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Re: reply to Danny Yee
Read, Dwight ANTHRO (Read@ANTHRO.SSCNET.UCLA.EDU)
Tue, 1 Mar 1994 12:58:00 PST
Pinsker writes:
"... the position that behavior is driven by _perceptual_
systems...is another matter entirely, and it is useful and
has not been discredited. The idea is that we can explain the behavior of
organisms which respond to their environment(which means that they're taking
in information about their environment), that is, what the organisms do, by
figuring out what information they're takingin and how they process it,
including, but not limited to, whatever conceptual grids they're using to
interpret the information they receive."
This, of course, refers to virtually any organism as any organism. By virtue
of being "alive," an organism
must in some fashion respond to its environment. I presume the term
"information" is being used here in something like its use in information
theory; i.e., the form of the information is not critical e.g. it could be
chemical information, only the content in whatever form it may arrive. At
this level there is little to quibble about--certainly organisms have the
means to respond to their environment, there is some means by which
information received is processed, and the consequence of that procession
then directs future behavior. The difficult question, of course, is to
figure out what happens between input and output.
D. Read
Read@anthro.sscnet.ucla.edu
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