[ExI] atheism

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 10:43:46AM -0800, Samantha Atkins wrote:

> Saying "well I can't really say whether there are invisible pink unicorns
> or not" is a cop-out, at best technically true since they are defined as
> being impossible to prove or disprove.  But hopefully we have all grown
> beyond such sophomore BS rhetorical games.

Some Sphex wasps drop a paralyzed insect near the opening of the nest. Before
taking provisions into the nest, the Sphex first inspects the nest, leaving
the prey outside. During the wasp's inspection of the nest an experimenter
can move the prey a few inches away from the opening of the nest. When the
Sphex emerges from the nest ready to drag in the prey, it finds the prey
missing. The Sphex quickly locates the moved prey, but now its behavioral
"program" has been reset. After dragging the prey back to the opening of the
nest, once again the Sphex is compelled to inspect the nest, so the prey is
again dropped and left outside during another stereotypical inspection of the
nest. This iteration can be repeated again and again, with the Sphex never
seeming to notice what is going on, never able to escape from its programmed
sequence of behaviors. Dennett's argument quotes an account of Sphex behavior
from Wooldridge's Machinery of the Brain (1963). Douglas Hofstadter and
Daniel Dennett have used this mechanistic behavior as an example of how
seemingly thoughtful behavior can actually be quite mindless, the opposite of
free will (or, as Hofstadter described it, antisphexishness).