Collective intelligence facilitates emergent resource partitioning through frequency-dependent learning Deciding where to forage must not only account for variations in habitat quality but also where others might forage. Recent studies have suggested that when individuals remember recent foraging outcomes, negative frequency-dependent learning can allow them to avoid resources exploited by others (indirect competition). This process can drive the emergence of consistent differences in resource use (resource partitioning) at the population level. However, indirect cues of competition can be difficult for individuals to sense. Here, we propose that information pooling through collective decision-making—i.e. collective intelligence—can allow populations of group-living animals to more effectively partition resources relative to populations of solitary animals. We test this hypothesis by simulating (i) individuals preferring to forage where they were recently successful and (ii) cohesive groups that choose one resource using a majority rule. While solitary animals can partially avoid indirect competition through negative frequency-dependent learning, resource partitioning is more likely to emerge in populations of group-living animals. Populations of larger groups also better partition resources than populations of smaller groups, especially in environments with more choices. Our results give insight into the value of long- versus short-term memory, home range sizes and the evolution of specialization, optimal group sizes and territoriality.
Self-Consciousness Human beings are conscious not only of the world around them but also of themselves: their activities, their bodies, and their mental lives. They are, that is, self-conscious (or, equivalently, self-aware). Self-consciousness can be understood as an awareness of oneself. But a self-conscious subject is not just aware of something that merely happens to be themselves, as one is if one sees an old photograph without realising that it is of oneself. Rather a self-conscious subject is aware of themselves as themselves; it is manifest to them that they themselves are the object of awareness. Self-consciousness is a form of consciousness that is paradigmatically expressed in English by the words “I”, “me”, and “my”, terms that each of us uses to refer to ourselves as such.
A central topic throughout the history of philosophy—and increasingly so since the seventeenth century—the phenomena surrounding self-consciousness prompt a variety of fundamental philosophical and scientific questions, including its relation to consciousness; its semantic and epistemic features; its realisation in both conceptual and non-conceptual representation; and its connection to our conception of an objective world populated with others like ourselves.
Creativity in context: Thematic profile analysis reveals the explanatory power of themes and culture in creative ideas The world faces formidable challenges that demand creative solutions tailored to specific socio-cultural contexts. We introduce thematic profile analysis, a computational method that combines topic modeling with large language models to situate creative ideas within context-dependent and culturally specific semantic spaces. A thematic profile quantifies the semantic distance between an individual’s creative ideas and themes from a corpus. Analyzing 18,414 ideas from 3,213 participants across 74 nationalities, we found that an individual’s thematic profile strongly predicted human creativity ratings (R = .58-.79). Thematic content was critical to creativity, with certain themes being more important to avoid or explore in one culture (e.g., Mexican) than another (e.g., U.S.A.). Thematic profile analysis enabled novel quantitative comparisons of themes across cultures – revealing substantial differences and similarities – providing a robust tool for capturing the context-dependency and cultural specificity of creativity.
Time-Integrated Spike-Timing-Dependent-Plasticity In this work, we propose time-integrated spike-timing-dependent plasticity (TI-STDP), a mathematical model of synaptic plasticity that allows spiking neural networks to continuously adapt to sensory input streams in an unsupervised fashion. Notably, we theoretically establish and formally prove key properties related to the synaptic adjustment mechanics that underwrite TI-STDP. Empirically, we demonstrate the efficacy of TI-STDP in simulations of jointly learning deeper spiking neural networks that process input digit pixel patterns, at both full image and patch-levels, comparing to two powerful historical instantations of STDP; trace-based STDP (TR-STDP) and event-based post-synaptic STDP (EV-STDP). Usefully, we demonstrate that not only are all forms of STDP capable of meaningfully adapting the synaptic efficacies of a multi-layer biophysical architecture, but that TI-STDP is notably able to do so without requiring the tracking of a large window of pre- and post-synaptic spike timings, the maintenance of additional parameterized traces, or the restriction of synaptic plasticity changes to occur within very narrow windows of time. This means that our findings show that TI-STDP can efficiently embody the benefits of models such as canonical STDP, TR-STDP, and EV-STDP without their costs or drawbacks. Usefully, our results further demonstrate the promise of using a spike-correlation scheme such as TI-STDP in conducting credit assignment in discrete pulse-based neuromorphic models, particularly those than acquire a lower-level distributed representation jointly with an upper-level, more abstract representation that self-organizes to cluster based on inherent cross-pattern similarities. We further demonstrate TI-STDP’s effectiveness in adapting a simple neuronal circuit that learns a simple bi-level, part-whole hierarchy from sensory input patterns.
Risky effort Decision-making involves weighing up the outcome likelihood, potential rewards, and effort needed. Previous research has focused on the trade-offs between risk and reward or between effort and reward. Here we bridge this gap and examine how risk in effort levels influences choice. We focus on how two key properties of choice influence risk preferences for effort: changes in magnitude and probability. Two experiments assessed people’s risk attitudes for effort, and an additional experiment provided a control condition using monetary gambles. The extent to which people valued effort was related to their pattern of risk preferences. Unlike with monetary outcomes, however, there was substantial heterogeneity in effort-based risk preferences: People who responded to effort as costly exhibited a “flipped” interaction pattern of risk preferences. The direction of the pattern depended on whether people treated effort as a loss of resources. Most, but not all, people treat effort as a loss and are more willing to take risks to avoid potentially high levels of effort.
Norms of Reasoning When we reason, we can be assessed against diverse norms. Unfortunately different types of such norms are often conflated. This article distinguishes some different types of norms to which we are subject when we reason, and shows how this can help to clarify certain philosophical debates. It then considers, briefly, ‘norms of starting points’, and, at more length, ‘norms of transitions’. In closing it briefly considers whether we might expect to find a unifying account of the source of these norms, and if so what it might look like.
PEL 346: Nyaya Sutra on Knowledge (Part One) On the Nyaya Sutra: Selections with Early Commentaries. While the original Sutra, reputed to be by someone named Akṣapāda (which means “looking at his feet”) Gautama was written somewhere around 150 CE, this 2017 edition by Matthew Dasti and our previous guest Stephen Phillips features many more words by the commentators Vatsyayana (450 CE), Uddyotakara (550), and Vācaspatimiśra (900), and by the editors themselves.
In this discussion, we look into Ch. 1 “Knowledge Sources,” which are chiefly perception, inference, and testimony. Perception gets by far the most lengthy treatment, differentiating between perceptions of different ontological categories of things like a pot vs. the individual brown swatch of color that inheres in the pot vs. the universal property brown. These differences matter because the Nyaya Sutra is giving us an externalist account of perception, where the point is not that a perceiver has a sensation that may or may not actually be connected to the world, but that in a legitimate case of perception, the sense organ comes into direct contact with the item perceived. So this raises physical and metaphysical questions about how our senses connect with objects at a distance, and we get to hear, for instance, about how ancient Indians thought of sound as the vibration of the ether, which is one, massive, undifferentiated substance (so not like air or water which are made up of particles) such that by making the noise I move the either that moves your eardrum not unlike if I were poking it with a long stick.
Perception also occurs, according to the sutra, without language, which is a weird thing to say if we want to include the possibility of perceiving the metaphysically universal brown, which seems tied to the verbal concept brown. Uddyotakara explains this by saying that a perception typically has three moments to it: I non-verbally perceive a thing, then I recall memories similar to that thing, then these memories overlay my perception such that I identify it as a perception of that type of thing. So some perceptions might stop at the first moment, or someone (certainly a pre-verbal child or sophisticated animal, but really, anyone) could potentially go through all three steps without having a specific name for the thing in question. An interesting twist is that one of the types of perception listed is perception of an absence: I expect to see something, don’t see it, and so conclude that it isn’t there. But yet we’re supposed to interpret this as similarly non-verbal and immediate.
Unlike for Western thinkers like Locke, on the Nyaya account, color and sound are not “secondary qualities” that are essentially subjective. To successfully perceive a color is just like perceiving a shape or anything else: If you perceive a color differently than I do, one of us is just wrong, and we could look at what environmental or physiological factors led to one (or both) of us failing.
Sticky Notes: Mozart Requiem This show is a bit different today. Last year I did a live video podcast on Mozart’s Requiem for my Patreon subscribers. I’ve now edited that show into an audio-only version for everyone to be able to listen to, since this is such an essential piece and there’s so much to talk about with it! The audio only version won’t get into as much granular detail as the video podcast did, and it won’t include quite as many clips from the movie Amadeus, but all the same, we take a deep dive into Mozart’s Requiem today, talking all about one of the greatest unfinished works in the history of art. We’ll discuss the myths and legends behind the piece, the movements that Mozart started but never finished, and the completions of the score by different composers, especially the heavily criticized but still regularly used completion of Franz Sussmayr. We’ll also talk about each movement in detail, exploring just what Mozart brought to the Requiem text. This piece has the distinction of being one of the greatest pieces ever written, just as it is, but also one of the great what-if stories in musical history. Join us to learn all about the Mozart Requiem, and if you want to see the full video version of the show, please head over to patreon.com/stickynotespodcast to find out how you can support the show.