71–79 of 79 posts
And if so, is it not reasonable to expect every species that benefits from honing and/or exploration to also 'play'?
I don't find it surprising.
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Some level of intelligence is a prerequisite for experience of qualia. A rock for example is below that threshold. The question then becomes what exactly is the minim level of perception we are willing to accept. Individual cells respond to their environment indirectly, that’s enough to qualify IMO but I accept people would disagree. Which just illiterates people don’t generally use philosophical definitions directly…
> Some level of intelligence is a prerequisite for experience of qualia. How do you know that? It’s entirely possible that a rock has all sorts going on that we just can’t detect. Which sounds facetious, but given that we can’t even detect consciousness in humans, it seems difficult to rule it out entirely.
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Why would you assume consciousness is a thing rather than a property of a system? Temperature for example isn’t a substance. I am not saying consciousness couldn’t be a thing, but it just seems to be an assumption without justification. As to arrangements of stuff being important, arrangement of individual pieces can make the difference between a watch and a pile of pieces or a person and a dead body. Many emergent p…
>Why would you assume consciousness is a thing rather than a property of a system? If consciousness were simply the property of a system, then I'd assume it is effectively an illusion. I'm not sure, and I'm not saying this it would be de facto wrong, I'm just saying it's absurd for me to conceive of it this way, because if it is the case that it's a byproduct of a system, then there is effectively no self. It may be…
"Play" as a concept, is a clear social construct. The behaviors we call "play" is very obviously an innate instinctual behavior for humans, and is entirely plausible the same for bees. I see little here to suggest that this implies sentience apart from simple anthropomorphism.
This is not obvious to me, I’ve always thought of for example a toddler playing with a ball by themselves as learning basic intuitive physics.
The behavioral pattern exists. It's obviously instinctual. It may exist for a variety of functions, both currently important to human evolution or as a vestige from a previous era. The my entire point is that "play" again, is a social construction placed on top of a observed behavioral pattern.
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I am not entirely prepared to accept that koalas have small mammalian minds
I realized recently there’s no evidence that they don’t, but a wealth of evidence that they do. I watch animals very closely now and I see more all the time that they are just like me in most ways. I suppose I used to watch them as a person who eats them, and my comfort with doing so depended on not seeing them as conscious creatures like me. Now that I don’t eat them, it’s as though there are more similarities than…
That said, I agree with what you are saying. We tend to assume a bigger than likely distance between us and other animals.
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what says play doesn't increase the chance of survival?
If you spend any time researching play at all, you'll find that's pretty much a universal view among scientists who study it. It's essential training and learning for survival. Love Graeber, RIP, but if that's something he claimed then he's unfortunately off on that one.
From the original study: > We found that ball rolling (1) did not contribute to immediate survival strategies, (2) was intrinsically rewarding, (3) differed from functional behaviour in form, (4) was repeated but not stereotyped, and (5) was initiated under stress-free conditions. ... > We suggest that the behaviour observed here has actual hedonic value for bumble bees, which adds to the growing body of evidence of…
> "Bumblebees play because we humans think that they play"
Or maybe they are just brain-wired to explore any strange object and instinctively clean any movable peeble, fruit, and object in the path of the entry of the colony. Cleaning the colony is a very common behavior reported in bees
"We observed the pleasure centers in the brain activated in a scanner" is not the same as "we think that the pleasure centers in the brain activate because the bumblebee seems happy". One is an objective claim, the other subjective (and looks like designed to sell animism 2.0 and happy feelings).
Subjective and tainted by the positive image that we had from bumblebees. Try to sell "happy spiders play football with fly heads" for example and everybody will conclude that spiders are the worst
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If you spend any time researching play at all, you'll find that's pretty much a universal view among scientists who study it. It's essential training and learning for survival. Love Graeber, RIP, but if that's something he claimed then he's unfortunately off on that one.
sorry, the universal rule is play isn't important, or the universal rule is play is important? Also, do you have some leads on sources? I'd be interested on reading up on this.
I think this[1] would be your definitive resources but if you can just search for "evolution of play" then you'll find a lot of stuff. Wikipedia has a hodgepodge of perspectives in section on the purpose of play [2] but you might be better off tracking down those citations.
1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-handbook-...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play_(activity)#Development_an...
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I realized recently there’s no evidence that they don’t, but a wealth of evidence that they do. I watch animals very closely now and I see more all the time that they are just like me in most ways. I suppose I used to watch them as a person who eats them, and my comfort with doing so depended on not seeing them as conscious creatures like me. Now that I don’t eat them, it’s as though there are more similarities than…
Apologies, I should have made my comment clear instead of trying to be witty - what I meant was that Koalas are marsupials, not mammals. That said, I agree with what you are saying. We tend to assume a bigger than likely distance between us and other animals.
Now I suppose neither of us are prepared to accept it.