Malcolm MacIver:
(Thursday, June 28, 9am)
Our work on electric fish-inspired underwater robots through the past decade has taught us much about how these fish can move across time, and what they sense. Compared to the much bigger sensing spaces of land animals such as birds and mammals, our underwater existence was dominated by behavioral urgency due to only sensing predators or prey within a few body lengths. I’ll focus on how sentience changed when fish clambered up on land 385 million years ago. A stunning change in sensory capability provided a strong selective advantage for imagining the future compared to our fish ancestors. Simulated predator-prey behavior suggests that planning had little benefit at the sensory distances typical of underwater life, but high benefit on land. Ecology may induce cognition. The aquatic to land transition was from a form of sentience stuck in a stimulus-response regime with respect to near-field threats and opportunities, to one where internally driven plans can take root in the imagination and allow mastery of spatially or temporally distant goals. I’ll close by sketching what the next transition in sentience ought to be.
MacIver, M. A., Schmitz, L., Mugan, U., Murphey, T. D., & Mobley, C. D. (2017). Massive increase in visual range preceded the origin of terrestrial vertebrates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(12), E2375-E2384.
Commentary: Evolution, an Irresistibly Clear View of Land, by Dan-E. Nilsson. Current Biology, 2017, . Response to commentary by MacIver & Schmitz.
Comme la lumière passe moins bien dans l’eau, lorsque les poissons ont commencé à regarder hors du milieu aquatique (dans l’air), leur champ de vision a augmenté. Ce changement aurait favorisé l’évolution du cerveau et le développement de stratégie cognitive prospective (anticipation, perspective futuriste, etc.). Je me demande, si le cerveau de ces premiers poissons a pu suivre l’évolution de leurs yeux. Augmenter son champs de vision implique aussi augmenter la quantité d’information à analyser. Je trouve aussi qu’elle néglige peut être l’importance des autres sens, telle que l’ouïe. Par exemple, le son se transmet aussi mieux dans l’air que dans l’eau. Les autres modalités sensorielles ont peut-être aussi également contribué à l’évolution de la cognition.
ReplyDeleteÉvidemment, les autres sens sont important pour la survie pour la plupart des espèces, qu’elles soient terrestres ou aquatiques. Par contre, certaines sont plus importantes pour les différentes espèces. Pour les prédateurs, la vision peut etre plus importante que l'ouïe, dependemment de l’adaption qu’on parle, puisqu’elle permet de facilement détecter les proies. Il serait difficile de detecter et être capable d’attraper un insecte qui ne fait presqu’aucun bruit. C’est pourquoi je crois que l’auteur s’est concentré sur la vision: c’est le premier a s'être developper et a avoir ete aussi efficace des le debut (avec la locomotion).
Delete(Desole pour les accents, mon clavier est anglais)!
Bonjour James, si mon souvenir est correct, Prof Maclver théorise qu'au moment où nos ancêtres poissons avec des yeux de crocodiles ont commencé à sortir de l'eau, ils ont bénéficié d'une période particulière dans l'évolution ou ils étaient pratiquement les seuls prédateurs terrestres. Bref, c'était un vrai festin. De la bouffe partout, des bonnes larves succulentes, etc. Autrement dit, ce n'est probablement pas dès leur sortie de l'eau que l'évolution du cerveau a été mise sous pression pour "suivre l'évolution des yeux" comme tu dis, mais pas mal plus tard lorsqu'il y a commencé à avoir de la compétition pour les ressources.
DeletePour ce qui est des modalités sonores, je vais aller avec Simon, mais juste ajouter que dans cette même optique (sans mauvais jeu de mot), le développement de l'audition n'a pas subi de grosses pressions évolutives (en d'autres mots, ce n'était pas une question de survie que de mieux entendre, sentir, etc.); c'était plutôt une période d'abondance et d'orgies alimentaires... :)
Sans oublier qu'en étant les seuls prédateurs terrestres dans le coin, ils étaient non seulement entourés de nourriture, mais en plus EUX-MÊMES protégée de tout autre prédateur. Un scénario idéal: il leur suffisait de sortir de l'eau pour être à l'abri de potentiels prédateurs qui eux auraient étés "prisonniers" de l'eau, incapable de les approcher.
DeleteThanks for the talk, I thought it was really thought-provoking. You identified two main factors that could have contributed to the development of sentience on land -- the ratio of sensory volume to motor volume and the level of entropy in the environment. Are there any other significant factors about moving onto land that could have influenced the evolution of sentience, or are those two factors exhaustive?
ReplyDeleteAlso,the end of the (really well produced) video you showed mentioned the role of technology in vastly increasing our sensory volume. I was wondering how you think technology will influence or has influenced our sentience and if you think this is/will be a mostly positive change or a negative change. Thanks!
(You have another chance to ask at the Panel.)
DeleteHello Jeremy insightful questions thanks. Regarding your question on whether other factors besides complexity of habit and expansion of sensory volume played a role in giving us the added "deliberative" dimension of sentience: This seems likely to me, I'm only telling you the ones I know a little bit about. For example, if you imagine eating lunch tomorrow, and thinking of the menu of your favorite place, and deciding you're really craving the pickled egg with anchovies....and a number of other finer preferences, it might be different if you had no language. It seems possible that language may enable imagining at a finer degree of resolution than without, especially imagining non-visual scenarios (since so much of our brain is already dedicated to visual processing/imagining).
DeleteRegarding the video: I can imagine a number of ways we can put band-aids over our pathetically short spatiotemporal range of planning. One, that may be eventually forced by the dominance of short range thinking, is to shift to autocratic political rule. This is obviously not that attractive, but it also clear that autocratic regimes do a better job at long term planning. More on the technology side, if we take things that are currently outside of our sensory volume, and jam them in, such as a real time visualization of our CO2 footprint, we can start to modulate behavior to reduce this in a potentially more effective way. The example at the end when a collective dons VR is about groups of people competing in a friendly way with other groups to reduce energy footprint/resource use, something that could be done as a way to harness our powerful collectivist instincts and competitive instincts for good. Finally, we can think of institutional inventions. This is something I'm actually working on right now. I'm about to launch a test of a Climate Prediction market. The idea is that prediction markets may be a good way to make long range, distant consequences something you can feel now, because you lose money proportionate to false belief in a market that requires you to make correct predictions about the future of our climate. Stay tuned for that.
In the first part of your response, you say that language could enable imagining at a finer degree of resolution than without. I was wondering if there’s something else that could come after or next to the sensory and motor volume to make the planning even more effective or perhaps including more stuff. By example, while I had lunch, a seagull suddenly appeared in front of me, staying still, clearly claiming a piece of my food. I don't really know the characteristics of such birds, but I’m pretty sure they have a better vision than I (If not, let’s just take the case of an hawk or owl). According to your hypothesis, they would initially (before that we acquire language) have a greater capacity of planning than we do, maybe even a greater imagination (depending on the scenario they’re able to plan).
DeleteIs language the single cause of the variability of our planning capacity and therefore of the richness of what we can imagine? Touch, view, smell, hearing and taste is given to a majority of animal, lots of them do better than us with often many senses each.
Hi, thanks so much for the response! Super interested in the idea of this sort of planning based evolution at a political level, and your climate prediction market? Is there any literature yet on the latter? Or is it forthcoming
DeleteFrédérick Deschênes: Eagles have better acuity than humans. This is an adaptation to hunting from far above where 1) they can survey a vast amount of space and 2) are hard to see by their prey. Note that the analogous case here to examples in my talk is the zero entropy world, because there is no structure between the eagle and their prey - or very little at least until up close. But the computational results suggest that when the world has low entropy, the benefit of planning is modest. Thus it is too simple to say planning is a direct function of acuity.
DeleteAfter conversing in class as to whether or not sentience is related to the reactive mode of living beings, I started to ask myself: what if it’s not the development of the acuity that gave us sentience, but the development of an endothermic characteristic? Or maybe both? I don't think reductionnism would be convenient in this scenario. Sentience is multidisciplinary concept. What are your thoughts?
ReplyDeleteYou seem to say that planning is always better than no plan at all. But it seems to me that a plan is predictable and predictable is a weakness in many cases. It is for a prey, for example.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your insightfull presentation. In your 2017 article on the massive increase in visual range, you say that (1) larger sockets correlate whit larger eyes, (2) larger eye strongly correlate with larger pupils and that (3) pupil size is a good proxi variable in estimating visual capability. However, we may lose a lot of statistical power from (1) to (3), accumulating error. Also, it seems to me that too many cases do not follow this logical reasoning, the range of sight of the eagle eye comparing to mine, to give an example.
ReplyDeleteThis is why we have a 100 page Supplement - I recommend you take a look at this, particularly the highly detailed sensitivity analysis, where we vary all parameters within the expected domain of variation. In brief, while there are some uncertainties, they do not affect the conclusion.
DeleteThank you! I will take a look.
DeleteDans l’eau, le champ visuel est particulièrement réduit. Conséquemment, il n’est pas possible de voir à une distance permettant la planification et la prise (réfléchie) de décision. Chaque moment est un danger possible dans lequel on doit avoir un temps de réaction constamment rapide. Selon Maclver, en sortant la tête de l’eau, le champ de vision était grandement amélioré. Éventuellement, par le grossissement des yeux et en voyant à une distance plus longue, chaque entrée sensorielle n’était plus automatiquement reliée à une réponse motrice rapide, et on a pu commencer à réfléchir à comment agir et réagir aux différents stimuli sensoriels. Il fait sens de dire, me semble-t-il, qu’à partir de ce moment, l’expérience subjective n’était plus la même, sans dire toutefois que la conscience (le ressenti) soit apparue à ce moment précis et qu’avant il n’y avait rien.
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ReplyDeleteDid we lose cognitive abilities in the transition out of the water as we gained new abilities from having better vision and those planning abilities?
Also, a little later in the summer school, other water creatures were used as models. One point became clear, if vision is the sensory system that gets the most attention, touch - tactile sensory system seems to be quite absent. Did we lose some sophistication when it comes to the tactile sensory system ?
DeleteWhat enhanced vision with the emergence from water may have driven was enhanced cognitive and behavioral capacities. But unless it is assumed that fish did not feel at all before emerging -- neither what it felt like to hear, nor hear, nor touch nor move nor see -- sentience surely preceded the emergence. What the evolution of sensory and cognitive capacities brings is change and expansion in what is felt, not in whether anything is felt at all.
ReplyDeleteTwo questions from a student with no background in biology or ecology: What was the previous or what is still the competing theory of that of Mr MacIver and his colleague? In other terms, if the evolution of the eyes isn't the first or the main reason why fishes got on the land, what could it be? The sole evolution of the limbs or a convergent evolution of all of the five senses? For example: https://www.earthtouchnews.com/natural-world/evolution/walking-fish-help-scientists-to-understand-how-we-left-the-ocean/
ReplyDeleteHow can we articulate the idea that we have still anatonomical clues linking us to the fishes, in particular this theory: That our evolution from embryo to baby as human baby would mimic our evolution from fish to human being, with eyes starting out on the sides of our head, but then moving to the middle. This, without apparently passing through a much elevated position on the head (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13278255).
We have seen that the eyes of aquatic vertebrates have tripled in size so that they develop very precise visual skills in the air: having both a short vision and long distance vision on the land floor. It is likely that there have been considerable changes in the environment. Would it be possible to have more explanations about environmental changes?
ReplyDeleteThank you.
Thank you for the presentation. Jonathan Balcombe gave a very compelling talk a bit later in the week, indicating that the probability of fishes being sentient is somewhat very high. So I agree with Professor Harnad that most likely sentience didn’t emerge when fishes invaded land, but was present before. But I wonder, was there a significant increase in brain size to accommodate the new neural pathways required for vision or was there simply a reorganisation within the brain?
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ReplyDeleteAttribuer la sortie de l'eau au développement cognitif de la planification semble assumé le fait que les être marins pourraient difficilement développer ce genre de capacités. Toutefois, il semble bien certains font preuve d'agilité cognitive. C'est le cas entre autre des pieuvres, qui explore leur environnement avec leurs tentacules et sont capable de se faire un schéma de leur environnement.
ReplyDeleteJe ne pense pas que tous les comportements des êtres marins sont rapides dû à une planification moins grande.