From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Tue Jun 24 2003 - 09:56:25 MDT
[Kharin]
Incidentally, as an afterthought, I'm not really sure that Fodor and Pinker make for natural allies. For example, I can hardly see Pinker finding this especially congenial; http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n19/fodo01_.html
[rhinoceros]
True. Their kinship seems to be only the "language of thought." I found another, more intersting, related link in that Web page, where Fodor deals specifically with Pinker's "How the Mind Works" and Plotkin's "Evolution in Mind."
Jerry Fodor - The Trouble with Psychological Darwinism
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n02/fodo01_.html
<begin quote from Fodor>
Taken severally or together, they present what is probably the best statement you can find in print of a very important contemporary view of mental structure and process.
But how much of it is true? To begin with, Pinker and Plotkin are reporting a minority consensus. Most cognitive scientists still work in a tradition of empiricism and associationism whose main tenets haven't changed much since Locke and Hume. The human mind is a blank slate at birth. Experience writes on the slate, and association extracts and extrapolates whatever trends there are in the record that experience leaves. The structure of the mind is thus an image, made a posteriori, of the statistical regularities in the world in which it finds itself. I would guess that quite a substantial majority of cognitive scientists believe something of this sort; so deeply, indeed, that many hardly notice that they do.
Pinker and Plotkin, by contrast, epitomise a rationalist revival that started about forty years ago with Chomsky's work on the syntax of natural languages and that is by now sufficiently robust to offer a serious alternative to the empiricist tradition. Like Pinker and Plotkin, I think the New Rationalism is the best story about the mind that science has found to tell so far. But I think their version of that story is tendentious, indeed importantly flawed. And I think the cheerful tone that they tell it in is quite unwarranted by the amount of progress that has actually been made. Our best scientific theory about the mind is better than empiricism; but, in all sorts of ways, it's still not very good. Pinker quotes Chomsky's remark the 'ignorance can be divided into problems and mysteries' and continues: 'I wrote this book because dozens of mysteries of the mind, from mental images to romantic love, have recently been upgraded to problems (though there are still some mysteries too!)' Well, cheerfulness sells
books, but Ecclesiastes got it right: 'the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning.'
Pinker elaborates his version of rationalism around four basic ideas: the mind as computational system; the mind is massively modular; a lot of mental structure, including a lot of cognitive structure, is innate; a lot of mental structure, including a lot of cognitive structure, is an evolutionary adaptation - in particular, the function of a creature's nervous system is to abet the propagation of its genome (its selfish gene, as one says).
<snip>
A lot of the fun of Pinker's book is his attempt to deduce human psychology from the assumption that our minds are adaptations for transmitting our genes. His last chapters are devoted to this and they range very broadly; including, so help me, one on the meaning of life. Pinker would like to convince us that the predictions that the selfish-gene theory makes about how our minds must be organised are independently plausible. But this project doesn't fare well. Prima facie, the picture of the mind, indeed of human nature in general, that psychological Darwinism suggest is preposterous; a sort of jumped up, down-market version of original sin. Psychological Darwinism is a kind of conspiracy theory; that is, it explains behaviour by imputing an interest (viz in the proliferation of the genome) that the agent of the behaviour does not acknowledge. When literal conspiracies are alleged, duplicity is generally part of the charge: 'He wasn't making confetti; he was shredding the evidence. He did X in aid of Y, and
then he lied about his motive.' But I the kind of conspiracy theories psychologists like best, the motive is supposed to be inaccessible even to the agent, who is thus perfectly sincere in denying the imputation. In the extreme case, it's hardly even the agent to whom the motive is attributed.
<snip>
The literature of Psychological Darwinism is full of what appear to be fallacies of rationalisation: arguments where the evidence offered that an interest in Y is the motive for a creature's behaviour is primarily that an interest in Y would rationalise the behaviour if it were the creature's motive. Pinker's book provides so many examples that one hardly knows where to start. Here he is on friendship:
<quote from Pinker> Once you have made yourself valuable to someone, the person becomes valuable to you. You value him or her because if you were ever in trouble, they would have a stake - albeit a selfish stake - in getting you out. But now that you value the person, they should value you even more . . . because of your stake in rescuing him or her from hard times . . . This runaway process is what we call friendship.' <end quote from Pinker>
<snip>
Reductionism about this plurality of goals, when not Philistine or cheaply cynical, often sounds simply funny. Thus the joke about the lawyer who is offered sex by a beautiful girl. 'Well, I guess so,' he replies, 'but what's in it for me?'
<snip>
Much to his credit, Pinker does seem a bit embarrassed about some of these consequences of his adaptationism, and he does try to duck them.
<quote from Pinker> Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that 'animals try to spread their genes'. This misstates . . . the theory. Animals, including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even less. People love their children not because they want to spread their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can't help it. . . What is selfish is not the real motives of the person but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person. Genes 'try' to spread themselves (sic) by wiring animals brains so that animals love their kin . . . and then the[y] get out of the way.<end quote from Pinker>
This version sounds a lot more plausible; strictly speaking, nobody has as a motive ('conscious or unconscious') the proliferation of genes after all. Not animals, and not genes either. The only real motives are the ones that everybody knows about; of which love of novels, or women, or kin are presumably a few among many.
<end quote from Fodor>
[rhinoceros]
Hmm... if you think of it, we seem to have the "egoistic gene" claiming back some territory from the "egoistic meme" -- both adding to our alleged delusion of conscious rational control over ourselves. I guess evolutionary psychologists will have to fight this one out with memeticists...
Do you remeber the 4 statements of that Chines guy which I posted at the start of this thread? That was what I was getting at.
<begin quote Chinese guy>
Most anthropologists agree on the following features of culture:
1. culture is socially acquired instead of biologically transmitted;
2. culture is shared among the members of a community rather than being unique to an individual;
3. culture is symbolic. Symbolizing means assigning to entities and events meanings which are external to them and which cannot be grasped alone. Language is the most typical symbolic system within culture;
4. culture is integrated. Each aspect of culture is tied in with all other aspects.
<end quote Chinese guy>
[rhinoceros]
Maybe it is a matter of definition of culture, but... to whom should we grant culture? EPs (the egoistic gene), memeticists (the egoistic meme), or share it between the two? Although the etymology of the word culture seems to point away from the egoistic gene, it is still not so easy for memeticists to take advantage of this.
For the meme metaphore to be of any use, the memes would need to be identifiable, standalone, and devoid of meaning themselves (like the genes), while at the same time their evolutionary mutation and selection mechanisms should account for the generation of cultural context and meaning. I can see that Dennett has been trying hard, but has he come close to anything like that yet?
---- This message was posted by rhinoceros to the Virus 2003 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=54;action=display;threadid=28744> --- To unsubscribe from the Virus list go to <http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jun 24 2003 - 09:56:57 MDT