on animal companions, sorta

Fascinating excerpt about what happens in "taming". I also read a piece in the NYT today about the intelligence of dogs. Cool to see more science on the critters we live.

for inflectionpoint and all the dog people n science people...

explaining vs. experience

I've read a couple of fascinating articles in the last couple days, both talking about how the expression of preference depends on things besides actual preference (experience of  'I like this').

One article talked about how when things are hard to explain (prefering abstract over commercial art, for example), due to not-having-the-language, people will say things which aren't actually true (that they like the commercial art), rather than have to say 'because' when asked 'why?'.

On another tangent, here is an article about how 'wanting' and 'liking' (or, reward and pleasure) are different.

Juicy! How might this affect our relationships, our magick?

A quote (part of a discussion on wireheading; the idea of sticking an electrode into the pleasure center of your brain):

The wanting system is activated by dopamine, and the liking system is activated by opioids. There are enough connections between them that there's a big correlation in their activity, but the correlation isn't one and in fact activation of the opioids is less common than the dopamine. Another quote:

It's relatively hard for a brain to generate pleasure, because it needs to activate different opioid sites together to make you like something more. It's easier to activate desire, because a brain has several 'wanting' pathways available for the task. Sometimes a brain will like the rewards it wants. But other times it just wants them.

So you could go through all that trouble to find a black market brain surgeon who'll wirehead you, and you'll end up not even being happy. You'll just really really want to keep the wirehead circuit running.
Problem: large chunks of philosophy and economics are based upon wanting and liking being the same thing.