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I want to convince you that our minds are not animated by some godly vapor or single wonder principle. The mind, like the Apollo spacecraft, is designed to solve many engineering problems, and thus is packed with high-tech systems each contrived to overcome its own obstacles. I begin by laying out these problems, which are both design specs for a robot and the subject matter of psychology. For I believe that the discovery by cognitive science and artificial intelligence of the technical challenges overcome by our mundane mental activity is one of the great revelations of science, an awakening
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Our eyes squash the three-dimensional world into a pair of two-dimensional retinal images, and the third dimension must be reconstituted by the brain.
chiaroscuro
Nearly two thousand years ago, the Greek physician Galen pointed out the exquisite natural engineering behind the human hand. It is a single tool that manipulates objects of an astonishing range of sizes, shapes, and weights, from a log to a millet seed. “Man handles them all,” Galen noted, “as well as if his hands had been made for the sake of each one of them alone.” The hand can be configured into a hook
“A common man marvels at uncommon things; a wise man marvels at the commonplace.” Keeping Confucius’
but there’s nothing common about common sense.
An intelligent system, then, cannot be stuffed with trillions of facts. It must be equipped with a smaller list of core truths and a set of rules to deduce their implications.
The mind is never so wonderfully concentrated as when it turns to love, and there must be intricate calculations that carry out the peculiar logic of attraction, infatuation, courtship, coyness, surrender, commitment, malaise, philandering, jealousy, desertion, and heartbreak.
incredible. The discoveries cast doubt on the autonomous “I” that we all feel hovering above our bodies, making choices as we proceed through life and affected only by our past and present environments.
sentence: The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life, in particular, understanding and outmaneuvering objects, animals, plants, and other people.
The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation.
The various problems for our ancestors were subtasks of one big problem for their genes, maximizing the number of copies that made it into the next generation.
On this view, psychology is engineering in reverse.
In the seventeenth century William Harvey discovered that veins had valves and deduced that the valves must be there to make the blood circulate.
Charles Darwin. He showed how “organs of extreme perfection and complication, which justly excite our admiration” arise not from God’s foresight but from the evolution of replicators over immense spans of time.
not just the complexity of an animal’s body but the complexity of its mind. “Psychology will be based on a new foundation,” he famously predicted at the end of The Origin of Species.
Evolutionary thinking is indispensable, not in the form that many people think of—dreaming up missing links or narrating stories about the stages of Man—but in the form of careful reverse-engineering.
Only in the past few years has Darwin’s challenge been taken up, by a new approach christened “evolutionary psychology” by the anthropologist John Tooby and the psychologist Leda Cosmides.
Cognitive science helps us to understand how a mind is possible and what kind of mind we have. Evolutionary biology helps us to understand why we have the kind of mind we have.
That is because the mind is not the brain but what the brain does, and not even everything it does, such as metabolizing fat and giving off heat.
The brain’s special status comes from a special thing the brain does, which makes us see, think, feel, choose, and act. That special thing is information processing, or computation.
This insight, first expressed by the mathematician Alan Turing, the computer scientists Alan Newell, Herbert Simon, and Marvin Minsky, and the philosophers Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, is now called the computational theory of mind.
The computational theory of mind resolves the paradox. It says that beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as configurations of symbols.
As Tooby and Cosmides have written, There are birds that migrate by the stars, bats that echolocate, bees that compute the variance of flower patches, spiders that spin webs, humans that speak, ants that farm, lions that hunt in teams, cheetahs that hunt alone, monogamous gibbons, polyandrous seahorses, polygynous gorillas. . . . There are millions of animal species on earth, each with a different set of cognitive programs. The same basic neural tissue embodies all of these programs, and it could support many others as well. Facts about the properties of neurons, neurotransmitters, and
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Psychology, the analysis of mental software, will have to burrow a considerable way into the mountain before meeting the neurobiologists tunneling through from the other side.
As many critics have pointed out, computers are serial, doing one thing at a time; brains are parallel, doing millions of things at once.
The surface-perception module solves an unsolvable problem, but at a price. The brain has given up any pretense of being a general problem-solver. It has been equipped with a gadget that perceives the nature of surfaces in typical earthly viewing conditions because it is specialized for that parochial problem. Change the problem slightly and the brain no longer solves it.
pedantic
The idea that heredity and environment interact is not always meaningless, but I think it confuses two issues: what all minds have in common, and how minds can differ.
In the sensory areas of the brain, where we can best keep track of what is going on, we know that early in fetal development neurons are wired according to a rough genetic recipe. The neurons are born in appropriate numbers at the right times, migrate to their resting places, send out connections to their targets, and hook up to appropriate cell types in the right general regions, all under the guidance of chemical trails and molecular locks and keys.
An interesting example is a new theory of pregnancy sickness (traditionally called “morning sickness”) by the biologist Margie Profet. Many pregnant women become nauseated and avoid certain foods. Though their sickness is usually explained away as a side effect of hormones, there is no reason that hormones should induce nausea and food aversions rather than, say, hyperactivity, aggressiveness, or lust. The Freudian explanation is equally unsatisfying: that pregnancy sickness represents the woman’s loathing of her husband and her unconscious desire to abort the fetus orally.
The human mind is a product of evolution, so our mental organs are either present in the minds of apes (and perhaps other mammals and vertebrates) or arose from overhauling the minds of apes, specifically, the common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees that lived about six million years ago in Africa.
because software is easier to modify than hardware. We should not be surprised to discover impressive new cognitive abilities in humans, language being just the most obvious one.
Second, natural selection is not a puppetmaster that pulls the strings of behavior directly. It acts by designing the generator of behavior: the package of information-processing and goal-pursuing mechanisms called the mind.
Behavior itself did not evolve; what evolved was the mind.
The logic of natural selection gives the answer. The ultimate goal that the mind was designed to attain is maximizing the number of copies of the genes that created it. Natural selection cares only about the long-term fate of entities that replicate, that is, entities that retain a stable identity across many generations of copying. It predicts only that replicators whose effects tend to enhance the probability of their own replication come to predominate.
Though there are some holdouts (such as Gould himself), the gene’s-eye view predominates in evolutionary biology and has been a stunning success. It has asked, and is finding answers to, the deepest questions about life, such as how life arose, why there are cells, why there are bodies, why there is sex, how the genome is structured, why animals interact socially, and why there is communication. It is as indispensable to researchers in animal behavior as Newton’s laws are to mechanical engineers.
People don’t selfishly spread their genes; genes selfishly spread themselves. They do it by the way they build our brains. By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the genes buy a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved. Our goals are subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes, replicating themselves. But the two are different. As far as we are concerned, our goals, conscious or unconscious, are not about genes at all, but about health and lovers and children and friends.
But biological evolution, according to the SSSM, has been superseded by cultural evolution. Culture is an autonomous entity that carries out a desire to perpetuate itself by setting up expectations and assigning roles, which can vary arbitrarily from society to society. Even the reformers of the SSSM have accepted its framing of the issues. Biology is “just as important as” culture, say the reformers; biology imposes “constraints” on behavior, and all behavior is a mixture of the two.
First, if the mind has an innate structure, different people (or different classes, sexes, and races) could have different innate structures. That would justify discrimination and oppression. Second, if obnoxious behavior like aggression, war, rape, clannishness, and the pursuit of status and wealth are innate, that would make them “natural” and hence good. And even if they are deemed objectionable, they are in the genes and cannot be changed, so attempts at social reform are futile. Third, if behavior is caused by the genes, then individuals cannot be held responsible for their actions. If
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non sequiturs.
A universal structure to the mind is not only logically possible but likely to be true.
Natural selection is a homogenizing force within a species; it eliminates the vast majority of macroscopic design variants because they are not improvements.
That is why all normal people have the same physical organs, and why we all surely have the same mental organs as well.
In another of the ironies that run through the academic politics of human nature, this evolution-inspired research has proposed sex differences that are tightly focused on reproduction and related domains, and are far less invidious than the differences proudly claimed by some schools of feminism. Among the claims of “difference feminists” are that women do not engage in abstract linear reasoning, that they do not treat ideas with skepticism or evaluate them through rigorous debate, that they do not argue from general moral principles, and other insults.
Forget the romantic nonsense in wildlife documentaries, where all creatures great and small act for the greater good and the harmony of the ecosystem. As Darwin said, “What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature!”
What could not hurt is a realistic understanding of the psychology of human malevolence. For what it’s worth, the theory of a module-packed mind allows both for innate motives that lead to evil acts and for innate motives that can avert them. Not that this is a unique discovery of evolutionary psychology; all the major religions observe that mental life is often a struggle between desire and conscience.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” is the first question we ask about a new human being, and from then on parents treat their sons and daughters differently: they touch, comfort, breast-feed, indulge, and talk to boys and girls in unequal amounts.
Nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives. Some feminists and gay activists react with fury to the banal observations that natural selection designed women in part for growing and nursing children and that it designed both men and women for heterosexual sex.
Without a clearer moral philosophy, any cause of behavior could be taken to undermine free will and hence moral responsibility. Science is guaranteed to appear to eat away at the will, regardless of what it finds, because the scientific mode of explanation cannot accommodate the mysterious notion of uncaused causation that underlies the will.
