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Altruism: Past, Present, Propagation
Get PDFI intend to examine the question of scalability of altruism and its long term sustainability. Altruism has posed multiple substantial conundrums in different fields, including challenges to its possibility, its efficiency, and its scalability. Multiple accounts of the evolution and dynamics involved in altruistic interaction among humans, institutions, animals and artificial intelligences rely on conflict between entities as the proximal cause of cooperation and altruism within entities. In this examination I go through our knowledge in anthropology, philosophy, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and biology to examine in which ways specific properties of humans and human groups, as well as theorized properties of agents in general, can accommodate truly altruistic actions and behaviors. Further I examine the question of where the processes that lead us to the current levels and type of altruism are headed and whether there is a basin of attraction towards which it would be desirable to go from an altruistic perspective in longer timescales. I will examine the limitations and constraints posed by game theory, neuroscience, and the specifics of our evolutionary past, and in so doing I paint a picture of altruism as a valuable and feasible, as well as scalable, strategy, for the foreseeable future. I lastly propose some roads toward achieving these scalable possibilities through a combination of evolutionary and technological nudges according to the current literature
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Performance Approaches to Semantics in Human Language
Get PDFOver the course of human history, prominent hypotheses for the source of human behavioral uniqueness have included freedom from metaphysical necessity, rational intention, and strong social altruism. However, when applied to questions concerning the evolution and current use of human language, these hypotheses generate more problems than they solve. These include everything from the statistical improbability of "hopeful monster" mutations to the unstable strategy of altruism without reciprocity. Adopting a performative view of human language removes these problematic dependencies, and explains aspects of language like phatic speech, fossils, and register, that require special pleading by one or more of the popular hypotheses.This thesis provides two pieces of computational evidence for a performative view of human language. First, it shows that the possibility space of human language is much smaller than expected for a rule based but otherwise semantically unrestricted communication system. Second, it shows that the semantic information contained in an entire speech act is poorly predicted by the semantic information of its individual parts, as might be expected for a compositional system designed for efficient communication.To conduct this second analysis, a novel method was developed based on the distributional theory of semantics for measuring the information content of human speech. Briefly, it is a measure of the distance between the distribution of terms in a language and the conditional probability of their appearance within a context of interest. This same method shows promise for testing other hypotheses about the nature and origin of language that involve an informational component
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Why Music and Shamanism for Orangutans are Similar
Get PDFHow do you get people to empathize with a species when you have no ability to get inside their heads? Today, orangutan conservation has become something that Indonesians do out in the forests. In service of these efforts, musicians and shamans have joined Sound For Orangutan, an annual music event held in Jakarta since 2012 with additional festivals in other locations in subsequent years. Within this frame of reference, I will argue that both music and shamanism exceed semantics that merely describes differences in things. On stage: musicians incorporate different primate “calls” in a single song that points to a location in which the orangutan and non-orangutan coinhabit. Through different styles (e.g., children’s song, rock, noise), they show a common interest in experiencing nonhuman emotions by singing like the primates. Backstage: shamans convince deities to prevent the rain from falling on the occasion. Through different religious orientations (e.g., Islam, Buddhism, Kejawèn), they conduct a similar set of rituals in which they produce smoke that looks like cloud movements.With likeness as my object of inquiry, I ask: Given the prevalence of non-linguistic logic, what is being communicated? What enables that communication, and thus the relations among people who take advantage of its analogies? In their senses of wonder and beauty by virtue of the recognition of likenesses, what develops the sequence that leads to the absence of attention to difference? For this project, I have collected a diverse array of information on: (1) Why musicians play music instead of verbalizing their emotions on stage; (2) How shamans convince deities with deeds rather than words; (3) A simulation technology that enables guitarists to reproduce the same sound across different venues and seasons; (4) A couple of musicians who no longer speak with each other but still sing with each other in sync at the same place at the same time for primates.Using a field research design that detects when likeness becomes more apparent than differences, this study seeks to articulate the limitations of linguistic models of communication for musical and shamanic phenomena. This entails an examination of the more basic and direct role of iconic and indexical processes in communicating emotions, establishing empathy, and communicating despite lacking shared language, culture, religion, on behalf of nature or deities. By processing concrete empirical data through Peircean semiotic and emergentist views that are capable of capturing how thoughts show up in the world spontaneously, my goal is to understand why shamanism and music in these instances are similar
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The Embryonic Origins of Primate Encephalization
Get PDFEncephalization is one of the defining characteristics of the primate Order. Unlike other mammalian radiations, primates exhibit exceptionally high relative brain sizes at birth and across prenatal development. This indicates that the shared degree of adult encephalization in primates is the developmental product of changes to early brain or body growth that have never been fully characterized. This dissertation examines brain and body growth relationships across prenatal ontogeny in a wide range of primate and non-primate mammals in order to reexamine the developmental origins of primate relative brain size.A review of allometric brain/body growth over fetal development shows that primate prenatal encephalization is shared by all primate radiations but not the closest out-groups, and begins during embryonic development. Fetal rates of exponential brain growth acceleration in primates are within the range of eutherian values; species with larger adult brains or isocortical proportions do not exhibit faster fetal brain growth. Neither allometric nor acceleration data support theories proposing faster fetal brain growth in mammals according to physiological or life history variables. Rates of fetal body and visceral organ growth acceleration are exceptionally slow in primates, consistent with slow postnatal body growth rates and life history schedules. Embryonic development is characterized by high brain/body proportions in many non-primate mammals; however, only primates retain this high allometric proportion into later fetal stages of development. This novel feature of primate growth is likely a consequence of slower post-cranial body growth, rather than any particular feature of primate brain growth and development.This study provides developmental evidence that increases in relative brain size at the origin of the primate Order may have been a consequence of body size reduction, possibly as an adaptation to locomotion within an arboreal niche
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Spatial Ecology in Sympatric Tamarins (Leontocebus weddelli and Saguinus imperator)
Get PDFTamarins (gen. Leontocebus and Saguinus) are small, charismatic, ecologically vital, and socioecologically atypical Neotropical primates. Their behavior, especially their habitat needs and their social use of space, can help address questions regarding the evolution of social behavior in primates as well as conservation problems regarding the health and viability of anthropogenically disturbed rainforest habitat. This dissertation was conducted on sympatric populations of saddleback tamarins (Leontocebus weddelli) and emperor tamarins (Saguinus imperator) at Los Amigos Biological Station in Madre de Dios, Peru, and analyzes the intersection of tamarin behavioral and spatial ecology from three distinct angles. Chapter 1 introduces the study system and data collection methods used throughout the dissertation. Chapter 2 uses high-resolution environmental imaging in combination with machine learning to characterize microhabitat use and the spatial distribution of critical sleeping and foraging behaviors. Chapter 3 describes the behavior of two individuals observed opportunistically during their transient phase, a critical period in which animals live alone, often in unfamiliar terrain, as part of their search for breeding opportunities. Chapter 4 tests the theory of home range size, using a multi-year dataset to assess whether larger groups travel farther and occupy larger ranges as predicted by socioecological theory. All three major projects are made possible by the presence of two sympatric tamarin species in a single small area of Amazonian rainforest, which facilitates both interspecific and intraspecific comparisons
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
À propos de l’homme, ou comment repenser la sélection naturelle du langage humain
Get PDFIl arrive qu’une complexité extrême mette le modèle de la sélection naturelle au défi d’expliquer quoi que ce soit. Depuis Darwin, l’aptitude humaine au langage est incessamment citée en exemple-type de ce cas de figure. Et ceux qui ont souligné les problèmes posés par cette faculté si spécifiquement humaine n’étaient pas tous des critiques du darwinisme. On sait l’argument avancé par Alfred Russel Wallace, co-instigateur de la théorie de la sélection naturelle, et réputé plus darwiniste que ..
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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