I don't know if notion of survival is just staying alive. I am not comfortable with the idea that likes and dislikes are solely a consequence of human's effort to survive.
Perceptual paradox to learned behavior?
Please listen me out. This is what i was thinking..
Tomato Curry:
To date, i like almost all curries with tomato as their base to a medium degree and my senses develop a kind of affinity towards consuming it. Lets think of a mental experiment which would make me dislike tomato curry, given my present state of brain. I am assuming that would be a paradox to my learned status quo. Lets say, i have been presented a dish which i have never tasted before. And tomato being its main ingredient as the base curry and it also looks like that. Well, I got an OK from the visual perception of the curry and developed a prediction in my brain of its high probability to satisfy my taste buds similar to my previous experiences.
Well, upon tasting it ,say, its horrible to an unimaginable degree. Now, how would i explain this to myself.
1. Will i now conclude that ALL the dishes which have tomato curry as their base are BAD from now on?. ( this apparently is a characteristic quality of women towards entire human race. Jumping to conclusions contrary to common sense and with all the confidence on earth!!)
2. Will i attach hatred towards that particular ingredient which overwhlemed tomato base and still have my liking towards dishes with tomato curries intact in my brain?
Most likely, it would be the second explanation and if thats the case this experiment did not suceed in making me develop a dislike towards well established liking towards tomato curry.
The key question is, why did this experiment fail?.
Now lets redo the same experiment with some hypothetical constraints. Lets not change anything with my learned behavior. But instead, lets eliminate existence of all dishes with tomato curry except the one which i am going to taste. So, the initial condition of this experiment is that my brain does not have any memory traces of the existence of all the other tomato curries but somehow still have the 'learned' liking. My reaction would be same but what would be the explanation??
This time i may most likely find the first explanation and i may dislike tomato curry from now on.
Instead of eliminating the existence of tomato curry based dishes through which i established liking, lets say, they do exist but there is no way i can bring them to my dining table. The only option i have is this horrible dish. In that case, i think, helpless denial to human brain of the reality that i cannot bring the 'likable' dishes to the table. Under this circumstances, i expect the possibilty of plasticity in the learned behavior. This again is a consequence of survival but does not quite fit the evolutionary perception of survival.
Am i thinking right? Rajat
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2 comments:
I decided to address the questions and doubts sequentially (while keeping in mind that I am no expert on any of this).
Does Survival Mean just staying alive?
NO. It means a lot more. The first thing that comes to mind in the broader definition of survival is “reproduction”. We wish for our species to perpetuate and see the rest of human kind as an extension to ourselves. More on this later…
I see how people get uncomfortable with the scientific (and dry) idea of us being a product of some evolutionary program written in our brain. We feel uncomfortable as Sreekanth says….but we ought to detach ourselves a bit from the bias that our society, our culture and our concept of god creates as a hindrance in effectively analyzing the situation. Be aware that I do not ask you to stop believing in things. I merely suggest that the bias ought to be picked out like a weed.
On to the tomato curry…!
First you cannot conclude anything from the experiment. Why…? Because there is no control for the experiment and therefore any conclusion drawn would be a guess.
I however do follow the premise you wish to describe and I would agree that the second is more probable when you already know what tomato curry tastes like.
I am a bit confused in the last paragraph but I will comment on what I understood. The way you try to describe likes and dislikes is through one assumption that in both experiments you ended up “hating” the dish. For that to happen it would mean that something in your brain is constantly averse to that specific gustatory experience. We do not know what that ingredient is but whatever it is its not nice. The association of the tomato to that taste is up to chance. For example if you lived in a culture where tomatoes were unknown and someone miraculously brought that dish to you then you would say that they were bad and you didn’t like it because you wouldn’t know what a real tomato is like to distinguish it from the horrible curry taste.
This example does not contradict anything though. It’s just an addition. The fact that you did not like the ingredient “X” is quite possibly (according to my previous explanation) a consequence of survival and to me is still based on how you evolved.
The idea however gets interesting when we find someone who does like the curry that you deemed as horrible. Here is the question that throws the evolutionary explanation off track…If you didn’t like it and he did and if both of you were born in the same year and lived very similar lives, belonged to the same religion and had similar customs at home, then why was it that he liked it and you didn’t.
He has never tasted anything that you haven’t. So there is a control in the experiment now (not a very good one but still passable). The basis for the difference has to be somewhere. Our basis for the like and dislike of anything comes from the associations (positive or negative) that we make for everything we see…We see a cow…but its covered in mud…so we don’t think it’s a clean animal and would rather stay away from it while sipping a cup of tea but we get milk from that cow so we think it can’t be that bad either. Nevertheless our bias for it being dirty needs to be addressed and so we pasteurize the milk and then go ahead and boil it one last time before consumption. The concept varies from person to person as people from different socioeconomic backgrounds would have a different perception about cleanliness. Nevertheless something being dirty as opposed to spotless is always in the minds of people. Maybe today we scientifically associate clean surrounding with good health. But we were still striving for clean surrounding whenever we could even when we didn’t know of microorganisms. Learned behavior and neuroplasticity obviously have had a big part to play in that but I wonder if we are born with that knowledge…
It would be an amazing experiment to figure out if we are like that…and it is just a hypothesis of mine that maybe there are certain rules that we follow in the stepwise processing of information in the brain that guides us towards liking or disliking. Some set of rules that create a bias. The extension of my hypothesis (read wild guessing and imagination) is that could it be possible that in some cases the reason why we dislike something is because of a blown fuse in perception itself, some programming error that swings the bias in the opposite way.
I realize that the guess is based on a hypothesis. So in other words it’s a super guess…:P
I think the subject is getting clearer. And I attribute this development to the power of discussing things and bringing it out in the open…It would be nice if some other people would contribute though…
And I thought eating is a simple job!
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