| Brain Modularity | Brain's Versatile Toolbox | Folk Psychology |
The Swiss Army Knife Theory - The mind is composed of a large
number of mental modules each designed to solve a specific problem. For
example, there is one mechanism for perceiving three dimensions, another
for
anger, another for falling in love. The mind is like a Swiss
Army
knife; i.e., it has lots of specialized tools. There is no
such
thing as general intelligence, general learning, or any
other general ability to solve problems. -
Item #79
The Swiss Army Knife Theory - Modularity of the Mind
The Swiss army knife theory states that the mind is divided in modules which are specialized in specific activities and help the brain solve problems in determined areas... According to this modular approach, our brain is composed of highly specialized “applications” to solve specific problems in the most effective way. Thus, our mind is a combination of specific areas or tools, just like the Swiss Army knife...
Let’s delve deeper into the principles that define the Swiss Army knife theory;
Mental Modules
In 1950, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky started defending one of his most renowned theories: that language isn’t a learned behavior but a functional and innate faculty. This premise later inspired Dr. Fodor.
He was also inspired by Turing’s work on mathematical computer models. Little by little, he created the foundation of his approach that states that the mind is divided into specialized modules.
He called them “the psychological faculties”. Thus, each process of your mind is divided into different specialized modules, like unique programs on a computer. Thus, there’s a module for sensation and perception, another one for volition, another for memory, and another one for language...
Prosopagnosia
Something that Dr. Nancy Kanwisher observed through MRIs is that many brain areas don’t communicate with each other. Thus, they work in an isolated manner.
An example is prosopagnosia, which is a condition where the sufferer sees perfectly but isn’t able to recognize people. Thus, they’re able to see their children but are unable to recognize them when they pick them up from school.
This theory states that many specialized areas of the brain work as modules, such as those that process color, shapes, movement, and speech...
https://exploringyourmind.com/swiss-army-knife-theory-modularity-mind/
The Brain's Versatile Toolbox - https://stevenpinker.com/
modern societies, including the
most abstruse concepts
of modern science
For more than 99 percent of our evolutionary history - we lived as foragers
- and our recent ancestors must have lived much as foraging tribes do today,
without any of the
trappings of modern civilization.
Observing their seemingly simple life, many people have wondered what nonliterate foragers do with their capacity for abstract intelligence. The foragers would have better grounds for asking that question about modern couch potatoes. A foraging life is a camping trip that never ends, but one without Swiss Army knives and freeze-dried pasta.
All foraging peoples use fire and shelters and manufacture many kinds of tools;
Their engineering is often ingenious, involving poisons, smokeouts, glue traps, nets, baits, snares, corrals, concealed pits and clifftops, blowguns, and bows and arrows. Animal prey may thus be flushed out, cracked open, trapped, ambushed, or done in by weapons. Plants are cut down or unearthed, shelled and skinned, and detoxified by cooking, soaking, fermenting, and other tricks of the kitchen magician.
How do they accomplish these feats? With the help of language, foragers pool their knowledge and coordinate their actions. Their words offer a window to the kinds of knowledge they possess;
All documented human cultures (and by extrapolation, ancestral foraging ones) have words for space, time, motion, number, mental states, tools, flora, fauna, and weather; they make logical distinctions between general and particular, apparent and real, possible and actual. People use these words and concepts to reason about invisible entities such as disease, meteorological forces, and absent animals.
They also possess knowledge that is not easily expressed in words;
Their mental maps may contain thousands of noteworthy sites, and their mental calendars record cycles of weather, animal migrations, and the life histories of plants.
So we humans evolved mental machinery that allowed us to cooperate and outsmart the local flora and fauna. Vital to that machinery is its ability to analyze and categorize experiences that reflect the world's causal structure, which lets us make good predictions about unseen events. The world is a heterogeneous place, with many kinds of entities-and laws that make them tick. The mental toolbox we inherited comes equipped with distinct kinds of intuitions-about space, number, objects, living things, tools, and minds. We can see these intuitions at work as children first try to make sense of their world.
1. Intuitive Physics
The most fundamental mental tool is an intuitive physics: an understanding of how objects fall, roll, and bounce. Its foundation is an appreciation that the world contains objects that persist when out of sight and that obey laws; it is not a kaleidoscope of shimmering pixels or a magic show in which things disappear and reappear capriciously. In 1890, the philosopher and psychologist William James famously described the world of the infant as a "blooming, buzzing confusion," but recent experiments have shown that babies are not as confused as James thought. Infants as young as three months are apparently interpreting the blooms and buzzes as the outward signs of persisting, law-abiding objects; they are visibly surprised when an experimenter rigs up a display in which objects seem to vanish, pass through each other, fly apart, or move without having been pushed. As one psychologist summed up the results, "a blooming, buzzing confusion" describes the life of the parents, not of the infant.
But some objects do seem to defy physical laws. As the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins noted, if you throw a dead bird into the air, it will describe a graceful parabola and fall to the ground, exactly as physics books say it should, but if you throw a live bird in the air it may not touch land this side of the county boundary. These apparent scofflaws are living things, and we interpret them not as weird, springy objects or as law-defying miracles, but as obeying different kinds of laws, the laws of an intuitive biology. Living things are sensed to house an internal essence, which supplies a source of renewable energy, or oomph, that propels animals (usually in pursuit of a goal), gives them their form, and drives their growth and bodily functions.
2. Intuitive Biology
This intuition guides the way people in all cultures treat the living world. Foragers are fine amateur biologists who classify local plants and animals into categories that often match the professional biologist's genus or species. They don't simply lump together animals that look alike; dissimilar-looking creatures such as caterpillars and butterflies or peacocks and peahens are classifled as the same animal. The intuition that organisms are driven by an internal constitution also allows foragers to predict movements and life cycles. Straight tracks tell of a beast aiming for a destination, at which it can perhaps be surprised; a flower in the spring may provide fruit or a nutritious underground tuber in the fall. The same intuition inspires foragers to prepare juices and powders from plants and animals and try them out as medicines, poisons, and food additives.
Children distinguish the living from the nonliving early in life. Infants expect objects to move only when launched by some external force, but they expect people to start and stop on their own. Preschoolers reason about animals by ignoring appearances and focusing on their innards. In one experiment, four-year-olds were shown pictures of an animal and asked what would happen if its outside or its insides were removed. When asked, for example, "What if you take out the stuff inside the dog, you know, the blood and bones and things like that, and got rid of it and all you have left is the outside? Is it still a dog? Can it still bark and eat dog food?", the children answered "no." Alternatively, the children were asked to consider something that didn't look like a dog at all: "What if you take off the stuff outside of the dog, you know, the fur, and got rid of it and all you have left are the insides?" This time the children answered that it was still a dog and did doggy things.
3. Intuitive Engineering
A third way of knowing is intuitive engineering, the understanding of tools and other artifacts. Artifacts are defined not by their shape or constitution but by what they are intended to do. A store selling chairs might be stocked with anything from stools and dining room sets to beanbags, hammocks, and wooden cubes. A stump or elephant's foot becomes a chair if someone decides to use it as one. The only thing that chairs have in common is that someone intends them to hold up a human behind.
Tools appear in the fossil record millions of years before modern skulls do and must have been a major selection pressure for the expansion of the brains that make them. Today's one-year-old hominids tinker with sticks for pushing, strings for pulling, and supports for holding things up. Before they enter first grade, children have different intuitions about artifacts and living things. If you make a lion look like a tiger with a costume or a dye job and a shave, children say it is not a tiger but still a lion. But if, with some snipping and gluing, you make a coffeepot look like a birdfeeder, they say it just is a birdfeeder.
4. Intuitive Psychology
No law of intuitive physics, biology, or engineering, however, can explain the actions of human beings, who clearly don't behave like rocks, animals, or wind-up dolls. To predict the deeds of others, we need intuitive psychology-the conviction that people are driven by invisible, weightless mental states, such as beliefs and desires. We mortals can't literally read other people's minds, but we can make good guesses by listening carefully to what they say, watching their faces and eyes, and trying to make sense of their behavior. Like the other core intuitions, the rudiments of mind reading are first exercised in the crib. Infants make eye contact and track their parents' gaze, especially when they are uncertain why a parent is doing something. Three-year-olds show that they understand the nature of beliefs and desires and where they come from-for example, that a looker often wants what he is looking at, that you can't eat the memory of an apple, and that a person can tell what's in a box only by looking in it.
Conclusion
A child's precocious understanding of these domains - psychology, biology, physics, and engineering - suggests that the brain is prepared for them. Indeed, some patients with brain damage cannot name living things but can name artifacts, or vice versa, implying that artifacts and living things are stored in different ways in the brain. And some kinds of mental disorders seem to impair some domains and spare others. People with autism, for example, seem to lack an intuitive psychology, whereas those with Williams syndrome are competent intuitive psychologists but are spatially and mechanically challenged.
Our mental tools are sometimes most conspicuous when we apply them in ways they were not designed for;
- Slapstick humor comes from a sudden shift away from thinking of a person in the usual way, as a living locus of beliefs and desires, to seeing him as a material object ignominiously obeying the laws of physics (such as slipping on a banana peel).
- Religious beliefs in souls, angels, and gods come from divorcing our intuitive psychology from our intuitive biology and physics so that we can think about minds that have no bodies.
- Animistic beliefs do the opposite-they marry intuitive psychology to intuitive biology, physics, or engineering and impute minds to trees, mountains, or idols.
And this brings us back to - how our Stone Age minds grasp modern science. Formal sciences grew out of their intuitive counterparts. The conviction that living things have an essence, for example, is what impelled the first biologists to try to understand the nature of plants and animals by cutting them open and putting bits of them under a microscope. Anyone who announced he was trying to understand the nature of chairs by bringing them into a laboratory and putting bits of them under a microscope would be dismissed as mad, not given a grant.
But to advance from intuitive science to modern science, we often have to turn off parts of the intuitions out of which it grew;
Newton's first law states that a moving object continues in a straight line unless acted on by a force. Ask college students what happens to a whirling tetherball that is cut loose, however, and a depressingly large minority, including many who have taken physics, say it would continue in a circular path. The students explain that the object acquires a "force," or "momentum," that powers it along the curve until the momentum gets "used up" and the path straightens out. Although erroneous, the students' beliefs are understandable because we evolved in a world with substantial friction, which makes moving objects slow down and stop, not in a lab with pucks gliding on air tables.
Modern science also pries our intuitive faculties loose from the objects they usually apply to and encourages us to aim them at seemingly inappropriate ones;
To do mathematics, we primates- visual animals-invented graphs. These allow abstruse concepts to present themselves to our mind's eyes as reassuringly familiar shapes: "Y = mx + b" is a straight line; differentiable functions are smooth curves. They also allow mathematical operations to be performed by doodling in mental imagery: to add a constant, mentally shove the line upward; to multiply, rotate it; to integrate, color in the space beneath it. To do chemistry, we stretch our intuitive physics and treat the essence of a natural substance as a collection of tiny, bouncy, sticky objects. To do biology, we take our way of understanding artifacts and apply it to living things-organs as machines "engineered" by natural selection-and then to their essences, the molecules of life. To do psychology, we treat the mind as an organ of a living creature, as an artifact designed by natural selection, and as a collection of physical objects, neurons.
According to a saying that is well known among psychologists, if you give a boy a hammer, the whole world becomes a nail. The saying is usually aimed at overreaching theoreticians, but it seems to be appropriate to Homo sapiens in general. If you give a species an elementary grasp of psychology, biology, and mechanics, then for better and for worse, the whole world becomes a society, a zoo, and a machine.
Pinker, Steven. Natural History 106.8 (Sep 1997): 42-45.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/pinker/files/the_brain.pdf
Folkways & Folk Science
Folkway - The learned behaviour, shared by a social group, that provides a traditional mode of conduct.
According to the American sociologist William Graham Sumner, who coined the
term, folkways are social conventions that are not considered to be of moral
significance by members of the group (e.g., customary behaviour for use of the
telephone). The folkways of groups, like the habits of individuals, originate
in the frequent
repetition of acts that prove
successful for
satisfying
basic human needs.
These acts become uniform and are widely accepted. Folkways operate primarily at an unconscious level and persist because they are expedient. They tend to group themselves around major social concerns, such as sex, forming social institutions (e.g., the family). Sumner believed that folkways from diverse areas of life tended to become consistent with each other, creating definite patterns.
Tradition, habit, and religious sanctions tend to strengthen folkways as time passes, making them more and more arbitrary, positive, and compelling. Some folkways become mores (borrowed from the Latin word for customs by Sumner) when they become ethical principles, the behaviours considered essential to the welfare of the society. Mores are more coercive than folkways: relatively mild disapproval follows an infringement of a folkway; severe disapproval or punishment follows the breaking of mores. Polygamy violates the mores of American society; failure to wait one’s turn in line is a breach of folkways.
Sumner saw folkways and mores as essentially conservative and doubted the ability of members of the society to change them consciously. The small variations introduced by individuals in their observance, however, allows for some change, according to Sumner.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/folkway
Folk Genres
Folk Psychology
The common-sense conceptual framework that we, as human beings, employ to understand, predict, and explain the behavior of other humans and higher animals. "...the rough-hewn set of concepts, generalizations, and rules of thumb we all standardly use in explaining and predicting human behavior [folk psychology] is a theory whose generalizations connect mental states to other mental states, to perceptions and to actions" --P S Churchland (1986)
Folk Biology
The cognitive study of how people classify and reason about the organic world. Humans everywhere classify animals and plants into species-like groups as obvious to a modern scientist as to a Maya Indian. Such groups are primary loci for thinking about biological causes and relations (Mayr 1969). Historically, they provided a transtheoretical base for scientific biology in that different theories -- including evolutionary theory -- have sought to account for the apparent constancy of "common species" and the organic processes centering on them. In addition, these preferred groups have "from the most remote period . . . been classed in groups under groups" (Darwin 1859: 431). This taxonomic array provides a natural framework for inference, and an inductive compendium of information, about organic categories and properties. It is not as conventional or arbitrary in structure and content, nor as variable across cultures, as the assembly of entities into cosmologies, materials, or social groups. From the vantage of EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, such natural systems are arguably routine "habits of mind," in part a natural selection for grasping relevant and recurrent "habits of the world."
Naive Physics
More recently, there has been a growing body of evidence suggesting that central (i.e., conceptual) mechanisms, as well as input-output processes, may be domain-specific. It has been argued, for instance, that the ability to interpret human action in terms of beliefs and desires is governed by a naive psychology, a domain-specific ability, often referred to as THEORY OF MIND; that the capacity to partition and explain living things in terms of biological principles like growth, inheritance, and bodily function is similarly governed by a FOLK BIOLOGY; and that
...the capacity to form consistent predictions about the integrity and movements of inert objects is governed by a NAIVE PHYSICS...
These devices are described as providing the basis for competencies that children use to think about complex phenomena in a coherent manner using abstract causal principles. Cultural competencies in these domains are seen as grounded in these genetically determined domain-specific dispositions, though they may involve some degree of CONCEPTUAL CHANGE.
Naive Geography
The earth is, indeed, flat to a very good approximation over distances much less than its radius. Assuming the whole earth to be flat was actually a sophisticated insight by primitive people: they realised that all the local accidents of geography: hills, valleys, rivers, and so on, were merely unevennesses of a surface which was on average flat as far as they could go. The flat-earth approximation was (and still is) entirely satisfactory for making mental and drawn local maps.
Folk Taxonomy
A vernacular naming system, and can be contrasted with scientific taxonomy. Folk biological classification is the way peoples describe and organize their natural surroundings/the world around them, typically making generous use of form taxa like "shrubs", "bugs", "ducks", "ungulates" and the likes. Astrology is a folk taxonomy, while astronomy uses a scientific classification system, although both involve observations of the stars and celestial bodies and both terms seem equally scientific, with the former meaning "the teachings about the stars" and the latter "the rules about the stars". Folk taxonomies are generated from social knowledge and are used in everyday speech. They are distinguished from scientific taxonomies that claim to be disembedded from social relations and thus objective and universal.
Folk Theories
Theories that are based on common, everyday experiences, but not subjected to rigorous experimental techniques, underlie many (likely, all) of our actions. For instance, a fairly sophisticated folk physics (the theory of the behavior of middle-sized, common objects, such as tables, chairs and bowling balls) is essential to our everyday interactions with the surrounding environment. (Just think of all the assumptions you make about the clothing you're currently wearing, e.g. that's it's not going to melt, that it stays at a certain temperature range in standard conditions, that it won't protect you from missiles, etc.) Similarly, folk psychology is the basis for (all?) our social actions and judgements about the psychology of others. It encompasses all of the assumptions we make about the correlations between people's behavior, mental states, and surrounding conditions.
Folk Psychology Mental Simulation
The simulation (or, "mental simulation") theory maintains that human beings are able to use the resources of their own minds to simulate the psychological causes of the behavior of others, typically by making decisions within a "pretend" context. The theory is usually, though not always, taken to present a serious challenge to the assumption that a theory underlies everyday human competence in predicting and explaining behavior, including the capacity to ascribe mental states to others.
Naive Realism
A common sense theory of perception. Most people, until they start reflecting philosophically, are naive realists. This theory is also known as "direct realism" or "common sense realism". Naive realism claims that the world is pretty much as common sense would have it. All objects are composed of matter, they occupy space, and have properties such as size, shape, texture, smell, taste and colour. These properties are usually perceived correctly. So, when we look at and touch things we see and feel those things directly, and so perceive them as they really are. Objects continue to obey the laws of physics and retain all their properties whether or not there is anyone present to observe them doing so.
Adapted from multiple sources;
https://geopolicraticus.wordpress.com/2016/08/06/folk-astrobiology/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naive_realism
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-simulation/
http://www.fact-index.com/f/fo/folk_psychology.html
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_taxonomy
Unconscious Motives Outside of Awareness
…social cognition research over the past 25 years has produced a stream of surprising findings regarding complex judgmental and behavioral phenomena that operate outside of awareness. Because the findings did not make sense given the “dumb unconscious” perspective of the psychological science mainstream (to wit, how could a processing system so dumb accomplish so much in the way of adaptive self-regulation?), we had to look outside of psychology to understand them and their implications for the human mind. Happily, when placed in the broader context of the natural sciences, especially evolutionary biology, the widespread discoveries of sophisticated unconscious behavior guidance systems not only make sense, they turn out to have been predicted on a priori grounds (Dawkins, 1976; Dennett, 1991, 1995)...
...Many recent studies have now shown that unconscious goal pursuit produces the same outcomes that conscious goal pursuit does (reviews in Dijksterhuis, Chartrand, & Aarts, 2007; Fitzsimons & Bargh, 2004). The goal concept, once activated without the participant’s awareness, operates over extended time periods (without the person’s conscious intent or monitoring) to guide thought or behavior towards the goal (e.g., Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, & Troetschel, 2001)...
The Unconscious Mind - John A. Bargh and Ezequiel Morsella
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2440575/
Intentional Transparency vs Intentional Opacity
Intentional Opacity; ...In plain language, people act in an intentional way. For example, a person will consistently pursue some goal by whatever means available. In addition, we are often consciously aware of our intentions. This has led people to suppose that intention is a conscious process, and that if we observe a person acting in an intentional manner, we suppose that he has consciously arrived at that intention, and is now pursuing it.
Yet there is a great deal of puzzling evidence that conflicts with this model of conscious intention. We often perceive people's intentions as being different than the intention that they report, especially when they appear to be acting in a self-interested way. Also, people often struggle to explain why they are doing what they are doing, and may admit the importance of subjective motivations such as emotions and gut feelings.
Intentional Design says that we can regard people as being designed by evolution, so we can also regard their intentional behavior and their conscious awareness of their intentions as being designed to pursue the ultimate intention of survival and successful reproduction. If we are consciously aware of all of our intentional behavior, then we say that we have been designed for intentional transparency. If this is not always so, then there is intentional opacity...
http://humancond.org/analysis/mind/intentional_opacity
Daniel Dennett has developed a framework that helps to explain the philosophical basis of our approach. He observes three different viewpoints or stances from which we can try to understand the behavior and organization of a thing or person:
- The Physical Stance: We may apply physics, chemistry, etc., to understand any arbitrary object: rock, toaster or person. “This object is flat because the 10 ton weight fell on it.”
- The Design Stance: We may realize that an object (toaster) has been designed to perform some function, and so assume that it will indeed perform as designed. “If I put in bread and push this lever, I will get toast.”
- The Intentional Stance: We may realize that the object (person) is an agent with mind of its own, and has some goals that it intends to achieve. We may then expect the agent to apply whatever resources it has to realizing its intentions. “He wants to go to Wrestlemania, and he just got a new bowling ball, so he may sell his old ball to get money for a ticket.”
We'll put our spin on these ideas, and then fuse the intentional and design stances to create intentional design.
http://humancond.org/analysis/philosophy/intentional_design
"We are typically not conscious of these reproductive quandaries. Nor are we usually aware of the evolutionary logic that led to this dangerous passion. A man does not think, "Oh, if my wife has sex with someone else, then my certainty that I'm the genetic father will be jeopardized, and this will endanger the replication of my genes; I'm really mad." Or if his partner takes birth-control pills, "Well, because Joan is taking the pill, it doesn't really matter whether she has sex with other men; after all, my certainty in paternity is secure." Nor does a woman think, "It's really upsetting that Dennis is in love with that other woman; this jeopardizes my hold on his emotional commitments to me and my children, and hence hurts my reproductive success." Instead, jealousy is a blind passion, just as our hunger for sweets and craving for companionship are blind. Jealousy is emotional wisdom, not consciously articulated, passed down to us over millions of years by our successful forebears..." - David Buss
