Murderous Elephant Sophonts
Gregor links two news articles I also noticed. The most recent says that Elephants pass the test of self-awareness, like apes, dolphins, and man. The other is about maurauding bands of violent orphan elephants. The journalist cited in NYT draws a parallel between human war orphans. The theory is that elephants actually learn civil behavior from their parents, and removing the parents breaks this pattern.
Of course, Rousseau’s ideas about humans were overturned long ago — if you abandon human children to raise themselves, they don’t automatically become civilized. The fact that “Lord of the Flies” was still widely discussed shows that Rousseau’s ideas were seductive less than 100 years ago, but thankfully we’re past that.
On the other hand, it’s tempting to completely kill nature and swing exclusively to nurture. Do the elephant examples show that elephants have an ancient culture passed down from some Abrahamic elders? Probably not.
Two interesting questions arise:
- Do some elephants, at some age, develop the ability to think far into the future and pass the wisdom to their young? That is, is the incidence of “culture” among elephants the result of intellectual prognostication? I say no.
- If you eliminated all adult elephants, would the current “civilized” state of elephant culture eventually re-emerge after a number of generations? If so, after how many generations? I say yes, with caveats.
Basically, self-awareness, mimicry, and empathy seem to go hand-in-hand. All that is necessary for “culture” to form among a group species is ability to observe, mimic, and condition behaviors. Think of it like this. One elephant gets into a particular situation and has a good outcome. Another gets in the same situation and does something different, and has a bad outcome. The elephants surrounding him observe and mimic (mentally or physically). Depending on the strength and characteristic of the accompanying stimulus, the behavior will become conditioned after few or many repetitions, and will stick without need to mimic. Younger elephants, presumably more impressionable, will pick up many stock behaviors by mimicking elders with acquired repertoire.
Basically, I am arguing that elephant societies (and dolphin societies) are a lot like neural networks. The self-awareness indicates ability for the nodes to communicate, and mimicry/conditioning is like nodes firing and propagating.
Of course, this pattern would apply to apes and humans, too. But with apes and humans you have to factor in third and fourth order intensionality, which makes things considerably more complex. And of course, none of this discounts nature — aggression is clearly in the elephants repertoire of in-built behaviors, and will emerge again if the neural net is scrubbed clean.
It also is no guarantee that the same “culture” will emerge again. The mechanics described just say that the social species will pass learnings intergenerationally; but these learnings are not necessarily logical. The environment today may be very different from the environment in which the current net was programmed. It is entirely plausible that the net today could be reprogrammed in a completely different pattern. The pattern is not evolutionary, rather it is environmental, so it is also quite possible that the “learned” pattern could be one that is deadly to the species as a whole. In other words, there is no evolutionary basis to say that the bands of murderous elephants will be assimilated and conditioned by the gentle elephants — it is equally possible (given our current understanding) that the murderous elephants could infect the elephant culture and skew it off on a survival-hostile path. Of course, I’m not predicting disaster, but it is completely illogical and unscientific to assume that such cultures will always “emerge/converge” back to the current state. The neural net of social learning is a lot more volatile than genetics, and a lot more is open to chance.
November 4th, 2006 at 7:31 am
This doesn’t directly contradict what you have written, and it is a somewhat tangential. But it adds something to the discussion.
I’ve conducted a bit of research in the learning mechanics of a randomly interconnected seas of biologically plausible neural networks. The physics of the neuron models are basically correct, but the learning mechanism is unknown. There is some learning capability in these networks, but they are very inefficient. I am really starting to doubt the idea that a human neural network is a blank slate molded by culture and experience. Probably, much of our cultural behavior is instinctive.
For example, sound processing in the auditory pathways of the brain is not random. It is, in fact, highly sophisticated and intricately connected for optimal sound processing. Why would it be clean/random? The structure of our skeleton and our heart are not random either. The eye of an insect is hardwired to its little brain, but they still can do marvelous things like dogfighting and catching other bugs in mid-air. So, it would seem absurd that the most complex behavior exhibited in man, i.e. culture, results from random brain interconnections that can cleaned and retrained by a generation gap or two.
I know that you are not arguing that brain interconnections would be randomly connected. You are just arguing that brain interconnections can be retrained by culture. And, you are arguing that culture itself is retrained by members of society. Sure, people are conditioned. But, I don’t think they can be conditioned much beyond what their existing wiring will allow.
A person may be aggressive or controlled, depending on the circumstance. The wiring for both behaviors is always there. The circumstances trigger which strategy/personality will be used. Conditioning creates preferences for the various strategies.
My point? It seems reasonable to me that all types of human social behavior are pre-wired and available in our brains. Social behavior is a buffet, selected by people, but not every behavior is available to everyone. If a behavior isn’t already wired, then members of society cannot use it, and culture cannot use it either. Therefore, conditioning is limited in its ability to produce cultural changes.
Completely unrelated, I can’t help but add… as morality declines in this nation, the incidence of single-parent children has increased dramatically. There is some parallel to the elephant orphans. The western world is reverting back to pagan culture (which has always been an available option).
November 6th, 2006 at 6:01 am
“…as morality declines in this nation…”
As the wikipedia editors often demand “Citation Please.”
It’s quite a task to show that “morality” (whatever that is) is waxing or waning anywhere/anytime, in part because we are clueless as to how one person’s morality is another’s immorality.
As Alfred Korzybski famously said “whatever you say it is, it isn’t” and “the map is not the territory.”
We set up hypothese involving the use of electronic metaphors and then behave as if such terms as “hard-wired” are germane to any discussion about “culture” (whatever that is).
To perform the mind-game of whether something is true requires so many herds of orphan elephants over so long a time…
So my comment is “morality is increasing” as more babies get fed and wars shrink.
Love.
November 7th, 2006 at 9:11 am
A Google search will provide the spectrum of non-objective opinions about the future of a society where committed relationships are abnormal, and where children are raised by a single parent in broken homes.
From a systems point of view, there is a capacitive effect, or phase shift, so to speak, that delays the consequences of today’s social policy shifts from being realized until future generations. Considering history, where long term trends are more easy to spot, we learn that unrestrained pagan societies do not prosper over the long term.
There is no point in arguing about the definition of a word like morality. That is why dictionaries were invented. What part of the mind is so threatened by the word to compel us to exclude things from what was once an established definition? I think we can both agree that what is happening in Darfur at the moment is immoral. And, we don’t need to stop there, because the world is full of examples of immorality.
Food for the body is worth less than food for the soul. Are more babies getting fed?
Many interesting things have happened in your lifetime to cause ‘wars to shrink.’ Foremost, the nuclear bomb and WWII provided motivation for seldom-reasonable men to restrain themselves from war and the consequent mutually assured destruction. I, for one, am not very confident that this unnatural peace will last.
November 16th, 2006 at 8:22 am
As morality declines… hunh? This has an inherent bit of question begging, because one has to ask, somewhat like Pilate, “What is morality.” Only when that has been defined/agreed to, can one then begin to measure the question of it’s adherence/non-adherenece (which is the usual issue when questions of it’s decline are bandied about).
To the topic at hand (culture, and it’s existence/transmission; spontaneous generation). You might want to loo at corvids. With a brain/body mass ratio akin to that of primates, a social structure, and idividual existence, long lives, dialects, and specificity of calls which hover at the border of language and the apparent cross-species ideation of some play activities (the use of balls in the playing of games by wild crows) as well as having, apparently, trained people to do things for them (the use of cars at intersections to get nuts cracked in both Australia and Japan) and a sense of numbers (number of studies which show corvids to be able to do simple arithmetics with numbers up to about six), they have all the traits one might expect to lead to cultural transmissions.
They also seem to be able to give fairly complex sets of instructions (though information content isn’t known, nor the means of transmission) about hazards, so that tens of thousands (they have been known to roost in nightly rookeries of 50-100 thousand) will avoid a place only a handful encountered danger, and that avoidance will linger for decades.
TK
November 16th, 2006 at 11:48 am
Honestas once pointed to this short Tolstoy story about morality: http://www.jacwell.org/Fall_2003/Three%20Questions.htm. It’s a nice definition that I am sure everyone here would agree on. Pushing it out beyond this is not really useful, and of course some humans can even dispute about “starving babies” (for example, they might say, ‘if you are in a hurry to get to an appointment to authorize a humanitarian food drop, it may be economic to let one baby by the roadside starve’).
When people start adding too many details, or pushing morality out through too many levels of indirection — and especially when they worry about others morals more than their own, immoral stuff happens. People see examples like the meth-smoking evangelical and assume that there is no such thing as morals. That’s almost as tragic as hypocrisy.
January 28th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
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