THE ROBOTIC HUMAN THINKING MACHINE
I get a kick out of calling myself a robot in various social situations. Some think I’m joking. Others might be offended, and, as for myself, I don’t know how serious I am, but the evidence continues to mount up that this wonderful reasoning process we humans pride ourselves on is nothing more than an adaptation, an instinct for thinking. Well, if thought is instinctive, how much credit can we take for employing it consciously? If we are not really consciously applying logic and reason, then what does it mean to think? The following is an brief bit of a paper by two evolutionary psychologists which seems to indicate that thinking is instinctive rather than consciously employed. If you can, you should try to get ahold of the entire paper, if not the book in which it appears.
“Taken together, the data showing design specificity, precocious development, cross-cultural universality, and neural dissociability implicate the existence of an evolved, species-typical neurocomputational specialization.
“In short, the neurocognitive system that causes reasoning about social exchange shows evidence of being what Pinker (1994) has called a cognitive instinct: It is complexly organized for solving a well-defined adaptive problem our ancestors faced in the past, it reliably develops in all normal humans, it develops without any conscious effort and in the absence of explicit instruction, it is applied without any conscious awareness of its underlying logic, and it is functionally and neurally distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.” Leda Cosmides and John Tooby in “Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange,” Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (p. 585)
Showing posts with label Pinker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pinker. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
KEEPING UP WITH THE __________________?
What with the trend for people to buy houses way too large for their needs that would put their grand-folk to shame and with these overlarge houses being overpriced and overvalued by as much as 30% in some American neighborhoods, modest and sensible people who want modest and sensible dwellings can no longer keep up with the Joneses; they're forced to keep up with the Dunces.
VAGUENESS: ITS USES IN DIPLOMACY
Steven Pinker always uses humor to illustrate his points and often delves into literature too. Here's an old joke, included in his recent book, The Stuff of Thought (p.396), from a section discussing bribes and how to get away with them by employing the language of implicature, rather than the outright offer itself:
When a lady says “no,” she means “maybe.”
When she says “maybe,” she means “yes.”
If she says “yes,” she's no lady.
When a diplomat says “yes,” he means “maybe.”
When he says “maybe,” he means “no.”
If he says “no,” he's no diplomat.
This prompted a feminist revision:
When a woman says “yes,” she means “yes.”
When a woman says “maybe,” she means “maybe.”
When a woman says “no,” she means “no.”
If the man persists, he's a rapist.
What with the trend for people to buy houses way too large for their needs that would put their grand-folk to shame and with these overlarge houses being overpriced and overvalued by as much as 30% in some American neighborhoods, modest and sensible people who want modest and sensible dwellings can no longer keep up with the Joneses; they're forced to keep up with the Dunces.
VAGUENESS: ITS USES IN DIPLOMACY
Steven Pinker always uses humor to illustrate his points and often delves into literature too. Here's an old joke, included in his recent book, The Stuff of Thought (p.396), from a section discussing bribes and how to get away with them by employing the language of implicature, rather than the outright offer itself:
When a lady says “no,” she means “maybe.”
When she says “maybe,” she means “yes.”
If she says “yes,” she's no lady.
When a diplomat says “yes,” he means “maybe.”
When he says “maybe,” he means “no.”
If he says “no,” he's no diplomat.
This prompted a feminist revision:
When a woman says “yes,” she means “yes.”
When a woman says “maybe,” she means “maybe.”
When a woman says “no,” she means “no.”
If the man persists, he's a rapist.
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
HERE’S MY SCIENCE HAIKU FOR THE DAY
Following, you’ll find a hiaku, seventeen syllables, but broken into the two contrasting thoughts or images. Then comes a quote from a current book I’m reading. It’s my fourth Steven Pinker book and he’s always as interesting as hell:
computational neuroscience:
Tinkertoy chickens cross the road
“The idea that shapes can be cognitively melted down into schematic blobs—skewered on axes originally came from a theory of shape recognition by the computational neuroscientist David Marr. Marr noted how easily people recognize stick figures and animals made from pipe cleaners or twisted balloons, despite their dissimilarity from real objects in their arrangement of pixels. He proposed that we actually represent shapes in the mind in blob-and-axis models rather than in raw images, because such a model is stable as the object moves relative to the viewer, while the pixels in the image are all over the place…. Not only do nouns for shapes (like ribbon, layer, crust, hunk, and groove) get their definitions from this world of pipe cleaners, cutouts, and balloons, but we seem to conceive of the objects around us in these terms. Few people think of a wire as a very very skinny cylinder and of a CD as a very short one, though technically that’s what they are. We conceive of them as having only one or two primary dimensions, respectively. Nor do we ordinarily imagine a lake as a translucent chunk with a flat top, sharp edges, and numerous bulges molded to the shape of the lake bottom. We think of it as a 2-D[imensional] surface.” Steven Pinker, The Stuff Of Thought, (pp. 181-82)
Following, you’ll find a hiaku, seventeen syllables, but broken into the two contrasting thoughts or images. Then comes a quote from a current book I’m reading. It’s my fourth Steven Pinker book and he’s always as interesting as hell:
computational neuroscience:
Tinkertoy chickens cross the road
“The idea that shapes can be cognitively melted down into schematic blobs—skewered on axes originally came from a theory of shape recognition by the computational neuroscientist David Marr. Marr noted how easily people recognize stick figures and animals made from pipe cleaners or twisted balloons, despite their dissimilarity from real objects in their arrangement of pixels. He proposed that we actually represent shapes in the mind in blob-and-axis models rather than in raw images, because such a model is stable as the object moves relative to the viewer, while the pixels in the image are all over the place…. Not only do nouns for shapes (like ribbon, layer, crust, hunk, and groove) get their definitions from this world of pipe cleaners, cutouts, and balloons, but we seem to conceive of the objects around us in these terms. Few people think of a wire as a very very skinny cylinder and of a CD as a very short one, though technically that’s what they are. We conceive of them as having only one or two primary dimensions, respectively. Nor do we ordinarily imagine a lake as a translucent chunk with a flat top, sharp edges, and numerous bulges molded to the shape of the lake bottom. We think of it as a 2-D[imensional] surface.” Steven Pinker, The Stuff Of Thought, (pp. 181-82)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)