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That’s a fair point. But to push back, how many sources of sensory information are needed for cognition to arise in humans? I would be willing to bet that hear
by j_bum 2y ago
That’s a fair point. But to push back, how many sources of sensory information are needed for cognition to arise in humans?
I would be willing to bet that hearing or vision alone would be sufficient to develop cognition. Many of these extra senses are beneficial for survival, but not required for cognition. E.g., we don’t need smell/touch/taste/pain to think.
Thoughts?
- krschacht 2y agoI think we need the other senses for cognition. The other senses are part of the reward function which the cognitive learning algorithms optimize for. Pleasure and pain, and joy and suffering, guide the cognitive development process.
- j_bum 2y agoI think you’re starting to conflate emotion with senses. Yes pain is a form of sensory experience, but it also has affective/emotional components that can be experienced even without the presence of noxious stimuli. However, there are people that don’t experience pain (congenital insensitivity to pain), which is caused by mutations in the NaV1.7 channel, or in one or more of the thermo/chemo/mechanotransducers that encode noxious stimuli into neural activity. And obviously, these people who don’t experience the sensory discriminative components of pain are still capable of cognition. To steelman your argument, I do agree that lacking all but one of what I would call the sufficient senses for cognition would dramatically slow down the rate of cognitive development. But I don’t think they would prohibit it.