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Consciousness and the social mind

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Here is the intro to Phil’s piece.

Emotion is a hot topic, getting hotter all the time. The reasons for this enthusiasm are various, but the growth of neuroscientific interest in the area surely ranks high among them. The same goes for another hot topic: social cognition. Within the last two decades, two subfields of neuroscience have emerged: affective neuroscience, the study of the neural mechanisms underlying emotion and emotional feeling; and social neuroscience, the study of the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition. The parallel development of these new brain sciences is no accident. As Damasio (1994) makes clear, emotional and social functioning are deeply intertwined, since practical rationality is scaffolded by the ability to feel one’s way through the world, the social world included. This is now a familiar theme in cognitive science. Less familiar is the idea that the link between emotional and social functioning identified by Damasio forms part of a constellation of connections between consciousness (in the phenomenal, ‘what it’s like’ sense; see Nagel, 1974) and social cognition. In this paper, I try to identify some of these other connections, and to explore their implications for how we think about the conscious mind in general.

The plan of the paper goes like this. In the first part, I argue that a wide swath of consciousness is a product of the social mind, as it arises from cognitive operations dedicated to processing information about the domain of persons. I begin by describing two phenomena that have attracted considerable attention in the empirical literature. The first is social pain: the affect associated with the perception of actual or potential damage to one’s interpersonal relations. The second phenomenon of interest is affective contagion: the tendency for emotions, moods, and other affective states to spread from person to person as a consequence of social perception. Neuroscientific investigation of these phenomena suggests that affective consciousness depends on perception of the social world in much the same way that it depends on perception of the body. It appears, in short, that consciousness is a ‘socially embodied’ capacity, in two senses of the term (articulated below). In the second part of the paper I look at the flip side of this thematic coin. Here I argue that the distinctive sociality of our species, especially its moral dimension, rests heavily on our ability to represent the conscious states of others. In closing, I try to connect the two main claims of the paper – the claim that consciousness is essentially social, and the claim that thinking about consciousness is socially essential – by showing how they jointly point to a kind of circular causal-mechanistic nexus between consciousness and social mindedness.

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Is Behavioral Economics Doomed?

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Here is a skeptical take on the insights supposedly offered by the rise of behavioral economics as represented by Daniel Kahneman and others. Since I’m in the process of reviewing Kahneman it will be interesting to see if Levine’s take on behavioral economics jibes with my take on Kahneman in particular and behavioral economics in general – I have a strong sense that is unlikely to be the case.

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Hayek and Behavioral Economics: Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension

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I see that the publisher now has a fully detailed page up for a volume that I’ve been privileged to be a part of. The Foreword is by a very nice chappie going by the name of V.Smith and includes luminaries such as McCloskey, Boettke, Gintis, Steel and others. My abstract:

Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension

Hayek’s and Simon’s social externalism runs on a shared presupposition: mind is constrained in its computational capacity to detect, harvest, and assimilate “data” generated by the infinitely fine-grained and perpetually dynamic characteristic of experience in complex social environments. For Hayek, mind and sociality are co-evolved spontaneous orders, allowing little or no prospect of comprehensive explanation, trapped in a hermeneutically sealed, i.e. inescapably context bound, eco-system. For Simon, it is the simplicity of mind that is the bottleneck, overwhelmed by the ambient complexity of the environmental. Since on Simon’s account complexity is unidirectional, Simon is far more ebullient about the prospects of explanation. Hayek’s social externalism functions as a kind of distributed “extra-neural” memory store manifest as dynamic spontaneous orders. Simon’s organizational rule-governed externalism negotiates the “inner” world (the mind) with the “outer” world through a homeostatic interface that offloads the cognitive burden into the environment. Their respective externalisms may differ in detail but not in spirit in that it ameliorates their shared presupposition of cognitive constraint. Even though any “optimization talk” for Hayek and Simon is objectionable, knowledge acquisition can be represented by a contextualized stigmergic swarm optimization algorithm that gives due emphasis to both the individual and the environment. The key insight is that “perfect” knowledge is unnecessary, impracticable and indeed irrelevant if one understands the mechanism at work in complex sociality, a stigmergic sociality that in effect augments or scaffolds cognition.

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Companion to Oakeshott

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At last PSUP have published the contents.

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Embodying the Mind by Extending It

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This article from a special issue of Review of Philosophy and Psychology.

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Animal Mindreading

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Kristin Andrews and Robert Lurz discuss animals and mindreading.

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Rationalism in Politics

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In anticipation of a talk I’m giving later on in the week on Oakeshott’s so-called “dispositional conservatism”, here is a nice little piece by my chum Gene Callahan serving as a good introduction to RIP.

The British philosopher and historian Michael Oakeshott is a curious figure in twentieth-century intellectual history. He is known mostly as a “conservative political theorist,” although he rejected ideology and his conservatism was primarily temperamental. Furthermore, his work on politics was only a fraction of his output, which comprised idealist philosophy, aesthetics, religion, education, the philosophy of history, and even horse racing. His popularity reached its zenith in the 1950s and early 1960s, when he was well known on both sides of the Atlantic, appearing on the BBC and becoming the favorite philosopher at National Review. But he never seemed to seek popularity, and did little or nothing to boost his own when it subsequently faded. Today, despite the growing interest in Oakeshott since his death in 1990, even his best-recognized work, his essay “Rationalism in Politics,” is, I contend, not appreciated widely enough—thus, this article.

Lovers of liberty should keep Oakeshott’s work on rationalism in mind for at least two reasons. First, it offers a complementary but still significantly different critique of planning to those of Mises and Hayek. However, at the same time, it provides a warning to the advocates of freedom not to fall into the rationalist quagmire themselves. The relevance of the latter point is demonstrated by, for example, the tendency of many development economists, even those who are “market oriented,” to attempt to impose their theoretical schemes for taking a shortcut to westernization on some Third World country, while running roughshod over all the traditions, customs, and morals native to the place, which, whatever their short-comings, at least managed to sustain the society in question over previous centuries. Freedom cannot be “imposed” on a people according to some preconceived scheme. We all need to watch out for “the rationalist within.”

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Collective Intelligence 2012

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Just under a week until the CI2012 shindig – as it so happens I’m busy co-writing a paper and co-editing a themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research on a species of CI – surprise, surprise “stigmergy.”

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Shaun Gallagher: Enactively extended intentionality

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Shaun Gallagher talk:

I argue that the extended mind hypothesis requires an enactive, neo-pragmatic concept of intentionality if it is to develop proper responses to a variety of objections. This enactive concept of intentionality is based on the phenomenological concept of a bodily (or motor or operative) intentionality outlined by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. I explore the connections between this concept and recent embodied approaches to social cognition.

See also Evan Thompson on “Mind in life and life in mind” and Michael Wheeler on “Cognition at the crossroads: from embodied minds to thinking bodies

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Hayek’s Self-organizing Mental Order and Folk-Psychological Theories of the Mind

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Here is the Introduction to Chiara Chelini’s paper, the full version available here.

Humans are social creatures and they deeply rely on mentalizing, which aims at understanding other people behaviours and formulating expectations about their future actions. The existence of inner mental states has been postulated in order to give an explanatory account of the observed behaviors of other individuals. In particular, the activation of theory of mind in social situations has been demonstrated by neuroeconomic and behavioural experiments such as: processes of market exchange and specialisation of labour (Coricelli, Mc Cabe and Smith, 2000), decision-making involving strategic uncertainty, detection of social cheaters and, in general, cooperative games in which subjects need to predict their opponents’ strategies; these are all situations in which theory of mind is activated. Historically, two different models of mental processes have been considered in the literature about folk psychology: theory-theory and simulation-theory. Theory-theory posits that subjects who are attributing to others a particular mental state are applying a tacit piece of knowledge previously acquired “about what people feel, think, want, etc in given circumstances and how they will, therefore, act” (Perner, Gschaider, Kǖhberger and Schrofner, 1999). They basically own “folk theories” about others’ mental states and implicit causal laws about how the mind works. On the contrary, simulation theory posits that, in attributing mental states, subjects are not possessing tacitly codified knowledge, but they are rather running a simulation “putting themselves in others’ shoes”. Simulating means using one’s own mind as a model for other people’s mental states, while being unaware of this activity. Simulation directly bridges perception and action (Decety and Grèzes, 2006). Hayek had already envisioned this relationship between sensory and motor activity (Hayek, 1952, p. 92) but he dwells more on a neuronal level explanation than a mental one. Notwithstanding this historical opposition between theory and simulation, an approach that highlights their intermingling contributions and cross-fertilisations has nowadays been favoured (Goldman, 2006). This is the reason why, after introducing a brief sketch of these two positions, our paper focuses then on theory of mind broadly speaking as the capacity to share psychological states with others: this is the social cognitive capacity making humans collaborative and cooperative, able to be engaged in mutual coordinated actions and plans (Tomasello, 2005). Humans, as social actors, have to possess a cognitive machinery that makes them able to coordinate. This paper investigates whether theory of mind can provide a plausible explanation, at the mind level, of the tacitly triggered process of knowledge coordination elaborated by Hayek. More specifically, does Hayek’s concept of coordinating and self-organizing orders imply a model of the mind that can be framed as the current philosophical concept of theory of mind? In particular, we address the question whether theory of mind can give an account of that “inter-personal” understanding of other people’s mental states that Hayek sketches without developing it in details (Hayek, 1952, p. 23). The paper is then structured as follow: sections 2 frames the concept of mentalizing as it has been historically developed in theory-theory and simulation-theory; section 3 presents Hayek’s philosophical psychology, identifying specific issues in order to integrate the latter with modern theory of mind; it explains the roles of communication between individuals and the process of knowledge formation in Hayek’s view, trying to address the question why Hayek’s philosophical psychology does not properly consider the concept of “theory of mind”. Section 4 concludes with further ideas of comparison, presenting the concept of “social mind” from a neuroscientific perspective, considering the idea of mirror neurons.

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