Cognitive Theory: Ongoing Progress, part 2

Lately, I've been investigating ways of breaking causality in Turing derivative devices (like computers). I remembered that years ago I wrote a non-recursive solution to Towers of Hanoi that wasn't sensitive to the initial state. In other words, it could begin with any legal positioning of the disks and solve in the least number of moves. So, it occurred to me that if the program didn't rely on the previous state for a solution then this would imply a causal break. And it would seem that randomness in the environment would do the same thing. This wasn't a new idea. I was well aware that Hofstadter said the same thing almost forty years ago.

The next thing to consider was whether this appears in living organisms. The example that came to mind was stereotypical behavior of zoo animals. For example, bears will pace for hours at a time. In the documentaries I'd seen on this the treatment was to make the bear's environment more random. So, it looks like we have confirmation of degraded behavior when environmental entropy is lacking, and an improvement of behavior when environmental entropy is restored. To be honest, the idea that something as intelligent as a bear is so dependent on environmental entropy was quite surprising to me.

This could mean that animals have been more dependent on environmental entropy than I suspected. This would also suggest that animal consciousness would be more constrained. However humans don't seem to have this severe reliance on environmental entropy. Why? The next question is if this is seen with great apes which are closer in brain structure to humans. Since I'm not very knowledgeable about this, I need more information from people who are.

How Abnormal Is the Behaviour of Captive, Zoo-Living Chimpanzees?

Our overall finding was that abnormal behaviour was present in all sampled individuals across six independent groups of zoo-living chimpanzees, despite the differences between these groups in size, composition, housing, etc. We found substantial variation between individuals in the frequency and duration of abnormal behaviour, but all individuals engaged in at least some abnormal behaviour, and variation across individuals could not be explained by sex, age, rearing history or background (defined as prior housing conditions).

So, this wouldn't rule it out. However, it doesn't have information about treatment. In the one experiment that I can recall that specifically sought to make the environment of zoo chimpanzees less predictable, the new elements only seemed to be noticed by juvenile chimps. Mature chimps didn't seem to pay any attention.

Stereotypic Behavior in Nonhuman Primates as a Model for the Human Condition

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder whose central features include impaired social interaction and communication as well as stereotyped patterns of behavior

This is of perhaps more interest to me because my nephew has Asperger Syndrome and he does have stereotypical behavior.

in a study of 210 residents of a facility for individuals with intellectual disability, 60.9% were reported to exhibit stereotypies

So, it appears that this behavior in humans is seen with some type of brain disorder. This would suggest that there is a distinct difference between, say, chimp and human cognition. But then we have treatment:

In rhesus macaques, stereotypies have been associated with environmental restriction such as single housing; those housed singly exhibited more repetitive locomotion, stereotypy, and self-directed behavior than did monkeys housed in social groups. Similarly, chimpanzees removed from their social group and placed in individual cages also showed an increase in stereotyped behaviors

In older animals, additional environmental enhancements such as foraging opportunities can also promote an improvement in behavior. For example, the provisioning of straw, food puzzles, and forage materials reduced abnormal behavior in chimpanzees and rhesus macaques; as foraging increased, abnormal behaviors, including stereotypies, decreased.

Now that is quite interesting to me since the chimpanzees are responding to entropy in a way similar to bears. And, this would explain why the older chimps didn't pay attention in the experiment that I was familiar with. And then:

As with nonhuman primates, environmental enrichment also reduced stereotyped behavior in both children and adults with autism and intellectual disabilities

when institutionalized intellectually disabled adults were presented with pictures to look at or objects to manipulate, allowing for an alternate activity, they showed reduced levels of stereotypies.

Similarly, when 13 autistic children were provided with multiple sensorimotor stimuli, including olfactory enrichment, music enrichment, and exposure to different textures and toys, they showed a significant reduction in autism severity scores in comparison with the control group that did not receive the enrichment, and there was also a significant increase in the number of parents reporting an improvement in autism symptoms

This does seem to refute Hofstadter's suggestion that environmental entropy alone could be enough for human level cognition. And, it points to a direction for more investigation. One more piece of the consciousness puzzle.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2AiwQWS