The Evolutionary Function of What People Find Meaningful

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Bastian ◽  
Dakin ◽  
Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Function

scholarly journals How to study consciousness scientifically

1998 ◽  
Vol 353 (1377) ◽  
pp. 1935-1942 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
J. R. Searle
Keyword(s):  
Information Processing ◽  
Causal Account ◽  
Scientific Problem ◽  
Evolutionary Function ◽  
The Brain

The neurosciences have advanced to the point that we can now treat consciousness as a scientific problem like any other. The problem is to explain how brain processes cause consciousness and how consciousness is realized in the brain. Progress is impeded by a number of philosophical mistakes, and the aim of this paper is to remove nine of those mistakes: (i) consciousness cannot be defined; (ii) consciousness is subjective but science is objective; (iii) brain processes cannot explain consciousness; (iv) the problem of ‘qualia’ should be set aside; (v) consciousness is epiphenomenal; (vi) consciousness has no evolutionary function; (vii) a causal account of consciousness is necessarily dualistic; (viii) science is reductionistic, so a scientific account of consciousness would show it reducible to something else; and (ix) an account of consciousness must be an information processing account.

scholarly journals Personality drives physiological adjustments and is not related to survival

2014 ◽  
Vol 281 (1783) ◽  
pp. 20133135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allert I. Bijleveld ◽  
Georgina Massourakis ◽  
Annemarie van der Marel ◽  
Anne Dekinga ◽  
Bernard Spaans ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Animal Personality ◽  
The Other ◽  
Exploratory Behaviour ◽  
Differential Survival ◽  
Free Living ◽  
Behavioural Patterns ◽  
Evolutionary Function ◽  
Physiological Adjustments ◽  
Organ Sizes

The evolutionary function and maintenance of variation in animal personality is still under debate. Variation in the size of metabolic organs has recently been suggested to cause and maintain variation in personality. Here, we examine two main underlying notions: (i) that organ sizes vary consistently between individuals and cause consistent behavioural patterns, and (ii) that a more exploratory personality is associated with reduced survival. Exploratory behaviour of captive red knots ( Calidris canutus , a migrant shorebird) was negatively rather than positively correlated with digestive organ (gizzard) mass, as well as with body mass. In an experiment, we reciprocally reduced and increased individual gizzard masses and found that exploration scores were unaffected. Whether or not these birds were resighted locally over the 19 months after release was negatively correlated with their exploration scores. Moreover, a long-term mark–recapture effort on free-living red knots with known gizzard masses at capture confirmed that local resighting probability (an inverse measure of exploratory behaviour) was correlated with gizzard mass without detrimental effects on survival. We conclude that personality drives physiological adjustments, rather than the other way around , and suggest that physiological adjustments mitigate the survival costs of exploratory behaviour. Our results show that we need to reconsider hypotheses explaining personality variation based on organ sizes and differential survival.

scholarly journals Fishnition: Developing Models From Cognition Toward Consciousness

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Droege ◽  
Natalie Schwob ◽  
Daniel J. Weiss
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Systems Approach ◽  
Trace Conditioning ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Animal Consciousness ◽  
Temporal Representation ◽  
Evolutionary Function ◽  
Level Model ◽  
High Level

A challenge to developing a model for testing animal consciousness is the pull of opposite intuitions. On one extreme, the anthropocentric view holds that consciousness is a highly sophisticated capacity involving self-reflection and conceptual categorization that is almost certainly exclusive to humans. At the opposite extreme, an anthropomorphic view attributes consciousness broadly to any behavior that involves sensory responsiveness. Yet human experience and observation of diverse species suggest that the most plausible case is that consciousness functions between these poles. In exploring the middle ground, we discuss the pros and cons of “high level” approaches such as the dual systems approach. According to this model, System 1 can be thought of as unconscious; processing is fast, automatic, associative, heuristic, parallel, contextual, and likely to be conserved across species. Consciousness is associated with System 2 processing that is slow, effortful, rule-based, serial, abstract, and exclusively human. An advantage of this model is the clear contrast between heuristic and decision-based responses, but it fails to include contextual decision-making in novel conditions which falls in between these two categories. We also review a “low level” model involving trace conditioning, which is a trained response to the first of two paired stimuli separated by an interval. This model highlights the role of consciousness in maintaining a stimulus representation over a temporal span, though it overlooks the importance of attention in subserving and also disrupting trace conditioning in humans. Through a critical analysis of these two extremes, we will develop the case for flexible behavioral response to the stimulus environment as the best model for demonstrating animal consciousness. We discuss a methodology for gauging flexibility across a wide variety of species and offer a case study in spatial navigation to illustrate our proposal. Flexibility serves the evolutionary function of enabling the complex evaluation of changing conditions, where motivation is the basis for goal valuation, and attention selects task-relevant stimuli to aid decision-making processes. We situate this evolutionary function within the Temporal Representation Theory of consciousness, which proposes that consciousness represents the present moment in order to facilitate flexible action.

scholarly journals Can Status Inequality Organize Cooperation in Multi-leader Systems? An Evolutionary Theory

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsuan-Wei Lee ◽  
Yen-Ping Chang ◽  
Yen-Sheng Chiang
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Evolutionary Game ◽  
Game Model ◽  
Task Groups ◽  
Cooperative Interactions ◽  
Evolutionary Function ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Status Inequality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Multiple Leaders

Abstract Status hierarchies often emerge in small collective task groups. In these groups, clearly defined hierarchies facilitate and stabilize structured cooperative interactions among group members, supporting their evolutionary function in the real world. What the existing research in this field has failed to consider, however, is that cooperation matters in these hierarchies with clear status inequality, as well as in other more realistic, multiple-leader groups with less clear hierarchies. Multi-leadership is ubiquitous but, by definition, flattens status inequality and may, in turn, jeopardize its capacity to sustain cooperation. Leveraging the relationship between multi-leadership and cooperation, our evolutionary game model reveals that hierarchies, in general, promote cooperation in groups with multiple leaders, but these hierarchies only do that up to a point, after which multi-leadership backfires. Accordingly, the model provides not only a theoretical account for how multi-leadership coexists with cooperation but also the conditions under which the coexistence would break.

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