The following is a mix of my notes and thoughts on a lecture by Hans-Lukas Teuber. I’ve taken the liberty to re-arrange the order of the topics/ideas to my liking. You’ll find some of the nice quotes from the lecture sprinkled around.
A crab has an organ known as the Statolith. The little bubble that it sits inside of is called a Statocyst. This organ is the equivalent to that of an accelerometer. It helps the crab know which way is up. Unlike humans, crabs grow up in bursts. They shed their skin (shell) during this statge. As the skin grows back, they exhibit an interesting behaviour:
They pick up a little pebble and rub against it to let a new statocyst form in the new shell.
An Austrian investigator noticed this behaviour and did the following:
He put a few crabs inside of a little aquarium which contained no pebbles. Instead it had some iron filings. The crabs then rubbed themselves against these filings to form their new statocysts. Then he came over near the aquarium with a magnet and managed to completely mess up the crab’s sense of orientation. He could even fool the crab into walking up the wall.
The first step in any new scientific field is to know what to be astonished at.
The questions about concepts like perception, movement, emotions and learning are all intertwined. For example, let’s take the one of the simplest possible question in perception:
How do I see a single line as a line? Why does the line stay vertical when I tilt my head? Why does the line not move when I move?
As you might’ve observed, when we try to deal with the problem of perception, the unanswered questions about movement start coming in.
How do we move relative to the objects we’re looking at?
The following is a conversation between a doctor and a patient suffering from eye paralysis:
Doctor: “How do you know something is amiss?”
Patient: “Every time I want to move my eyes the world jumps.”
Note how the person never says that his eyes are paralysed. What is clear by now is that it’s hard to dissociate the problem of perception from the problem of movement.
The great questions in any field are the ones which an intelligent child asks and then stops asking once he’s unable to find the answers.
The goal of any science is to explain, predict and control. Astrophysics for example has been good at explain and predict. But it has not been able to control the stars whose properties can be easily explained or predicted.
Physiology is that science that tries to account for the function of organisms. Things like tissues, body fluids, etc. This is done by calling upon the other sciences like physics or chemistry wherever required.
On the other side is Sociology. It tries to account for the behaviour of organisms in groups. Psychology is firmly planted in the middle.
Science right now is organized in the form of a hierarchy. With the base science being physics. Every other science “sits on top” of the assumptions made by physics. For example, psychology builds on top of physiology and physiology is the physics of living beings.
Although this reliance on the more fundamental sciences is necessary, it is not sufficient.
The laws of falling bricks is simple. Force = Mass x Acceleration
Although the same law also applies to the cat, we see that even if the cat is dropped upside down, the cat will turn around and land on it’s legs. The cat of-course is very different from a brick. A cat has a otolith. It’s an organ which informs it about it’s orientation with respect to gravity.
The same law as that of the brick also applies to a man who has just jumped from the window. The man also has an otolith, which might enable him to land on his feet. Once the person is off the edge, the same laws would apply to him as that of the brick and the cat. But while he’s still on the edge, the complexity is much much higher. Maybe he’s doing it because he’s all hope in life. Or it could be that he’s high on drugs.
The laws of the brick and the cat’s behaviour are not enough to explain the behaviour of the man.
Although the lower sciences as that of the brick (physics) and the cat (physiology) are necessary to explain the man’s behaviour, they are not sufficient.
Being on stage and being in love are not so different.