SubscribeNietzsche had this to say about Pinker:kthxbye.
<blockquote>Logorrhea that extends for multiple
lines.
</blockquote>More of my own deathless prose.
fiction, then, would be a kindFreud: thought is trial action.
of thought experiment
I defined a conscious entity as one that represents itself in its map of the world. If we can get a machine to do this, will it no longer be a machine? (Will it no longer make sense to call it a machine?) In other words, are HAL9000 and C3PO not machines?This is called, I believe, "process consciousness." All life, argueably, represents itself in its map of the world. The question is, is it conscious of the process of representation, which is called "access consciousness."
Nobody can claim that the "evidence" for such assertions is good science. And as far as I can tell EP is in the same boat with regards to dubious methodologies, risible experimental protocols, and questionable results.Uh, yeah, jokeefe, try not to be so flippant. We're talking about serious science here. Good grief. And in the same comment, he says "[i]t's an argument over methods."
This is a bit flippant. Good science has nothing to do with the politics of the outcome.
Every aspect of an organism's phenotype is the joint product of its genes and its environment. To ask which is more important is like asking, Which is more important in determining the area of a rectangle, the length or the width? Which is more important in causing a car to run, the engine or the gasoline? Genes allow the environment to influence the development of phenotypes.The more I read about the criticm's of EV, the more obvious it is that its detractors misunderstand the ideas in the field.
Indeed, the developmental mechanisms of many organisms were designed by natural selection to produce different phenotypes in different environments. Certain fish can change sex, for example. Blue-headed wrasse live in social groups consisting of one male and many females. If the male dies, the largest female turns into a male. The wrasse are designed to change sex in response to a social cue -- the presence or absence of a male.
With a causal map of a species' developmental mechanisms, you can change the phenotype that develops by changing its environment. Imagine planting one seed from an arrowleaf plant in water, and a genetically identical seed on dry land. The one in water would develop wide leaves, and the one on land would develop narrow leaves. Responding to this dimension of environmental variation is part of the species' evolved design. But this doesn't mean that just any aspect of the environment can affect the leaf width of an arrowleaf plant. Reading poetry to it doesn't affect its leaf width. By the same token, it doesn't mean that it is easy to get the leaves to grow into just any shape: short of a pair of scissors, it is probably very difficult to get the leaves to grow into the shape of the Starship Enterprise.
Pinker doesn't care much for art, though. When he does care for something—cognitive science, for example—he is all in favor of training people to do it, even though, as he admits, many of the methods and assumptions of modern science are counter-intuitive. The fact that innate mathematical ability is still in the Stone Age distresses him; he has fewer problems with Stone Age sex drives. He objects to using education "to instill desirable attitudes toward the environment, gender, sexuality, and ethnic diversity"; but he insists that "the obvious cure for the tragic shortcomings of human intuition in a high-tech world is education." He thinks that we should be teaching economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics, even if we have to stop teaching literature and the classics. It's O.K. to rewire people's "natural" sense of a just price or the movement of a subatomic particle, in other words, but it's a waste of time to tinker with their untutored notions of gender difference.
There are two senses of the label "evolutionary psychology," [...] The first, broader sense, includes any psychology that takes evolution seriously, or includes evolutionary considerations in its explanations of psychological phenomena. The second, which is generally associated with Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, David Buss, and Steven Pinker, includes only those evolutionary psychologists who adhere to a certain set of tenets, including massive modularity, assumptions about the "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" (or the EEA), and a belief that the modern mind evolved in the EEA. To distinguish this second sense from the first, I will use Buller's convention or referring to it with capital letters (Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Psychologists), and using only lowercase letters for the first sense.That site, by the way, has some very convincing arguments about why EP hasn't produced any science of note. He argues in particular, that brain plasticity (something anathema to EP proponents) likely has much more to do with human cognitive achievements than does the modularity that EP ties to their fairytale of the EEA.
If you've read through my archives (I can't imagine anyone has), or have been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that I am no fan of Evolutionary Psychology (EP). I'm not alone in feeling that way. Most cognitive scientists aren't fans. And we have good reasons not to be.
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Dammit, I've been flogging that idea on Metafilter for years! Where's my tenure track position at Harvard?
posted by jokeefe at 1:27 PM on October 25, 2007