge. Early great apes that foraged for fruit would have had even higher
competition for this resource that's concentrated in isolated patches
with few access points.

OK maybe that didn't end up that short ;) I hope I didn't mess it up too
badly given it was mostly from memory, but that's basically it.

John Harshman

2024-04-06 02:15:58 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how
I think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not
sure though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things
for the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the
book is plain wrong and if so on what.
I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough
that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

I for one would be interested in a summary.

Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move the
goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the goal
is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification of
agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
* no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
beyond its immediate environment
* first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,
resting, etc) and their behavior will depend not just on their immediate
environment but also on what their goal is at any given time. They'll
have hardwired behaviors that are deployed to meet the goal according to
the above described feedback loop, with a global inhibition mechanism
that can shut everything down in response to danger.
* second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of goal-seeking
feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to not just achieve
a goal, but achieve it in the best way possible. Includes the ability to
mentally stage potential behaviors, anticipate their outcomes and then
pick which will work best. Also much finer inhibition abilities, able to
inhibit one behavior and switch to another in service of the same goal
instead of the global shutdown of lizards. And the ability to generate
new behaviors instead of the earlier hardwiring.
* third level - great apes. I can never remember quite what this one
does so I had to re-skim a bit but basically it's an extra layer
monitoring & controlling the mammalian decision-making one that results
in higher-level reasoning, including controlling not only how to achieve
a goal but which goal to seek to achieve (thus resolving cases where
goals conflict), understanding other's decisions, and understanding
causality - not only the basic mammalian "if I do this, that will
happen" but "if this happens *in general*, that will happen".
* fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret sauce"
is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great apes that
are also able to function as parts of a collective goal-seeking agent
that uses the same basic "goal-perception-behavior-perception" feedback
loop as all other agency. This means simultaneously modelling different
kinds of agent - the "self" agent analogous to great apes (what are your
personal interests) but also the "role" agent (what is your job as a
member of the group) and the collective agent (what are the group's
goals), as well as the "self" agency & "role" agency of collaborators.
This also implies/explains moral dilemmas: whereas other animals only
ever need to worry about one agents' goals (themselves), humans need at
every point to decide whether they'll behave in service of their
personal goals, or those of a group they're part of and if so which one
(the immediate task-oriented team? Their family? Their tribe?).
[Tomasello doesn't mention (but I immediately thought of) how a species
with an innate sense of collective agency where said agency was both
greater than any single individual but also analogous to their own
agentic self might rationalize that sentiment...]
He proposes this happened in two steps, the evolution of pairwise
collaboration somewhere in the hominid lineage, and the evolution of
full group agency in direct Homo sapiens ancestors, with the development
of strong cultural variation & norms that provide a kind internal
regulation to the collective agent and allow collaboration between
strangers that share a culture. He also proposes actual group selection
acting at this point, with groups with strong collaborative cultures
outcompeting others.
[this meshes beautifully with the "social cohesion signalling"
hypothesis for the evolution of music btw]
[another aside - he doesn't say this but it occurs to me that "arbitrary
cultural variation + collaboration" seems like it could drive the
evolution of universal computation (so children can learn whatever 100%
arbitrary cultural baggage is required to function in their band) as
well as truth-seeking (the only grounding on which one *could* base
collaboration in the face of arbitrary cultural variation), which is
kind of the core of what we think of as "our intelligence"]
He proposes the driver of the evolution of each of these layers is a
kind of unpredictability in the organism's environment. Animals that
live in very stable environments can rely on hardwired behaviors that
change at the speed of evolution. Early vertebrates would have been
hunters that had to quickly adapt to also-evolving prey and
agency/goal-seeking would have allowed that. Early mammals were social
animals that were in competition not only with the prey but with their
peers; an extra control layer to optimize behaviors would give them an
edge. Early great apes that foraged for fruit would have had even higher
competition for this resource that's concentrated in isolated patches
with few access points.
OK maybe that didn't end up that short ;) I hope I didn't mess it up too
badly given it was mostly from memory, but that's basically it.

Thanks for that. Sounds interesting. My greatest immediate apprehension
is that it would take a truly huge amount of experimental and
observational evidence to test the various aspects of the scenario, and
I wonder how much of it has already been done.

Arkalen

2024-04-06 08:51:20 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that
kind of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still
impacts how I think about human consciousness and social living. I'm
still not sure though how much of that is just being dazzled, or
reading things for the first time that are actually already
well-known, or if the book is plain wrong and if so on what.
I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough
that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

I for one would be interested in a summary.

Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move
the goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the
goal is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.
He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification
of agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
* no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
beyond its immediate environment
* first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,
resting, etc) and their behavior will depend not just on their
immediate environment but also on what their goal is at any given
time. They'll have hardwired behaviors that are deployed to meet the
goal according to the above described feedback loop, with a global
inhibition mechanism that can shut everything down in response to danger.
* second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of
goal-seeking feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to
not just achieve a goal, but achieve it in the best way possible.
Includes the ability to mentally stage potential behaviors, anticipate
their outcomes and then pick which will work best. Also much finer
inhibition abilities, able to inhibit one behavior and switch to
another in service of the same goal instead of the global shutdown of
lizards. And the ability to generate new behaviors instead of the
earlier hardwiring.
* third level - great apes. I can never remember quite what this one
does so I had to re-skim a bit but basically it's an extra layer
monitoring & controlling the mammalian decision-making one that
results in higher-level reasoning, including controlling not only how
to achieve a goal but which goal to seek to achieve (thus resolving
cases where goals conflict), understanding other's decisions, and
understanding causality - not only the basic mammalian "if I do this,
that will happen" but "if this happens *in general*, that will happen".
* fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret
sauce" is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great
apes that are also able to function as parts of a collective
goal-seeking agent that uses the same basic
"goal-perception-behavior-perception" feedback loop as all other
agency. This means simultaneously modelling different kinds of agent -
the "self" agent analogous to great apes (what are your personal
interests) but also the "role" agent (what is your job as a member of
the group) and the collective agent (what are the group's goals), as
well as the "self" agency & "role" agency of collaborators. This also
implies/explains moral dilemmas: whereas other animals only ever need
to worry about one agents' goals (themselves), humans need at every
point to decide whether they'll behave in service of their personal
goals, or those of a group they're part of and if so which one (the
immediate task-oriented team? Their family? Their tribe?).
[Tomasello doesn't mention (but I immediately thought of) how a
species with an innate sense of collective agency where said agency
was both greater than any single individual but also analogous to
their own agentic self might rationalize that sentiment...]
He proposes this happened in two steps, the evolution of pairwise
collaboration somewhere in the hominid lineage, and the evolution of
full group agency in direct Homo sapiens ancestors, with the
development of strong cultural variation & norms that provide a kind
internal regulation to the collective agent and allow collaboration
between strangers that share a culture. He also proposes actual group
selection acting at this point, with groups with strong collaborative
cultures outcompeting others.
[this meshes beautifully with the "social cohesion signalling"
hypothesis for the evolution of music btw]
[another aside - he doesn't say this but it occurs to me that
"arbitrary cultural variation + collaboration" seems like it could
drive the evolution of universal computation (so children can learn
whatever 100% arbitrary cultural baggage is required to function in
their band) as well as truth-seeking (the only grounding on which one
*could* base collaboration in the face of arbitrary cultural
variation), which is kind of the core of what we think of as "our
intelligence"]
He proposes the driver of the evolution of each of these layers is a
kind of unpredictability in the organism's environment. Animals that
live in very stable environments can rely on hardwired behaviors that
change at the speed of evolution. Early vertebrates would have been
hunters that had to quickly adapt to also-evolving prey and
agency/goal-seeking would have allowed that. Early mammals were social
animals that were in competition not only with the prey but with their
peers; an extra control layer to optimize behaviors would give them an
edge. Early great apes that foraged for fruit would have had even
higher competition for this resource that's concentrated in isolated
patches with few access points.
OK maybe that didn't end up that short ;) I hope I didn't mess it up
too badly given it was mostly from memory, but that's basically it.

In terms of the cognitive abilities every specific claim in the book is
backed by experimental evidence on model organisms that seems to hold
up, especially at the lower levels. But as you say it's wide-ranging
enough that it does ask more than that.

I think my own concern, that was crystallized a bit going over the
summary and confronting once again just how hard it is for me to
remember various bits, is to what extent this framework is a solid
hypothesis that generates predictions as opposed to a superficially
satisfying but empty rephrasing of what's already known. (which wouldn't
prevent it being a good read insofar as it's read by someone who doesn't
already know it - I didn't know how different we are from chimpanzees in
terms of cooperative attitudes for example).

So I guess what I'd like to see is if one can define each agency level
rigorously enough to predict behavior from it, potentially find neural
correlates, and come up with new behavioral experiments to test specific
aspects of the proposed inner workings, and/or accurately predict the
performance of as-yet-untested species in such experiments based on
their presumed agency type.

*Hemidactylus*

2024-04-14 15:44:37 UTC

Arkalen <***@proton.me> wrote:
[snip]

Post by Arkalen
In terms of the cognitive abilities every specific claim in the book is
backed by experimental evidence on model organisms that seems to hold
up, especially at the lower levels. But as you say it's wide-ranging
enough that it does ask more than that.
I think my own concern, that was crystallized a bit going over the
summary and confronting once again just how hard it is for me to
remember various bits, is to what extent this framework is a solid
hypothesis that generates predictions as opposed to a superficially
satisfying but empty rephrasing of what's already known. (which wouldn't
prevent it being a good read insofar as it's read by someone who doesn't
already know it - I didn't know how different we are from chimpanzees in
terms of cooperative attitudes for example).
So I guess what I'd like to see is if one can define each agency level
rigorously enough to predict behavior from it, potentially find neural
correlates, and come up with new behavioral experiments to test specific
aspects of the proposed inner workings, and/or accurately predict the
performance of as-yet-untested species in such experiments based on
their presumed agency type.

He uses squirrels as stand-ins for early mammals to contrast with lizards
(reptiles). One thing that caught my mind was that mammals might
“prevision” error. He later talks of a squirrel presented with a goal of
going from the current branch to another branch and simulated the leap vs
whether to just take the route of walking back toward the tree center and
then out to the other branch. This part seems to capture Popper’s dictum
that through error elimination ideas may die in our stead:

“It has imagined (in a kind of off-line perception) what would happen in
the situation if it leaped for the branch, and what would happen if it
walked down and around, comparing the two options in a process of mental
trial and error in which failure is not fatal but informative.”

So the squirrel mentally falsified the leap?

LDagget

2024-04-06 11:14:00 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?

. . .

Post by Arkalen
* first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,

. . .

Post by Arkalen
* second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of goal-seeking
feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to not just achieve

. . .

Post by Arkalen
* fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret sauce"
is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great apes that

more snipping

Post by John Harshman
Thanks for that. Sounds interesting. My greatest immediate apprehension
is that it would take a truly huge amount of experimental and
observational evidence to test the various aspects of the scenario, and
I wonder how much of it has already been done.

Seems to me that it's very anthropocentrically biased.
The suggestion that nemotodes don't have goals as described is odd.
They seek food, seek mating.
Hell, bacteria have goal seeking behavior in terms of seeking food,
or fleeing toxins via chemotaxis. Just because we understand some
of these things in terms of simpler biochemistry means what?

We can induce mating behavior in sea slugs with peptide hormones,
or they can induce those hormones themselves through other pathways.

It seems an attempt to over-emphasize the use of central nervous
system control which downgrounds gut level control or other physiological
control schemes as inferior. But why? Again, smells anthropocentric.
We can recall that many significant neuropeptide hormones stem from
what were first gut peptide hormones. Is there some innate advantage
across all life to relocating control systems?

Sure, it's worked out well for those who currently have done so, but
it seems to be working well in those creatures who haven't.

It would be curious to simply test these ideas with observations
of ants. A botanist who studies complex communities might also
have some interesting commentary.

Arkalen

2024-04-06 16:41:37 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?

. . .

Post by Arkalen
* first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,

. . .

Post by Arkalen
* second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of
goal-seeking feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to
not just achieve

. . .

Post by Arkalen
* fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret
sauce" is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great
apes that

more snipping

Post by John Harshman
Thanks for that. Sounds interesting. My greatest immediate
apprehension is that it would take a truly huge amount of experimental
and observational evidence to test the various aspects of the
scenario, and I wonder how much of it has already been done.

The word "agency" can mean many things and the book is clearly about
defining a specific set of phenomena; the fact the word "agency" is used
by other people to mean something different doesn't impact the substance
of the argument, at most it could make one question the wisdom of the
vocabulary choices.

Here the difference he proposes between organisms with and without
"agency" isn't that we know the biochemistry in one case and not in the
other, it's a specific claim about how they function and how many
degrees of freedom the individual organism has with respect to their
evolutionary hardwiring.

He defines a "feedback-control system" for agency that has the following
features:

- a goal
- behavior(s) suitable to reaching the goal
- perception that verifies whether the goal is achieved
- a feedback loop between them to repeat the behavior until the goal is
achieved

The thing is, living things don't *have* to function with this kind of
organization. You could have an organism that chemotaxes towards
nutrients & absorbs all it encounters and chemotaxes away from toxins or
chemicals associated with predators/bad environments and reproduces once
it's reached a certain size, and evolutionarily speaking that's a
perfectly cromulent organism; if it can survive and spread this way it
will. Insofar as it has the "goal" of eating or breeding or avoiding
predators however that goal is evolution's goal more than the
individual's. The nature of the goal and the specific behaviors it
engages in to meet it change over the generations via evolutionary
processes. Insofar as there is a feedback loop between perception and
behavior that optimizes things towards the goal, the "perception" is
"how does this organism interact with its environment" and the feedback
loop is "is this organism reproductively successful".

But if you have a living thing that *does* have this kind of
organization then "goals" have a different definition for it.
"Evolution" still has the "goal" of it eating but the way this is
behaviorally implemented means the individual itself can be described as
having this goal in a completely different sense, that manifests
differently. You can even get differences between "evolution's goals"
and "the individual's goals" - usually not with eating but for example
you can have goal-driven animals evolve the drive to have sex, although
from an evolutionary point of view the actual goal is reproduction.

Now whether these different behavioral organizations actually occur in
different animals the way the book claims is a different question but it
seems a reasonable claim to me. Although it's true he is a bit ambiguous
about nematodes; here is his discussion of them after introducing early
animal filter-feeders as an example of the former [disclaimer: I said
"nematodes", it's actually C elegans which may well not be a nematode at
all in which case my bad]:

"Not only do the chemosensory neurons detect either good or bad things
and 'signal' the motor neurons to produce bodily contractions that
propel the organism either forward or away from those things, but C
elegans also uses the rate at which it is ingesting food, typically
bacteria, to detect the location of richer and less rich clumps (Scholtz
et al., 2017). Moreover, if a behavior such as forward movement brings a
bad result (e.g., a noxious chemical), the creature can perform one of
two actions to move away (Hart, 2006). C. elegans finds its food by
moving around in its environment actively, sometimes even learning the
location of food in novel environments after several encounters (Qin &
Wheeler, 2007).

The behavior of C. elegans would thus seem to be organized in a more
complex manner than that of unicellular organisms. The have different
mechanisms for sensing things in the world and acting in response.
Classically, the function of a nervous system is to connect separate
mechanisms of perception and action, and ganglia are seats of this
integration, so it would seem that the separate mechanisms of perception
and action are integrated in C. elegans (and also, by inference, in
early bilaterians). However, it is unlikely that there is also a
comparison with some kind of internal goal to create direction: their
locomotion is mostly random or stimulus driven (Scholz et al., 2017).
And these organisms do not seem to exhibit anything that we would want
to call behavioral control: they do not inhibit or otherwise control
action execution, and what they learn is simply the location toward
which to direct their hardwired movements. It is thus unlikely that
early bilaterians, as modeled by C. elegans, were goal-directed,
decision-making agents, only animate actors."

We can induce mating behavior in sea slugs with peptide hormones,
or they can induce those hormones themselves through other pathways.
It seems an attempt to over-emphasize the use of central nervous system
control which downgrounds gut level control or other physiological
control schemes as inferior. But why?

"Inferior" is your take, not the book's. The book is also razor-focused
on behavior, only mentioning nervous systems in the context of
describing behavior. You could claim that the author betrays an
illegitimate preference for central nervous systems in their choice of
model animals; that lizards have much higher behavioral flexibility than
C. elegans and also have a much more complex brain which makes it look
like the two are associated but the author could have described the
exact same behavioral differences using sea slugs instead of lizards.

I'm guessing that this claim would be incorrect though, and that central
nervous systems are in fact associated with higher behavioral
complexity. It seems like you might disagree ?

Again, smells anthropocentric.
We can recall that many significant neuropeptide hormones stem from
what were first gut peptide hormones. Is there some innate advantage
across all life to relocating control systems?

Are you aware of this paper on a hypothesis for the evolution of neurons
? It's possible you do as it does include a link between digestive
molecules and neurotransmitters.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12461

As for an advantage to using nervous systems for control systems an
obvious one seems to be the ability to link up different functions of
the organisms in arbitrary ways instead of function-constrained ones. I
don't think hormonal systems can do that as flexibly but I'm happy to be
proved wrong ("can induce mating behavior with hormones" definitely
isn't sufficient).

Sure, it's worked out well for those who currently have done so, but
it seems to be working well in those creatures who haven't.

To a first approximation anything any species does works well by virtue
of that species existing. "Working well" isn't the standard. This book
looks at behavioral complexity/flexibility. It doesn't cast judgement on
different kinds of behavioral organization being good or bad, it
discusses what they are.

It would be curious to simply test these ideas with observations
of ants. A botanist who studies complex communities might also
have some interesting commentary.

Tomasello thinks ants and other social insects are also goal-directed
agents, it's one of the examples of potential convergent evolution of
the trait he mentions. Interestingly, that suggests he thinks other
insects aren't. I think it's a subject that would definitely merit
developing and challenging but it's not done in the book.

LDagget

2024-04-06 17:46:42 UTC

big snip

Post by Arkalen
Are you aware of this paper on a hypothesis for the evolution of neurons
? It's possible you do as it does include a link between digestive
molecules and neurotransmitters.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12461
As for an advantage to using nervous systems for control systems an
obvious one seems to be the ability to link up different functions of
the organisms in arbitrary ways instead of function-constrained ones. I
don't think hormonal systems can do that as flexibly but I'm happy to be
proved wrong ("can induce mating behavior with hormones" definitely
isn't sufficient).

apologies for the huge snip but your excellent post remains elsewhere.
Part of the reason for the snip is the system I'm using is poor at
handling large posts. I also am disinclined towards many interposed
comments. And in particular, I haven't read the book, you have, so
my further comments get too meta. Suffice that your points are well
taken and I won't quibble (more) without having read the book.

Beyond that, I looked into the cite above. Haven't read it but will.
Glanced through the refs, most are past the time I paid much attention
to the gut/brain connection. I did note a ref to a paper I plan to
look up. It could help me catch up.
Kaelberer, M. M., & Bohorquez, D. V. (2018).
The now and then of gut-brain signaling.
Brain Research,1693, 192–196.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2018.03.027

Thanks for the leads.

As a final thought, that he considered ants might induce me to read
the book. My knowledge there is at best superficial but I like them
as a model organism to decode chemical _effectors_ of behavior.

Arkalen

2024-04-07 00:24:50 UTC

Post by LDagget
big snip

Post by Arkalen
Are you aware of this paper on a hypothesis for the evolution of
neurons ? It's possible you do as it does include a link between
digestive molecules and neurotransmitters.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12461
As for an advantage to using nervous systems for control systems an
obvious one seems to be the ability to link up different functions of
the organisms in arbitrary ways instead of function-constrained ones.
I don't think hormonal systems can do that as flexibly but I'm happy
to be proved wrong ("can induce mating behavior with hormones"
definitely isn't sufficient).

apologies for the huge snip but your excellent post remains elsewhere.

No apologies needed but thank you for the compliment :)

Post by LDagget
Part of the reason for the snip is the system I'm using is poor at
handling large posts. I also am disinclined towards many interposed
comments. And in particular, I haven't read the book, you have, so
my further comments get too meta. Suffice that your points are well
taken and I won't quibble (more) without having read the book.
Beyond that, I looked into the cite above. Haven't read it but will.
Glanced through the refs, most are past the time I paid much attention
to the gut/brain connection. I did note a ref to a paper I plan to
look up. It could help me catch up. Kaelberer, M. M., & Bohorquez, D. V.
(2018). The now and then of gut-brain signaling.
Brain Research,1693, 192–196.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2018.03.027
Thanks for the leads.

I thought the paper was super-interesting, it proposed the following
hypothesis for the initial evolution of neurons:

- Early animals like Dickinsonia moved around bacterial mats digesting
the substrate; if they ran into each other nothing prevented them
climbing onto each other & digesting the other animal instead; this
induced an incentive to detect each other's presence, maybe also a
predator/prey split where some sought out & others avoided that presence

- One way they could detect each other is via bioelectrical fields. All
cells generate & are sensitive to electrical fields, you'd just need to
couple a movement response. It would be super close-range but better
than nothing

- At the very edge of the detection sensitivity you'd get an
intermittent signal, and a second layer of electricity-sensitive cells
reacting to the intermittency of that signal from the first would extend
the range

- Prey in general tend to be subject to a trade-off in the sensitivity
to their escape response that depends on how rich a nutrient patch is:
escape too late and they risk being eaten but escape too soon and they
sacrifice their own chance to eat.

- Thus you could have a coupling between motility, electricity-sensitive
cells and also the ventral digestive cells detecting bacterial proteins

--> These would be the ancestors of perception, processing, action
potentials & neurotransmitters

The beauty of this hypothesis is that it really does seem to bootstrap
neurons: in modern neurons the electrical and chemical interactions are
pure intermediates between other modes of perception and action but in
this scenario they'd have started out as the direct modes of perception.

Post by LDagget
As a final thought, that he considered ants might induce me to read
the book. My knowledge there is at best superficial but I like them
as a model organism to decode chemical _effectors_ of behavior.

I don't want to discourage you from reading the book but I don't want to
mislead you either, he mentions ants mostly to explain he won't talk
about them, and like I said he doesn't get into the details of how
behavior is implemented chemically or neurally at all.

Bob Casanova

2024-04-06 19:53:46 UTC

On Sat, 6 Apr 2024 18:41:37 +0200, the following appeared in
talk.origins, posted by Arkalen <***@proton.me>:

Just a comment; While I'm in no way competent in this field
and can't discuss it coherently, I'm enjoying the "food for
thought" immensely. Thanks!

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?

. . .

Post by Arkalen
* first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,

. . .

Post by Arkalen
* second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of
goal-seeking feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to
not just achieve

. . .

Post by Arkalen
* fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret
sauce" is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great
apes that

more snipping

Post by John Harshman
Thanks for that. Sounds interesting. My greatest immediate
apprehension is that it would take a truly huge amount of experimental
and observational evidence to test the various aspects of the
scenario, and I wonder how much of it has already been done.

The word "agency" can mean many things and the book is clearly about
defining a specific set of phenomena; the fact the word "agency" is used
by other people to mean something different doesn't impact the substance
of the argument, at most it could make one question the wisdom of the
vocabulary choices.
Here the difference he proposes between organisms with and without
"agency" isn't that we know the biochemistry in one case and not in the
other, it's a specific claim about how they function and how many
degrees of freedom the individual organism has with respect to their
evolutionary hardwiring.
He defines a "feedback-control system" for agency that has the following
- a goal
- behavior(s) suitable to reaching the goal
- perception that verifies whether the goal is achieved
- a feedback loop between them to repeat the behavior until the goal is
achieved
The thing is, living things don't *have* to function with this kind of
organization. You could have an organism that chemotaxes towards
nutrients & absorbs all it encounters and chemotaxes away from toxins or
chemicals associated with predators/bad environments and reproduces once
it's reached a certain size, and evolutionarily speaking that's a
perfectly cromulent organism; if it can survive and spread this way it
will. Insofar as it has the "goal" of eating or breeding or avoiding
predators however that goal is evolution's goal more than the
individual's. The nature of the goal and the specific behaviors it
engages in to meet it change over the generations via evolutionary
processes. Insofar as there is a feedback loop between perception and
behavior that optimizes things towards the goal, the "perception" is
"how does this organism interact with its environment" and the feedback
loop is "is this organism reproductively successful".
But if you have a living thing that *does* have this kind of
organization then "goals" have a different definition for it.
"Evolution" still has the "goal" of it eating but the way this is
behaviorally implemented means the individual itself can be described as
having this goal in a completely different sense, that manifests
differently. You can even get differences between "evolution's goals"
and "the individual's goals" - usually not with eating but for example
you can have goal-driven animals evolve the drive to have sex, although
from an evolutionary point of view the actual goal is reproduction.
Now whether these different behavioral organizations actually occur in
different animals the way the book claims is a different question but it
seems a reasonable claim to me. Although it's true he is a bit ambiguous
about nematodes; here is his discussion of them after introducing early
animal filter-feeders as an example of the former [disclaimer: I said
"nematodes", it's actually C elegans which may well not be a nematode at
"Not only do the chemosensory neurons detect either good or bad things
and 'signal' the motor neurons to produce bodily contractions that
propel the organism either forward or away from those things, but C
elegans also uses the rate at which it is ingesting food, typically
bacteria, to detect the location of richer and less rich clumps (Scholtz
et al., 2017). Moreover, if a behavior such as forward movement brings a
bad result (e.g., a noxious chemical), the creature can perform one of
two actions to move away (Hart, 2006). C. elegans finds its food by
moving around in its environment actively, sometimes even learning the
location of food in novel environments after several encounters (Qin &
Wheeler, 2007).
The behavior of C. elegans would thus seem to be organized in a more
complex manner than that of unicellular organisms. The have different
mechanisms for sensing things in the world and acting in response.
Classically, the function of a nervous system is to connect separate
mechanisms of perception and action, and ganglia are seats of this
integration, so it would seem that the separate mechanisms of perception
and action are integrated in C. elegans (and also, by inference, in
early bilaterians). However, it is unlikely that there is also a
comparison with some kind of internal goal to create direction: their
locomotion is mostly random or stimulus driven (Scholz et al., 2017).
And these organisms do not seem to exhibit anything that we would want
to call behavioral control: they do not inhibit or otherwise control
action execution, and what they learn is simply the location toward
which to direct their hardwired movements. It is thus unlikely that
early bilaterians, as modeled by C. elegans, were goal-directed,
decision-making agents, only animate actors."

"Inferior" is your take, not the book's. The book is also razor-focused
on behavior, only mentioning nervous systems in the context of
describing behavior. You could claim that the author betrays an
illegitimate preference for central nervous systems in their choice of
model animals; that lizards have much higher behavioral flexibility than
C. elegans and also have a much more complex brain which makes it look
like the two are associated but the author could have described the
exact same behavioral differences using sea slugs instead of lizards.
I'm guessing that this claim would be incorrect though, and that central
nervous systems are in fact associated with higher behavioral
complexity. It seems like you might disagree ?

Are you aware of this paper on a hypothesis for the evolution of neurons
? It's possible you do as it does include a link between digestive
molecules and neurotransmitters.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tops.12461
As for an advantage to using nervous systems for control systems an
obvious one seems to be the ability to link up different functions of
the organisms in arbitrary ways instead of function-constrained ones. I
don't think hormonal systems can do that as flexibly but I'm happy to be
proved wrong ("can induce mating behavior with hormones" definitely
isn't sufficient).

Sure, it's worked out well for those who currently have done so, but
it seems to be working well in those creatures who haven't.

It would be curious to simply test these ideas with observations
of ants. A botanist who studies complex communities might also
have some interesting commentary.

--
Bob C.

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science,
the one that heralds new discoveries, is not
'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"

- Isaac Asimov

JTEM

2024-04-06 22:47:54 UTC

Post by Bob Casanova
Just a comment; While I'm in no way competent in this field

Nor any other, for that matter.

Post by Bob Casanova
and can't discuss it coherently

You're lucky if you manage to pee without staining your
socks yellow.

Post by Bob Casanova
I'm enjoying the "food for thought" immensely.

Two of the collective's alters walk into a bar, bob
casanova and some other alter, where they see a dog
off in the corner, licking its balls.

Other alter: "I wish I could do that!"

Bob casanova alter: "Me too, but I'm afraid he'd
bite me."

Naledi is a fraud, btw. Everything "Reported" about
them is fake.

--
https://jtem.tumblr.com/tagged/The%20Book%20of%20JTEM/page/5

*Hemidactylus*

2024-04-07 13:51:31 UTC

Arkalen <***@proton.me> wrote:
[snip]

Post by Arkalen
Here the difference he proposes between organisms with and without
"agency" isn't that we know the biochemistry in one case and not in the
other, it's a specific claim about how they function and how many
degrees of freedom the individual organism has with respect to their
evolutionary hardwiring.

Degrees of freedom is one notion Dennett explores to bootstrap “free will”.

Post by Arkalen
He defines a "feedback-control system" for agency that has the following
- a goal
- behavior(s) suitable to reaching the goal
- perception that verifies whether the goal is achieved
- a feedback loop between them to repeat the behavior until the goal is
achieved
The thing is, living things don't *have* to function with this kind of
organization. You could have an organism that chemotaxes towards
nutrients & absorbs all it encounters and chemotaxes away from toxins or
chemicals associated with predators/bad environments and reproduces once
it's reached a certain size, and evolutionarily speaking that's a
perfectly cromulent organism; if it can survive and spread this way it
will. Insofar as it has the "goal" of eating or breeding or avoiding
predators however that goal is evolution's goal more than the
individual's. The nature of the goal and the specific behaviors it
engages in to meet it change over the generations via evolutionary
processes. Insofar as there is a feedback loop between perception and
behavior that optimizes things towards the goal, the "perception" is
"how does this organism interact with its environment" and the feedback
loop is "is this organism reproductively successful".
But if you have a living thing that *does* have this kind of
organization then "goals" have a different definition for it.
"Evolution" still has the "goal" of it eating but the way this is
behaviorally implemented means the individual itself can be described as
having this goal in a completely different sense, that manifests
differently. You can even get differences between "evolution's goals"
and "the individual's goals" - usually not with eating but for example
you can have goal-driven animals evolve the drive to have sex, although
from an evolutionary point of view the actual goal is reproduction.

Hmmm, is this evolution’s goal stemming from Tomasello himself? Not liking
the idea of evolution having goals. First the outcome of evolution itself
can stem from several factors, selection being one. Given drift, neutral
evolution, and the prevalence of junk DNA in humans and other organisms,
evolution seems too happenstance for goals. Goal directed evolution is the
stuff of orthogenesis or omega point. Complexity of human brains or
evolution of complexity itself if I recall Gould on this is a drunkard’s
walk constrained against a lower boundary.

That said teleology should be watered down to teleonomy (Mayr) or apparent
goal direction in organisms due to their “programming” and is an outcome
not a target. One needs to differentiate also between the proximal focus
and distal (ultimate) when looking at evolutionary outcomes. Proximate
causation happens at the level of physiology and so called “goals” obtain
here as organisms negotiate their environment for food and such. Failures
resulting in reduced reproductive output will “reprogram” future
generations away from those failures.

Said reprogramming may result in long term trends over generational time,
but that trending (eg- cognitive complexity) cannot be interpreted as an
evolutionary goal as trends can result in devastating dead ends especially
if the ecological context or fitness landscape shifts dramatically.

Sure humans and octopods have converged upon cognitive complexity, but so
many other species haven’t.

And this is where adaptive evolution is being considered. I dare say most
evolution is not adaptive.

[snip rest]

Arkalen

2024-04-08 13:43:30 UTC

Post by *Hemidactylus*
[snip]

Degrees of freedom is one notion Dennett explores to bootstrap “free will”.

Hmmm, is this evolution’s goal stemming from Tomasello himself?

It doesn't *not* stem from him :p Let's say I'm pretty sure he uses the
same metaphor phrased in a similar way somewhere in the book but I'm not
certain and I'm not going to check so I feel bad implicating him in my
phrasing choices.

Post by *Hemidactylus*
Not liking
the idea of evolution having goals. First the outcome of evolution itself
can stem from several factors, selection being one. Given drift, neutral
evolution, and the prevalence of junk DNA in humans and other organisms,
evolution seems too happenstance for goals. Goal directed evolution is the
stuff of orthogenesis or omega point. Complexity of human brains or
evolution of complexity itself if I recall Gould on this is a drunkard’s
walk constrained against a lower boundary.

Honestly on reflection I agree that "evolution" having "goals" might be
a bad metaphor here, although maybe not for the same reasons as you.
First I want to narrow things down to *adaptations*, because those are
what we're talking about here. The book fully assumes the cognitive
mechanisms it discusses are adaptations, an assumption I think is
reasonable but whether it is or not, it's normal for the book to use
language and make arguments that make sense for adaptations even if not
all evolved traits are adaptations and that language wouldn't work for
those that aren't.

With that out of the way I've fully moved away from Dawkins' idea we
should avoid notions of "purpose" with respect to adaptations and talk
about "appearance of purpose" instead. I think it confuses more than it
clarifies in most cases. I think it makes more sense to redefine
"purpose" (and "function", "design" etc) in a way that covers both
evolved adaptations and human engineering, because their underlying
commonalities justify it. For example the way selective pressures for
flight lead a wing to have the structure it does justify thinking of it
as "for flying" the same way an airplane wing is and in a way a rock
isn't "for having the precise shape it happens to have". There is an
interplay between the structure suiting the thing to a function because
the function was causally involved in making the structure that's common
to both evolutionary adaptations and human design and accounts for the
superficial similarities.

That kind of reasoning is why I wasn't bothered about talking about
evolution metaphorically having a "goal" but I'm still rethinking that
choice somewhat because I'm not confident the metaphor worked. Like, I
explained how "purpose" can be redefined based on commonalities between
how adaptation and human design work but in this context we're talking
about the "goals" of a system called "agency" that was defined a
specific way in the book, and I'm not sure "evolution" can be massaged
into that definition even for a metaphor. This bit here was very much my

Post by *Hemidactylus*

Post by Arkalen
Insofar as there is a feedback loop between perception and
behavior that optimizes things towards the goal, the "perception" is
"how does this organism interact with its environment" and the
feedback loop is "is this organism reproductively successful".

but the more I think of it the less confident I am that it worked.
Evolution doesn't do loops!

I definitely don't want to say something like "bacteria seem to have
goals but definitely don't and goal-directed agents do have goals,
ignore the appearance of a commonality as it is pure illusion" because I
don't think it's pure illusion, there's got to be a good way to account
for why one looks like the other and express it simply.

(other than "the division Tomasello proposes isn't a thing at all" of
course, which I don't buy)

Post by *Hemidactylus*
That said teleology should be watered down to teleonomy (Mayr) or apparent
goal direction in organisms due to their “programming” and is an outcome
not a target. One needs to differentiate also between the proximal focus
and distal (ultimate) when looking at evolutionary outcomes. Proximate
causation happens at the level of physiology and so called “goals” obtain
here as organisms negotiate their environment for food and such. Failures
resulting in reduced reproductive output will “reprogram” future
generations away from those failures.
Said reprogramming may result in long term trends over generational time,
but that trending (eg- cognitive complexity) cannot be interpreted as an
evolutionary goal as trends can result in devastating dead ends especially
if the ecological context or fitness landscape shifts dramatically.

Long-term trends in evolutionary change is definitely not what I meant
by "evolutionary goal".

OK I've thought on it a bit and I think I've figured out what I meant;
turns out it's very similar to the "purpose" thing after all. You'll
tell me if it makes sense, and if so, whether you can think of a pithy
way of saying it.

1) When/why do we think systems have goals? When there it behaves in
ways that yield a certain outcome, and the behaviors seem optimized so
that this outcome will happen. As if the outcome caused the behavior and
not just the other way around.

2) Humans have a whole cognitive system where this is indeed the case,
with internal representations of the desired outcome, different possible
behaviors, what outcomes they might lead to, and processing to ensure
the behavior that's actually displayed leads to the desired outcome.

3) Tomasello describes his basic "feedback-control system" as a system
where this is also the case, with an internal representation of the goal
and control over whether (and which) behaviors are displayed depending
on whether (and until) the outcome is achieved. He even argues that this
is the minimal possible system that can be goal-seeking like this.

4) Bacteria (Tomasello would argue; I'm interested in counter-arguments)
do NOT have such a feedback-control system. They do not flexibly adjust
their behavior according to whether their perceptions match up to some
internal representation of a goal.

5) Bacteria DO display behaviors that are causally related to an outcome
as we expect of a system that has goals - the difference is that the
process enabling that causal relationship, the one that adjusts the
behaviors in such a way that they end up yielding a specific outcome, is
not within the bacterium but is the process of evolution that produced it.

Hence, poetically but more misleadingly than I guess it's worth, "the
bacterium's goals are not its own but evolution's".

4 is definitely the weak point of that chain IMO, my intuition is that
it's true but I'm curious how rigorously it can be demonstrated.

Post by *Hemidactylus*
Sure humans and octopods have converged upon cognitive complexity, but so
many other species haven’t.
And this is where adaptive evolution is being considered. I dare say most
evolution is not adaptive.
[snip rest]

RonO

2024-04-06 14:15:27 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how
I think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not
sure though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things
for the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the
book is plain wrong and if so on what.
I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough
that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

I for one would be interested in a summary.

You have to go back to single celled microbes to have "no agency", and
then it would be trying to define what you are talking about. If you
want to define agency as something that requires a brain and that type
of decision making, you can do that, but that is just an extension of
what organisms were doing before they had brains. Take a simple
behavior undertaken by bacteria. There is something called the SOS
response. A bacterium finds itself in an unfavorable environment, a
physiological response is started that results in genetic mutations
occurring faster than normal. The bacterium does this because it
obviously has worked to improve the individuals situation at a high
enough frequency that the bacterial lineage survives as a population.

Bacteria can use their flagellum to move to better environments, and
they have sensors and decision making apparatus in terms of changing
direction and moving towards that better environment. Nematodes have a
more sophisticated system to do the same thing. Humans have an even
more sophisticated system to do the same thing. Chimps and humans have
group agency, they can form hunting parties more sophisticated than wolf
packs and lion prides, but wolf packs and lion prides still have less
sophisticated group agency. Have you watched Planet Earth on the BBC
channel? They show group agency among sea creatures. Sea snakes and
fish cooperate in order to be more successful in hunting prey. They
also show octopus and fish cooperating in order to hunt prey. They show
group agency among fur seals to trap fish, and they show dolphins and
whales cooperating with each other to be more efficient predators.

Agency just seems to have levels of being able to interact with the
environment. It is a general aspect of life because organisms that can
do it have an obvious advantage. Life has evolved more sophisticated
means to interact with the environment, and it has resulted in what we
call consciousness.

Ron Okimoto

Post by Arkalen
* first level of agency - early vertebrates. Basic goal-seeking: a
lizard will have distinct goals at any given time (seeking food,
resting, etc) and their behavior will depend not just on their immediate
environment but also on what their goal is at any given time. They'll
have hardwired behaviors that are deployed to meet the goal according to
the above described feedback loop, with a global inhibition mechanism
that can shut everything down in response to danger.
* second level - early mammals. They have a second layer of goal-seeking
feedback-loop system that pilots the first in order to not just achieve
a goal, but achieve it in the best way possible. Includes the ability to
mentally stage potential behaviors, anticipate their outcomes and then
pick which will work best. Also much finer inhibition abilities, able to
inhibit one behavior and switch to another in service of the same goal
instead of the global shutdown of lizards. And the ability to generate
new behaviors instead of the earlier hardwiring.
* third level - great apes. I can never remember quite what this one
does so I had to re-skim a bit but basically it's an extra layer
monitoring & controlling the mammalian decision-making one that results
in higher-level reasoning, including controlling not only how to achieve
a goal but which goal to seek to achieve (thus resolving cases where
goals conflict), understanding other's decisions, and understanding
causality - not only the basic mammalian "if I do this, that will
happen" but "if this happens *in general*, that will happen".
* fourth level - humans. Tomasello argues that the human "secret sauce"
is essentially collective agency - reasoning agents like great apes that
are also able to function as parts of a collective goal-seeking agent
that uses the same basic "goal-perception-behavior-perception" feedback
loop as all other agency. This means simultaneously modelling different
kinds of agent - the "self" agent analogous to great apes (what are your
personal interests) but also the "role" agent (what is your job as a
member of the group) and the collective agent (what are the group's
goals), as well as the "self" agency & "role" agency of collaborators.
This also implies/explains moral dilemmas: whereas other animals only
ever need to worry about one agents' goals (themselves), humans need at
every point to decide whether they'll behave in service of their
personal goals, or those of a group they're part of and if so which one
(the immediate task-oriented team? Their family? Their tribe?).
[Tomasello doesn't mention (but I immediately thought of) how a species
with an innate sense of collective agency where said agency was both
greater than any single individual but also analogous to their own
agentic self might rationalize that sentiment...]
He proposes this happened in two steps, the evolution of pairwise
collaboration somewhere in the hominid lineage, and the evolution of
full group agency in direct Homo sapiens ancestors, with the development
of strong cultural variation & norms that provide a kind internal
regulation to the collective agent and allow collaboration between
strangers that share a culture. He also proposes actual group selection
acting at this point, with groups with strong collaborative cultures
outcompeting others.
[this meshes beautifully with the "social cohesion signalling"
hypothesis for the evolution of music btw]
[another aside - he doesn't say this but it occurs to me that "arbitrary
cultural variation + collaboration" seems like it could drive the
evolution of universal computation (so children can learn whatever 100%
arbitrary cultural baggage is required to function in their band) as
well as truth-seeking (the only grounding on which one *could* base
collaboration in the face of arbitrary cultural variation), which is
kind of the core of what we think of as "our intelligence"]
He proposes the driver of the evolution of each of these layers is a
kind of unpredictability in the organism's environment. Animals that
live in very stable environments can rely on hardwired behaviors that
change at the speed of evolution. Early vertebrates would have been
hunters that had to quickly adapt to also-evolving prey and
agency/goal-seeking would have allowed that. Early mammals were social
animals that were in competition not only with the prey but with their
peers; an extra control layer to optimize behaviors would give them an
edge. Early great apes that foraged for fruit would have had even higher
competition for this resource that's concentrated in isolated patches
with few access points.
OK maybe that didn't end up that short ;) I hope I didn't mess it up too
badly given it was mostly from memory, but that's basically it.

Arkalen

2024-04-06 17:44:22 UTC

Post by RonO

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that
kind of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still
impacts how I think about human consciousness and social living. I'm
still not sure though how much of that is just being dazzled, or
reading things for the first time that are actually already
well-known, or if the book is plain wrong and if so on what.
I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough
that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

I for one would be interested in a summary.

You have to go back to single celled microbes to have "no agency", and
then it would be trying to define what you are talking about.

Yes. Doing so is the book's point.

Post by RonO
If you
want to define agency as something that requires a brain and that type
of decision making, you can do that, but that is just an extension of
what organisms were doing before they had brains.

The book doesn't define agency as requiring brains, it defines it as a
specific type of behavioral organization. It admittedly takes it so much
for granted that this organization requires a brain that it doesn't even
mention it (that I recall), but it's really not relevant to the book's
argument.

After all the book itself says the kinds of agency it discusses evolved
convergently in different lineages. If we showed some brainless creature
displays the kind of internal organization & resulting behavioral
complexity characteristic of one of the kinds of agency defined in the
book, the fact it doesn't have a brain wouldn't matter at all. If it had
the kind of internal organization without the types of behavior
Tomasello associates with them or vice-versa, that would indeed go
against his thesis.

Post by RonO
Take a simple
behavior undertaken by bacteria. There is something called the SOS
response. A bacterium finds itself in an unfavorable environment, a
physiological response is started that results in genetic mutations
occurring faster than normal. The bacterium does this because it
obviously has worked to improve the individuals situation at a high
enough frequency that the bacterial lineage survives as a population.
Bacteria can use their flagellum to move to better environments, and
they have sensors and decision making apparatus in terms of changing
direction and moving towards that better environment. Nematodes have a
more sophisticated system to do the same thing. Humans have an even
more sophisticated system to do the same thing. Chimps and humans have
group agency, they can form hunting parties more sophisticated than wolf
packs and lion prides, but wolf packs and lion prides still have less
sophisticated group agency. Have you watched Planet Earth on the BBC
channel? They show group agency among sea creatures. Sea snakes and
fish cooperate in order to be more successful in hunting prey. They
also show octopus and fish cooperating in order to hunt prey. They show
group agency among fur seals to trap fish, and they show dolphins and
whales cooperating with each other to be more efficient predators.
Agency just seems to have levels of being able to interact with the
environment. It is a general aspect of life because organisms that can
do it have an obvious advantage. Life has evolved more sophisticated
means to interact with the environment, and it has resulted in what we
call consciousness.
Ron Okimoto

Yes, and the book presents a specific classification of those levels,
arguing it corresponds to specific kinds of internal organization that
result in specific behavioral patterns. I can't really tell if you
disagree with the book (or my summary of it at least) and think what you
just wrote is a refutation of it, or if you agree with it but think what
you just wrote is a better way of describing the system than the book's.

Arkalen

/snip

RonO

2024-04-06 23:54:44 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that
kind of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still
impacts how I think about human consciousness and social living.
I'm still not sure though how much of that is just being dazzled,
or reading things for the first time that are actually already
well-known, or if the book is plain wrong and if so on what.
I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still
might if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long
enough that someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

I for one would be interested in a summary.

You have to go back to single celled microbes to have "no agency", and
then it would be trying to define what you are talking about.

Yes. Doing so is the book's point.

Post by RonO
If you want to define agency as something that requires a brain and
that type of decision making, you can do that, but that is just an
extension of what organisms were doing before they had brains.

The book doesn't define agency as requiring brains, it defines it as a
specific type of behavioral organization. It admittedly takes it so much
for granted that this organization requires a brain that it doesn't even
mention it (that I recall), but it's really not relevant to the book's
argument.
After all the book itself says the kinds of agency it discusses evolved
convergently in different lineages. If we showed some brainless creature
displays the kind of internal organization & resulting behavioral
complexity characteristic of one of the kinds of agency defined in the
book, the fact it doesn't have a brain wouldn't matter at all. If it had
the kind of internal organization without the types of behavior
Tomasello associates with them or vice-versa, that would indeed go
against his thesis.

Post by RonO
Take a simple behavior undertaken by bacteria. There is something
called the SOS response. A bacterium finds itself in an unfavorable
environment, a physiological response is started that results in
genetic mutations occurring faster than normal. The bacterium does
this because it obviously has worked to improve the individuals
situation at a high enough frequency that the bacterial lineage
survives as a population.
Bacteria can use their flagellum to move to better environments, and
they have sensors and decision making apparatus in terms of changing
direction and moving towards that better environment. Nematodes have
a more sophisticated system to do the same thing. Humans have an even
more sophisticated system to do the same thing. Chimps and humans
have group agency, they can form hunting parties more sophisticated
than wolf packs and lion prides, but wolf packs and lion prides still
have less sophisticated group agency. Have you watched Planet Earth
on the BBC channel? They show group agency among sea creatures. Sea
snakes and fish cooperate in order to be more successful in hunting
prey. They also show octopus and fish cooperating in order to hunt
prey. They show group agency among fur seals to trap fish, and they
show dolphins and whales cooperating with each other to be more
efficient predators.
Agency just seems to have levels of being able to interact with the
environment. It is a general aspect of life because organisms that
can do it have an obvious advantage. Life has evolved more
sophisticated means to interact with the environment, and it has
resulted in what we call consciousness.
Ron Okimoto

I disagreed with your statement that nematodes had no agency, and I
outlined what the book needed to consider about how life works in terms
of dealing with the environment we find ourselves in.

It sounds like the book understand this, and is dealing with forms
cognition involved after lifeforms evolved nervous systems. Nervous
systems only allowed more sophisticated interactions with the environment.

Ron Okimoto

Post by Arkalen
Arkalen
/snip

Richmond

2024-04-06 14:51:50 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Tomasello defines "agency" as a kind of goal-seeking system: a system
that has a goal, is capable of perceiving the environment, verifying
whether the goal is met, if not deploying a behavior that would move
the goal forward, and looping between verification/behavior until the
goal is met. Analogy is a robot lawnmower.

If we substitute the ultimate goal, which is to survive, instead of
various means to an end type goals, then agency becomes life. But...

Post by Arkalen
He argues that animal evolution has seen progressive complexification
of agency that basically involves adding layers, with higher ones
monitoring/controlling the lower ones. He focuses on the history of
human evolution specifically and takes some example organisms from
lineages that presumably match the level of agency a human ancestor
would have had (he acknowledges convergent evolution of various levels
of agency in other lineages but leaves it at that).
* no agency - nematodes. There isn't goal-seeking, just
stimulus-response. The animal eats food if it runs into it, escapes
danger if it's present etc but doesn't really *plan* or anticipate
beyond its immediate environment

The robot lawnmower doesn't plan either. Although some planning went
into making it no doubt. I think the animal does have a goal here, which
is to survive, and behaviours like eating and avoiding are a means to
that goal.

Some animals have not progressed to more complexity. In fact I don't
think it is necessarily progress, it depends on whether it achieves the
goal. There are still bacteria for example, doing quite well without the
complexity of the human brain.

Arkalen

2024-04-06 17:09:25 UTC

Post by Richmond

If we substitute the ultimate goal, which is to survive, instead of
various means to an end type goals, then agency becomes life. But...

Yes, "plan" was bad word choice on my part because by Tomasello's own
classification "planning" would be a level 2 type of agency at least,
and he wouldn't describe lizards (the exemplar for "goal-directed
agents") as doing it either. I don't have a single-word alternative
though. Maybe I could have said "doesn't flexibly direct/inhibit its
behaviors to meet specific goals that change over time".

Post by Richmond
Some animals have not progressed to more complexity. In fact I don't
think it is necessarily progress, it depends on whether it achieves the
goal. There are still bacteria for example, doing quite well without the
complexity of the human brain.

It is a rather annoying feature of discussing the evolutionary history
of any highly derived trait (and ten times worse when the trait is
highly derived *in humans*), that it will necessarily involve going
through the history of a lineage with that trait looking at how it
progressively got more derived in that lineage. And if any version of
that trait can be found in extant organisms, those organisms will be
used as illustrative examples.

This *looks* like framing evolution as an inherent progression along
this trait with organisms that have a less-derived versions seeming
"less evolved". But it's not. I mean, it *can* be, but a person who
fully believes that evolution isn't about universal progression, that
every modern animal is equally evolved, that no extant adaptation is
better than another because the fact they exist means they promote the
survival of the species they're in and that's the only standard for
"goodness" that's relevant to evolution... will still, in the specific
context of discussing the historical evolution of some highly-derived
trait, end up discussing it in these terms. All they can do is add
caveats to make it clear what it is they're doing. Tomasello does.

Chris Thompson

2024-04-07 01:33:30 UTC

Post by Richmond

If we substitute the ultimate goal, which is to survive, instead of
various means to an end type goals, then agency becomes life. But...

I believe most biologists would argue that the ultimate goal is not
survival but reproduction. The two are not at all identical. Just look
at the feeding behavior of male mayflies.

Chris

Post by Richmond

The robot lawnmower doesn't plan either. Although some planning went
into making it no doubt. I think the animal does have a goal here, which
is to survive, and behaviours like eating and avoiding are a means to
that goal.
Some animals have not progressed to more complexity. In fact I don't
think it is necessarily progress, it depends on whether it achieves the
goal. There are still bacteria for example, doing quite well without the
complexity of the human brain.

Richmond

2024-04-07 07:35:52 UTC

Post by Chris Thompson
I believe most biologists would argue that the ultimate goal is not
survival but reproduction. The two are not at all identical. Just look
at the feeding behavior of male mayflies.

OK, survival of the genes then?

Burkhard

2024-04-06 09:53:17 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,

hello too! It's so nice to have you back!!

Post by Arkalen
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind of
blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for the
first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is plain
wrong and if so on what.

I haven't read this one (but on the reading list now), I knew his work
mainly from the debate he had with Chomsky, and his rejection of the
idea of an innate universal grammar in favour of a social learning
model. I thought at the time that while the idea of shared intentionality
was very appealing and plausible, and explains a lot, on its own
I could not see how it overcomes the "poverty of the stimulus problem"
(but this was ages ago that I read it tbh)

What I also found really interesting, for my day job, was his discussion
on third-party punishment (which he claims is uniquely human)

Post by Arkalen
I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might if
motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

Arkalen

2024-04-08 14:10:56 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,

hello too! It's so nice to have you back!!

Thanks :)

Post by Arkalen
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for
the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is
plain wrong and if so on what.

I haven't read this one (but on the reading list now), I knew his work
mainly from the debate he had with Chomsky, and his rejection of the
idea of an innate universal grammar in favour of a social learning
model. I thought at the time that while the idea of shared intentionality
was very appealing and plausible, and explains a lot, on its own
I could not see how it overcomes the "poverty of the stimulus problem"
(but this was ages ago that I read it tbh)
What I also found really interesting, for my day job, was his discussion
on third-party punishment (which he claims is uniquely human)

Was that debate live/recorded or written ? I'd be interested in seeing
it. I'm honestly surprised to hear he was rejecting innate universal
grammar in favor of social learning because I'd have thought the first
is a more logical outgrowth from what he presents "The Evolution of
Agency". For example I'm pretty sure he presents aspects of human
cooperation like basic altruism, coordinating via eye movements and
pointing etc as specific adaptations we have and chimpanzees don't or
much less so. I'd have thought "innate universal grammar" fit
comfortably in there. But I'm also not familiar enough with the debate
to be sure all the terms mean what I think they mean.

That reminds me though, I was thinking about the issues of teaching
animals language shortly after reading the book and this hypothesis kind
of fits with that too. Plenty of animals seem fine associating symbols
with things and expressing themselves that way but the resulting speech
lacks pronouns ("Koko want birkin bag; jealousy professor" not "I want a
birkin bag; you're jealous") and differentiating things like actor/acted
upon (we know Koko wants the birkin bag because the opposite doesn't
make sense but she could have ordered those words any which way to
express that meaning, with no way of lifting the ambiguity if context
didn't allow us to guess who's doing what).

And those differences seem pretty critical to the task of *coordinating
roles within a collaboration*. There's really no way to disambiguate
[Sally/John/Timmy/Jane/get groceries/pick up/mow/pool/lawn] into "I'll
get the groceries & you'll pick up Timmy at the pool, Jane can mow the
lawn" without true grammar!

Post by Arkalen
I'd toyed with the idea of doing a book report here, and still might
if motivation arises, but I figured now it's been out long enough that
someone else might actually have read it and have takes.

*Hemidactylus*

2024-04-13 22:28:52 UTC

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,

hello too! It's so nice to have you back!!

Thanks :)

Post by Arkalen
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for
the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is
plain wrong and if so on what.

I haven't read this one (but on the reading list now), I knew his work
mainly from the debate he had with Chomsky, and his rejection of the
idea of an innate universal grammar in favour of a social learning
model. I thought at the time that while the idea of shared intentionality
was very appealing and plausible, and explains a lot, on its own
I could not see how it overcomes the "poverty of the stimulus problem"
(but this was ages ago that I read it tbh)
What I also found really interesting, for my day job, was his discussion
on third-party punishment (which he claims is uniquely human)

Was that debate live/recorded or written ? I'd be interested in seeing
it. I'm honestly surprised to hear he was rejecting innate universal
grammar in favor of social learning because I'd have thought the first
is a more logical outgrowth from what he presents "The Evolution of
Agency". For example I'm pretty sure he presents aspects of human
cooperation like basic altruism, coordinating via eye movements and
pointing etc as specific adaptations we have and chimpanzees don't or
much less so. I'd have thought "innate universal grammar" fit
comfortably in there. But I'm also not familiar enough with the debate
to be sure all the terms mean what I think they mean.
That reminds me though, I was thinking about the issues of teaching
animals language shortly after reading the book and this hypothesis kind
of fits with that too. Plenty of animals seem fine associating symbols
with things and expressing themselves that way but the resulting speech
lacks pronouns ("Koko want birkin bag; jealousy professor" not "I want a
birkin bag; you're jealous") and differentiating things like actor/acted
upon (we know Koko wants the birkin bag because the opposite doesn't
make sense but she could have ordered those words any which way to
express that meaning, with no way of lifting the ambiguity if context
didn't allow us to guess who's doing what).
And those differences seem pretty critical to the task of *coordinating
roles within a collaboration*. There's really no way to disambiguate
[Sally/John/Timmy/Jane/get groceries/pick up/mow/pool/lawn] into "I'll
get the groceries & you'll pick up Timmy at the pool, Jane can mow the
lawn" without true grammar!

The book seems good enough so far. Got me interested in feedback control
systems and their complexification across taxa. He teased me with a shout
out to Piaget’s behavioral driven evolution, but kinda shifts from Papa
Jean’s favored Baldwin effect. Tomasello could have really fucked up for me
in how he addresses MacLean’s obsolete triune brain schema.

He says: “In terms of brain bases for these new motivational mechanisms,
classic views attribute to reptiles a completely nonemotional reptilian
brain that lacks a limbic system, which contrasts with the emotional brain
of mammals (P. MacLean, 1990). Modern research now downplays the
differences between reptilian and mammalian brains (e.g., Naumann et al.,
2015), but it is still the case that the “limbic system” (however that is
now conceptualized) seems to play a more important role in mammalian than
in reptilian behavior.” From The Evolution of Agency

He cites this interesting article that starts off showing a von Baerian
divergence from a shared Bauplan over the Haeckelian mode of MacLean’s
version of the “reptile brain”:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)00218-3

The article cites Sagan rather than MacLean, starts off pretty good then
loses the plot for me. Is there still a so-called reptile brain then or a
basal amniote brain at least that mammals and great apes complexify a bit?

Above Tomasello puts “limbic system” in requisite square quotes. His book
seems more a look at behavioral systems than neuroanatomy and its function,
so I don’t know how much Tomasello is aware of Joe LeDoux’s arguments
against a coherent limbic system, which he kinda deconstructed out of
existence. Limbic systems and triune brains belong in the dustbin.

*Hemidactylus*

2024-04-15 11:27:41 UTC

Post by *Hemidactylus*

Post by Arkalen
Hello all,

hello too! It's so nice to have you back!!

Thanks :)

Post by Arkalen
Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?
I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for
the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is
plain wrong and if so on what.

I haven't read this one (but on the reading list now), I knew his work
mainly from the debate he had with Chomsky, and his rejection of the
idea of an innate universal grammar in favour of a social learning
model. I thought at the time that while the idea of shared intentionality
was very appealing and plausible, and explains a lot, on its own
I could not see how it overcomes the "poverty of the stimulus problem"
(but this was ages ago that I read it tbh)
What I also found really interesting, for my day job, was his discussion
on third-party punishment (which he claims is uniquely human)

Was that debate live/recorded or written ? I'd be interested in seeing
it. I'm honestly surprised to hear he was rejecting innate universal
grammar in favor of social learning because I'd have thought the first
is a more logical outgrowth from what he presents "The Evolution of
Agency". For example I'm pretty sure he presents aspects of human
cooperation like basic altruism, coordinating via eye movements and
pointing etc as specific adaptations we have and chimpanzees don't or
much less so. I'd have thought "innate universal grammar" fit
comfortably in there. But I'm also not familiar enough with the debate
to be sure all the terms mean what I think they mean.
That reminds me though, I was thinking about the issues of teaching
animals language shortly after reading the book and this hypothesis kind
of fits with that too. Plenty of animals seem fine associating symbols
with things and expressing themselves that way but the resulting speech
lacks pronouns ("Koko want birkin bag; jealousy professor" not "I want a
birkin bag; you're jealous") and differentiating things like actor/acted
upon (we know Koko wants the birkin bag because the opposite doesn't
make sense but she could have ordered those words any which way to
express that meaning, with no way of lifting the ambiguity if context
didn't allow us to guess who's doing what).
And those differences seem pretty critical to the task of *coordinating
roles within a collaboration*. There's really no way to disambiguate
[Sally/John/Timmy/Jane/get groceries/pick up/mow/pool/lawn] into "I'll
get the groceries & you'll pick up Timmy at the pool, Jane can mow the
lawn" without true grammar!

The book seems good enough so far. Got me interested in feedback control
systems and their complexification across taxa. He teased me with a shout
out to Piaget’s behavioral driven evolution, but kinda shifts from Papa
Jean’s favored Baldwin effect. Tomasello could have really fucked up for me
in how he addresses MacLean’s obsolete triune brain schema.
He says: “In terms of brain bases for these new motivational mechanisms,
classic views attribute to reptiles a completely nonemotional reptilian
brain that lacks a limbic system, which contrasts with the emotional brain
of mammals (P. MacLean, 1990). Modern research now downplays the
differences between reptilian and mammalian brains (e.g., Naumann et al.,
2015), but it is still the case that the “limbic system” (however that is
now conceptualized) seems to play a more important role in mammalian than
in reptilian behavior.” From The Evolution of Agency
He cites this interesting article that starts off showing a von Baerian
divergence from a shared Bauplan over the Haeckelian mode of MacLean’s
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)00218-3
The article cites Sagan rather than MacLean, starts off pretty good then
loses the plot for me. Is there still a so-called reptile brain then or a
basal amniote brain at least that mammals and great apes complexify a bit?
Above Tomasello puts “limbic system” in requisite square quotes. His book
seems more a look at behavioral systems than neuroanatomy and its function,
so I don’t know how much Tomasello is aware of Joe LeDoux’s arguments
against a coherent limbic system, which he kinda deconstructed out of
existence. Limbic systems and triune brains belong in the dustbin.

Hmmm…, given Evan MacLean is cited several times by Tomasello, I’m not too
sure what to make of this:
https://academictree.org/psych/peopleinfo.php?pid=7955

Which indicates Evan MacLean to be Paul MacLean’s actual grandson?
Interesting.

And:
https://academictree.org/psych/peopleinfo.php?pid=7956

Note Tomasello.

And here Evan is noted for advisory role pertaining to the Paul D MacLean
Award:
https://dogs.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/people/CVs/MacLean_CV.pdf

jillery

2024-04-06 12:16:14 UTC