“Revolution in Thought: A new look at determinism and free will"

[southernhybrid]

I'm not going to get back to the stupid claims made by Lessons, but since I think dogs are much better than people and they are much smarter than people realize, I do have a little bit to say about dogs.

If dogs were in charge of the world, we might accomplish world peace as they are the most loving, forgiving beings ever to have evolved to be our companions. If there was a god, it would be a dog.

https://knowanimals.com/how-do-dogs-see-human-faces/

When you look into your dog’s eyes, you might wonder what they see. Dogs can actually recognize human faces, even if they don’t see them the same way you do. Unlike us, dogs see fewer colors and rely more on different shades and shapes. This unique way of seeing helps them identify you and other familiar faces.

Researchers have found that dogs have a special part of their brains dedicated to recognizing faces. This means your furry friend can pick you out in a crowd, even when surrounded by strangers. Understanding how dogs perceive our faces adds to our appreciation of their intelligence and the bond you share.

The Science of Sight in Dogs​

Dogs don’t see the world the same way humans do. Their eyes have a special layer called the tapetum lucidum. This layer reflects light, making it easier for dogs to see in low light.

While dogs have fewer color receptors than humans, they can detect some colors like blue and yellow. Their eyesight is geared toward motion detection, which is helpful in noticing small changes in their environment.

Using advanced tools like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have shown that dogs process images in a way that helps them recognize human faces effectively. This ability is crucial for their social interactions with you.

Facial Recognition and Emotional Expressions​

Dogs are excellent at recognizing not just faces but also the emotions attached to those faces. Studies reveal that dogs have a dedicated area in their brains for processing human faces.

When you smile or frown, your dog can likely sense your feelings through your expressions. They can pick up on subtle cues, such as how your eyebrows move or the position of your mouth. This awareness helps them decide how to respond, whether it’s coming to comfort you or playing when you’re happy.

Understanding these facial expressions is a big part of why dogs form close bonds with humans, as they learn to read you over time.

 

[peacegirl]

An example I posted before.

There is a city where a group of dogs meet, get on a subway, and get off at stops where they know there is food.

Watched a show on it.

AI Overview
Stray dogs in post-Soviet cities like Moscow have famously learned to navigate the transit system to scavenge for food, successfully associating PA announcements with specific station stops. Similarly, viral stories feature stray dogs riding independently to Subway franchises for meals.

I have seen dogs reacting to TV video. Heads move tracking critters on the screen.

Dogs can learn a lot of things, but they cannot differentiate between different faces without their sense of smell, sound, or gait, since vision is not their dominant feature.

 

[peacegirl]

Regurgitating the pseudoscience in the book is pointless.

Debating whether philosophies of free will and determinism can have an affect on humidity is worthwhile..

You never understood that there is an answer to this long-standing debate. You just chalk it up to there being none. That's a lack of understanding on your part that an answer doesn't, in fact, exist.

Repeating unsubstantiated claims and not responding to issues I raise with the alleged solution to war and crime.

They are definitely substantiated, but you have no clue because you haven't read a thing, and you keep using today's volatile world to discount the possibility of a new one based on a new understanding of human nature.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Written to steve_bank:

How can there be power struggles when there will be no more social and political factions and no more status quo?

Let's imagine the following hypothetical.

There is a small island nation of 20 people. Two people are psychopaths and 1 is a sociopath. Another person is a profound liar and very greedy. Yet another person is a pedophile. Among the rest of the population are 3 pre-pubescent children and regular folks of varying adult ages, IQ, and wealth. All persons, even the children, are literate.

You convince the government of this nation to let you go there to preach your father's words. The population is there and you read the book on a mount while everyone listens. Then, you hand each person a copy of the book on their way out.

Little did you realize that Trump and North Korea had a nuclear war while you did this and everyone is dead on the planet except for you and the islanders.

What are the next three major events that will happen due to the new world's population receiving the words of your father?

Show this mathematically.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

An example I posted before.

There is a city where a group of dogs meet, get on a subway, and get off at stops where they know there is food.

Watched a show on it.

AI Overview
Stray dogs in post-Soviet cities like Moscow have famously learned to navigate the transit system to scavenge for food, successfully associating PA announcements with specific station stops. Similarly, viral stories feature stray dogs riding independently to Subway franchises for meals.

I have seen dogs reacting to TV video. Heads move tracking critters on the screen.

Dogs can learn a lot of things, but they cannot differentiate between different faces without their sense of smell, sound, or gait, since vision is not their dominant feature.

You keep repeating that after having seen this.

The look of love – dogs recognise their owner’s faces - Hanne Grice Pet Training & Behaviour

A new study led by the University of Padua in Italy has shown how much dogs rely on seeing their owners’ faces in order to recognise them. The study also measured how much dogs prefer to gaze at and follow their owners, rather than a stranger. This latest research reported in the latest Animal...

www.hannegrice.com

 

[pood]

Let’s keep in mind that dog is god spelled backward.

 

[Rhea]

A clock's time can slow down or speed up due to a change

This is the kind of vague-posting that doesn’t advance your ideas at all. You dismiss wihtout a clear reason. Just vague “change”.

What kind of change? What mechanism are you proposing?

We’ve been doing all the work here.
For example, do you mean a clock’s spring getting weak? Do you mean a battery aging? Obviously science has excellent ways to control for that, such as using molecular oscillations to set the clock incredibly precisely. We also have MSAs and Gauge R&Rs to make sure our clocks are providing precision.

Or did you mean some other kind of change that you couldn’t be bothered to articulate because you didn’t think precision was important?

You advance nothing, and it leaves the rest of us concluding, “she does not know how to achieve repeatability at all.”

 

[Rhea]

We are not talking about visual cues. We are talking about true recognition.

Here you are implying that “true recognition” occurs without “visual cues.”

It seems to be aligned with your assertion, that you have not proven, that the brain can process the world around it without vision.

Which, not only have you not proven, you haven’t even tested because you claim you can’t, and honestly, you haven’t even described so that those around you who do have this skill could test.

I am absolutely incapable of recognizing people without visual cues. (In the absence of smell and sound and touch, as you demand for the dog experiments). I cannot just look at a person and know who they are. I can’t do it.

 

[Rhea]

each person will be mathematically prevented from desiring

Show your math. Or stop using the word “mathematically” in a dishonest way.

(Note: this is not you getting shut down or shut out. This is you being invited to show your math and join the club of people who know what “mathematically” means.)

 

[pood]

each person will be mathematically prevented from desiring

Show your math. Or stop using the word “mathematically” in a dishonest way.

(Note: this is not you getting shut down or shut out. This is you being invited to show your math and join the club of people who know what “mathematically” means.)

Her writer also claimed that in the new world, it would be mathematically impossible for married couples to desire to share the same bed.

People have been waiting for years for her to provide the relevant equation for this claim.

 

[steve_bank]

Pg by her postings and arguments along with our responses demonstrate why Lessan's philosophy will not bring about the predicted utopia.

It doesn't prove anything. The Golden Age of man doesn't mean there will be no differences of opinion, but opinions will never escalate into all-out fights.

Conflict and differences are unavoidable. Even if people have what they need to live.

Differences don't necessarily lead to conflicts.

Social and political factions arise. Power struggles. People who do not like the status quo.

How can there be power struggles when there will be no more social and political factions and no more status quo?

Russian and Chinese communism tried to eliminate hierarchical power and level the socioeconomic structure. It failed.

There seems to be Marxism in there somewhere. The end of excising economics and politics. Distributed power.

Power to the people.

CHAPTER SIX: THE NEW ECONOMIC WORLD

p. 278 Communism and the dream of socialism came into existence out of mathematical necessity as a reaction to injustice, but once the injustice is removed, communism and the dream of socialism have no further value. It was assumed that Marx had all the answers, but in this new world, nobody will tell anybody what to do, although each person will be mathematically prevented from desiring to hurt others.

Of the irony.

Pg talks about conditioning yet repeats a fixed set of lifelong conditioned responses. Unable to see humans as we are.

The difference between dogs and humans is dogs have to be taught to do stupid tricks. We teach ourselves to do stupid tricks.

Lessan's utopian view is based on an assumption there is a pure idealized human state that will bring an end to our troubles.



We are not logical reasoning critters, emotions can and do chemically over ride the logic, impulse control, and reasoning areas in the brain.

There is a genetic component to our behavior.

 

[peacegirl]

Your entire conclusion that the experiment with beagles proves that they actually recognize their human is utter bullocks. Training a dog to recognize visual patterns is not the same thing as true recognition. You will have to think again before telling me that he needs to eliminate the observation that dogs can identify their humans. Show me a dog that has not seen his human for months and gets excited (by a wag of a tail or a happy whimper or something of that nature) when you stick a picture of his human in front of his face, close up. Show me where a dog recognizes his human from a computer screen when no other cues are present, such as movement or sound. When you do, please post it so everyone can see this for themselves.

Interesting. We did. Several people did. The exact thing Lessans claimed was not possible, shown to be possible.

And your reaction is so interesting. Not “oh? Let’s look at that and see if it fits,”. But rather, “no! I did not see the thing that was clearly there.” End of discussion, dismissed. Without looking at the test parameters and whether it’s a good test or bad test. No examination of the test set-up and it’s implications, just dimissal.

Also interesting is

Training a dog to recognize visual patterns is not the same thing as true recognition

I mean - isn’t it???????
Truly. Isn’t it?

No, it isn't. Dogs can be trained to see patterns to their human when they get a reward, but I'm talking about facial recognition without a treat. Facial recognition is more difficult for a dog because they can't distinguish their human from your human.

I have a very VERY hard time recognizing faces—remembering them. I train myself very hard to remember the students in my classes so that I can recall which one is who just for the day. I have to work very very hard at this. I pretty much cannot tell grey-haired white men apart from each other. I love name badges. They are my rescue devices. I love when people have colored hair and weird piercings and birth marks and tattoos because they are much much easier for me to remember than faces.

It’s one of the reasons I love this community because I can remember who you all are so much more easily.


I am human and I have to train myself on pattern recognition to identify people. I feel like we all do, some people are just better at it than others.

Ironically, I am outstanding at other types of pattern recognition and that has made me a good manufacturing process troubleshooter. I can detect and exploit some pretty subtle pattern observations to correct a drifting process setpoint or disturbance. But I cannot recognize the face of a person I worked with for five years when I come back from a year away at another site.

I saw a YouTube video about that condition. I'm happy for you that you learned how to compensate and it hasn't interfered with your life in a big way. But truly, this doesn't really relate to his description of what he believed happens at birth to allow for this focusing that enables vision. If you don't believe his explanation and instead believe that the ciliary muscle of an infant's eye is underdeveloped --- accounting for the lack of focus --- then you are entitled to believe the present scientific explanation. I won't hold it against you.

You will have to think again before telling me that he needs to eliminate the observation that dogs can identify their humans

So you should read the links and examine the tests and see if you can identify the flaw in the tests before you claim that the many many MANY examples, including formally designed studies, of dogs using pictures to recognize their humans, fail to prove the point.

I have seen enough, and it is so easy to conclude that dogs recognize faces when that is the desired outcome. Measuring the length of time a dog looks in the direction of his human versus looking slightly shorter at another person is not absolute proof that what they are looking for is the reason for the difference. I never see any replication of these experiments that would give a measure of confidence.

Your dismissal is really interesting to me. I love examining studies, and if I don’t believe them, I like to definitely pinpoint why they failed to be a good study. It’s like the NYT crossword for me, like finishing a 5000 piece jigsaw, like solving before Columbo can.

You seem to react very differently. Just handwave and walk away.

I'm not dismissing anybody. Interesting because I find that I'm often the one being dismissed. We have different perspectives.

 

[peacegirl]

each person will be mathematically prevented from desiring

Show your math. Or stop using the word “mathematically” in a dishonest way.

(Note: this is not you getting shut down or shut out. This is you being invited to show your math and join the club of people who know what “mathematically” means.)

Her writer also claimed that in the new world, it would be mathematically impossible for married couples to desire to share the same bed.

People have been waiting for years for her to provide the relevant equation for this claim.

Pood, it's right there at the bottom of my page, free of charge. The two-sided equation (the core of the discovery) is in Chapter Two. Do I have to spoon-feed it to everyone? If they're not interested, they won't be interested if I give it to them on a silver platter. And if they are interested, they will click the link and read it with real interest. That's all I can do.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Pood, it's right there at the bottom of my page, free of charge.

Which page do you mean?

 

[peacegirl]

Written to Rhea:

Rhea, I am not going through this garbage again. The tests that you are depending on have flaws. Aceept it, or move on. Show me a dog that can recognize his human in a real-life observation. These studies mean shit if they can't back it up.

Your request isn't very smart. Dogs rely on smell, hearing, sight--and all of the senses as do humans. In order to show how much a dog relies on sight in recognition of its owner, you have to isolate sight from those other potentially confounding variables. That means a NON-real-life observation, it means apply the scientific method to isolate the variable. This is the third time I am posting this link:

The look of love – dogs recognise their owner’s faces - Hanne Grice Pet Training & Behaviour

A new study led by the University of Padua in Italy has shown how much dogs rely on seeing their owners’ faces in order to recognise them. The study also measured how much dogs prefer to gaze at and follow their owners, rather than a stranger. This latest research reported in the latest Animal...

www.hannegrice.com

This experiment is underwhelming. Dogs rely on vision for many things, but they are incapable of language, which is what separates our ability to identify individuals visually from that of dogs, who cannot do so without the help of smell, sound, gait, or association. For example, a dog, knowing that his owner comes home at a certain time, will anticipate the sound of the car coming down the street and will be waiting eagerly for the front door to open. A non-real-life observation can be inaccurate due to the design itself, as I mentioned earlier. Real-life observations matter because they are not being manipulated in the hope of getting a desired result. Bias is alive and well. You are right in that it's not always easy to know whether all dogs react in the same way. A picture eliminates the other cues of sound, smell, and gait, and so far, I have not seen a dog look at a picture of his owner and show any signs of recognition, from a wag of a tail to a whimper, or even licking the picture itself like the dog licked the bacon. Or how about showing the dog a few pictures to see if he could pick out his owner? That would be interesting to see.

 

[peacegirl]

Pood, it's right there at the bottom of my page, free of charge.

Which page do you mean?

My page on this thread. The link is at the bottom.

 

[southernhybrid]

Some people don't want to know the truth. I'll give it one more try. And, why wouldn't a person believe something that has lots of scientific evidence as opposed to something that seems to be based on wishful thinking?

https://www.discovermagazine.com/yo...your-face-in-a-photo-here-s-how-we-know-48548

Testing Dogs’ Ability to Recognize Their Owners​

A 2020 study in Animal Cognition wanted to see if dogs could recognize images of their owners from optimal and not-so-optimal images. In the study, researchers set up a challenge in which, to reunite with their owners, the dogs had to choose the correct location based on a photograph of their owner's face versus a photograph of a stranger.

The results indicated that the dogs were more likely to approach an image of their owner than a stranger. And that the image quality did not matter.

How Do We Know Dogs Recognize Our Faces?​

While certain studies suggest that dogs can recognize their owner’s faces, one 2015 study published in PeerJ helped clarify how dogs process faces more generally.

For the study, six dogs were trained to lie still in an fMRI machine without sedation or restraint. While in the machine, researchers presented the dog with images of everyday objects, other dog faces, and human faces.

During the study, the research team identified a region in the dog’s brain, known as the canine temporal lobe, that responded more strongly to images of human faces than to everyday objects. The team also noted that this area of the brain shared a similar response with the dog and human images.

Overall, the results showed that no particular face seemed to appear in the dog’s primary visual cortex, meaning this wasn’t just a typical visual response. And according to the study authors, the research revealed that face processing is not unique to primates.

To this day, researchers continue to study the unique ways dogs and humans interact. Who knows what we will discover next?

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Written to Rhea:

Rhea, I am not going through this garbage again. The tests that you are depending on have flaws. Aceept it, or move on. Show me a dog that can recognize his human in a real-life observation. These studies mean shit if they can't back it up.

Your request isn't very smart. Dogs rely on smell, hearing, sight--and all of the senses as do humans. In order to show how much a dog relies on sight in recognition of its owner, you have to isolate sight from those other potentially confounding variables. That means a NON-real-life observation, it means apply the scientific method to isolate the variable. This is the third time I am posting this link:

The look of love – dogs recognise their owner’s faces - Hanne Grice Pet Training & Behaviour

A new study led by the University of Padua in Italy has shown how much dogs rely on seeing their owners’ faces in order to recognise them. The study also measured how much dogs prefer to gaze at and follow their owners, rather than a stranger. This latest research reported in the latest Animal...

www.hannegrice.com

This experiment is underwhelming. Dogs rely on vision for many things, but they are incapable of language, which is what separates our ability to identify individuals visually from that of dogs, who cannot do so without the help of smell, sound, gait, or association. For example, a dog, knowing that his owner comes home at a certain time, will anticipate the sound of the car coming down the street and will be waiting eagerly for the front door to open.

Your refutation is underwhelming. Dogs recognize their owners by sight alone. Of course it isn't always perfectly done, but start with a null hypothesis that they cannot. The null hypothesis is rejected by data from the experiments. That's science.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Pood, it's right there at the bottom of my page, free of charge.

Which page do you mean?

My page on this thread. The link is at the bottom.

I don't know what you're talking about.

 

[peacegirl]

Your posts are way too long and convoluted. If you have something to say, get to the point without an entire chapter to explain it.

!!!

I need to just repeat that again for emphasis…

Your posts are way too long and convoluted. If you have something to say, get to the point without an entire chapter to explain it.

Peacegirl. Peacegirl.


You’re the one who posts literal chapters at us without geting to the point.
You have me laughing so hard rn. Are you making a joke here?
You’re funnin’ us, right?

Yes, but this is my thread, and people need to read HIS words. It's hard for me to read refutations that could be shortened for better understanding, even if it takes a couple of posts to do it. Small blocks of text would be much easier to read and respond to. I didn't mean to be rude.