Re: Origins of our minds?
- From: *Hemidactylus* <ecphoric@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 21 Oct 2007 16:05:01 -0700
On Oct 21, 10:25 am, dkomo <dkomo...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John Wilkins wrote:People have written the software to run the various programs on the
dkomo <dkomo...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
<snip top>
5. Human psychology consists of a large number of functionally
specialized evolved mechanisms, each sensitive to particular forms of
contextual input, that get combined, coordinated, and integrated with
each other to produce manifest behavior.
So I think this doesn't follow for all cognitive faculties or processes,
and in fact I want EP to deliver a principled reason for distinguishing
between dispositions to behave in a particular way, which most cognitive
psychologists think is innate, from modules. If they cannot offer this,
or assert that if it's innate it *must* be modular in the informational
encapsulation sense, they have failed to establish anything useful, and
fall prey to the just-so ism of panadaptationists.
The interesting question is what are these "evoloved mechanisms" or
"modules". Are they distinct neural circuits? In most cases, I think
not. They are merely organized and temporally persistent patterns of
information within the brain.
An analogy with computers can be instructive. Take the physical memory
of any laptop or desktop PC. These memories are perfectly homogeneous,
being nothing more than huge arrays of transistors. But at any given
time, the memories are filled with dozens of complex programs running
simultaneously (in a serial, time-sliced fashion). For instance, even
though at this moment I am using only a single program, my newsreader,
my laptop has 44 operating system processes running along with it.
These processes are "organized patterns of information" embedded within
a physical substrate -- the computer's solid state memory. Moreover,
due to the use of virtual memory, many of these processes (aka programs)
are not even physically contiguous, being split into different areas of
memory, and between the memory and hard drive.
An apt analogy with the cognitive faculties and modules of the mind, no?
laptop and keep them from sending eachother into competitive disarray,
usually, for memory space or task sequencing. Laptops and the programs
on laptops are human creations and humans (excepting me) understand
them very well. You are basing an analogy on how your laptop works
that , though compelling, does not necessarlity translate into the way
the human mindbrain has evolved and operates in the present day.
There's nothing wrong with analogies, as long as you realize their
limitations.
We are projecting our assumptions about human wetware backward in
time, trying to make it clean cut as the EEA, which none of us has
experienced first hand. There are inferences avaliable as to what it
may have been like for our ancestors at that time, but whether all our
cognitive machinery was set in stone back then is a serious question.
Even if it was, and I don't totally discount that possibility, we have
the problem of knowing whether each explanation that has walked the
plank of peer review within the community of EP pirates is valid.
Maybe some deserve to rest forever in Davy Jones (the pirate icon not
the Monkee icon) locker due to their just so nature.
I have no doubt that the human mindbrain is a product of evolution. Of
that there cannot be any doubt whatsoever. My bone to pick comes down
to the role of selection in honing specific proposed adaptions, when
Gould's alternative could be a monkey wrench that eliminates the
necessity of that particular explanation (Occam's parsimony rears its
head). Many aspects of human behavior could be offshoots indirecrtly
related to adaptions. Like he said with religion it could be a
byproduct of the human brain growing large enough for other reasons
whereby humans eventualy contemplate mortality and developed stories
to assuage their fear. Maybe the more superstitious parts of religious
behavior are better handled by a Skinnerian method. But Skinner was
trounced by Lorenz and ethology in general when it came to abberrant
behaviors that didn't fit the behaviorist mold, so Skinner can be
challenged (ethologically AND cognitively).
Religion could have some neural bases (see recent thread talking about
Persinger's God helmet) and Dean Hamer wrote a book about god genes,
but both approaches are not without their shortcomings. And IIRC Hamer
is what is called a "behavioral geneticist" and they are themselves
dismissive of EP.
So there!
.
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