tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5909266595230883267.post710044743797570234..comments2023-09-17T01:59:30.592-07:00Comments on <b>Remembrance in Spacetime</b>: What's it all about?TheBigHenryhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04917973198063733316noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5909266595230883267.post-46935361613545017062007-06-16T17:37:00.000-07:002007-06-16T17:37:00.000-07:00A given organism behaves in a particular way becau...A given organism behaves in a particular way because it possesses specific morphological and physiological features that respond to or are affected by ambient information in specific ways. These morphological and physiological features are to a large extent genotype dependent. In as much as behavior is based on an animal’s morphology and physiology, it is heritable and conspecific. A given animal’s behavior thus partly derives from the behavioral fitness of its ancestors and the favorable rate of survival and reproduction that such fitness affords. It is further driven by the ambient information it encounters throughout its existence. Humans and other animals have come to exhibit broad behavioral strategies, which can be conveniently characterized in general as survival techniques. One such strategy involves reward-seeking behavior, another information-seeking behavior (or, in other words, exploit and explore). No given organism exhibits one or the other behavior exclusively. Reward-seeking behavior, as evidenced in numerous fMRI studies, is a function of activity in the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex of the behaving animal’s brain; whereas information-seeking behavior, also according to fMRI studies, is a function of activity in the later developing (in both the phylogenetic and ontogenetic sense) frontopolar cortex and the intraparietal sulcus.<br><br>Is exploitative behavior more analogous to entropy and so less efficient (or more wasteful) than exploratory behavior, which within this schema would be more analogous to gravity? A good case can be made that it is so (for example, long-term survival is at times best served by delay of gratification, and only exploratory behavior will tell you that). To explore, in any case, sounds nobler than to exploit, and the former certainly appeals to what we humans think of as the nobler side of our nature. On the other hand, reward-seeking has its benefits. It has, in a very real sense, helped us get where we are today. Maybe what it’s all about is not so much the ultimate outcome of a conflict between fundamentally opposing forces but the developmental trajectory carved out by the interplay of selective forces. In which case, the abortive action of a given sensible human operator mean next to nothing.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com