Publishing Hyperbole

cognitive science, consciousness, neurophilosophy, philosophy of mind

I for one am very pleased that consciousness has become a topic for discussion amongst the literati. I welcome the accessible writing of David Armstrong, Susan Blackmore, Andy Clark, Tim Crane, Dan Dennett, Gerald Edelman and Stephen Pinker to name but a few of the more prominent popular expositors. But I cringe at the dreadful  hyperbole that publisher’s insist on generating. A case in point is Random House’s blurb on the forthcoming book by Jeff Warren entitled The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness.  Here is the offending excerpt:

Part user’s manual and part travel guide, The Head Trip is an instant classic, a brilliant summation of consciousness studies that is also a practical guide to enhancing creativity, mental health, and the experience of what it means to be human. Many books claim that they will change you. This one gives you the tools to change yourself.

Wow – an instant classic, eh? Move over Dave Chalmers! :) The ultimate “how to” book” – a staple of tabloid TV – it promises that the reader’s humanity might also be enhanced. Rollover Shakespeare and tell Goethe and Kafka the news.

Whatever the virtues of Warren’s book may be, this sort of pompous promotion is annoying. Not to mention the “hip” title and an annoying subtitle. To be fair this rash of subtitling books is as much a part of the academic industry (it may well have begun here) as it is a part of the popular publishing industry. These pseudo literary titles are no more than a crass marketing ploy to “sex-up” the product. I liken these subtitles to the blurb in an art exhibition catalogue “telling me what the painting is really about”. This is pure condescendence: a general reader is ostensibly already interested in the inherent complexities of the subject matter.

Victim of the Brain

cognitive science, consciousness, Dennett, neurophilosophy, philosophy of mind, videos

A 1988 docudrama about “the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter“. The protagonist is Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos. The film features interviews with a youngish Hofstadter and a never young looking Dan Dennett :) (90 minutes).

Encounters with Michael Oakeshott

liberalism, oakeshott, philosophy of history, political philosophy

Here is another finely crafted essay on Oakeshott, the man – written by someone who knew him well and who through his editoral activities, did much to bring Oakeshott to wider attention.  This essay should be read along with Michael Oakeshott as a Character and Why Read Oakeshott?  

 ========================================

By Timothy Fuller

My first encounter with Michael Oakeshott was on a Saturday afternoon in the library of Kenyon College in the fall of 1959 when, with the place mostly all to myself, I found on a shelf the Blackwell’s Political Texts edition of Hobbes’s Leviathan, edited by a certain Michael Oakeshott. I was just then deciding to change my major field of study – I had started as a pre-med, then considered Classics and English. I was taking my first course in political philosophy, a subject which immediately attracted me. Finding Oakeshott’s Leviathan confirmed my intuition. I was about to write an essay on Hobbes for the course. I sat down at a secluded library table to look through what this author, hitherto unknown to me, had to say. From the first sentence, “Thomas Hobbes, the second son of an otherwise undistinguished vicar…” I was captivated. I read through the whole essay as the afternoon wore on. I was taken by what I later learned was a famous and controversial interpretation among Hobbes scholars. As I finished it, I looked up and thought to myself that I must someday write an essay like this, that to desire anything less was not to be serious about what I now knew I intended to do.

The following Monday I burst in on my political theory professor asking if he had ever heard of Oakeshott. Providentially, one might say, he also was an Englishman who had read modern history at Trinity College, Cambridge before coming to America to do graduate work at Harvard and to teach. Not only had he known Oakeshott but he had worked with him on the Cambridge Journal in the 1940s. He was the first of those I was to encounter who described what it was like in the 1930s and 40s to hear the legendary Oakeshott lecture on the history of political thought (others I met later include Brian Tierney and Peter Laslett). My teacher was patient with my enthusiasm to take up political thought and teach it. It is, of course, what I did and do, and I have never regretted it for a moment. I owe my direction, in part, to the Oakeshott I was to meet face to face only much later.

He was legendary among Cambridge students, not alone for his lectures but also for somewhat dandyish ways and for his love of horse racing. He was said to have abandoned his scheduled lectures on certain occasions when the races at Newmarket were on. The latter interest found expression in the book he wrote with his friend, Guy Griffith, A Guide to the Classics or How to Pick a Derby Winner. The book was published in 1936 by the distinguished house of Faber and Faber, whose esteemed editor was T. S. Eliot. At least a few people, looking hastily at the title, must have bought it thinking it was an essay by two scholars on the classics. Eliot mentions the book in passing in his 1944 address to the Vergil Society, “What Is a Classic?” Careful readers used its prescriptions for betting with occasional success and, so I am told, one such sent Oakeshott, in appreciation, a case of Chateau Margaux.

Oakeshott lurked in the back of my mind for a few years until, while I was in graduate school, Rationalism in Politics appeared. This was the book that launched him in America and remains today his most widely read book. At this point, my interest was rekindled and, when I came to writing my doctoral thesis on John Stuart Mill, I deployed numerous ideas of Oakeshott’s in examining and criticizing Mill’s basic political doctrines. In part, also, I was responding to the very controversial view of Mill that Maurice Cowling – at that time, a follower of Oakeshott – had recently published in his Mill and Liberalism to the effect that Mill was a “moral totalitarian.” This accusation is not one Oakeshott himself would have pronounced. In 1979, through Shirley Letwin, I finally met and began a rewarding friendship with Cowling who, by then, had overturned a number of his earlier Oakeshottian views and who, characteristically as I came to know, rebuffed my praise of his early work. When I started teaching, Oakeshott’s work became a regular part of my courses on modern political thought.

My first meeting with Oakeshott came in 1974, the centennial year of Colorado College. (He was to return once more, in June 1982, to receive an honorary degree) I had proposed, and the college had put me in charge of, organizing a year long lecture series on the present and future state of liberal learning. I wrote to Oakeshott, inviting him to spend a week at the college and to present the first lecture. He accepted, and offered, in Tutt Library at Colorado College on September 17, 1974, to an audience of nearly four hundred, “A Place of Learning.” This now well-known essay was printed in the Colorado College Studies in January 1975, later reprinted numerous times in various places, ultimately to appear as the lead essay in The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989).

Oakeshott electrified the audience with extraordinarily powerful, and beautifully conceived, formulations issuing from the mouth of a slight, unassuming man who might go unnoticed unless and until he spoke with you. Oakeshott was, of course, highly critical of the contemporary social sciences but he made his points with a grace that led one of my colleagues in sociology to remark that he had never been so charmingly demolished. At the same time, his evocation of what liberal learning really is was so heartfelt, and expressed with such an effortless invocation of the great resources of the Western tradition, that he instantiated and made real to all present what, in lesser hands, would have seemed hopelessly romantic. Apart from his lecture, he spent much of his week in residence talking with students and faculty and I began to glimpse his greatness as a teacher. Later, when I witnessed Oakeshott performing in the general seminar of the History of Political Thought at LSE, I enjoyed another version of the same experience.

His visit to Colorado was the beginning of our friendship which lasted until his death in December 1990. I took him around Colorado to admire the skill of cowboys on horseback punching cows, to see the aspen groves turning to orange and gold, and to clamber about the hills of the Cripple Creek goldfields. I asked him why he had agreed to come to Colorado since, although my letter had made it clear that I knew something about him, he surely had never heard of me. This was not quite true because we had several mutual acquaintances who had vouched for me, as I later found out.

He told me that two things determined him to come: First, he had an uncle who had migrated to California at the turn of the century to grow tomatoes; this had excited in him an interest in the American West and he read widely on the topic from childhood. He had a lot of western literature at his disposal. Although he had been to the east coast of the United States, this was his first chance to see the west of his boyhood imagination. It seemed to him exactly like what he had read about. Second, he was charmed by the thought of an encampment of liberal learning nestled at the foot of Pike’s Peak which, as he imagined it, had been founded by pioneers crossing the great plains in covered wagons bearing Shakespeare and the Bible. This was not quite accurate but not altogether wrong either. He endeared himself to us all when he began his now famous lecture by saying: “I have crossed half the world to find myself in familiar surroundings: a place of learning.” We felt – and he felt – genuine kinship between ancient Cambridge and pioneering Colorado College. This quintessential Englishman had a romantic attraction to the “frontier experience.”

We corresponded, and then in 1977 I began my annual pilgrimages to England to spend time with him. We arrived in London in August of that year and Oakeshott took us for a drink to the bar of the Ritz Hotel (introducing me to one of his favorite drinks, Campari and soda) before going along to lunch with Shirley and Bill Letwin at 3 Kent Terrace which was to result in another extraordinary friendship and my entry into the most rewarding society of friends and companions I have known. Meeting Shirley Letwin for the first time could be a test of one’s poise. If you got through the test satisfactorily, you could bank on a permanent commitment that taught me what fierce and devoted friendship really means. I did not yet know that, of course. Michael had alerted her about me and had shown her a seminar paper I had written about his thought. She started by telling me it was among the best things she had seen on Michael, but then went on to pummel me with questions about all the American political theorists whom she seemed to despise, many of whom were friends of mine. I managed to maintain myself until Michael, in his marvelously graceful way, turned the engagement to a more conversational topic. I owe to Michael the chance of such high, Aristotelian friendship with Bill and Shirley Letwin.

In 1979, I arrived at LSE to spend time as an Academic Visitor in the Government Department. Oakeshott had long since formally retired but he retained his room in Lincoln’s Chambers and, as he only came to the School officially on Tuesdays for the History of Political Thought seminar, I was given the other desk in his room that had been before me that of Professor Pickles. On Tuesdays when he was to give his papers on the study of history, which were later published in On History and other essays (1983, 2000), he would spend the day at his desk rewriting the papers. He did this every time he presented them, refining them over a number of years before they finally were published. In the meantime, Xeroxes of various versions of them circulated among his devoted student followers. Unless he was to see a student, I remained in the office working back to back with him. He smoked continuously until it was time to leave our cloudy space for the seminar meeting at 4 PM. We often went out to eat together after the seminar, his two favorite places being Luigi’s on Tavistock Street and Mon Plaisir on Monmouth Street. The latter especially remains a favorite of mine. It was during this time that I came to know well Bill and Shirley Letwin, Ken Minogue, Elie Kedourie, Wolfgang Von Leyden, Maurice Cranston, Robert Orr, John Morrall and John Charvet, and also Maurice Cowling at Cambridge. I still think of this as a golden era at the LSE, a time when most of my best students came to study in the History of Political Thought program.

Oakeshott could enchant students even when, as was often true, they understood him only in part. He was, at eighty, more attuned to the young than teachers half his age. He never forgot what it was to be young, and he could forgive students for much because he loved the glorious, transitory inconsequence of youth. Like Socrates, he was young when old. He never imposed his ideas except so far as their natural force would take them. He would listen patiently to virtually any question students posed and would answer them by making them better questions than they started out to be. Study in the university, he famously said, is the gift of an interval: a liberation from the unavoidable drills of school and a momentary release before the limiting responsibilities of adulthood set in. He thought work should balance play, enjoyment ambition and conversation debate. He urged that we should be conservative with respect to the rules of the civil life in order to be radical in everything else. He was a Bohemian in the right way. He told students arriving at the university to think of themselves as strolling minstrels stopping off to perform before they were moved on by the local constabulary, and he encouraged them to think this far superior to occupying a niche in the social organization. He counseled students to be, as it were, irresponsible for a time so that liberal learning could enter in. And yet no one could doubt that what he was urging, and what he exemplified, was the profound seriousness of the life of the mind.

In the 1980s, Oakeshott decided to give up his flat at 16 New Row in Covent Garden to live year round in his Dorset cottage in the tiny village of Acton on the edge of the Purbeck marble quarries. His cottage was the combination of two quarryman’s cottages which he had bought years before, knocking out the central partition to make one larger cottage. I first visited the cottage in the summer of 1977. In the decade of the 80s I visited him often there. There was no central heat, and, until late in his life, no telephone or indeed other elements of that modern life for which Oakeshott had little regard. The computer did not exist for him. He thought most modern inventions had done the human race little good. He wrote everything by hand. From his cottage one looked out on the Channel to the Isle of Wight in the distance. And, because of its situation in the Wessex country of Hardy, one felt oneself transported back before World War I, even to the 19th century, to a world where one might meet Jude the Obscure coming down the path. This is exactly how Oakeshott wanted to feel. Life was, to him, sweeter then.

Oakeshott kept most of his books at the cottage, including many rare volumes that he was able to collect in the good old days when old books were relatively cheap and mostly bought by people who would read them rather than treat them as collectibles, antiques or investments. The cottage had, at one end of the main room, a large fireplace that gave off much heat, at least at that end of the room. I would often huddle at the fireplace while Oakeshott would roam the farther reaches of the room complaining that it was rather hot.

He was an excellent cook and gardener. One of his prized achievements was to have turned a deep cistern in his garden into a guest bedroom that one entered by climbing down a ladder about eight feet below ground where a bed awaited one. To me it seemed a little out of Edgar Allen Poe but I never had to sleep there; I always got the guest room inside the cottage. Oakeshott also owned a blue 1958 MG-B which he drove at excessive speeds through the hedgerows.

The cottage was a place of conversation that often lasted until late into the night. It was genuine conversation. It could be witty and frivolous, up to a point. It could be sophisticated and often philosophical. It could be literary or theological. It could be, but infrequently, about current politics for which Oakeshott had little taste even though he was well informed. If you posed a serious question to him, he would often sit entranced for a time, until you began to think he hadn’t heard you and you started to speak to fill in the void or to repeat yourself when, of a sudden, a considered, precise and elegant response would come forth, and you realized that, in such moments, elapsed time had no significance for him.

In his learned brilliance, Oakeshott made shrewd judgments about people and arguments, but he was, in a way, the least judgmental of all people. He was an intellectual aristocrat, but his sense of the universal predicament of being human – what he called the ordeal of consciousness – was authentically democratic. He was a true individualist, and I mean really and truly. He spent no time worrying whether others had more or less than himself, he treated every encounter with another person as a unique circumstance, a potentially poetic experience. On the other hand, if an encounter was not fruitful, he went his way happily, awaiting another opportunity to present itself. He had the capacity, like Montaigne and Pascal, to sit alone in a room, to think and to write. He was certainly a companion to himself and, perhaps for that reason, he was a marvelous companion to others. When he found himself talking with someone of modest talent and little thought, he would look up at a corner of a room, jangling the coins in his pocket, and respond, “Oh, you think that! Do you? Do you?” His “do yous” were famous. And, at the Oakeshott memorial meeting at LSE in 1991, John Casey, a fellow of Oakeshott’s Cambridge college, suggested that if God had spoken to Oakeshott rather than Moses, saying “I Am that I Am,” Oakeshott might have replied, “Are you? Are you?”

Oakeshott was a great teacher but he thought of himself as a learner, occasionally disclosing to others what he thought he had learned, inviting them to say what they might think of it. He was also a writer in the deepest sense. He wrote, so far as I can tell, every day of his life from his undergraduate days until well into his eighties. He kept notebooks in which he copied out quotations, analyzed what he was reading, tried various opening gambits for essays, and so on. As we all now know, he wrote numerous essays and lectures that he did not publish.

When he died he bequeathed his papers to Shirley Letwin to do with as she thought best. She and I went to the cottage in Dorset in May 1991 to remove the papers to the new Letwin house in London at 15 Arlington Road where, until not too long ago, they were kept before coming to the LSE. She and I worked together on the joint venture to publish some of these with the Yale University Press. Since most of this archive, with the exception of some private correspondence, is now accessible to all interested parties, I need say no more about it. I read all of it, but so can anyone else now. Rather, I want to remember him in terms of some of the most memorable things he had to say on the topics dearest to his heart.

Oakeshott was eloquent on youth, old age and mortality: “Everybody’s young days are a dream, a delightful insanity, a sweet solipsism … the world is a mirror in which we seek the reflection of our own desires … urgency is our criterion of importance; and we do not easily understand that what is humdrum need not be despicable. We are impatient of restraint; and we readily believe, like Shelley, that to have contracted a habit is to have failed … For most there is what Conrad called the ‘shadow line’ which, when we pass it, discloses a solid world of things … each with its price; a world of fact, not poetic image , in which what we have spent on one thing we cannot spend on another; a world inhabited by others besides ourselves who cannot be reduced to mere reflections of our own emotions.” (On Being Conservative, 1956)

He spoke of love and friendship as only one who has felt and considered both could do: “Friends and lovers are not concerned with what can be made out of each other, but only with the enjoyment of one another. A friend … is somebody who evokes interest, delight, unreasoning loyalty, and who (almost) engages contemplative imagination … Neither merit nor necessity has any part in the generation of love; its progenitors are chance and choice – chance, because what cannot be identified in advance cannot be sought; and in choice the inescapable practical component of desire makes itself felt.” (The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind, 1959)

“In conversation,” he famously remarked, “thoughts of different species take wing and play round one another, responding to each other’s movements and provoking one another to fresh exertions … There is no symposiarch or arbiter; not even a doorkeeper to examine credentials … voices which speak in conversation do not compose a hierarchy… it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure … with conversation as with gambling, its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering … It is the ability to participate in this conversation, and not the ability to reason cogently, to make discoveries about the world, or to contrive a better world, which distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilized man from the barbarian.” Conversation is also the sign of liberal learning for “Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation.” (The Voice of Poetry)

Universities are places of learning ideally set aside to achieve conversationality: “A university will have ceased to exist when its learning has degenerated into what is now called research, when its teaching has become mere instruction and occupies the whole of an undergraduate’s time, and when those who come to be taught come, not in search of their intellectual fortune but with a vitality so unroused or so exhausted that they wish only to be provided with a serviceable moral and intellectual outfit; when they come with no understanding of the manners of conversation but desire only a qualification for earning a living or a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.” (The Idea of a University, 1950)

Of course politics, the necessary evil, is always with us: “The pursuit of perfection as the crow flies is an activity both impious and unavoidable in human life. It involves the penalties of impiety (the anger of the gods and social isolation), and its reward is not that of achievement but that of having made the attempt. It is an activity, therefore, suitable for individuals, but not for societies.” (The Tower of Babel, 1948)

“In political activity, then, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion.” (Political Education, 1951)

His views on politics resulted from considering politics philosophically: “Thinking is at first associated with an extraneous desire for action, and it is some time, perhaps, before we discern that philosophy is without any direct bearing upon the practical conduct of life, and that it has never offered its true followers anything which could be mistaken for a gospel. Of course, some so-called philosophers afford pretext enough for this particular misunderstanding. Nearly always a philosopher hides a secret ambition, foreign to philosophy, and often it is that of a preacher. But we must learn not to follow the philosophers upon these holiday excursions.” (Experience and its Modes, 1933)

“Philosophical reflection is recognized here as the adventure of one who seeks to understand in other terms what he already understands … It is, in short, a well-considered intellectual adventure recollected in tranquility.” (On Human Conduct, 1975)

One can see how, in Oakeshott’s disposition, the distinct activities of philosophy and poetry – it is hard to say which he came to value more – nevertheless will converge: “Poetry has nothing to teach us about how to live or what we ought to approve. Practical activity is an endless battle for noble or for squalid but always for illusory ends, a struggle from which the practical self cannot escape and in which victory is impossible because desire can never be satisfied … Poetic activity has no part in this struggle and it has no power to control, to modify, or to terminate it. If it imitates the voice of practice its utterance is counterfeit. To listen to the voice of poetry is to enjoy, not a victory, but a momentary release, a brief enchantment … Poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life, a wild flower planted among our wheat.” (The Voice of Poetry)

Throughout, Oakeshott felt the pressure of the eternal on our temporality and he reflected on the resulting tension – the tension characterizing the civilization of which he was a loving voice – over the whole of his life: “Religious faith is the evocation of a sentiment (the love, the glory, or the honour of God, for example, or even a humble caritas), to be added to all others as the motive of all motives in terms of which the fugitive adventures of human conduct, without being released from their mortal and their moral conditions, are graced with an intimation of immortality: the sharpness of death and the deadliness of doing overcome, and the transitory sweetness of a mortal affection, the tumult of a grief and the passing beauty of a May morning recognized neither as merely evanescent adventures nor as emblems of better things to come, but as aventures, themselves encounters with eternity.” (On Human Conduct)

Cognitive Science meets Social Epistemology

cognitive science, social cognition, social epistemology

Cognitive Science and FactCheck.org, or Why We (Still) Do What We Do

The following article is culled from Annenberg Fact Check (if this is the sort of discussion you find interesting, why not check out the journal EPISTEME. Articles such as Alvin Goldman on the epistemic failure of the FBI regarding 9/11 and Roger Koppl on why he thinks torture doesn’t generate epistemic veracity, intelligently speak to current issues of public interest).

October 17, 2007
by Joe Miller

Have you heard about how Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet? What about how Iraq was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center? Or maybe the one about how George W. Bush has the lowest IQ of any U.S. president ever? Chances are pretty good that you might even believe one (or more) of these claims. And yet all three are false. At FactCheck.org our stock in trade is debunking these sorts of false or misleading political claims, so when the Washington Post told us that we might just be making things worse, it really made us stop and think.

A Sept. 4 article in the Post discussed several recent studies that all seemed to point to the same conclusion: Debunking myths can backfire because people tend to remember the myth but forget what the debunker said about it. As Hebrew University psychologist Ruth Mayo explained to the Post, “If you think 9/11 and Iraq, this is your association, this is what comes in your mind. Even if you say it is not true, you will eventually have this connection with Saddam Hussein and 9/11.” That leaves myth busters like us with a quandary: Could we, by exposing political malarkey, just be cementing it in voters’ minds? Are we contributing to the problem we hope to solve?

Possibly. Yet we think that what we do is still necessary. And we think the facts back us up.

The Post story wasn’t all that surprising to those who follow the findings of cognitive science research, which tells us much of our thinking happens just below the level of consciousness. The more times we hear two particular bits of information associated, for example, the more likely it is that we’ll recall those bits of information. This is how we learn multiplication tables – and why we still know the Big Mac jingle.

Our brains also take some surprising shortcuts. In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Virginia Tech psychologist Kimberlee Weaver shows that the more easily we recall something the more likely we are to think of it as being true. It’s a useful shortcut since, typically, easily recalled information really is true. But combine this rule with the brain’s tendency to better remember bits of information that are repeated frequently, and we can run into trouble: We’re likely to believe anything we hear repeated frequently enough. At FactCheck.org we’ve noted how political spin-masters exploit this tendency ruthlessly, repeating dubious or false claims endlessly until, in the minds of many voters, they become true. Making matters worse, a study by Hebrew University’s Mayo shows that people often forget “denial tags.” Thus many people who hear the phrase “Iraq does not possess WMDs” will remember “Iraq” and “possess WMDs” while forgetting the “does not” part.

The counter to this requires an understanding of how it is that the brain forms beliefs.

In 1641, French philosopher René Descartes suggested that the act of understanding an idea comes first; we accept the idea only after evaluating whether or not it rings true. Thirty-six years later, the Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza offered a very different account of belief formation. Spinoza proposed that understanding and believing happen simultaneously. We might come to reject something we held to be true after considering it more carefully, but belief happens prior to the examination. On Spinoza’s model, the brain forms beliefs automatically. Rejecting a belief requires a conscious act.

Unfortunately, not everyone bothers to examine the ideas they encounter. On the Cartesian model, that failure results in neither belief nor disbelief. But on the Spinozan model we end up with a lot of unexamined (and often false) convictions.

One might rightly wonder how a 17th-century philosophical dispute could possibly be relevant to modern myth-busting. Interestingly, though, Harvard psychologist Daniel T. Gilbert designed a series of experiments aimed specifically at determining whether Descartes or Spinoza got it right. Gilbert’s verdict: Spinoza is the winner. People who fail to carry through the evaluation process are likely to believe whatever statements they read. Gilbert concludes that “[p]eople do have the power to assent, to reject, and to suspend their judgment, but only after they have believed the information to which they have been exposed.”

Gilbert’s studies show that, initially at least, we do believe everything we hear. But it’s equally obvious that we reject many of those beliefs, sometimes very quickly and other times only after considerable work. We may not be skeptical by nature, but we can nonetheless learn to be skeptical. Iowa State’s Gary Wells has shown that social interaction with those who have correct information is often sufficient to counter false views. Indeed, a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology by the University of Southern California’s Peter Kim shows that meeting a charge (regardless of its truth or falsity) with silence increases the chances that others will believe the claim. Giving false claims a free pass, in other words, is more likely to result in false beliefs (a notion with which 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry, who didn’t immediately respond to accusations by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth about his Vietnam record, is all too familiar).

So, yes, a big ad budget often trumps the truth, but that doesn’t mean we should go slumping off in existential despair. You see, the Spinozan model shows that we will believe whatever we hear only if the process of evaluating those beliefs is somehow short-circuited. Humans are not helpless automatons in the face of massive propaganda. We may initially believe whatever we hear, but we are fully capable of evaluating and rejecting beliefs that turn out not to be accurate. Our brains don’t do this naturally; maintaining a healthy skeptical attitude requires some conscious effort on our part. It also requires a basic understanding of logic – and it requires accurate information. That’s where this Web site comes in.

If busting myths has some bad consequences, allowing false information to flow unchecked is far worse. Facts are essential if we are to overcome our brain’s tendency to believe everything it hears. As a species, we’re still pretty new to that whole process. Aristotle invented logic just 2,500 years ago – a mere blink of the eye when compared with the 200,000 years we Homo sapiens relied on our brain’s reflex responses to avoid being eaten by lions. We still have a long way to go. Throw in a tsunami of ads and Internet bluster and the path gets even harder, which is why we’re delighted to find new allies at PolitiFact.com and the Washington Post’s FactChecker. We’ll continue to bring you the facts. And you can continue to use them wisely.

Sources:

Descartes, Rene. Principles of Philosophy. Tr. John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 [1644].

Gilbert, Daniel T., Romin W. Tafarodi and and Patrick S. Malone. “You Can’t Not Believe Everything Your Read.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65.2 (1993): 221-233.

Kim, Peter H., et al. “Silence Speaks Volumes: The Effectiveness of Reticence in Comparison to Apology and Denial for Responding to Integrity- and Competence-Based Trust Violations. Journal of Applied Psychology 92.4 (2007): 893-908.

Mayo, Ruth, Yaacov Schul and Eugene Burnstein. “‘I Am Not Guilty’ vs. ‘I Am Innocent’: Successful Negation May Depend on the Schema Used for its Encoding.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 40.4 (2004): 433-449.

Spinoza, Baruch de. Ethics. Tr. Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994 [1677].

Weaver, Kimberlee, et al. “Inferring the Popularity of an Opinion from its Familiarity: A Repetitive Voice Can Sound Like a Chorus.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92.5 (2007): 821-833.

Wright, E.F. and Gary L. Wells. “Does Group Discussion Attenuate the Dispositional Bias?” Journal of Applied Psychology 15 (1985): 531-546.

Modules, Networks, and the Brain’s Need to Heed

cognitive science, connectionism, consciousness, Edelman, Fuster, hayek, neurophilosophy, philosophy of mind, social cognition

This is an article I culled from Scientific American.com. What struck me about this article is that it features the work of Joaquín Fuster, one of the very few first-order neuroscientists who appreciate Hayek’s proto-connectionism (the other being Edelman). Fuster really deserves to be better known within the philosophy of mind community – his writing is highly accessible. I thoroughly recommend two of Fuster’s works:

Memory in the Cerebral Cortex: An Empirical Approach to Neural Networks in the Human and Nonhuman Primate (MIT, 1995)

Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition (Oxford, 2003). 

Last but by no means least, I happen to know Fuster as a most generous and modest man. Fuster can be seen in action: here lecturing on his special subject – the Cortical Dynamics of Working Memory.

Attention!

How the Brain Coordinates its Efforts to Pay Heed

Mark D’Esposito

Henry H. J. Wheeler Imaging Center

University of California, Berkeley

 

How does the brain organize its work? And how does it heed what it needs to heed? Theories of brain organization focus on two distinct but complementary principles of brain organization: modularity, the existence of brain regions with specialized functions, and network connectivity, the integration of information from various brain regions that results in organized behavior. In the study under review here, the modular and network models appear to play specialized roles in directing the attention of monkeys seeking certain visual targets through either “top-down” or “bottom-up” attentional strategies.

Modules versus networks

In the modules-versus-network debate, modularity is probably the simpler brain model to understand. Clinical observation of individuals with brain damage, as well as brain-imaging studies (functional MRIs, or fMRIs) of healthy individuals, demonstrate that certain brain regions control specific cognitive processes, such as the ability to produce speech. For instance, in patients with nonfluent aphasia, which creates a selective inability to speak, comprehension of spoken language remains intact. In 1861 Paul Broca observed that damage to the left frontal lobe in an autopsied brain had produced nonfluent aphasia. Modern brain-imaging studies of patients with strokes to this area (now known as “Broca’s area”) confirmed Broca’s theory. Moreover, fMRIs of healthy individuals reveal that the left frontal lobe is activated when subjects generate speech.

Of course, that some brain areas specialize in certain functions does not exclude the possibility that those areas are also part of larger networks of brain regions communicating with one another. Although the modular model may accurately describe many cognitive functions, it is insufficient to explain complex cognitive processes that cannot be localized to isolated brain regions. It is unlikely that our ability to get the gist of a conversation, for instance, is the work of a single specialized brain module. Such complex behavior more likely arises from interactions between brain regions through network connectivity.

In his 1995 book Memory in the Cerebral Cortex: An Empirical Approach to Neural Networks in the Human and Nonhuman Primate, UCLA neurologist Joaquin Fuster began an argument he extended in his 2002 work Cortex and Mind: Unifying Cognition. According to Fuster, new studies of brain networks have led to a “revolution in contemporary neuroscience.” He contends that the empirical shift from a reductionist modular model to a holistic network model offers promise of accomplishing our long-term goal of resolving the mind-brain question. Fuster’s conception of a network model of brain function includes several key notions:

(1) Cognitive information is represented in wide, overlapping and interactive brain networks.

(2) Such networks develop on a core of organized modules of elementary sensory and motor functions, to which they remain connected.

(3) The cognitive code is a relational code, based on connectivity between discrete brain regions.

(4) The code’s diversity and specificity derive from the myriad possible combinations of those brain regions.

(5) Any brain region can be part of many networks and thus of many percepts, memories, items of experience or personal knowledge.

(6) A given brain network can serve several cognitive functions.

(7) Cognitive functions consist of functional interactions within and between brain networks.

A division of labor …

In “Top-Down Versus Bottom-Up Control of Attention in the Prefrontal and Posterior Parietal Cortices” (click here for pdf download), published in Science this year, Timothy Buschman and Earl Miller, both of MIT, add to this model by exploring the neural mechanisms underlying both functional specialization and functional integration. Buschman and Miller investigated how the brain allows us to give volitional attention to something in our environment, such as looking for our keys (top-down attention), versus automatically attending to something salient (or attention-grabbing), such as a fire alarm (bottom-up attention). To study these processes, the researchers focused on two brain regions known to be involved in attentional processes, the frontal and parietal lobes.

Using monkeys, Buschman and Miller recorded from neurons in these brain regions while the monkeys located a visual target on a computer screen. The target was always randomly located in an array of four stimuli, but there were two sets of conditions: In the first, the “pop-out” task, the target object would be clearly different from the nontarget stimuli (for example, it was not only a different color but also a different orientation), making the target more conspicuous. In the second test, the “search” task, the target stimulus would match some of the nontarget stimuli in at least a few dimensions (for instance, it might have the same color but not the same orientation). Because the target stimulus in this latter test was not salient, the monkeys had to rely on their memory of the desired target’s appearance as they looked for it. As expected, it took longer for the monkeys to find this second type of target.

Buschman and Miller found that frontal-lobe neurons were first to find the target during the search task, whereas parietal lobe neurons were first to find the target during the pop-out task. In other words, selection of a more obscure target (top-down attention) may be mediated by the frontal lobes, whereas fast selection of a highly salient target (bottom-up attention) may be mediated by the parietal lobes. These findings suggest that the frontal and parietal lobes may mediate different cognitive processes consistent with functional specialization.

… and cooperative ventures

The researchers also investigated how these two brain regions communicated with each other during the two attention tasks by measuring the degree of synchrony between neuronal activity in each region. (Such synchrony — a rough alignment of electrical wave patterns emitted from different brain areas — is thought to facilitate or indicate communication and cooperation among brain regions. See Gyorgy Buzsaki’s Rhythms of the Brain.) Synchrony between frontal and parietal regions was stronger in lower frequencies during the search task and in higher frequencies during the pop-out task, suggesting that synchronous activity between brain regions may increase the effectiveness of communication between these regions. Also, different modes of attention (for example, top-down as opposed to bottom-up) may emphasize synchrony at different frequencies. Buschman and Miller proposed that the increase in low-frequency synchrony during the search task could reflect a “broadcast” of top-down signals across the entire brain, whereas higher-frequency synchrony may support the local interactions between brain regions.

A methodological advance

These results add detail to the picture neuroscience is getting of how brain networks operate. And the study’s methodological advance — the ability to record simultaneously from two distant brain regions in an awake and active monkey — offers a significant new tool for studying brain network connectivity. (In humans, functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, can also explore interactions between brain regions, as it simultaneously records correlates of neural activity throughout the entire functioning brain.) Over the next decade, hundreds of roughly similar monkey neurophysiology and human imaging studies will be performed in neuroscience laboratories around the world. From these studies, the pieces of the puzzle will continue to fall into place, allowing us to make significant strides toward answering the ultimate question: How does the brain work?

 

Mark D’Esposito is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he the Director of the Henry H. Wheeler Jr. Brain Imaging Center at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Insitutute. He studies working memory, frontal lobe function, and cognitive neuroscience. He also maintains a practice in clinical neurology.

Pinker and Goldstein on Atheism

cognitive science, consciousness, philosophy of mind, religion

In the wake of Dennett and Dawkins, two more prominent names weigh in on atheism.  This article from Salon.com I reproduce here because of annoying pop-up adverts. Also see David Berreby’s piece on Dawkins (Berreby happens to drop in a reference to Oakeshott – this Oakeshott fellow seems to be getting fashionable amongst bloggers). Readers might be interested in my  article Taking the Super out of the Supernatural and in my review article of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.

Proud atheists
Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein, America’s brainiest couple, confess that belonging to one of America’s most reviled subcultures doesn’t mean they believe scientists can explain everything.

By Steve Paulson

Oct. 15, 2007 | “I’ve always been obsessed with the mind-body problem,” says philosopher Renee Feuer Himmel. “It’s the essential problem of metaphysics, about both the world out there and the world in here.”

Renee is the fictional alter ego of novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. In her 1983 novel, “The Mind-Body Problem,” Goldstein laid out her own metaphysical concerns, which include the mystery of consciousness and the struggle between reason and emotion. As a novelist, she’s drawn to the quirky lives of scientists and philosophers. She’s also fascinated by history’s great rationalist thinkers. She’s written nonfiction accounts of the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the 20th-century mathematician-philosopher Kurt Gödel.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Goldstein would end up living with Steven Pinker, a leading theorist of the mind. He’s a cognitive psychologist at Harvard; she’s a philosopher who’s taught at several colleges. Although they come out of different disciplines, they mine much of the same territory: language, consciousness, and the tension between science and religion. If Boston is ground zero for intellectuals, then Pinker and Goldstein must rank as one of America’s brainiest power couples.

With a series of bestselling books on language and human nature, including “How the Mind Works,” Pinker has emerged as his generation’s most influential cognitive theorist. His work on the evolution of language, and how humans possess an innate capacity for language, revolutionized linguistics. His writing about the nature/nurture debate helped shift prevailing thinking away from seeing human nature as a blank slate.

Pinker and Goldstein share a basic philosophical outlook, but I discovered that their views diverge somewhat when it comes to the “science and religion” debate. In a wide-ranging joint interview, we talked about animals and language, atheism and astrology, Iraq and faith, and their most recent books, Goldstein’s “Betraying Spinoza” and Pinker’s “The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature.”

Steve, do you think language is what makes our species unique? Is this the defining trait of human beings?

PINKER: It’s certainly one of the distinctive traits of Homo sapiens. But I don’t think language could have evolved if it was the only distinctive trait. It goes hand in hand with our ability to develop tools and technologies, and also with the fact that we cooperate with nonrelatives. I think this triad — language, social cooperation and technological know-how — is what makes humans unusual. And they probably evolved in tandem, each of them multiplying the value of the other two.

You have a fascinating observation in your new book about causation. You say the way we construct sentences, particularly verbs, has a lot to do with how we understand cause and effect.

PINKER: That’s right. For example, if John grabs the doorknob and pulls the door open, we say, “John opened the door.” If John opens the window and a breeze pushes the door open, we don’t say, “John opened the door.” We say something like, “What John did caused the door to open.” We use that notion of causation in assigning responsibility. So all of those crazy court cases that happen in real life and are depicted on “Law and Order,” where you have to figure out if the person who pulled the trigger was really responsible for the death of the victim, tap into the same model of causation.

I talk about the case of James Garfield, who was felled by an assassin’s bullet, but lingered on his deathbed for three months and eventually succumbed to an infection because of the hare-brained practices of his inept doctors. At the trial of the murderer, the accused assassin said, “I just shot him. The doctors killed him.” The jury disagreed and he went to the gallows. It’s an excellent case of how the notion of direct causation is very much on our minds as we assign moral and legal responsibility.

Rebecca, you’ve written a great deal about competing philosophical theories of language. Do you think our mind can function apart from language? Or does language define our reality?

GOLDSTEIN: Obviously, much of our thinking is being filtered through language. But it’s always seemed to me that there has to be an awful lot of thinking that’s done prior to the acquisition of language. And I often have trouble translating my thoughts into language. I think about that a lot. It often seems to me that the thoughts are there and some words are flitting through my mind when I’m thinking. So there’s something very separate between thinking and language. But that might vary from mind to mind.

As a novelist, this must be something you think about.

GOLDSTEIN: Very much so. My novels begin with a sense of the book, a sense of the place, and then I have to find the language that does justice to it. Strangely, I find that in my philosophical work as well. And in math; I’ve done a lot of math. I have the intuition, I’ll see it, and then I have to translate it into language. So I’ve always had a keen sense that thought does not require language.

What do you make of the language studies of various animals — for instance, the bonobo Kanzi, who’s learned to piece together simple sentences by pressing lexigrams. Is that real language?

PINKER: It isn’t a scientific question whether something is real language. That’s really a question of how far you want to extend the word “language.” I think the scientific question is: Are the chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas who are trained by humans doing something that’s fundamentally the same as what children are doing when they first acquire language? I suspect they are quite different. You need experimenters hell-bent on training chimpanzees, whereas with children, you can’t help but acquire a language if you’re a child in a human community. Indeed, children thrown together in a community that doesn’t have a language of its own will invent one in order to communicate with each other. And while it’s impressive that chimps have been trained to learn a few dozen or even a couple hundred symbols or signs, the ability to combine them is quite rudimentary and forced.

You each dedicated your most recent books to each other, and I’m curious about how your relationship has influenced your work. You’ve both written about language and human nature, about religion and the power of reason. Do you talk about these things around the dinner table?

GOLDSTEIN: [Laughs.] Yes, there’s no way around it. Our work spills over into our lives, and our lives spill over into our work.

PINKER: But that’s not the only thing we talk about.

Would you say your common interests are partly what brought you together?

GOLDSTEIN: Oh yes, completely. Actually, we met through each other’s work. I was a great fan of Steve’s work. And then I discovered that he had cited me in one of his books. It was my unusual use of an irregular verb. So it was completely through our work and my tremendous interest in Steve’s work that we first came to know each other. I don’t know if I should say this, but when I first met Steve in the flesh, I said that the way he thinks had so completely changed the way I think — particularly what I had learned from him about cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology — that I said, “I don’t think I’ve had my mind so shaken up by any thinker since [18th-century philosopher] David Hume.” And he very modestly said, “That can’t be the case.” But it was the case. So I can certainly say that Steve has profoundly influenced the way I think.

PINKER: I’ve certainly been influenced by Rebecca as well. Our connection isn’t just that we met through an irregular verb, which sounds like the ultimate literary romance of two nerds finding each other. [Goldstein laughs.] Rebecca as a philosopher is a strong defender of realism — the idea that there is a real world that we can come to know –which emboldened me to press that theme in my own writings, even though people often say that we just construct reality through language. And the topic of consciousness — how the mind emerges from the body, and what makes the three-pound organ that we call the brain actually experience things subjectively — is a theme that runs through both my nonfiction and Rebecca’s fiction and her philosophical writings.

Do you show each other your articles and books as you’re writing them?

GOLDSTEIN: Yes, we’ve each seen each other’s work in early drafts and in the final work. But this is the first time I’ve ever shared my work with anybody while it’s happening. I’m very private about my work. So this has been a very new experience for me. Now I’m wondering how I ever wrote any books without having Steve read them.

Are you very open in your criticisms and suggestions about each other’s work?

PINKER: Very much. But we’re not brutal.

GOLDSTEIN: We can be brutal. [Laughs.] Sweetly brutal.

PINKER: But yes, we each say, “This isn’t working. This joke isn’t funny. I don’t think your readers are going to understand what you’re trying to get at here.”

Rebecca, the dedication in your Spinoza book reads, “For Steve, despite Spinoza.” Can you explain that?

GOLDSTEIN: Spinoza wasn’t a great fan of romantic love. He didn’t think that the life of reason had any place for romantic love. And Spinoza’s methodology is strictly reductive. He tries to prove everything, starting with definitions and axioms. And he has this rigorous proof that romantic love will always end badly.

Does that mean he did not experience romantic love himself?

GOLDSTEIN: He didn’t, as far as we know. There are some rumors about his landlady’s daughter, who went to another young man when he gave her a pearl necklace. But no, Spinoza’s view about love is all directed toward love of truth and God and nature. It’s not directed toward another person. To love another person is to want desperately for them to reciprocate. And that’s not something we have complete control over. Therefore, it’s irrational. He argues that romantic love just increases your fragility and vulnerability and therefore you ought not to do it.

In your book on Spinoza, you talk about your own religious education in an orthodox Jewish school, and how Spinoza was trotted out by one of your teachers as precisely the kind of heretical thinker that good Jewish girls should avoid. But this seemed to make you especially interested in him. Why do you still like Spinoza so much?

GOLDSTEIN: It’s interesting. It’s almost like there are two different Spinozas. And I really didn’t bring them together until I wrote the book. At my very orthodox all-girls high school, Spinoza was presented to us as a kind of cautionary tale: This is what can go wrong if you ask the wrong questions. I was in a school that discouraged one from even going on to college. And philosophy was absolutely the worst thing you could study because it does ask you to question everything. Then there was the Spinoza I came in contact with when I was a professional philosopher. Spinoza is a metaphysician of a very extravagant sort. He wants to deduce everything through pure reason. And that was a kind of philosopher that I was also taught to dismiss and disdain. So both sides of my training — the orthodox Jewish training, the analytic philosophy training — pushed me to dismiss Spinoza.

I also like the grandeur of his ambition. He really does believe that we can save ourselves through being rational. And I believe in that. I believe that if we have any hope at all, it’s through trying to be rigorously objective about ourselves and our place in the world. We have to do that. We have to submit ourselves to objectivity, to rationality. I think that’s what it is about Spinoza. He’s just such a rationalist.

Spinoza certainly dismissed the religion he’d been exposed to. Do both of you consider yourselves atheists?

[pause] GOLDSTEIN: Yes.

PINKER: Yes.

GOLDSTEIN: Proud atheists.

PINKER: There, we said it. [Laughs.]

So you have to hesitate for a moment before you use that dirty word?

PINKER: Atheists are the most reviled minority in the United States, so it’s no small matter to come out and say it.

I find it puzzling how the recent atheist manifestos by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have all turned into bestsellers in a country that’s overwhelmingly religious. According to various polls, half of all Americans believe the Bible is the literal truth. A recent Newsweek poll found that 91 percent believe in God. How do you explain the enormous popularity of these books?

PINKER: Part of it is that the people who buy books — at least that kind of highbrow trade book — are not a random sample of the population. The opinions sampled by these polls are probably soft. When people are asked a question, they don’t just turn a flashlight into their data bank of beliefs and read out what they see. When people say, “Yes, I believe in God and the Bible,” they’re kind of saying, “I’m a moral person. I have solidarity with the community of churchgoers that I was brought up in and that I currently belong to.” I think that if you were to probe a lot of people’s religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.

GOLDSTEIN: It would be fascinating, though, to see a poll of the people who are buying the new atheist books and see how they are answering these questions.

PINKER: Well, the question often arises whether these authors are preaching to the choir. Especially since these books make no concessions toward religious sensibilities. It’s a full-throated intellectual assault on the concept of God. My sense is that the books are really not aimed at the 91 percent of the people you cited who believe in God, but rather at some minority of people who are wavering, who’ve been brought up in a religious way but now have some private doubts. They perhaps think that confessing to being an atheist is like confessing to being a child molester. So they’re not willing to even think those thoughts. Then they come across a book that seems to vindicate all of their doubts. And that tortured minority of reflective, analytic people from a religious background — perhaps like Rebecca from her religious background — are who the books are aimed at. Julia Sweeney’s one-woman show, “Letting Go of God,” would be representative of the kind of person whose mind could be changed by a book like that.

Steve, you recently waded into the controversy over Harvard’s proposal to require all undergraduates to take a course called “Reason and Faith.” The plan was dropped after you and other critics strongly opposed it. But the people who supported it say that every college graduate should have a basic understanding of religion because it’s such a powerful cultural and political force around the world. Don’t they have a point?

PINKER: I think students should know something about religion as a historical phenomenon, in the same way that they should know something about socialism and humanism and the other great ideas that have shaped political philosophies and therefore the course of human events. I didn’t like the idea of privileging religion above other ideologies that were also historically influential, like socialism and capitalism. I also didn’t like the euphemism “faith.” Nor did I like the juxtaposition of “faith” and “reason,” as if they were just two alternative ways of knowing.

One of your critics in this controversy is Stephen Prothero, a religious studies professor at Boston University, who wrote the book “Religious Literacy.” He said, “You can be a very smart person and be very dumb when it comes to religion. Professor Pinker just doesn’t get it.” Prothero says we have to understand religion to come to grips with hot-button issues like abortion, stem cell research and gay rights. And he says Iraq is such a mess right now because our leaders in Washington just didn’t understand a basic fact about Islam before they launched the war — that Sunnis and Shiites hate each other.

PINKER: I think religion is one of the things you have to understand. But the situation in Iraq is not primarily a theological one. There are just as fierce battles among the various tribes and militias, clans and nationalities. So it’s not just a Shiite-Sunni dispute. The mistake was not being ignorant of religion. The mistake was being ignorant of all aspects of Iraqi society, including family structure, local history, the evolutionary psychology of kinship and how it reinforces ties of family and clan and kin in Iraq in a way that differs from countries that we’re more familiar with. So religion should be part of it. But I don’t see why, of all of the forces that go into history — military, economic, sociological, evolutionary, psychological — religion itself should be privileged.

GOLDSTEIN: It depends on what you mean by understanding religion. Obviously, religion is a tremendously powerful influence in history. But I have to say — and I think this is something that Steve and I disagree on — I do worry whether some of the people who are writing the new atheist books understand what it feels like to be a religious person. Do they get what that feels like? I don’t want to say that there’s only one kind of religious impulse. There are so many different ways of responding to the world that could be called religious — some of them very expansive and life-embracing, and some of them not. But I think one of the things that made Steve nervous was to pose these two things — faith and reason, religion and science — as alternative ways of pursuing truth. In terms of the pursuit of knowledge, faith is not an alternative mode to science and to reason.

PINKER: Exactly. I would be opposed to a requirement on astrology and astronomy, or alchemy and chemistry. Not because I don’t think people should know about astrology. Astrology had an important role in the ancient world. You can’t understand many things unless you know something about astrology — the plays of Shakespeare and so on. What I’m opposed to is equating it with reason or science.

But can you really equate religion with astrology, or religion with alchemy? No serious scholar still takes astrology or alchemy seriously. But there’s a lot of serious thinking about religion.

PINKER: I would put faith in that same category because faith is believing something without a good reason to believe it. I would put it in the same category as astrology and alchemy.

Those are fighting words!

GOLDSTEIN: [Laughs.] He said it, not me.

Rebecca, where do you come down on this? Obviously, you’ve moved away from the religious milieu you grew up in. But do you reject it out of hand, as Steve does?

GOLDSTEIN: I do, intellectually. We get into terrible trouble if we believe sloppily, if we let emotions — and our own view of the way we want the world to be — shape the way we think the world is. This accounts for a great deal of the madness in the world. So I am completely committed to trying to justify everything, and in that regard, I have very little use for faith. However, I know what it feels like to believe without justification. And we all do it. I mean, I believe my children are the most wonderful children ever born. Of course, most parents feel that way. It’s a useful thing, perhaps. Could I justify it? Should I even go about justifying my love for them? There would be something wrong with that. So I have more sympathy toward an emotional reaction to the world and some of the more religious reactions.

Steve, you’ve written about the need for scholars to investigate what you call “dangerous ideas.” For instance, do women have different abilities and emotions than men? Would society be better off if heroin and cocaine were legalized? Let me suggest a dangerous idea not on your list — the idea that the mind is more than the physical mechanics of the brain, that there might be some aspect of consciousness that goes beyond an individual’s brain. Is this a dangerous idea?

PINKER: No. It’s an idea that probably the majority of the population believes. The more dangerous idea is what most biologists believe, which is that the mind is the information-processing ability of the brain. In the 19th century, the idea that there’s something to consciousness beyond the functioning of the brain was a serious scientific hypothesis. Scientists as distinguished as Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolution, and William James, a hero of both Rebecca’s and mine, were involved in kitschy, seance-like demonstrations trying to contact the souls of the dead. Those experiments failed. We don’t seem to be able to communicate with the great beyond.

But there’s some dispute on this history. Deborah Blum just wrote about this in her book “Ghost Hunters.” James and other scientists searched for proof of the supernatural, and he discounted the vast majority of these psychics. He dismissed virtually all of them as frauds. But there were a few he couldn’t explain away.

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, his Mrs. Piper. He was very convinced by her. He did want desperately to believe in the afterlife. He had lost a young son, Herman. There’s often that tremendous desire. I’ve lost a sister. I’d love to believe she still exists in the world. I know how powerful that desire is. But that’s different from any kind of proof or evidence.

Virtually all religious believers think the mind cannot be reduced to the physical mechanics of the brain. Of course, many believe the mind is what communicates with God. Would you agree that the mind-brain question is one of the key issues in the “science and religion” debate?

PINKER: I think so. It’s a very deep intuition that people are more than their bodies and their brains, that when someone dies, their consciousness doesn’t go out of existence, that some part of us can be up and about in the world while our body stays in one place, that we can’t just be a bunch of molecules in motion. It’s one that naturally taps into religious beliefs. And the challenge to that deep-seated belief from neuroscience, evolutionary biology and cognitive science has put religion and science on the public stage. I think it’s one of the reasons you have a renewed assault on religious beliefs from people like Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.

The neuroscientific worldview — the idea that the mind is what the brain does — has kicked away one of the intuitive supports of religion. So even if you accepted all of the previous scientific challenges to religion — the earth revolving around the sun, animals evolving and so on — the immaterial soul was always one last thing that you could keep as being in the province of religion. With the advance of neuroscience, that idea has been challenged.

Some prominent scholars of the mind have not adopted the strict materialist position. The atheist Sam Harris, who’s a neuroscientist by training, says he’s not at all sure that consciousness can be reduced to brain function. He told me he’s had various uncanny — what some would call telepathic — experiences. And there’s David Chalmers, the philosopher, who’s also critical of the materialist view of the mind. He has argued that the physical laws of science will never explain consciousness.

GOLDSTEIN: It’s interesting. Actually, my doctoral dissertation was on the irreducibility of the mind to the physical. We have not been able to derive what it’s like to be a mind from the physical description of the brain. So if you were to look at my brain right now, I would have to tell you what it is that I’m experiencing. You can’t simply get it out of the physical description. So where does that leave us? It might mean that we’re not our brain. It might mean that we have an incomplete description of the brain. Our science is not sufficient to explain how this extraordinary thing happens — that a lump of matter becomes an entire world. But the irreducibility doesn’t in itself show immaterialism. And you can turn it around and say, look, all the neurophysiology that we have so far shows there is a correlation between certain physical states and mental states. And even a dualist like Descartes said there’s a one-to-one correlation between the physical and the mental. So I’m not sure that we’ve settled this question once and for all.

PINKER: I’m also sympathetic to Chalmers’ view. It might not be the actual stuff of the brain that makes us conscious so much as it is the information processing. I don’t think Chalmers’ view would give much support to a traditional religious view about the existence of a soul. He says that consciousness resides in information. So a computer could be conscious and a thermostat could have a teensy bit of consciousness as well. Still, the information content requires some kind of physical medium to support the distinctions that make up the information. And the Cartesian idea that there are two kinds of stuff in the universe — mind and matter — doesn’t find a comfortable home in current views of consciousness, even those of Chalmers.

I know neither of you believes in paranormal experiences like telepathy or clairvoyant dreams or contact with the dead. But hypothetically, suppose even one of these experiences were proven beyond a doubt to be real. Would the materialist position on the mind-brain question collapse in a single stroke?

PINKER: Yeah.

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, if there was no other explanation. We’d need to have such clear evidence. I have to tell you, I’ve had some uncanny experiences. Once, in fact, I had a very strange experience where I seemed to be getting information from a dead person. I racked my brain trying to figure out how this could be happening. I did come up with an explanation for how I could reason this away. But it was a very powerful experience. If it could truly be demonstrated that there was more to a human being than the physical body, this would have tremendous implications.

Many stories of the paranormal turn on anecdotal, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. They fall outside the realm of what scientists can study because they are not repeatable. That raises the question, does science have certain limits to its explanatory power? Might there be other parts of reality that are beyond what science can tell us?

PINKER: It’s theoretically possible. But if these are once-in-a-lifetime events, one has the simpler explanation that they’re coincidences. Or fraud.

GOLDSTEIN: Or wishful thinking.

PINKER: Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance. That’s why it would be essential to do the statistician-proof experiment or the Amazing Randi-proof experiment, showing that it isn’t just stage magic. If that could be done, if you could show that someone could know something without it having to go through their sense organs — that you could cut the optic nerve connecting the eyes to the brain and the person could still see. Then, yeah, everything that I’ve been saying would be refuted. The fact that we don’t have reliable paranormal phenomena, the fact that all aspects of our experience do depend on details of the physiology of the brain, make it a persuasive case that our consciousness depends on the brain.

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, but what you’re saying could be very true. It could be in the nature of the phenomena that it’s extremely difficult to reproduce it in controlled experiments. In which case, we’ll never know. I think it’s a kind of arrogance to say that our science is complete. It’s an amazing thing that we can know as much about the physical world as we do know. Why assume that we know everything about the world that there is to know? We’ve developed through all sorts of happenstance a kind of methodology that allows us to know a tremendous amount. It’s an extraordinary thing that we can test and probe nature. And it’s yielded amazing secrets. But why assume that this methodology that we’re just damn lucky to have been able to stumble upon is going to yield all secrets? Of course, there could be things beyond the reach of science. But could we have any good evidence for accepting it? As soon as you have good evidence, it becomes science. So can there be good evidence for non-scientific propositions? No. Because the minute there is good evidence, it becomes science.

I still have to wonder if the study of neurons, synapses and brain chemistry will ever be able to explain things like dreams or the creative process.

PINKER: That’s a good example of something that’s very difficult to study scientifically because it’s rare and unpredictable. But it doesn’t involve any kind of magic. When you throw together 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections, a lot of things are going to happen that are very hard to track down. And I suspect that creativity — we don’t call it creative unless it’s rare — means that it’s going to be hard to study but not impossible. Historians who study creative individuals have uncovered a lot about the preconditions for creativity — for instance, what goes into a Mozart or an Einstein.

They can understand that. But just by looking at the brain itself, will you ever be able to understand the creative mind?

PINKER: I suspect not. In fact, the reason I’m not a neurobiologist but a cognitive psychologist is that I think looking at brain tissue is often the wrong level of analysis. You have to look at a higher level of organization. For the same reason that a movie critic doesn’t focus a magnifying glass on the little microscopic pits in a DVD, even though a movie is nothing but a pattern of pits in a DVD. I think there’s a lot of insight that you’ll gain about the human mind by looking at the whole human behaving, thinking and reporting on his own consciousness. And that might be true of creativity as well. It may be that the historian, the cognitive psychologist and the biographer working together will give us more insight than someone looking at neurons and brain chemistry.

Perspectives on social cognition

cognitive modeling, cognitive science, consciousness, embodiment, epistemology, extended mind, metaphysics, neurophilosophy, philosophy of mind, social cognition, social epistemology, stigmergy, swarm intelligence

socialcognition.gif

The September 7th issue of Science is a special issue devoted to social cognition: the table of contents found here. I reproduce the introduction “Living in Societies” by Caroline Ash, Gilbert Chin, Elizabeth Pennisi and Andrew Sugden. The appearance of this issue has prompted me to post the introduction to the special issue of social cognition Chris Onof and I recently edited for Cognitive Systems Research – the introduction can be downloaded here (this is a pre-press galley: please do not cite). A table of contents for this issue can be found here along with links to the publisher’s website.

Living in Societies (note: page references are linked)

An awareness of one’s position and the relationships of others in a group is a rarity among vertebrate species, yet it has proved so spectacularly influential in just one species–our own–that it has become a major factor in determining the ecology of an entire planet. Although we can describe behavior patterns and speculate about their evolutionary advantage, we also need to understand their contribution to a species’ reproductive success. A new wave of research is investigating the primate social brain within this evolutionary context, often through studies of wild primates.

This special issue of Science explores the adaptive advantages of group life and the accompanying development of social skills. Science’s Greg Miller visited a chimpanzee sanctuary in Uganda to examine how researchers take advantage of these semiwild habitats to explore the cognitive abilities of our primate cousins (p. 1338). Just how valuable these opportunities can be is illustrated by the massive experimental study of physical and social cognition described by Herrmann et al. (p. 1360). Silk (p. 1347) describes how research on sociality in baboons and other Old World monkeys is beginning to reveal the long-term relationship between social bonds and the fitness of individuals. In their book Baboon Metaphysics, reviewed by Jolly (p. 1326), Cheney and Seyfarth further illustrate the value of field studies.

One of the most striking evolutionary trends among primates has been the expansion of brain size. Many competing theories have been invoked to explain this physiologically costly size shift. Dunbar and Shultz (p. 1344) review the evidence suggesting that it is the computational requirements of the special social lives of primates, in particular the requirement for pair bonding, that have driven the evolution of the human brain. An expanded capacity gives human beings unique cognitive skills, yet our primate cousins are quite capable of discriminating between necessary and superfluous actions, as described by Wood et al. (p. 1402). Our brains give us extraordinary powers of imagination and sophisticated cultural adaptation; for instance, humans can undertake mental time travel and anticipate the consequences of actions. Gilbert and Wilson (p. 1351) review the psychology and neuroscience of prospection; that is, how we predict future emotional experiences and how thinking about the future in the present can lead us astray. One of the most recent manifestations of our social brains has been the imaginative leap taken into the construction of virtual worlds. Our reporter Greg Miller undertook another field trip, this time to Second Life, and describes the progress researchers are making in using and understanding this new dimension of the human social experience (p. 1341).

It will be fascinating to learn how humans will cope with our increasingly virtual societies. We can only hope that our growing evolutionary insight into social behavior will help us to distinguish reasonable expectations of human society from those that are implausible.