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Originally Posted by Computerpro3 /img/forum/go_quote.gif
It's absolutely fascinating to think about. I watch my German Shepherd and clearly she thinks. When she wants to play, she brings the frisbee. When she wants to go out, she brings the leash. At the most basic level, she at least can associate certain feelings and urges with objects. The mere fact that classical conditioning has been proven to work on animals proves a thought-recognition process.
Yet how can all this be without a language? And if there is a language, wouldn't we have figured it out by now? And in a way, isn't interacting with humans in the manner of performing certain actions to communicate wishes/needs (bringing the food bowl/frisbee) a form of physical language?
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I would have to exercise caution when talking about classical conditioning paradigms as thought recognition. Awareness is a very difficult thing to show experimentally, but the neural pathway for the shock pairing with, say, a conditioned stimulus such as a tone is quite well understood. Some of the pioneering work for those who are interested can be found in a reasonably digest-able form by Eric Kandel, whose work with the mollusk Aplysia in his autobiography called
In Search of Memory.
There are essentially two circuits. The primary one that involves the withdrawal of a limb when you touch a hot stove, for instance, actually never reaches the brain. The circuit is completely self contained within the somatosensory experience (pain/heat receptors) to the spinal cord back out to the involuntary muscle contraction.
The second circuit is the one most pertinent to this discussion and quite interesting. However, the signal that travels to the brain in a simple animal such as Aplysia merely creates a sort of complex connection with other neurons in their nervous system. These so-called synapses (3 that I am thinking of most particularly) are subject to "learning" in that they can become stronger or weaker due to use. This is also the strongest candidate mechanism for learning in the human brain, but intuitively we know that the two are very different.
Where in the Aplysia resides the conscious experience? To what extent is it aware that something has changed. How far can it extrapolate in order to avoid such unpleasant stimuli? The whole nature of classical conditioning is that it will avoid that one stimulus, since it learned that it was averse. However, what about similar stimuli? What about other sensory interactions with the stimuli?
My point is simply that animals who are susceptible to classical conditioning (all of us) do not necessarily undergo conscious awareness/higher order thinking. Is that what we're talking about here? Or are we narrowing our definition of thought to merely neurons firing due to some external stimulus?
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Originally Posted by Gautama /img/forum/go_quote.gif
I wrote a short term paper on this last year.
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And! What were the (albeit temporary) conclusions?
