主题：【链接(集)】The Telepathy Debate -- 衲子
“自发灵感”(spontaneous inspiration)指无师自通地发明某种技能, 而生物的群体关系将影响这种技能通过依葫芦画瓢式的“模仿学习”(imitative learning)在生物个体间的扩散速率。
自发灵感通常是小概率事件, 譬如说, 鸟儿有1%(此数据并不精确,这只为打个比方说明问题)的概率能自发地‘顿悟’啄破奶瓶封口偷奶喝的技巧。 如果这个技巧没能通过模仿学习而得到传播，那么大概只有1%左右‘独创的’鸟儿‘发明家’才掌握这种技巧。
自发灵感获得技能的概率似乎随着这种技能在历史上，以及在别的群落内的积累而增长（若排除了基因编码的原因），这是"形态谐振"论、群体潜意识 等模型 所针对的问题。
“The rate of spread of the habit accelerated as time went on.” 二战后重新送奶，“The behavior spread much more rapidly and cropped up independently much more frequently the second time round than the first time. This example demonstrates the evolutionary spread of a new habit which is probably not genetic but rather depends on a kind of collective memory due to morphic resonance.”
"A NEW SCIENCE OF LIFE"节 的 第四第五段.
在山雀的例子中, 设原先有1%的自发灵感概率, 加上通过模仿学习的流传, 一年内全英国的山雀要么顿悟,要么学会偷奶喝了. 因为现在掌握这个技巧的山雀数量众多, 因此存储于它们的"形态场",或"集体潜意识", 或"阿赖耶识的共业种子"的信息就强. 以后的自发灵感概率增长到4%. 解释了日后传播的加速.
而在知更鸟的例子中, 由于它们独行侠的风范, 偷奶技巧没能通过模仿学习得以传播。所以只有少数的发明家才拥有此不传之秘。不过, 完全有可能随着时间的推移, 以后的知更鸟独自领悟‘独孤九剑’的概率从以前的1%增长到, say, 1.5%。 为什么只有1.5%,而不是4%呢? 因为掌握技巧的知更鸟少,所以存储于其形态场的信息较弱. (从订奶的客户看来,依然只有零散的知更鸟偷奶喝的事件. 这不是啥了不得的大事, 当然更不会注意到其较为微弱的变化趋势.)
所以, 形态谐振、集体潜意识、耦合的阿赖耶识 可以解释both山雀and知更鸟的cases. 窃以为大作没抓住要领.
我懒得一个个地去翻译了。大家自己看好了。
[URL=The Cream Myth] http://www.thecorpuscle.com/2005/04/index.html[/URL]
A party conversation, April 16, 2005:
(Dialogue is an approximation. Some inebriation may be involved.)
C: You remember that show we taped?
T: What show?
C: The one with the birds. Stealing the cream.
T: Oh, yeah. Don't know if we taped it, though.
C (facing M): These birds, over in England, they... On people's porches, the milkman would leave people's milk? The bottles had little tin-foil tops on them and these birds learned how to peck through the foil covers and drink the cream. That was before the war. And then when the war came along they stopped delivering people's milk. For the whole war. Five years later they started again, and these birds, their life spans were only like one year or something, but after five years, when they started delivering the milk again, the birds knew how to peck through the foil and get the cream.
M: Wow. It's like there was a Bird Library. They went to the Bird Library and looked up how to get the cream.
C: Right. Somehow the knowledge was preserved.
M: Or they had legends. Bird legends.
T: Right. (after a brief pause.) The Cream Myth.
The Many Faces of Psychological Research in the 21st Century, Jane S. Halonen, Stephen F. Davis, Editors (2005?), Chapter 13, "Comparative Psychology and Animal Learning", by Jesse E. Purdy and Michael Domjan:
In 1949, Fisher and Hinde reported on birds (blue tits) that had been robbing cream from milk bottles delivered to the doors of English homes. Observers speculated that a single blue tit had discovered, probably quite by accident, how to peck through a bottle cap and consume the rich cream that floated on top of the milk. The occurrence of milk theft then gradually spread throughout the whole of England and into Europe through some form of social learning.
The Aggressor's Way, 2nd Edition (2004), by Francis Hardy:
The small British bird, the blue tit, has the annoying habit of pecking the covers of milk bottles that are delivered outside the doors of many UK homes, and then drinking the milk from the tops of the bottles. This practice was first reported in 1921 near Southampton in southern England, and observations over the years have shown that the habit has been slowly spreading from this area ever since. The evidence suggests that the technique was probably discovered by one particularly innovative bird and has been spreading by simple imitation. Of course, no one knows the exact circumstances of the initial discovery of this new source of food but it could have been a simple case of serendipity - as for example a bird pecking at an insect which had settled on a milk bottle cover and then finding that its beak went through the cover and into the delicious tasting liquid underneath. Many blue tits in the UK are now adept at exploiting this rich source of food - particularly in hard winters when more conventional food is scarce - and there is evidence that other bird species, such as the house sparrow and marsh tit, are also taking up the habit.
The Living Company, by Arie de Geus, 1999:
The United Kingdom has a long standing system of delivering milk in bottles to the door. At the beginning of the 20th century these milk bottles had no top. Birds had easy access to the cream which settled in the top of the bottle. Two different species of British garden birds, the blue tits and red robins, learned to siphon up cream from the bottles and tap this new, rich food source.
This innovation, in itself, was already quite an achievement. But it also had an evolutionary effect. The cream was much richer than the usual food sources of these birds, and the two species underwent some adaptation of their digestive systems to cope with the unusual nutrients. This internal adaptation almost certainly took place through Darwinian selection.
Then, between the two world wars, the UK dairy distributors closed access to the food source by placing aluminium seals on their bottles.
By the early 1950's the entire blue tit population of the UK, about a million birds, had learned how to pierce the aluminium seals. Regaining access to this rich food source provided an important victory for the blue tit family as a whole; it gave them an advantage in the battle for survival. Conversely, the robins, as a family, never regained access to the cream. Occasionally, an individual robin learns how to pierce the seals of the milk bottle. But the knowledge never passes to the rest of the species.
In short, the blue tits went through an extraordinarily successful institutional learning process. The robins failed, even though individual robins had been as innovative as individual blue tits. Moreover, the difference could not be attributed to their ability to communicate. As songbirds, both the blue tits and the robins had the same wide range of means of communication: colour, behaviour, movements, and song. The explanation could be found only in the social propagation process: the way blue tits spread their skill from one individual to members of the species as a whole.
In spring, the blue tits live in couples until they have reared their young. By early summer, when the young blue tits are flying and feeding on their own, we see birds moving from garden to garden in flocks of eight to ten individuals. These flocks seem to remain intact, moving together around the countryside, and the period of mobility lasts for two to three months.
Robins, by contrast, are territorial birds. A male robin will not allow another male to enter its territory. When threatened, the robin sends a warning, as if to say "Keep the hell out of here." In general, red robins tend to communicate with each other in an antagonistic manner, with fixed boundaries that they do not cross.
Birds that flock, seem to learn faster. They increase their chances to survive and evolve more quickly.
"Bonkers About Birds":
Fact Eighteen: Blue tits used to open milk bottle tops to drink the cream. They stopping when semi-skimmed milk became popular.
The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future, by WM. H. K?tke, Book Two: The Seed of the Future, Part I. Creating a Whole Life, Chapter 13: The Principles of Life, "The Moral Basis of the Life of the Earth":
In Southampton, in 1921, a blue tit was observed to peck through the foil cap of a milk bottle, tear the foil back and drink from the bottle. The spread of this habit was recorded at regular intervals from 1930 to 1947. There are eleven species to which this habit has spread but it is most frequently confined to great tits, coal tits and blue tits. After the first observation of this "milk poaching," the habit was seen to spread rapidly through England where sometimes flocks of tits would follow milk delivery people through the neighborhoods waiting for the milk bottles to be put on people's porches. The detailed studies of this phenomenon show that the habit was independently "discovered" by individual tits 89 times in the British Isles. In the view of morphic resonance, this habit pattern resonated within the tit species and the pattern was then increasingly manifest by individual tits. During World War II milk deliveries in England stopped for the duration that was longer than the normal tit life span, yet when milk deliveries commenced again, tits all over England again began to take up the habit. After the war, "It seems certain that the habit was started in many different places by many individuals," researchers said. The habit also spread to Sweden, Denmark and Holland.
The Co-Intelligence Institute, "More on Morphogenetic Fields":
Experiment 1: In the 1920s Harvard University psychologist William McDougall did experiments for 15 years in which rats learned to escape from a tank. The first generation of rats averaged 200 mistakes before they learned the right way out; the last generation 20 mistakes. McDougall concluded that, contrary to accepted genetic science, such acquired knowledge could be inherited.
Experiment 2: In later efforts to duplicate McDougall's experiments in Australia, similar rats made fewer mistakes right from the start. Later generations of rats did better even when they were not descendents of the earlier rats. This wasn't genetics at work. It was something else. Nobody tested it further.
"Experiment" 3: In the 1920s in Southampton, England, a bird called the blue tit discovered it could tear the tops of milk bottles on doorsteps and drink the cream. Soon this skill showed up in blue tits over a hundred miles away, which is odd in that they seldom fly further than 15 miles. Amateur bird-watchers caught on and traced the expansion of the habit. It spread faster and faster until by 1947 it was universal throughout Britain. In a parallel development, the habit had spread to blue tits in Holland, Sweden and Denmark. German occupation cut off milk deliveries in Holland for eight years -- five years longer than the life of a blue tit. Then, in 1948 the milk started to be delivered. Within months blue tits all over Holland were drinking cream, a habit that had taken decades to take hold before the war. Where did they get this knowledge?
[...]
What is going on here?
Sheldrake has hypothesized a field of morphic ("pattern-related") resonance in which patterns of knowledge, structure or behavior of a certain kind of thing (whether a salt crystal or a human mind) become increasingly embedded as a "habit," an ingrained pattern of information which influences and is accessible to other members of that category of thing. In commenting on the rat experiments, Sheldrake said: "If rats are taught a new trick in Manchester, then rats of the same breed all over the world should show a tendency to learn the same trick more rapidly, even in the absence of any known type of physical connection or communication. The greater the number of rats that learn it, the easier it should become for their successors."
A minority of biologists have been suggesting the possibility of morphogenetic (form-generating) fields for decades. Sheldrake's unique contribution has been to create a testable hypothesis regarding such fields. Despite the fact that it seems to violate all broadly-accepted principles of science, the experimental evidence is rapidly mounting that, indeed, something of this kind is at work.
The Cream Myth: From the mind of Man, or from bird brains?
抱歉分了三个帖子，木有办法，5000字上限的规定阿。没有别的意思，就是让大家把所有的有关报道都看一看，看完了您再去看纳子和这位Sheldrake老兄的推论。抱歉昨天没有把所有的东西都给翻译过来。实在是懒得纠缠了。有时间，该干点正经事了。
我同样不认为心灵感应什么的绝对不存在，但很多事情用常规心理学去解释更符合奥卡姆剃刀的原则。就拿一般人经历的预知来电来说，确实有几种认知现象能使人们认为他们猜对来电的几率大于随机几率---
首先是有关记忆的availability bias：当人们发现自己猜对的时候，他们通常会有些惊讶，情感反应会增加，于是对这一事件的印象会特别深刻；而当人们猜错的时候，他们会觉得这是正常的，因此就没放在心上，更可能是直接忘掉自己曾经有过猜测。过一段时间，当你问他有没有经常猜对来电，他会觉得：‘有，有时确实会猜对，似乎成功率不仅仅是随机的几率’，这是因为他能一下子想起来以前猜中的那几次，却不会记得多少猜错的次数，于是判断就有了bias。
其次是关于‘第六感’以及subtle cues：有时候人们会突然想起某件事、某个人，而他们完全不知道为什么会想起来，似乎是无端端就想起来了。但事实上，我们的思维并非真的那么‘无厘头’。催眠法和精神分析学派揭示了潜意识的存在，我们所意识到的部份，往往只是整个思维过程的一部份，甚至只是冰山一角。很多实验都证明了暗示能有效地影响人的思维和行为，被影响者懵然不知，但这种影响幅度一般相当有限（类似许多超感官实验的effect size），比如说单单透过暗示使一个正常人去犯法，这是不可能的，但使行人走路步伐变慢却完全可能。回到电话上，有时一些事先发生的事件能够预示即将来到的某个电话，人们不一定能有意识的发现这种关系并理性地推测出谁即将来电，但只要他们确实接触到了这些预示，有时候就会形成一种暗示，于是在一段时间内此人就会偶尔出现‘某某将要致电给我’的感觉，人们习惯将这种感觉称为第六感，因为这不是他们有意推断出来的，这种想法就像是凭空跑出来的。
对那些不浮躁，肯认真做学文的parapsychologist来说，他们最头痛的就是subtle cues，因为关于心灵感应现象的实验，每一个trial必然要牵涉至少两个或以上的人/生物（比如还有裁判），这对于控制各种confound非常不利，很难保证没有任何的cues泄露出来，哪怕是大量自动化的automated ganzfeld procedures也不例外。如果是做更贴近实际生活的调查研究，则记忆上的availability bias也可能会成为严重的问题。再加上实验结果的effect size又小，拿这些数据宣称其证明了某某极具革命性的发现，很难不引起质疑。这些不是迫害与苛求，而是extraordinary claim就要有extraordinary proof来支持，这是parapsychology所必须面对的挑战。
我认为，这至少是一个可信的解释。
所以，就滥用了一下自己的权利。呵呵，这可是公事公办。
原来想写点什么东西来反驳，查到了几个蓝头山雀的文章，准备一个个的翻译过来。突然就懒了，觉得没有意义把我有限的生命浪费在这些无聊的争论中。对又怎样，错又怎样？我生活中有着一大堆的难题，却跑到这里跟人谈这些无所谓的东西来消磨时光。更不用说要以天下为己任，路见不平，主持社会公道什么的了。我自己改变不了什么社会，至少我能够改变一下自己，起码让自己的生活更加积极向上一点。让自己和家人过得好一点。所以，以后到河里来的时间要少一些了。还请诸位多多灌水，我来负责灌花、灌麦乳精好了。
生命不息，灌就不止。诸位，玩好。
根本上这用正常的理论就可以解释，不需依赖什么看不到的神秘场，不必要的假设啊。
偷奶是一种复杂行为，啄奶瓶只是其中一个步骤，没有奶瓶可啄，不代表鸟儿不会继续留意每家的大门，或者尝试啄其他东西，这些行为依然可以经由模仿学习传给下一代。要一只鸟忘掉一种non-reinforced的行为需要时间，而且是体现在行为频率的逐渐衰减，不是说不送奶后一下子就会放弃了，不做了，然后到下一代就会完全忘记了。
对整个物种来说，改变集体行为所需的时间会更长，很可能在战前很长的一段时间内，鸟群已经完全改变了平时落脚的习惯，改变了它们的主要寻食地区。这不一定完全由奶造成，人类产生的其他垃圾都可能成为鸟的食物。随着人口增加、居住点规模的发展，鸟儿在有人区活动的比例会越来越大，这也完全可以造成第二次学习比第一次学习更快。更别说在新颖多变的人工环境下，那些肯尝试新事物的鸟儿获得了更大的生存优势，在自然选择下这种好奇心大的鸟数目越来越多，第二次出现的‘发明家’也就会比第一次更多，这又是一个理由。
尤其是这个 "The detailed studies of this phenomenon show that the habit was independently "discovered" by individual tits 89 times in the British Isles."
也就是说, 并非 (A)源自一只聪明的山雀的发现, 然后通过"依葫芦画瓢"从它传播至全英国的山雀; 而是 (B)有许多(89只)山雀独立发现了这个窍门, 各自传播给较小范围内的山雀(与山雀活动范围大致匹配).
如果是(A), 那么我的解释就站不住脚, 因为自发灵感只是一次性的极偶然的事件, 随后的扩散完全依赖群体间的沟通.
幸而是(B), 就是说, 自发灵感可能发生多次, 这样的话, 如果自发灵感的概率增大, 譬如从(89次)/(全英国的山雀) 增大到(200次)/(全英国的山雀), 那么这时全英国的山雀都学会这项技巧的时间无疑将缩短. 因为在200次的case, 每只'聪明'山雀只需传播给英国山雀population的1/200, 这显然比传播给1/89的population的扩散时间更短.
只算是个marginal的例证. 因为有许多因素不能control, 所以难以将某些行为确定地归结到一个原因上面.
就是普通的塑料瓶装饮用水，可能是600ml或550ml那种的。
我打开喝了一点儿，然后放在窗台上--盖子扔了。
晚上回到家，看到里面泡着老鼠--已经淹死了。
它的姿势是头上尾下的。（好象历史传说，老鼠偷油吃就是这样的，坐在油瓶口，把尾巴伸进去，把油蘸出来吃。）
可能此鼠也想如法炮制，没想到自己身子骨小了点儿，整个出溜下去了，瓶子里没有借力的地方，就爬不出来了。 ：）
从它淹入水的时间看，应该不超过12小时，你说的“老鼠可以再不靠岸的情况下凫水一两天的时间”在此案例中未能验证。 ：）
此外，还有次捉鼠，是更幼小些的鼠，落到浴缸里了，浴缸是干的，无水，当然不会淹死。我回去的时候，它还很活跃。但是浴缸四壁比较光滑，它也无法借力爬出来。另外，它还幼小，素质上看，也无能力直接跳出来。我见到它，就拿个瓶子，上次淹死老鼠的瓶子同类，把它脑袋抵住，它就爬进来了。终处以火刑。 ：）
老鼠游泳的姿势跟人差不多，都是要爬着游。而人踩水的技术，老鼠学不来，因为它的体形和后爪的形状都不允许。所以，那只可怜的老鼠，没办法只把鼻子露出来，只能大口大口的灌水……
阿门，愿你的水瓶子安息。
连老鼠游泳的技术细节都了如指掌！ ：）
这个都是瞎看书看出来的。大师河里有，可不是我啊。俺是妖道。