Animal Mind

When I write "animal mind", my first reaction is to yell out, oxymoron. They simply do not go together. Descartes was right. Look at an animal, say a housefly. Who could possibly declare that it has a mind? If they do, we can holler, well prove it, through observation and experimentation. Show me the critter's mind! They could easily counter with, if you think you are so clever, can you prove that you have a mind! Now, that is not very easy to do, is it? A mind is one of those abstract entities that nominalists tell you are really nominal, belonging to the physical world, an abstraction of neurphysical processes. So, I could map out all the sites and processes to do with consciousness, language and the like, and then tell the other party, voila! But consciousness? Nobody has a handle on that. Language however we can work with. We can locate the various areas connected with its propagation - isolate genes needed for its development. Yes, here we are on surer ground. We can get our little fly's brain and then place it alongside ours, and compare. The fly lacks a hell of a lot of things we have. Why it doesn't even have emotions. You do not have angry flies. Flies can be aggressive, but not angry. Flies can be sex fixated, but not in love. To have the latter affects you need a lot of hardware and software houseflies lack. It is not mind we are talking about, but communication. Mind might be defined as the communicating of awareness of affective dispositions. A real mouthful. The requirement then is not complexity of the neural network, but the richness of the neurochemistry.

saliency relations iii

saliency relations and values

saliency relations

saliency ii

I am going to use as the engine of my saliency modelling, a multi-tiered affective structure based on Panksepp above and others.

Saliency

Now working on a saliency model based on animal affective neuroscience.

Semiotic Equation 2

In the diagram above one sees the relations between semiotic components. After the Big Bang, one can talk of primodial signals - later the structures and processes were organized physically into growing forms like crystals which predate the bubbles and life forms. The rules and codes of organization anticipate the building blocks of life (in a dynamic environmental context). Those rules and codes are unread from an organism's point of view. Later we find the development of secondary signalling. The sign is after the code in terms of evolution, but of course to "understand" or interpret a code one needs signs and symbols. The symbol is the last development - all of these are needed to interpret the communication phenomena. This is just a quick thought on relations. Note the divide between quantity and quality. Although one can talk of coding for quality at the level of perception even initial reception, the organism as a central organized entity is not aware of this - it occurs without awareness or sentience.

Semiotic Equation

Working on an equation (working or informal) that will help identify the key problems in semiotics with respect to the move from quantative to qualitative.

Threshold of Semiotics

A recurring problem in Zoosemiotics and Biosemiotics is that of sign awareness or recognition threshold. In other words, what is the simplest life form that is capable of sign awareness? What is required to be aware of a relation between A & B? Awareness of a relation is not the same as responding or reacting to a stimulus in an instinctive or mechanical  manner. Another important point is that the sign awareness must be from the organism's point of view and not from the human observer's pov (i.e., descriptive semiotics). We can  attribute semiotic communication to lower life forms, but this attribution is descriptive. This is a very important point since many researchers forget this. I have in my various  articles reiterated this point, one shared by critics of biosemiotics (including leading  cognitive semioticians ). I have argued that for an animal to be aware of a relationship there must be a neural working space in which signals from two or more modalities are dealt with. A bacterium when it handles information does it moreorless in the same manner as receptor cells do. The difference is that a bacterium has a freer organization (an independent life form) but discrete network. While it is true that a bacterium signals to a community at large, however the propagation and reception of the message is mechanistic, quantifiable, and very basic. Even the collective memory of the bacteria is limited in comparison to the memory found in the simplest multicellular life forms. The quorum sensing for example in bacteria is at the level of biochemistry, whereas in honeybees the swarming activity is more  distal. Of course, when we look at the behaviour and communication of a bacterium, or for that matter a virus, we see that there is still a qualitative difference between their memory and signalling systems and say stars and radios. Those qualities are subjective, connected with the awareness of sensing - sensation. A bacterium does not have a proper sense of body, as it does not have a CPU which manages the signals, instead it has biochemical structures and processes that register chemically changes - such changes occur in us automatically in our cells, and we are not conscious of them. When we compare the processing of external and internal information in the first animals proper, we find that it is less freely distributed, and more centrally controlled than in unicellular life forms. The moon jellyfish has for example eight mini CPU (marginals) that process multisensory information. These marginals constitute a cognitive working space. In addition to this, although the jellyfish lacks the capacity for true image-making, (85 % of animals have this capacity), I have hypothesized that activity connected with food, particularly troublesome fish larvae, may be registered as a "flash" in the visual context - this forming the basis for later inner representations. In otherwords primordial semiosis (awareness of signs) could be synaesthetic. Certainly, the hypothesis would be in accordance with classical semiotics where the image is paramount. From my perspective semiosis (sign awareness/consciousness should be seen in a natural continuum and viewed exactly as other evolutionary traits using the tests of evolutionary biology. Our ability to be or see relations in nature and use a token to stand for these, has evolved from simpler systems. The gulf between the linguistic and nonlinguistic systems is a different problem. If we move from the moon jellyfish (radial design) towards the bilateral design, we see that cephalization brings new and more advanced attention/focus systems which are qualitatively different from the radial design. Attention and saliency antcipates consciosness and meaning. Quite how, will be the subject of further discussion.