Hypothesis: One reason there aren’t many agenty people is that a lot of parents find that agenty children are more of a challenge to their authority than they want and/or take more resources of various sorts than they feel they can afford.
My feeling about this is: Look at animals. They pretty much just do random stuff: hang out here, hang out there, eat when they’re hungry, etc. It’d be kind of surprising if evolution had taken us from that to industrial strength ass-kicking fast enough for civilization not to have formed in between.
(Additionally, there’s the whole near/far idea, that the intelligent parts of our brains aren’t supposed to be controlling our behavior, really.)
They pretty much just do random stuff: hang out here, hang out there, eat when they’re hungry, etc.
That sounds like the behavior of a bored domestic cat, or a bear in a mediocre zoo. Wild animals, especially clever, complex-brained ones can get up to some abstract or spontaneous stuff. Elephants hold funeral vigils for their dead (and at least sometimes for dead humans as well); orcas hunting seals will play sadistically with a captured pup for minutes or hours before getting down to the business of feeding; echidnas will go to incredible lengths to explore something novel, even after ascertaining it has no chance of providing them with food. There’s one recent funny case of an Antarctic leopard seal attempting to teach a human scuba diver how to kill penguins (in much the same way cats sometimes catch mice and leave them for their house-humans). When you add in complex social interactions, animal behavior (particularly that of any species prone to human-noticeable levels of personality variation) is quite dynamic—and even a lot of what looks like superficially simple behavior is the product of low-level drives common to many organisms being acted out in unique ways by the individual critter.
Thanks for the info. My impression was that emotions are like different modes that an animal can operate under, and you switch modes in a kind of haphazard way based on social and environmental cues, energy level, etc. Does that sound more or less accurate?
Has coherent goal-directed behavior spanning multiple days been observed in animals?
Well, that’s sufficiently vaguely-phrased that just something like a pack of wolves or orcas pursuing their quarry for days, which does happen, would seem to qualify. Or the bird building a nest as described below.
FWIW, pregnant African elephants often find a good time and place to give birth around the end of their term and then consume the leaves of a certain tree to induce labor (humans in the area use it for the same purpose). The pregnancy takes over a year and the labor itself, once begun, can take several days.
Hypothesis: One reason there aren’t many agenty people is that a lot of parents find that agenty children are more of a challenge to their authority than they want and/or take more resources of various sorts than they feel they can afford.
My feeling about this is: Look at animals. They pretty much just do random stuff: hang out here, hang out there, eat when they’re hungry, etc. It’d be kind of surprising if evolution had taken us from that to industrial strength ass-kicking fast enough for civilization not to have formed in between.
(Additionally, there’s the whole near/far idea, that the intelligent parts of our brains aren’t supposed to be controlling our behavior, really.)
That sounds like the behavior of a bored domestic cat, or a bear in a mediocre zoo. Wild animals, especially clever, complex-brained ones can get up to some abstract or spontaneous stuff. Elephants hold funeral vigils for their dead (and at least sometimes for dead humans as well); orcas hunting seals will play sadistically with a captured pup for minutes or hours before getting down to the business of feeding; echidnas will go to incredible lengths to explore something novel, even after ascertaining it has no chance of providing them with food. There’s one recent funny case of an Antarctic leopard seal attempting to teach a human scuba diver how to kill penguins (in much the same way cats sometimes catch mice and leave them for their house-humans). When you add in complex social interactions, animal behavior (particularly that of any species prone to human-noticeable levels of personality variation) is quite dynamic—and even a lot of what looks like superficially simple behavior is the product of low-level drives common to many organisms being acted out in unique ways by the individual critter.
Thanks for the info. My impression was that emotions are like different modes that an animal can operate under, and you switch modes in a kind of haphazard way based on social and environmental cues, energy level, etc. Does that sound more or less accurate?
Has coherent goal-directed behavior spanning multiple days been observed in animals?
Well, that’s sufficiently vaguely-phrased that just something like a pack of wolves or orcas pursuing their quarry for days, which does happen, would seem to qualify. Or the bird building a nest as described below.
FWIW, pregnant African elephants often find a good time and place to give birth around the end of their term and then consume the leaves of a certain tree to induce labor (humans in the area use it for the same purpose). The pregnancy takes over a year and the labor itself, once begun, can take several days.
Something as simple as a bird building a nest would seem to meet that criterion.