The Neurophilosopher reports that lizards modify their displays in response to visual noise. Two issues strike me from reading the paper by Ord et al: (a) the plasticity of anole lizard display behaviour, which the authors will not confirm though they believe it deserves further study, and (b) the richness of an environment that includes noise. The response to acoustic noise is well documented in a variety of other species. Does the response to noise imply an idea of noise? Does it imply a cogitation?
Labels: display, environment, lizards, noise, zoosemiosis
3 Comments:
I'm sure it does imply an idea of cogitation. Minds 'know' - mindless beings like plants causally react.
The 'explanation' by S. on Deleuze is indeed useful.
It also quite clearly indicates a central 'problem' in DG - their inability to distinguish minds or empsyched beings from a nature which is not empsyched. '
They do have a pansychism which some find attractive (ideas have to be 'seductive'). Why do people like pansychism?
Except perhaps a little bit in their last bk (what is phil) when they invoke Raymond Ruyer's 'primary true forms'. They would also like the neurophilosopher's minds are brains tack.
'The mind is the brain - it is not man that thinks but the brain' (in the concl. to What is Phil - they are inverting Erwin Strauss' formulation 'it is man that thinks not the brain).
Not only do they not distinguish cadacualtic persons - they effectively propose a 'monopsychism' as their student Eric Alliez notes in 'The Signature of the world.
But they are v. interesting and sometimes funny (like the little Nietzsche I've read).
P.
I don't know why panpsychism is appealing. Maybe it has to do with the impulse to think everything, which is a topic I might blog. I started reading Hans Jonas' The Phenomenon of Life. I believe he's going to argue that plants are psychic entities, or perhaps that all of nature is empsyched. We'll see. In my own mind I see a difference between plants and say water, though I'm not sure how I would characterize that difference.
I think Hans does do something like that. Probably got something to do with his gnostic dalliance.
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