“I think we must consider that powerful interoceptive affects such as HUNGER <<emphasis added>> and thirst DO indeed shape thought and behavior. In fact, when a person is starving or dying of thirst, the brain has a difficult time thinking of anything else besides food and water. So perhaps the nested hierarchy should be taken down a notch to the brain stem level where interoceptive affects reside. That makes more sense, anatomically speaking. The interoceptive affects (hunger, thirst, disgust, pleasure, pain, anaerobic, etc) —> emotional affects —-> memory and learning (limbic) —> tertiary cognition (cortex). I think that revision increases the validity of Panksepp’s model of global brain function.”

Stuart Sims

There are many correlations between Panksepp’s work and my theory of emotion. He sees emotion as universal in all animals. His emotional modules; Play, Seek, Care, Lust, Rage in my view are predicated on attraction. Even Panic is inversely a function of attraction as emotion requires a concrete object, and then in the absence of something tangible for emotion to focus on, energy becomes fear. But the big distinction is that I don’t think his model goes deep enough and is ultimately reductionist relying on neuro-chemicals and hormones as substrata, machinery without the mind. Of course this then requires human-like thoughts to add meaning to the churning of the gears. So we end up with the incongruity of the universality of emotion from the top to the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, with all having to think human like thoughts so that what they do makes sense. Most absent from the discussion is the imposition of a principle of conductivity that is implemented by the interplay of neurology, physiology and anatomy, with anatomy being the most important player. Recall that the centralization of the nervous system and the development of a bi-laterally symmetric body plan evolved either simultaneously, or, the former AFTER the latter.

What struck me about this post was the authors’ argument that we must go deeper than Panksepp’s modules and look to more basic parameters of existence such as hunger. For Sims this means the brain stem and I would argue that’s not yet deep enough as until a theory of consciousness and a model for emotion gets down to the physics of movement (which means we must add Balance to Hunger), the psychology of the animal mind will remain inscrutable.   

The master threshold of the mind is the Balance/Hunger continuum. If an animal doesn’t move, it doesn’t eat. If an animal moves too much, it is eaten. The Balance systems serves as a brakes on the motion for which the Hunger system craves. This master threshold is predicated on anatomy, physiology and neurology, in that order of priority since that’s the order of emergence on the evolutionary time scale.

But the good news here is that the paradigm is shifting towards a more primordial view of emotion.

Above is an article from NY Times which shows that science is starting to ask the right questions; why is hunger implicit in a state of attraction toward a baby? Unfortunately too much of the article is concerned with the author’s personal decision about having a baby herself and this distracts her from concentrating fully on the scientific question she should have absorbed herself in and which is the purported point of the article. Thus she misses the point entirely.

As mentioned earlier Gary Wilkes is a thoughtful writer on dogs and is willing to make definitive statements. Since some of these statements touch on my theory, I like to expound on these topics since I can contrast my model with a gene-centric interpretation as offered by Wilkes. We will find that gene-centric theories are recursive and always end up in self-contradicting logic loops.

This is what he has to say on the matter:

Wilkes:

“Why do some dogs roll in dead things and poop? Because that is a behavior observed in canids. THAT is the explanation. Unless you have a way-back machine and can observe a function of this, you are simply blowing smoke when you offer an explanation.”

“SOME canids do this. That means it’s not as dominant a gene as noses, ears, four legs, tails or eyeballs. Not ALL canids do this. It’s likely a vestigial behavior that may or may not have had a purpose at one time, but didn’t limit the survival of those who possessed it. You can ‘maybe’ all you want, but there isn’t any need to explain it beyond this.”

KB: In other words if a gene-centric theory can’t explain something, then there is no need for an explanation.

Note that geologists don’t have a “way-back machine” and yet they are able to formulate informed explanations on past events based on what they can indeed know of geological processes they study in the present. Now the behavioral processes in the present, and can which help us make informed explanations on why dogs do what they do, are emotional processes. But unfortunately the gene-centric theorists are formulating explanations based solely on natural selection of genes, instincts and human conceptualizations of nature. They will even insert human thoughts into the mind of a dog (or any animal) in order to make the explanation seem complete. At least Wilkes is bold enough to indicate where he has reach an explanatory limit. But his premise that the explanatory possibilities have been exhausted is incorrect.

Wilkes on Emotion:

“There is no consensus. Without specific definitions, logical analysis is impossible. To say that all aggression is ‘fear based’ requires a solid definition of fear – yet none exists. The same is true of words like ’emotion’. The experts never bothered to explain the biological function of those things.  …………  

One of the things that are both incredibly important and poorly understood is ’emotion’. They are commonly thought of as ‘causative’ agents, but we then act as if they are not. If that sounds confusing, it’s because emotions have never been explained well enough.”

KB  The most important component of animal behavior is emotion and yet behavioral sciences and those who think in depth about dogs have been busy constructing theories and explanations while admitting they don’t understand emotion, the most important fundamental of the animal mind and behavior.

Emotion is the confluence of physiology and neurology in service to locomotion. It is not fundamentally about survival of the individual or the species, but of establishing a networked consciousness through collectivized movements. This not only ensures survival but enables a trans-species communication that adds new energy to the system. Dogs are the exemplars of this emotional phenomenon which is how they flourish in tandem with humans.

Emotion as energy runs to ground just as all energies in nature run to ground. A “preyful aspect” which is anything to do with a body and even fresh snow, dew or the bio-musk of disturbed earth, is an emotional ground. When a dog experiences resistance to movement, this registers as tension in the tips of his shoulder blades and so ALL dogs roll on their backs to ground out this tension, and some seek out more vivid grounds (poop, blood, carrion, etc.) to release their muscular tension being held in the forequarters. The most important thing is to understand that the network is more elemental than genes. There is no gene or set of genes that encode for the V formation that geese fly in. Given their body plan it’s the only way they can cover great distances. Their locomotive rhythm causes them to network.

“

“A crowd that flows like water”

“The behavior of large numbers of insects, animals, and other flocks is often based on rules about individual interactions. Bain and Bartolo applied a fluid-like model to the behavior of marathon runners as they walked up to the start line of the Chicago Marathon (see the Perspective by Ouellette). They observed non-damping linear waves with the same speed for different starting corrals of runners and at different races around the world. Their model should apply both to this type of polarized crowd as well as to other groups, which may help guide crowd management.”

The Physics Of A Crowd

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6422/46

It is now possible for science to apply wave mechanics to large aggregates of people and animals. As we progress, I predict we will find the same wave mechanics existing within the emotional makeup of individuals as I have modeled in my theory of the dog’s makeup. 

This study mentions “polarized crowds” which I interpret to mean a crowd aligned toward a common objective or destination. With humans there is intention involved but even this sits upon an emotional bedrock: the desire to move well relative to others. This is accomplished by wave-making (like a goose flying) and wave-coupling (like geese flying in formation). What is starting to be revealed in such research is that physics is the basis of motive, not psychology.

Coming up on @ABC11_WTVD at 5 and 6 – A grandmother in Henderson says her grandson was bit on his face and legs by a police K9, after she called authorities to help find him pic.twitter.com/UrpjdFFFJC

— Michael Perchick (@MichaelPerchick) April 4, 2018

(Stimuli)                      (Senses/Perception/Processing)            (Behavior)

It’s been suggested by a reader that one can train a dog without trying to figure out what’s about what’s going on within their mental process, what I call Throughput. That is true to a degree, for example one can wire a house successfully without a good grasp of electrical theory (in fact I wouldn’t want Einstein to wire my house would you?) but let me add that we ignore Throughput at our loss.

In the late 19th century physics endured what was termed the ‘“Ultraviolet Catastrophe.” At the risk of my over simplification in this experiment a steady stream of energy was applied to an idealized black body which had exceptionally uniform qualities. The expectation was that once saturated energy would be emitted in a steady stream just as it had been absorbed. The flow of energy was like a continuous stream In, Through and then Out.

However this didn’t happen. Instead the energy didn’t radiate continuously and with the same frequency as it came in, as it should have if it was a wave as it was presumed to be at the time, but rather in discrete frequencies. Energy would build up inside the black body and nothing would come out until a certain pitch was attained and then it emerged on a higher level of a seeming continuum. Meanwhile the classical physics of electromagnetism as a wave predicted that shorter ultraviolet wavelengths would increase to infinity and this was immediately in violation of classical physics itself and which would mean that a toaster with a heating filament would end up acting like an ultraviolet “nuclear” reactor. It was a total contradiction and hence the catastrophe.

In other words the experiment revealed that there was an organizing structure to the black body revealed by its Output. Output revealed Throughput and in turn Throughput revealed the hidden structure of the Input. They were all of a whole with each shedding light on the makeup of the other. From this experiment the structure of the Atom was deduced with electrons envisioned as occupying valence orbitals; and Einstein deduced the existence of the photon as a discrete package of energy so that light had a particle aspect in addition to its wave feature. Newtonian mechanics was about to be displaced by quantum mechanics. And while we don’t need the latter to wire a house, we sure do need it for computing, cell phones, GPS and all the high technology that is currently enabling the modern information revolution. We ignore Throughput at our peril.

So is there a window into the dog’s mind afforded by Output that provides us a look at Throughput?

An inarguable fact is that moving well (Output) is the most adaptive response to any given situation, either moving well toward something one wants, or moving well away from something one fears. Therefore moving well serves as an animals’ internal metric of well-being, i.e. feeing good (Throughput). Furthermore, an animal’s anatomy, physiology, neurology and cognitive capacities evolved to maintain and/or maximize its sense of well-being. And since moving well is the most adaptive response to any given situation, therefore moving well is the basis for how an animal’s anatomy, physiology, neurology and cognitive capacities evolved to work together. And if Throughput—-and—-Output evolved in service to moving well this means that Input, how external stimuli acts upon the mind is also as a function of resistance to moving well.

In “Design In Nature” Adrian Bejan defines optimal movement as the “Locomotive Rhythm.” It is an organized wave of physical motion that minimizes the various resistances which impede movement. Therefore since the locomotive rhythm is the basis of moving well it is also the basis of an internal metric of well-being. The locomotive rhythm is a universal design criteria for all organisms whether they move over the ground, fly through the air or swim in water.

According to the Constructal law, internal organs are configured in size and placement within the body in terms of the locomotive rhythm as their central “design” criteria. Likewise, since cognition evolved to maximize well-being and well-being is a function of moving well, external objects are configured within the mind also in terms of the locomotive rhythm, specifically, in terms of their resistance to moving well so that these resistance values can be minimized. This is why the physical momentum is transformed into an emotional momentum and then attributed to a stimulus so as to create the motive to convert this force into the locomotive rhythm, into moving well.

Since an animal’s body and mind evolved to maximize its sense of well-being, therefore its actions are always striving to optimize a feeling of well-being and we can deduce that Input——Throughput—- Output—-(perception—processing—performance)—-are functions of efficient movement in service to optimizing a state of well-being. Every stimulus is perceived, processed and responded to relative to this intrinsic metric of well-being. The mental process of objectification, the way sensory data is imported into the brain and goes on to take shape in the mind, is a function of resistance to movement. External inputs are assimilated into their form as objects of resistance (particle) to the locomotive rhythm so that their impedance values can be minimized, or, they can be coupled with so as to generate an amplification of force (wave).

Taking a look into Throughput teaches us that the number one motive of a dog is to be able to project force and receive positive feedback via feeling good by moving well. Now if one doesn’t know this one will presume that tangible consequences, i.e. receiving pleasure or avoiding pain, is the guiding metric for a dog’s behavior and one can pretty well train a dog thinking this way. However sooner or later one is going to run into a contradiction (such as a dog that’s raised with nothing but positive feedback but then as an adult becomes dangerously aggressive) and this can prove catastrophic to our training. We ignore Throughput at our loss and at their peril.

Wilkes invented the clicker tool and he commendably knocks heads with the positive-force-free-only school of dog training who would like to regulate the rest of us out of existence. Somehow we became friended on Facebook and I started to get his postings in my Facebook feed. He has interesting things to say and he’s also against mandatory neutering, so big kudos there.

On his site I remained in the background since I don’t want to end up combative on someone else’s home ground but on one occasion he issued a challenge to define fear, emotion and aggression, each in a brief straightforward sentence. Thinking this would be a way to engage on the level of pure theory I felt it was a promising opportunity for a meaningful discussion (not to mention a chance to promulgate my theory).

Wilkes put it this way:

“Now we can see, clearly, that two critical words – fear and aggression are often assumed to be paired. Some ‘experts’ claim that all aggression is fear based. However, in this discussion, there are so many different ideas about these terms that any specific statement is questioned. i.e. There is no consensus. Without specific definitions, logical analysis is impossible. To say that all aggression is ‘fear based’ requires a solid definition of fear – yet none exists. The same is true of words like ’emotion’. The experts never bothered to explain the biological function of those things. Could a doctor practice medicine without understanding the circulatory system of the blood stream? What if the doctor didn’t even acknowledge the concept of a ‘stream’? I’m not going to let that person touch me. Why would I let an analogous ‘behavior expert’ have access to my dog?”

Now I’m one of those “experts“ who believes that all anti-social examples of aggression are indeed expressions of fear since in my model the fundamental impulse of the canine mind is to be social. In this vein I’ve rigorously defined fear, aggression, emotion, stress, et. al, in simple one sentence statements and I am able to do so because my theory of behavior is based on a model, one that was arrived at through an immediate-moment manner of analysis of animal behavior. In short I don’t read human thoughts (see below) into the mind of an animal to explain its behavior. The reason the mainstream has no consensus is because they are not building a model but instead are inserting human thoughts and concepts to explain behavior and this leads to all kinds of logical inconsistencies and internal contradictions that trap people into one dead end or another (as these are virtually infinite) and hence no consensus.

Now I’m sure Wilkes would object by saying that certain behaviors are innate and instinctively reflexive without having anything to do with a thought (but then how are they modifiable by training?) and are rooted in the genes. But this is just an intellectual device of expedience which defers the thought (for example a human concept such as territoriality or survival) to the level of the gene as if that resolves the problem and removes the homunculus. The gene obviously isn’t thinking but apparently its metric for success remains the human concepts of maintaining territory, competing for resources and so on. So the agency of thought is seemingly removed but the invisible conceptualizer is still busy at work somewhere undefined.

What is a human thought? The comparison of respective points of view, be it between two beings with their own unique perspectives or between two points in time. Eliminating comparative perspectives allowed me to develop a model for the animal mind as a flow system. And to Wilkes’ point of a doctor practicing medicine without understanding the circulatory system, he could have put it more accurately by saying- – —- without having a MODEL for how the human body works AS A FLOW SYSTEM ———- flow being why in fact we say ‘’stream” when it comes to the blood and even consciousness.

Why is a model so important? In addition to rendering concise definitions and protecting the observer from projecting human thoughts into animal behavior; unbeknownst to those who work without a model they are unwittingly constructing one nonetheless by reflexively placing instinct and genes as the deepest layer in the architecture of the animal mind, deeper than emotion, or as synonymous with emotion; complete befuddlement. And this means that only thoughts can modify behavior (the term “forming associations” is another intellectual expedient and we can find a thought lurking in there as well). So in the absence of a model untested questions and assumptions seep into treatments of behavior and a de facto model emerges inadvertently. (BTW IMO emotion IS deeper than instinct and this is why certain deep seated behaviors can be both innate AND modifiable.)

Another vital benefit of a model is that it shows you internal contradictions because every statement must add up with every other statement. We can’t hide behind bromides such as “dogs do things for the fun of it,” “some dogs are smarter than others,” “animals are wild and unpredictable,” “exception to the rule,” “every dog is different” and so on. These are handy qualifiers that are used to putty over inconsistencies in one’s theory of the dog’s mind.

Wilkes also wrote:

“Behavior is a dynamic process. Yet, for some reason, people want definitive static advice about behavior.”

This brings me to the crux of my critique that I want to state before I offer my definitions. The mind of an animal can only be understood as a Flow System predicated on the transfer of energy (mass plus momentum = Force = Energy) —-in other words the simple movement of the body is a transfer of energy and this type of analysis has nothing to do with woo-woo magical thinking —- it revolves around the mechanics of movement; a transfer of force from one individual to another, as well as from the individual to the environment. If the force transfers efficiently (via a wave mechanics) the animal feels good. This is an objective, clinically sound observation since the animal’s body is moving efficiently. This gives us a window into the mind of the animal and this understanding is the only one consistent with the latest inroads that physics is making into the nature of evolution, most especially a principle of Thermodynamics called ‘’The Constructal Law” which determines how all interactions between constituents of a system, whether it be an inanimate or animate one, can transpire. Organisms and the environment are all one system connected by the flow of matter and energy and it’s where any understanding of behavior as a dynamic process will lead, if that is, one begins with the transfer of force and works their way up to the higher cognitive processes rather than inserting human concepts and then mistakenly finding them deeper and deeper down the phylogenetic tree as one tries to account for structure.

Furthermore, a flow model is consistent with the growing science of swarm intelligence which is proving that complex collective behavior works according to a systems logic, I.e. a flow dynamic. Any other treatment of behavior is a static process and can’t be said to be dynamic other than by inserting human thoughts to compensate for its deficiencies. Saying a dog has a drive to defend his territory is human narrative, it’s story telling plain and simple.

So on Wilkes site I offered the following definitions and also fleshed them out with specific examples of what one experiences emotionally when driving a car.

Emotion is a State of Attraction

Aggression is Blocked Attraction

Fear is the Collapse of a State of Attraction

These are not esoteric definitions as they can be directly experienced by anyone who is physically (or emotionally) connected to an energy system because in these cases one’s animal mind rises to the surface of consciousness. These definitions are also based on sub-modules by which I mean one can probe deeper, for example, what is the source of emotion so that a state of attraction ensues? — What does a collapse of a state of attraction mean? and so on. Furthermore these states can be experienced directly. In other words, what does a collapse of a state of attraction FEEL LIKE?

So I followed these definitions up with a real life example. For instance the reason a human is able to drive a car is because our animal mind (as opposed to our rational mind which operates as a surface overlay above our animal mind) is able to transpose the basic mechanics of how one moves their body onto the processes by which the car moves. This happens through the phenomenon of emotional projection (which is the driver assimilating the car’s c-o-g into their sense of their own physical c-o-g—-and then incorporating the momenta of other objects of attraction such as other vehicles into the resulting feeling of flow). It’s our animal, emotional mind (emotion embodying the calculus of motion) that allows us to accomplish this. Through this capacity one is able to intuitively track the movement and relative speeds of other cars and do this calculation without thinking but via feeling. The novice driver begins by thinking about it, but once they are able to apply their locomotive rhythm to the behavior of their car and the cars around them, it then smooths out into an autonomic, automatic process. Mapping via emotional projection and eliminating the thought process is what we call the learning curve.

Also note the social networking dynamic at work. Each car is an object of resistance that can interfere with your movement. This means that all movements are interlaced and this means that you can’t move well unless the other cars are moving well. Traffic has to flow as an aggregate group phenomenon.

So if a driver is moving along at 75mph and encounters a dawdler in the passing lane, they will start to feel themselves becoming aggressively inclined toward the driver blocking their way. They’re beginning to experience Blocked Attraction. They’re attracted to their destination, but the way isn’t open.

And if a driver is moving along and suddenly there’s a trooper in the rear view mirror, they experience the Collapse of a State of Attraction and that is the experience of fear because the police have the power to interrupt the feeling of flow.

These simple definitions are correlated to everyday emotional  experiences and it’s pretty straightforward stuff.  But then a funny thing happened on our way to the larger debate, my definitions and examples went missing. An earlier one still remains but it apparently was overlooked and we didn’t yet engage. Either Facebook lost them, or I can’t find them, or they were deleted. So in future posts and in the interest of a good debate otherwise unavailable I’m going to excerpt some of Wilkes’ provocative or illustrative statements and contrast them with my model. Of course he is welcome to debate in person, that would be the most informative.

Little by little the paradigm on dogs is shifting. The current consensus is becoming that the hunt is what drew wolf and early man together and ultimately yielded the domestic dog. What’s particularly refreshing about this treatment is how it relies on Indigenous stories of domestication as a basis for serious investigation which is then fleshed out with a clinical scientific method.

In the seventies and eighties reading the science on dogs meant a relentless browbeating of how dogs were domesticated by selecting for docility, submissiveness, respect for a pack leader. Meanwhile working in my father’s kennel business was all about aggression in dogs with security and police patrol work, problem dogs that bit people, dogs that killed livestock, not to mention the dogs that were relentless ratters, woodchuck hunters and the field dogs that were happy to flush birds all day. We always had house and barn cats and they had prey instinct but not nearly as savage as many of the dogs I had come to know. Yet they were seen as almost wild and close to their natural underpinnings while dogs were called tamed and almost totally removed from nature. Concurrently I quickly learned that you couldn’t trust “friendliness.” A dog would snuggle up to me in the admitting office and then later in his kennel would try to bite me. At some point it all began to make sense when I realized that working together in the hunt was the basis of sociability, and friendliness was a defensive response when in socially charged, non-hunting contexts. I credit working with protection and police dogs for the breakthrough and my manner of analysis (immediate-moment) which didn’t put human thoughts into the mind of a dog.

What remains lacking in the emerging consensus is the role of emotion in the hunt. In fact I will go so far to state that emotion evolved through the hunt, it’s not something that was tacked on to conscious experience, it’s a universal operating system of the animal mind. The other glaring omission remains the recognition that human beings are every bit a part of nature as is an animal in the natural world and that domestication is a natural evolutionary process. Thus the dog is the wildest aspect of the wolf, magnified until it is the major feature of its emotional makeup.

What’s particularly rich is how the book is received by Marc Bekoff on his Psychology Today Blog.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/201712/the-first-domestication-how-wolves-and-humans-coevolved

Bekoff focuses on how cooperation not competition is the basis of the relationship between the wolf and early humans and simultaneously wants to give high cognitive capacity the credit for this. Meanwhile a mathematician has divined the systems’ rules by which a wolf hunt proceeds and these simple rules have nothing to do with high cognition. This is why the emotional bond between a Police handler and her/his dog, or a hunter and his gun dog, the hounds and the hound master, the shepherd and the sheep herder, all a function of hunting is more profound than between the average owner and companion dog who is only asked to be friendly. So if cooperation in the hunt which is the basis of the wolf’s lifestyle is based on a systems’ logic, why wouldn’t the social lives of  be based on the same non-competitive system’s logic as well? Bekoff still sees the social dynamic as based on dominance and submission. Whereas an immediate-moment analysis arrives at this understanding and this is a point of view that Bekoff has pilloried on his blog (when he used to accept comments) accusing me of failing biology 101.

It’s a touching story and we can all resonate with the mother Orca and the loss of her calf. But is this grief, and if not, is grief more meaningful than what the mother Orca could otherwise be said to be experiencing?

Now when I argue that this is not grief because grief requires a comprehension of mortality, and furthermore if we’re going to confer grief onto animals this by extension means that Orca’s must worry about the next day’s fishing prospects, whether or not the life they’ve been living has been living up to an Orca’s true potential. And it’s not all upside as they would also be mentally capable of treachery, manipulative deceit, and murder. Another aspect of the dark side to being endowed with a capacity for grief is what about all the Orca mothers who don’t display grief, are they therefore lacking in moral character and maternal compassion?

While it may appear that I’m the grinch stealing the romance from the stories told about animals, it’s actually the other way around. I’m the only one saying that animals don’t have to think like humans to be deemed worthy of the high social virtues such as altruism, love, empathy, compassion, cooperation etc.. Because of the implications of attributing grief to the mother Orca as I’ve noted above, instead I believe we need to work harder to find a better answer. The answer is in the false dichotomy that if it’s not thinking than it is a machine. There is another way to understand animal intelligence without inserting a human intellect.

I propose attributing an immediate-moment mind to an animal.

This reveals that this mother Orca demonstrates something far more sublime and transcendent than attributing grief to the animal mind. And for the record she is indeed feeling loss, pain and a registry of disordered sensibilities so indeed I have compassion for her. We all know what that feels like. But nevertheless does she understand that her calf is dead?

First of all were we to see a human tending day after day to the corpse of a loved one we’d say they’re becoming unhinged, that there’s a mental dysfunction being triggered or at least amplified by the death of their loved one. In short, the problem is that they don’t accept their loved one’s mortality. They don’t believe they are dead.

Through an immediate-moment lens we see that emotion is a group energy, it has universal properties and principles of movement common to every emotional being. This means that an animal doesn’t see its SELF as separate and distinct from whatever it is attracted to and bonded with. And this means that what the animal feels on the inside, is what it feels causes what it sees on the outside. It feels that its internal emotional experience is what energizes its body and motivates it to move, and therefore what it feels inside is what energizes AND MOBILIZES what it is attracted to do what it does on the outside. The source of its life is not in its being, its life springs from the internal emotional experience of the one relating to it. And unlike the family of a person tending obsessively to the corpse of their loved one, the other Orcas don’t think she’s dysfunctional in the least since they feel the same way and are swept up into tending the dead calf  due to the mother’s behavior.

Now why did the the mother Orca lose the feeling and return to life as normal? Because maintaining a sense of self, and all the other selves therein contained in that master self, depends on feedback of a specific type, i.e. Newton’s third law of motion: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. (Note that emotion is a calculus of motion.) This is the basis of trust and a feeling of safety so one can count on the feedback they’re comfortable handling. So as the calf decomposed and failed to render any equal/opposite feedback, and its flaccid, morbid unresponsiveness absorbing all input like an emotional black hole, eventually broke the connection between mother and calf and she was free to move on.

Emotion due its universal properties and principles of movement creates a group consciousness, a networked intelligence. The Orca pod is operating through a collective mind due to a universal range of affect common to each one. And because each is an emotional counterbalance to the other, they move best when they mirror each other in conformance to the laws of motion. In short what I feel you feel and this composes one mind and doesn’t require human thoughts. Just the presence of heart and the feeling of loss. This is the sublime transcendental message we could be seeing in animal behavior, in short, the nature of Nature is to nurture.

{{ Things can always be said more clearly. The mother FEELS her calf as an extension of her body. If it’s not breathing she FEELS like she can’t breath. Thus get it to the surface. And to watch the body of the calf sink down into the abyss FEELS like she is falling which is how the animal mind constitutes death without an understanding of mortality. }}

From the New York Times Science Section:

“The setting was romantic enough. Sunny spring day. A cherry tree blossoming a vivid pink. One party, the suitor, was dark, fetching and amorous. But the other party lay there like a corpse. It was, in fact, a corpse.

Scientists are baffled by this behavior because they assume that the living crow knows that the dead crow is dead, that sexual behavior is fundamentally about procreation, that objects and stimuli come to be related one to the other in the crows mind according to human concepts such as territoriality, competitive rivalry, survival enhancement, access to resources and the like.

The dead crow triggers the physical memory in the living crow OF ANOTHER LIVING CROW. The living crow is trying to “wave-couple” with the inert crow’s body in order to reanimate that stimulus so that it conforms to the physical memory it carries of another living crow to which it’s probably bonded.

QUESTION EVERYTHING. How? Consider an immediate-moment manner of analysis rather than human narrative construction (story telling) which uses human rational concepts such as necrophilia.

This experiment is exploring the cooperative capacity of dogs relative to wolves. It ends up with a muddled result because of two interrelated biases built into the interpretation.

One, it sees the nature of cooperation as a function of cognitive capacity as opposed to emotional capacity. Are wolves smarter and more cooperative than dogs? Are dogs dumber than ravens? We end up with these kinds of irrelevant comparisons.

Secondly, the mindset behind this experiment is the supposition that mankind sits outside nature and artificially distorts nature. So if a dog is stymied by the two rope setup in the experiment and quickly turns to a human for help, this is interpreted as dependency and helplessness inculcated through domestication. Without seeing nature as a whole, this is like saying a vine is smarter than the plant it’s smothering.

So how would we interpret this experiment in terms of emotional capacity? Emotion establishes an ambient group mood. Want to experience this directly? Walk into a comedy club, then a funeral parlor, then a football stadium, then a subway car. If you pick up the ambient mood in each context, you can seamlessly fit in. If you fail to, things could get ugly.

Also embedded in a mood is a) direction of flow and b) rate of flow. If a comedian is really crackling, all eyes are drawn on stage and the air is electrified as successive punchlines raise the amplitude in the audience. These values are temperamental as they are assigned to living beings. The negative is the one who gives you access to emotional release, your laughing belly is the positive polarity.

But these values can also be environmental by which I mean they are assigned to inanimate features. In the subway the direction of flow is which way the train is facing and the rate is the intensity of sights and sounds whizzing by. But then there can be temperamental values simultaneously as in a crazed looking vagrant acting volatile at the nearest door and so you pick a “new negative,” a door in the rear of the car. The door is a negative because it grants access to being released from the subway. But the crazed man is also a negative because in this case your better judgment says look for a new negative with less resistance.

So every scenario has these values incorporated in emotionally relevant animate or inanimate features of the surroundings. Our human intellect makes a big distinction between these two classes of emotionally relevant objects, but the animal mind does not other than the fact that animated objects generate more intense rates of flow and so generate far more feedback. If our access to a positive seems assured, the ambient mood is pleasant. If access is questionable, the ambient mood is unpleasant. The point I’m making here is that every situation is precoded this way because the architecture of the animal mind is thermodynamic by nature, energy flows from the negative to the positive (high to low pressure) and there is a rate of flow that either fulfills or exceeds one’s emotional capacity. When it exceeds then either instincts (or thoughts in humans) take over.

The funniest thing about this video, and talking about comparing apples to oranges, is that two food crazed wolves are compared to two fluffy house dogs. Yes the wolves perform the exercise perfectly, but it doesn’t hold any of the characteristics of a cognitive comprehension of cooperation. If the first wolf could eat any faster he’s eat his helper’s food as well.

However let’s reconsider the two fluffy dogs. Note that one dog is far more interested in the food than the other one. Why? A high emotional capacity, they have emotionally polarized to two complementary personality traits and behavioral patterns. One is Active and Direct, the other is Reactive and Indirect. In other words, have they failed the test? Yes as it is interpreted through the self-limiting biases. But do they display a more cohesive team configuration so that were they to work at a team rather than “competing for access” as are the wolves, they will approach the problem from different perspectives that in toto are far more encompassing of the problem.

What then is domestication? It is the inculcation of a high emotional capacity that allows the animal to perceive a direction of flow and then align and synchronize with the most intense rate of flow that there is in nature, the doings of human beings. It is not building in a high cognition. It is reducing the mind to the basic thermodynamic template.

Where did this evolve from? The fact that wolves hunt a prey with a negative that is impenetrable unless they confront it through the group mind perspective as displayed by the two fluffy dogs. Now when one of the wolves is let out of his pen well after the first wolf is already on station, the wolf on station does indeed make eye contact with the oncoming wolf as his negative grants access to the positive. (The question is can he hold onto this feeling when the other wolf is close?) And also, were these wolves to have grown up imprinted on human beings, or had been born with a higher emotional capacity that would squeeze out the intensity of instinct, they too when they encountered enough resistance in a cooperation problem would look for the new negative, i.e. the human eye.

It’s also interesting that when two search and rescue dogs were tested, they performed more like the wolves although without the compressive over stimulation. I would speculate this has to do with the fact that they’re not fluffy house dogs but actually go out and hunt with their humans and have to find many new negatives during the course of a training exercise or actual mission.

Human beings do not sit outside of nature. We create a powerful ambient emotional mood, a virtual field of energy, and all animals are influenced when they are in it. Consider the following experiment:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180316113053.htm

In this experiment wild mice are put in a barn that humans frequent to leave them food. That’s the extent of the influence. There’s no selective breeding or any interactions. And yet gradually the wild field mice acquire the traits of domestication syndrome with changes in body shape and coat colors. The human activity because food was involved could reduced their perspective to its basic thermodynamic signature, negative-as-access-to-positive. This must then trigger the epigenetic phenomenon and gradually their genes shift to become basal stem cells that have the best chance to integrate with the powerful current of emotion generated by human beings.

Imagine then the level of reciprocal influence and rapport were one was actually working with an animal so that both parties could do what they love doing best? Hunting. Eventually, behavioral and genetic changes would subscribe to the overarching group mood, which in this case would contain the most intense rate of change possible, hence a high emotional capacity and a reduction of instinct.

The moral of the story? Human beings are not apart from nature, we are a part of nature.

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What does a dog need? Love, play, food, shelter? These are important, but what a dog truly needs, says Kevin, is to be part of a team. Everything in a dog’s life is secondary to the dynamic emotional rapport it feels when it’s part of a team. How can you help to make that happen? Communication is essential, and much of the dog’s communicating occurs through its body language.

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