Posts by Don

A quick clarification that may have led to some confusion:

When I say Anticipations are similar to "mental concepts" in modern neuroscience, I'm not talking about rational reasoning. Godfrey may be able to help me with this.

A "concept" in this sense is a technical term that denotes a mental model against which your brain compares sensations coming in and uses to make predictions on the course of action to keep your body budget in equilibrium. Its all pre-rational, we don't "know" it's going on. The model or concept can get refined but it works below the surface.

I'm not explaining this very well, but I wanted to be clear I'm not referring to a "conceptualizing" or "reasoning."

Godfrey ? Help .

Eikadistes , the three-part brain **may** be an analogy/metaphor to simplify an explanation of human nature but it shouldn't be taken to describe the anatomy of the brain. You bring up an interesting point about the ubiquity of 3s and 4s. Maybe something about completion or the satisfying arrangement you can get from 3 (triangle) or 4 (square) objects.

Excellent summary, Cassius !! Thanks! It's got me thinking, so I'll take a step back and respond asap.

To go back to your original question:
Is There A Relationship Between "Anticipations" and "Instinct"?

I don't think so. Instinct has to do with behavior. The Anticipations have to do with perception.

To use your favorite castorine example, beavers build dams over flowing water it appears as a result of stimuli compelling that behavior. There appears to be some sort of necessity involved. There is a visible measurable behavioral result.

From my perspective, Anticipations (I'm going to say similar to "mental concepts" in the strict scientific sense of Barrett's and her peers' research) are used by the mind to assess, identify, and categorize sensory stimuli. Previous sensations build, fine-tune, and strengthen "Anticipations" but they don't lead to a compulsive behavior.

Or maybe I'm conflating instinct and instinctual behavior. Still thinking...

Quote from Cassius

Here's an example that might appeal to some. If (hopefully when) we are one day able to reconstruct Jurassic-Park style a new generation of ancient dinosaurs, would we not expect to see them exhibit behaviorisms that were typical of their ancestors eons ago, even though by the terms of their resurrection none of them ever met their parents?

I'm really torn on this one. First, I firmly agree any representative of a resurrected species is going to display instinctive behavior. And it would be cool to actually see a dinosaur or even a mammoth or mastodon.

On the other hand, you'd have to start with one. How sad would it be to doom an animal to be the only member of its species to be alive, to deny it the pleasure of "friendship" or of having a recipient to return its mating call or see its dance.

Quote from Don

"Plato wrote that the human psyche consists of three parts: rational thoughts, passions (which today we call emotions), and appetites like the drive for hunger and sex. Rational thought was in charge, controlling the passions and appetites, an arrangement that Plato described as a charioteer wrangling two winged horses."

This quote from the paper I referenced got me to think that it may be tempting to see the three Platonic parts of the psyche as comparable somehow to the three legs of the Epicurean Canon somehow. However, that temptation or any permutation of it should be resisted at all costs. That - or the idea of the triune brain analogy - sets up a false hierarchy.

I think we've discussed elsewhere that the "parts" of the Canon work in concert, each influencing the other. That's, personally, what I find so elegant about seeing Epicurean parallels in Dr. Barrett's work and that of her colleagues. Sensations influence affect which influences concepts which influence how sensations are processed which... And translated into Epicurean terms: sensations influence the two pathē (pleasure and pain) which influence prolepses which influence how sensations are processed... It's not a 1:1 correspondence but I think it has promise and it aligns with the most current brain research.

Where does this leave us in the instinct question? I don't know if you can separate "nature vs nurture." One influences the other. They're inextricably linked. It's even been found that the environment has an effect on the expression of some genes. Cues in the environment can activate certain genes and these can be inherited by offspring. That's, as I understand, a recent finding. See, for example, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-018-0113-y

Quote from Cassius

And now we add to the list of fact issues: "is the brain triune like the godhead?".

Developing a method for dealing with fact disputes apparently is something we'll need to figure out!

Doing some additional reading, I found that the triune brain myth is more akin to Plato's analogy of the mind as the charioteer and the two horses. It's more of an analogy. However, it is also misleading in portraying how the brain is actually structured and how it evolved.

See also:

https://medicine.yale.edu/news/yale-medi…ill-compelling/

"The triune brain is a combination of Plato’s tripartite psyche and Aristotle’s and Darwin’s phylogenetic scale, tattooed onto the human brain. Plato wrote that the human psyche consists of three parts: rational thoughts, passions (which today we call emotions), and appetites like the drive for hunger and sex. Rational thought was in charge, controlling the passions and appetites, an arrangement that Plato described as a charioteer wrangling two winged horses." https://web.northeastern.edu/affectiveandbr…euroletters.pdf

The triune brain in antiquity: Plato, Aristotle, Erasistratus. "This paper investigates its origins and suggests that it is perhaps now time to move on." https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20391097/

and, finally, probably the best scientific paper title I've ever seen: "Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside"

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0963721420917687

Quote from elli

Don does Dr. Barett mean that all the neurologists (including the founding member in Athens Garden mr. Christos Yapijakis) are based till our days on a wrong theory? Oh gee!

If they're using a triune brain model, yep, they're using outdated information.

Just FYI: Modern brain research has debunked the 3-part human brain. All mammalian brains (and possibly others, sorry, can't recall off the top of my head .... pun not necessarily intended) contain all those parts to varying degrees. See the work of Dr. Barrett and others.

https://how-emotions-are-made.com/notes/Triune_brain_myth

https://drsarahmckay.com/rethinking-the-reptilian-brain/

https://thebrainscientist.com/2018/04/11/you…a-lizard-brain/

Quote from Cassius

I believe those Beaver dams are going to prove critical to this question!

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67662/…vers-mood-build

Quote from Cassius

Who does Epicurus look like? For some reason I am thinking of Gerard Butler -the star of "300" -

THIS...IS... PLEASURE!!!

Quote from JJElbert

I don't know if this is an example of the "uncanny valley" or not, but when I look at this picture it's just–it's just odd somehow...

This is LOT better than some and AI has come a LONG way (no more dead-eyed Polar Express), but yeah there's definitely still some side trips down there uncanny valley. I would have liked to see his hair a little more gray but overall seeing him in his prime was cool I'll admit.

FYI

Operant conditioning: Innate vs learned behaviors (video)

Khan Academy · khanacademymedicine

Oct 26, 2015

Quote from Godfrey

It both precedes and reacts to sensations, forming concepts and affecting behaviors from such an early age that it is commonly and mistakenly thought that there are ideas and behaviors that are innate.

I think that's an important statement right there! (Emphasis added)

"Epicurus taught that all our perceptions, thoughts, sensations, concepts, etc. have their genesis in material, physical processes. There's nothing supernatural - nothing beyond our physical reality - that exists that could have an impact on us."

How's that for the elevator pitch?

Quote from Cassius

s. Just like I can see a tree in front of me and choose to contemplate it or think about something else, or hear a symphony and choose to think about something else, there seems to me to be no reason whatsoever to conclude that the mind's reception of an image would dictate that the mind occupy itself in contemplating that image to the exclusion of other thoughts.

Oh I don't think any of the texts say you can't perceive more than one thing at a time. You can touch something with your hand, see something else with your eyes, "think" of something with your mind. In fact, you have an almost infinite number of eidola streaming at you all the time. It's like a radio. ALL radio stations are streaming through the air. The dial decides which station to pay attention to.

Prolegomena_14_2_2015_Gavran_Milos.pdf

Another potentially interesting paper, search for "memory" in text.

Quote from Cassius

I would also add "no reason whatsoever...." especially since we know that Epicurus considered agency to be an important attribute of human action - it would fly in the face of agency to presume that receipt of an image would compel the mind to pursue that image and nothing else -- any more than we should consider hearing or seeing something to compel our thoughts to comply with what we see or hear.

It could be that the agency resides in one's ability to decide which images to focus on of all those streaming simultaneously to us.

The Cassius reply does seem to imply that Cicero got it wrong in some way, but that's not a lot to go on.

https://classicalstudies.org/annual-meeting…and-imagination

This paper appears to look at the exact question posed by Cassius . Unfortunately, only the abstract is at the link and it has not been uploaded to Academia. I'm putting the link here but if the paper turns up, I'll update.

It appears to have been presented at the 2016 conference.