Why Do Individuals Seek Information? A Selectionist Perspective

Several authors have proposed that mechanisms of adaptive behavior, and reinforcement learning in particular, can be explained by an innate tendency of individuals to seek information about the local environment. In this article, I argue that these approaches adhere to an essentialist view of learning that avoids the question why information seeking should be favorable in the first place. I propose a selectionist account of adaptive behavior that explains why individuals behave as if they had a tendency to seek information without resorting to essentialist explanations. I develop my argument using a formal selectionist framework for adaptive behavior, the multilevel model of behavioral selection (MLBS). The MLBS has been introduced recently as a formal theory of behavioral selection that links reinforcement learning to natural selection within a single unified model. I show that the MLBS implies an average gain in information about the availability of reinforcement. Formally, this means that behavior reaches an equilibrium state, if and only if the Fisher information of the conditional probability of reinforcement is maximized. This coincides with a reduction in the randomness of the expected environmental feedback as captured by the information theoretic concept of expected surprise (i.e., entropy). The main result is that behavioral selection maximizes the information about the expected fitness consequences of behavior, which, in turn, minimizes average surprise. In contrast to existing attempts to link adaptive behavior to information theoretic concepts (e.g., the free energy principle), neither information gain nor surprise minimization is treated as a first principle. Instead, the result is formally deduced from the MLBS and therefore constitutes a mathematical property of the more general principle of behavioral selection. Thus, if reinforcement learning is understood as a selection process, there is no need to assume an active agent with an innate tendency to seek information or minimize surprise. Instead, information gain and surprise minimization emerge naturally because it lies in the very nature of selection to produce order from randomness.

Hard limits to cognitive flexibility: ants can learn to ignore but not avoid pheromone trails

Learning allows animals to respond to changes in their environment within their lifespan. However, many responses to the environment are innate, and need not be learned. Depending on the level of cognitive flexibility an animal shows, such responses can either be modified by learning or not. Many ants deposit pheromone trails to resources, and innately follow such trails. Here, we investigated cognitive flexibility in the ant Lasius niger by asking whether ants can overcome their innate tendency and learn to avoid conspecific pheromone trails when these predict a negative stimulus. Ants were allowed to repeatedly visit a Y-maze, one arm of which was marked with a strong but realistic pheromone trail and led to a punishment (electroshock and/or quinine solution), and the other arm of which was unmarked and led to a 1 M sucrose reward. After circa 10 trials ants stopped relying on the pheromone trail, but even after 25 exposures they failed to improve beyond chance levels. However, the ants did not choose randomly: rather, most ants begun to favour just one side of the Y-maze, a strategy which resulted in more efficient food retrieval over time, when compared to the first visits. Even when trained in a go/no-go paradigm which precludes side bias development, ants failed to learn to avoid a pheromone trail. These results show rapid learning flexibility towards an innate social signal, but also demonstrate a rarely seen hard limit to this flexibility.

COOPERATIVE LEARNING: AN EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR STUDENT’S THINKING STYLE

The features of thinking processes as well as styles of thinking are embodied in a person's innate tendency in processing information, which is referred to as thinking style. In all aspects of social interactions, it is critical to understand a person's thinking style. It has been reported in the literature that if a person understands his/her thinking style, he/she determines which function they can perform better in the team. However, once the group’s thinking style is established, the team will work more motivated, energized and make better decisions. Therefore, the team work or the cooperative learning approach has a close association with the thinking style of the members. In the present paper, an effort is taken to study the thinking Style of Students of higher secondary schools of Dehradun district and to compare the thinking style of the students who are learning with the Cooperative Learning method and with the Traditional Method. The findings indicate that cooperative learning method is effective than the traditional method.

CULTURAL ECOFEMINISM IN CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN’S FEMINIST UTOPIAN VISION AND ITS LIMITATIONS

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American feminist author of fiction and non-fiction, lecturer and sociologist of the late 19th, early 20th centuries. She integrates her sociological commentary into her ecofeminist vision for an alternative community consisting merely of women in her utopian fiction Herland published in 1915. The community she envisioned can best be read through the lens of cultural ecofeminism with her essentialist view of women’s innate tendency to uphold the sanctity of the environment opting for a peaceful coexistence rather than patriarchal domination. Since men are considered to be impediments to such a coexistence, they are absent from the utopian vision based on sisterhood of all women where they breed through parthenogenesis and raise their daughters as a community rather than in individual family units. Familial relations are not entirely eliminated, rather, as all Herlanders descend from a common maternal ancestor, are biologically as well as culturally connected.

Psychological (and Emotional) Architecture

Wilson calls biofilia an “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes” (Wilson, 1984, p. 1), an “innate emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms” (Wilson, 1993, p. 31), or an “inborn affinity human beings have for other forms of life, an affiliation evoked, according to circumstances, by pleasure, or a sense of security, or awe, or even fascination blended with revulsion” (Wilson, 1994, p. 360). The research in this area is indicating that bringing elements of nature into the workplace, whether real or artificial, is beneficial in terms of employee outcomes. Nevertheless, although investigation into the benefits of biophilia for individual well-being is relatively new, there is clearly mounting evidence that biophilic design can have a positive impact, from reducing stress and anxiety, to improving the quality and availability of respite from work and in increasing levels of self-reported well-being.

Argument of Against the Death Penalty

This chapter outlines the different views and arguments of Giuseppe Pelli's unfinished dissertation of Against the Death Penalty. It provides an analysis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Discourses 'on the Sciences and Arts' and 'on Inequality', and Pelli's early indication of lack of sympathy with Transalpine Enlightenment philosophers, with the exception of Montesquieu. The natural law philosophers and jurists from Hugo Grotius provided the main foundation and stimulation for his own ideas. Pelli reveals himself as a close reader of, among others, Grotius, Heineccius, the Cocceji father and son and Vattel. The chapter also highlights Pelli's deep pessimism about human nature, and inclination to moralizing. Here he labels the punishment by execution of the 'vicious' as itself a vice, having its origins in the 'general corruption' of our hearts, our innate tendency to give way to capricious anger, cruelty and malice. Ultimately, in the course of his treatise, it explains his humanitarian instincts and motives and how his commitment to his cause come to the fore. But he is also insistent that his case rests on rational argumentation.

Tragedy and Ecophobia: A Study of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea

Terry Eagleton’s humorous question of “how a tragedy differs from a congress of global warming” echoes the tragic and traumatic life of human beings facing increasing violence of nature. In a tragedy, the protagonist does not have biophilia as conceptualized by Edward O. Wilson to explain the innate tendency of human beings to find connections with nature and other forms of life, rather experience with themselves of an ecophobia, ‘antipathy towards nature’ as defined by Simon C. Estok. In a tragedy, “the unfathomable agencies of Nature”, to Eagleton, create ecophobia among the characters of tragedies written in most of the periods of literature. It is experienced in a Renaissance tragedy Macbeth by the Bard of Avon with the appearance of ‘nature’s mischief’ as well as in a modern tragedy Riders to the Sea by J.M. Synge with the destructive sea devouring Maurya’s five sons, husband, and husband’s father creating an antipathy towards nature as shown in Macbeth’s fear of the ‘unruly’ and ‘rough’ night and the ambiguous movement of the Brinamwood, and Maurya’s desperate request to resist Bartley to travel by sea to the Galway fair. Their ecophobia has created an unhinged personality among them. With all these perspectives this paper aims to re-establish a connection between ecophobia and tragedy and examine how ecophobia has been internalized among the characters of the aforementioned play.

Humans, nature and dialectical materialism

Capitalist relations are the crucial object of social critique due to their innate tendency to accelerate the metabolic rift and alienation, yet, I argue, our focus should stretch beyond capitalist relations. Indeed, both ecocidal and conservationist tendencies have occurred in multiple historical forms of social relations, including socialist societies, for example, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. These are phenomena that reiterate the social, rather than purely capitalist relations as the driver of environmental destruction. Metabolic rifts occur due to malfunctioning of the human–human/human–nature relationships and it is the elimination and prevention of that malfunctioning that must be the aim of radical environmental politics and policies, not merely (the necessary) elimination of capitalist relations. This article contributes to the symposium in three complementary ways. First, it critiques the application of dialectical reading of human–nature relations as articulated in the Foster–Moore debate in its own right. Second, it rearticulates that reading through the lens of the dialectical biospheric analytics of late Soviet ecology. And third, it invokes the dialectical thought of Evald Ilyenkov.

Robert White and the Study of Lives

Robert Winthrop White was an important psychologist and personality researcher at Harvard University during the middle years of the 1900s. First as a student and then chief lieutenant and colleague of Henry A. Murray at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, White became a leading proponent of Murray’s intensively case study-oriented “personological” approach to personality analysis and description. This approach emphasized that personality is not a fixed entity but a constantly changing and developing configuration of many different factors, which must be appreciated as a whole and is best conveyed in the context of individual life histories. Although sometimes overshadowed by both Murray and Harvard personality psychologist Gordon Allport, who both promoted the life study approach, White became the most prolific and skilled early practitioner of that approach. His early case study of “Earnst” was the only one selected to illustrate the Murray project’s personological approach in the seminal 1938 work Explorations in Personality. As the “caretaker” director of the clinic in the late 1930s and early 1940s, White oversaw the collection of numerous further case histories, several of which became the foundations of four highly influential books: The Abnormal Personality, Lives in Progress, Opinions and Personality, and The Enterprise of Living. In 1959, White made important contributions to the theory of motivation by asserting that the standard conception of motives as tension-reducing instincts or drives was severely limited and should be complemented by an innate “effectance” motive: an innate tendency to seek rather than reduce tension while achieving “competence” in dealing with the outside world.

Aristotle and the Origins of Evil

Why do human beings, on Aristotle’s view, have an innate tendency to badness, that is, to developing desires that go beyond and against their natural needs? Given Aristotle’s teleological assumptions (including the thesis that nature does nothing in vain), such tendency should not be present. I argue that the culprit is to be found in the workings of rationality, in particular in the (necessary) presence of theoretical reason. As theoretical reason requires that human beings have unlimited non-rational desires for the fine (to kalon), it also gives rise to a tendency to form unlimited non-rational desires for other things.