[senthil_rajasek]

"If you only take one thing away from this talk, make it this: beavers are idiots. They have no idea why they’re building these huge structures; they just blindly do it."

I can understand the author's use of the Beaver analogy but it may not be the right analogy.

Beavers build these dams to keep the water level at a certain height. This not only offers protection from predators but also makes it easy to access food.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver#Dams

They may have poor eyesight but they have a keen sense of hearing.

May be he meant that the Beaver does not know why its teeth grow continuously but it uses it to cut down trees and make dams.

[JoeAltmaier]

Go further - the beaver doesn't know that its building a dam. It just builds because it feels compelled to. Then when the dam is done (the beaver triggers on the sound of water falling and stops when the sound is gone) the beaver reaps some benefit.

Over millions of years, beavers that behaved like this prospered. The beaver doesn't know why or even think about it. No more than you think about your particular cell enzyme reactions.

[jarcane]

They'll also abandon perfectly good dams just to move up stream and build another. They're some of the most environmentally destructive critters on earth; like most creatures if allowed to thrive they'll just keep devouring every tree and damming every river until they starve and die off, only beavers can wind up taking whole ecosystems with them.

[hereonbusiness]

Those sneaky bastards, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that they've also been dumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year while no one was looking :)

[JoeAltmaier]

Depends on your point of view. North America used to be a festering swamp of mosquito-ridden beaver ponds. Built over millions of years. That WAS the ecology. The landscape we see today is unnatural and temporary.

We reformed this continent to suit ourselves. Most attempts to protect some bit of land and trees in the name of preservation is ... shortsighted at the least.

[jarcane]

Eh, I think the more important take from it is that any species is prone to developing an unbalanced advantage that ultimately does them in.

We humans just happen to be the ones on top right now doing the unbalanced expansion thing.

[JoeAltmaier]

I don't think the beaver did itself in? It was us (or the Iroquois Confederacy anyway) that hunted them to near extinction. They got along for 10 million years just fine the way they were.

[fnordfnordfnord]

>They're some of the most environmentally destructive critters on earth.

That's rich, coming from a human.

Also, from Wikipedia: "the beaver have transformed Alhambra Creek from a trickle into multiple dams and beaver ponds, which in turn, led to the return of steelhead and North American river otter in 2008, and mink in 2009.[43][44]"

[drzaiusapelord]

This is also how I see a lot of human behavior. We do things for emotional need or feel compelled to do them, then later justify them logically. I dislike the modern idea that humans are somehow fundamentally different than animals, from a cognition standpoint. It just seems overly self-serving.

[hawleyal]

Go further. All things behave this way. You were compelled to comment given your current circumstance, your particular makeup of cells and electricity sitting in your chair typing, blah blah blah. The beaver knows it's building a dam insasmuch as anyone else knows what they are doing.

[mod]

No, not really.

GP can reason about what he's doing. He knows that he's commenting on HN. He can come up with a plausible reason why (recreation, perhaps). In a more interesting scenario, say building a dam, GP would cut down logs with the express intention of building a dam to make a pond.

The beaver doesn't know what it's doing, literally. It can't tell you why, it doesn't have a greater plan of building a dam, etc.

You're really talking about motivation, and I'll agree that the motivation is roughly the same for GP and the beaver--some mix of chemicals in their respective brains influencing behavior.

[fnordfnordfnord]

>The beaver doesn't know what it's doing, literally. It can't tell you why,

That's because beavers don't speak English.

> it doesn't have a greater plan of building a dam, etc.

Just because you've never seen beavers with little tiny HP calculators poring over pages of drawings and equations does not mean that beavers are mindlessly purposelessly building the dams. You think they just throw stick and through some coincidence, a beaver lodge appears? That's crazy. Beavers build those dams with the intent that it will protect them from predators; they intend to dam up creeks in order to submerge the eventual entrance to their lodge. It is deliberate.

[JoeAltmaier]

All animals that build shelters do it 'by accident' if that means through compulsive behaviors that end up with a meaningful construction. Termites. Ants. Birds. Gophers. Beavers.

[hawleyal]

You're pretending like human shelters are somehow different.

[Mobiu5]

"It is deliberate."

Source?

[fnordfnordfnord]

You got me. Do you happen to know of any other critters that construct dwellings by accident, and then I guess live in them by accident too?

[c22]

What possible evidence do you have to support this? Why is it crazy to think that the beaver builds a dam because it wants a place to live? Why wouldn't the beaver choose to cut down logs with the intention of using them to build a dam? After all, this is what we observe the beaver doing. Of course since we cannot inhabit the mind of the beaver we cannot know for certain whether the beaver is a thinking being or a blind automaton, but since we consider ourselves thinking beings and the beaver's brain is not wholly unlike our own, why don't we give the beaver some benefit of the doubt? Most of us extend this courtesy to other humans...

[cjp]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_beaver#Behaviour

Beavers are best known for their dam-building. They maintain their pond-habitat by reacting quickly to the sound of running water, and damming it up with tree branches and mud. Early ecologists believed that this dam-building was an amazing feat of architectural planning, indicative of the beaver's high intellect. This theory was tested when a recording of running water was played in a field near a beaver pond. Despite the fact that it was on dry land, the beaver covered the tape player with branches and mud.

-- Richard P.B. (1983). "Mechanisms and adaptation in the constructive behaviour of the beaver (C. fiber L.)". Acta Zoologica Fennica 174: 105–108.

[fnordfnordfnord]

What does that really prove? Beavers have no knowledge of tape players. If you took that same tape player to the local police precinct and instead of a babbling brook, you played the sound of gunfire; there's a fair chance the policemen will return your gunfire with real gunfire. Does that make them no smarter than a beaver? Even if they are no smarter than beavers, is it really an irrational behavior?

>as soon as they had comfortably bestowed Sandy and me on our horse, I lit my pipe. When the first blast of smoke shot out through the bars of my helmet, all those people broke for the woods, and Sandy went over backwards and struck the ground with a dull thud. They thought I was one of those fire-belching dragons they had heard so much about from knights and other professional liars. I had infinite trouble to persuade those people to venture back within explaining distance. Then I told them that this was only a bit of enchantment which would work harm to none but my enemies. And I promised, with my hand on my heart, that if all who felt no enmity toward me would come forward and pass before me they should see that only those who remained behind would be struck dead. The procession moved with a good deal of promptness. There were no casualties to report, for nobody had curiosity enough to remain behind to see what would happen. --Mark Twain, A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT

[calvins]

Interesting, and reminiscent of what Douglas Hofstadter has called Sphexishness <http://www.personalityresearch.org/evolutionary/sphexishness...

[JoeAltmaier]

That denies conscious thought to me. You can ask me why I do something. Go ask the beaver, see what it says.

[increment_i]

Is verbally relating the reason why one does something a prerequisite to conscious thought? Dams don't get built by beavers all over the world by sheer random chance - there's obviously some deliberate intention there. Its also possible they observe and learn this process from their family members:

"When young are born, they spend their first month in the lodge and their mother is the primary caretaker while their father maintains the territory. In the time after they leave the lodge for the first time, yearlings will help their parents build food caches in the fall and repair dams and lodges." (Source: Wikipedia)

[JoeAltmaier]

Beaver compulsively place sticks in piles near water until they don't hear the water falling any more. Nothing to do with intent.

[increment_i]

Can we say compulsion is completely different from intent though? Or are we just arguing over semantics? Can we place an arbitrary intelligence threshold on when compulsion can be inferred as intent?

For instance, most spiders build webs, and it would seem they do it by no other mechanism than pure genetic instinct. However, there don't seem to be any external 'cues' as to when the web is finished (in contrast to the water falling cue we assume beavers use). The spider builds the web until it's done building the web. Did the spider intend to build a web, or was it compelled to?

[hawleyal]

Does the fact you can communicate why you think do something mean you could have changed your decision?

[jamestnz]

>All things behave this way. You were compelled to comment given your current circumstance, your particular makeup of cells and electricity sitting in your chair typing

This is an interesting comment I think, because if you take it far enough it ends up having implications for free will.

Consider the exercise described in this excerpt from a Sam Harris lecture on free will. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-Xp7mvOcVM (only 14m long and quite fascinating). I'll briefly describe the gist of it for non-video folks.

Exercise: Think of any city in the world. That's it, just think of the name of a city. No limits or restrictions, any city from any country in the world, just pick one.

Having chosen one, consider WHY you chose the city you did. It might seem like your choice was utterly uncompelled by external factors; you specifically made a reasoned choice, or you engaged your whims, or you just went with the first one that popped into your mind, or whatever. In any case, the city you ultimately chose was completely up to your own free will. Right?

Well, we can quickly begin to narrow down the field of possible choices. For one, it's clear that nobody who did the above exercise thought of a city that they'd never heard of. So for each person, the city they chose necessarily came from the set of cities they'd actually heard of. And even then, some filtering or selection "algorithm" is clearly happening behind the scenes, because there exist cities you've heard of, but which didn't happen to occur to you at all just now.

So some cities would seem to have a higher or lower chance of coming to mind than others, based on factors unique to the individual. For example, a city someone just mentioned 5 minutes ago and you're now thinking of, a city that's been featuring in the news lately, or the cities you've personally lived in, or you made a memorable trip to once, or which are culturally fascinating to you, etc etc.

And then consider the actual process that occurred in your head when you started to choose your city. In general, thoughts and ideas largely just kinda "occur" to you, by some process that's not under your conscious control. So in starting to think of a city, the names of some cities just started popping into your head. But what was controlling which cities were popping into your mind, and which weren't? Obviously you can't have consciously controlled this brainstorming process, because this would require you to have thought of the city before you thought of it.

So you wanted to think of a city, and your brain just started conjuring them into your conscious mind somehow. Since you didn't consciously supervise which cities were popping to mind and which weren't, it's as if your brain is doing something like accessing your memories, experiences, prejudices, preferences, etc; and bringing cities into your mind by some automatic process that's not consciously available to you.

But, what determines the list of cities that someone has heard of in their lifetime, and which have therefore made it into the brain to be available for this exercise? Well, many things that were never under your control to begin with. An obvious example: many people end up living much of their lives in the same city they were born. Which means at least one city is in your brain merely because your parents happened to give birth/raise you there, and the thought of moving away never occurred to you (or it did, but you stayed anyway). You don't choose where you were born.

And as you say, everything works like this. So perhaps you thought of Rome because you had Italian food for lunch yesterday, therefore biasing yourself towards thinking of it. But then why did you make that particular lunch choice? Perhaps a coworker made the lunch decision that day, meaning the reason Rome just occurred to you was because of a decision your coworker made. Where's the free will in that? Or perhaps you did decide lunch on your own that day. How did you go about this? Obviously by wanting to think of lunch options, and your brain started popping ideas into your head somehow....

[javajosh]

>Beavers build these dams to keep the water level at a certain height.

My friend, I think you are implying intention where there is none. It's true that the effect of beaver dam-building is advantageous, but there was never any deliberation about it on the beavers part. It's a curious case of effort without decision. One can easily think of a situation where a beaver might actually do better to not build a dam - but a beaver will try to build one anyway. It's just what he does.

Do humans eat to keep from starving? Do we have sex to have babies? Do we love our babies so that they don't die? I don't think so. We do these things because it's built into us to do them, just like the beaver.

[fnordfnordfnord]

>but there was never any deliberation about it on the beavers part.

How do you know that?

>One can easily think of a situation where a beaver might actually do better to not build a dam - but a beaver will try to build one anyway. It's just what he does.

A beaver is not an NPC in a video game. It has actual intelligence. Maybe not much, but more than can be modeled in such a trivial way. And humans for our part are quite often found behaving irrationally and against our better interests.

>Do humans eat to keep from starving?

We eat because we're hungry, we farm to keep from starving. Why did we launch a man to visit the moon? Is the fact that the beavers haven't sent their own delegation to the moon evidence of their inferiority? Maybe they just prefer non-interventionist foreign policy.

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much-the wheel, New York, wars and so on whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons. (23.1)

[c22]

> One can easily think of a situation where a beaver might actually do better to not build a dam - but a beaver will try to build one anyway.

The real question is if the beaver realizes this. I can think of situations where humans have done things that I believe it would have been better for them not to do based on my own information which may be different from theirs.

[pm90]

Sex seems a lot more simple than building a dam though. I mean, how does the Beaver even know this kind of stuff? Is it in its genetic material, or is it taught by its parents?

Either way, fascinating stuff.

[tomstuart]

Just to answer your question: it's in its genetic material. It really is fascinating; it can even make evolutionary sense to think of the dam as an extension of the beaver's physical body, in as much a beaver's dams are "built by" its genes just like the cells of its body are. Google "extended phenotype" if you'd like more detail.

[Raphmedia]

I put a ball in your hands. How do you get the idea to throw it? Who is giving it to you? Your logic work that way, through countless genetic iterations.

Now, the fun part, is that dogs, through similar genetic iterations, have evolved to love catching said ball and bringing it back to us.

Life is fun.

[senthil_rajasek]

The way I like to think about it is ... Birds build nests, Bees build hives and Beavers build dams.