Quote of the Day – The Problematical Quest for Expertise

In any normal domain of expertise, even the most knowledgeable of specialists can’t come close to knowing everything about the domain. The breadth of knowledge that one would need to assimilate in order to be an expert in every nook and cranny is so cast that setting oneself such a goal makes no sense. And of course the idea of being an expert ‘in every nook and cranny’ is itself problematical, since when one uses a magnifying glass, every domain shatters into yet further subdomains.

~ Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogies as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, p. 245

Why Us and Not Them? A Review of Sarah Hrdy’s Mothers and Others

“Thou hast no sense. You French people love your own children; but we love all the children of our tribe.” ~Naskapi tribesman

Sarah Hrdy has done the field of evolutionary psychology an inestimable service by writing Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (2009). First and foremost, Hrdy has contributed to the advancement of a burgeoning field by bringing together a large and diverse assortment of cutting-edge empirical work in one volume. Second, Hrdy’s deep familiarity with recent work in primatology and cross-cultural anthropology provides a helpful constraint on evolutionary speculations about the human “Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness” (EEA). Insofar as Hrdy’s book can be seen as a plea for sociobiology to go beyond weakly substantiated speculation about our ancestral way of life, it deserves attention by anyone interested in the origins of human cognition.

The first chapter kicks off with a provocative thought experiment. Hrdy points out that we take it for granted just how well humans get along when stuffed on an airplane with three hundred cranky strangers.  But imagine the same airplane crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with chimpanzees. The inevitable bloody mayhem stands in stark contrast to the overt politeness usually governing human strangers. Hrdy now asks the central question of the book: Why us and not them?  That is, why do humans get along so well with each other but chimps don’t?  Hrdy says “The goal of this book will be to explain the early origins of the mutual understanding, giving impulses, mind reading, and other hypersocial tendencies that make [riding airplanes] possible” (p. 4).

Hrdy catalogues several traditional answers where the difference between humans and chimps has to do with our big brainy intelligence. After arguing the fossil record paints a different story,  Hrdy chastises such overly “intellectualist” stories for putting the cart before the horse and instead favors a hypothesis recently argued by Michael Tomasello (Herrmann et al., 2007; 1999): “The crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions” (p. 9). Why are humans so “ultra-social” compared to chimps? It obviously won’t do to point to the existence of special human capacities like our ready disposition for empathy because that only pushes the question back further: why do humans have such capacities but chimps don’t? Given that natural selection is blind to possible future benefits, there must have been some “initial payoff” for developing such social-cognitive competencies. Clearly we will need to give an “ultimate” evolutionary explanation for the origin of our uniquely human social-cognitive competencies that outlines a plausible fitness payoff.

In the second chapter, Hrdy reviews contemporary evolutionary accounts of our social-cognitive capacities and finds them lacking. A popular theory is to claim that increased intersubjectivity would have been adaptive for a  group of social primates, particularly with respect to “intergroup conflict” (Choi & Bowles, 2007). However, Hrdy asks “How much sense would it have made for our Pleistocene ancestors eking out a living in the woodland and savannas of tropical Africa to fight with neighboring groups rather than just moving?” (p.19)[1] Moreover, Hrdy is skeptical of these hypotheses for a more general reason. She asks,

If intersubjectivity was so useful for maintaining cohesive social groups, defending one’s in-group from violent neighbors, or wiping out competitors, why didn’t other social primates (those ‘demonic neighbor-stalking chimpanzees in particular) evolve such gifts as well? (p. 37)

Hrdy applies a similar logic to other evolutionary accounts such as the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis or the hypothesis that humans are special because we have mirror neurons. For Hrdy, most hypotheses on the table either fail to answer the question, “Why us and not them?” or they rely on empirically false claims about the abilities of chimpanzees (e.g. the false claim that chimp infants cannot imitate or follow eye-gaze, see p. 58). Hrdy’s ultimate diagnosis of all these false starts is that they mistakenly used the chimpanzee model as a basis for theorizing about our human ancestors. Hrdy’s prescription is to turn to recent developments in primatology and cross-cultural anthropology to study how human childcare in extant hunter-gatherer societies works, and from there find an appropriate primate model to make inferences about the EEA.

The third chapter in a nutshell is Hrdy’s defense of the old expression “It takes a village to raise a child”. Indeed, Hrdy’s overall answer to the central motif of the book is that the  selection pressure for human competence in social cognition arose due to novel rearing conditions approximately 1.8 million years ago where youngsters depended on more people than just their parents for care. Hrydy proposes that these “alloparents” like sisters, aunts, grandmothers, and even extended exchange networks involving non-paternal males were the crucial link in the evolutionary story. If a child’s survival in the EEA would have been affected by the availability of alloparental care, then there could have been selection pressure for infants to develop the mental resources to decode the mental states of others in order to illicit extra-parental help. As Hrdy puts it, “the need for alloparental succor transformed the selection pressures that shaped our species, and in doing so altered the way infants developed and then the way humans evolved” (p. 67). Although she acknowledges a possible role for intergroup competition in shaping our prosocial attitudes (p. 20), Hrdy believes many researchers have overlooked the crucial importance of child-rearing and have not sufficiently thought about the difficulty of ensuring the survival of helpless, slow-maturing children in the wild.

To support her hypothesis, Hrdy turns to primatology data (some of which she collected herself) to examine patterns of mother-child care in Great Apes. The most salient finding is that Great Ape mothers under no circumstances ever hand over the infants to another caretaker (even sisters eager to practice their parenting skills). This stands in sharp contrast to modern hunter-gatherer societies where “mothers trust others and allow them to take their infants shortly after birth” (p. 78), a form of child-rearing known as “cooperative breeding”. According to Hrdy, humans are not the only cooperative breeders, a distinction also shared by a family of New World monkeys called the callitrichids, of whom the marmosets are a representative example.[2]  Although humans are cognitively similar to chimps in many ways, it is these “dumber” yet socially sophisticated New World monkeys that may provide the best primate model for reconstructing the EEA in virtue of their shared emotional proclivity for prosociality and cooperative breeding (Not to mention the sociality seen in bonobos, who are genetically equa-distant from humans as chimps).

In the fourth chapter, Hrdy takes up the popular 20^th century framework of “attachment theory” and updates it in light of recent developments in the study of alloparenting in human societies. John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, famously modeled the mother-child attachment relationship on the iconic notion that the mother and child were inseparable, just like chimp mother-infant relationships. Reviewing both old and new data, Hrdy concludes that modern research on attachment formation overwhelmingly suggests that the development of healthy social attachments depends crucially on forming bonds with nonparental caretakers. Indeed, “infants nurtured by multiple caretakers grow up not only feeling secure but with better-developed and more enhanced capacities to view the world from multiple perspectives” (p. 132). And in essence, since children with reliable alloparental care would have had access to more calories and care-taking resources, they would have survived better than those who didn’t, thus generating an adaptive selection pressure for the development in infants of the mind-reading capacities necessary to solicit help from others.

The fifth chapter takes on standard evolutionary theories of parental investment and considers the potential role of fathers in successful childrearing. A standard story might be that because females rely on the assistance and resources of fathers to raise their children, the practice of pair-bonded monogamy arose due to a tacit “sex contract” between males and females. In essence, the contract states that in return for parental investment, the females will “exclusively” offer the male sexual access. But Hrdy wonders what happens when the “loving father” is not around to help? Could alloparents step in? In light of paleoanthropological data concerning the relative infrequency of male hunters scoring meat in the Pleistocene, as well as numerous anthropological data describing the strong egalitarianism of hunter-gatherer tribes (sharing the spoils of the hunt with nonkin during large communal feasts), Hrdy says “It’s clear that the most successful hunter would often get no more for his family than the most hapless did” (p. 149).  Here Hrdy approvingly cites Kristen Hawkes’  “show-off hypothesis” (1991) where the benefit of successful male hunting was cashed out more in terms of prestige and reputation rather than pure caloric load distributed to kin. Accordingly, it is the hard work of female gatherers that probably made the biggest daily caloric impact on the survival of children. And if such females could form matrilinear coalitions for cooperative breeding, an inflexible sex contract to secure caretaking resources would have been unnecessary,  leaving room for more flexible parenting (and mating) strategies, including ones where the males don’t offer care exclusively to their kin (which is not to say fathers would place equal weight on nonkin, see p. 157)

As Hrdy puts it, “At the heart of the [sex contract] model lay a pact between a hunter who provided for his mate and a mate who repaid him with sexual fidelity so the provider could be certain that children he invested in carried at least half of his genes” (p. 147). Hrdy doesn’t deny the existence of sexual jealously and male concerns about paternity, but Hrdy’s moral is that “A fixation with genetic paternity obscures the full range of emotions and motives that influence nurturing tendencies in men, and may also obscure their impacts on child survival” (p. 159). Such strategic flexibility might explain the existence of otherwise puzzling cultural diversity concerning male sexual proprietariness, including so-called “partible-paternity” societies like the Eskimos, Montagnais-Naskapi, Central American people like the Siriono, and many tribes in Amazonian South America (p. 153).

Hrdy spends the rest of the book bringing more empirical data to the table and elaborating on the theory of alloparenting, including further analyzing the conditions that favor alloparenting in other species (chapter six), the features of babies that makes them so alluring (“sensory traps”) to adult caretakers (chapter seven), the importance of grandmothers in hunter-gatherer societies (“the most reliably beneficial of all alloparents” (p. 260)) and how this might have facilitated matrilocal (or “matri-patrilocal”) rather than strictly patrilocal residence patterns in the EEA (chapter eight), and finally,  a consideration of various life history traits such as long childhood and as well as some broad and speculative thoughts about how the rise of agrarian civilization affected female sexual autonomy (chapter nine).

To appreciate the significance of Hrdy’s scholarship, it helps to review a standard methodological procedure for doing evolutionary psychology. First, you identity an adaptive problem facing our ancestors in the EEA e.g. the problem of finding a good mate. Second, you develop a computational model that is capable of solving this problem e.g. gather evidence about proxies of fitness such as facial symmetry. Third, you hypothesize plausible neurological mechanisms that could realize the computational solution. Last, you run experimental tests looking for confirmation that the hypothesized mechanisms actually exist. Crucially, this methodology will only produce plausible results if you can realistically set up the initial adaptive problem. That is, if your assumptions about the problems encountered in the EEA are mistaken, then the rest of your explanation will inherit the mistake and you will end up proposing solutions to a problem that never existed. Accordingly, the success of evolutionary psychology as a discipline critically depends on using all of the scant evidence available to make realistic assumptions about the EEA.

Some standard assumptions about the EEA are unassailably right e.g. female pregnancy. But other standard assumptions about possible parenting investment strategies are more questionable. For example, I already mentioned the standard “sex contract” account whereby females “agree” to stop sleeping around with other men in order to secure their fatherly resources. This tense arrangement supposedly benefits both parties. The men receive assurance that they won’t waste resources on some other man’s baby, and the women receive assurance that they will have enough resources from a committed male to raise their baby. This story is supposed to take us all the way from the Pleistocene to contemporary cultural patterns of serial monogamy (albeit with occasional but limited cheating). However, several recent books  (Barash & Lipton, 2001; Ryan & Jethá, 2010)[3] have challenged the standard sex contract story on several dimensions (particularly the assumption that females actually are sexually monogamous). The most relevant dimension for our purposes is skepticism about the following assumption:  the strategy of a father providing care to anyone outside his direct kin network is not evolutionarily stable due to the pressure of competing “selfish” fathers who only provide care to their kin. In a critical review of the latter book, Ellsworth (2011) attempts to undermine the alternative narrative by approvingly citing Thornhill and Gangestad (2008) in claiming the “primary selective pressures favoring such female estrus adaptations were pair-bonding and dependence on male provisioning” (p. 332, emphasis added). However, if Hrdy’s emphasis on the importance of alloparental care for decreasing childhood mortality rates has any validity, then the standard sex contract story needs to be updated to allow for the possibility of more flexible and opportunistic female mating strategies. If alloparental care was available from non-fathers, then mothers would not have depended entirely on male provisioning and could have more room for strategic maneuvering through matrilineal coalitions and extra-pair mating  (Greiling & Buss, 2000).

While many details are needed to flesh out her narrative, Hrdy manages to synthesize a remarkably diverse catalogue of evidence from a variety of academic fields to paint a picture of the human species that tentatively answers the question: Why us and not them? The field of evolutionary psychology has long been accused of telling groundless “Just so stories” that miss the complexity of human life, but Hrdy’s book is a persuasive testament to the sweeping power of informed evolutionary explanation. Hrdy weaves decades of interdisciplinary research into a compelling and charmingly human story, one that challenges the necessity of overly Machiavellian or “demonic” metaphors[4] when describing the whole of our prosocial life, particularly when it comes to understanding the emotions that regulate the critical mother-child relationship. If nothing else, Mothers and Others paints a tantalizing portrait of what 21^st evolutionary psychology might look like, and for that, Hrdy should be commended.

References

Barash, D., & Lipton, J. (2001). The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company.

Choi, J. K., & Bowles, S. (2007). The coevolution of parochial altruism and war. science, 318(5850), 636-640.

Ellsworth, R. (2011). The Human That Never Evolved. Evolutionary Psychology, 9(3), 325-355.

Greiling, H., & Buss, D. M. (2000). Women’s sexual strategies: The hidden dimension of extra-pair mating. Personality and Individual Differences, 28(5), 929-963.

Hawkes, K. (1991). Showing off: tests of an hypothesis about men’s foraging goals. Ethology and Sociobiology, 12(1), 29-54.

Herrmann, E., Call, J., Hernandez-Lloreda, M. V., Hare, B., & Tomasello, M. (2007). Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis. Science, 317(5843), 1360-1366.

Hrdy, S. (2009). Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ryan, C., & Jethá, C. (2010). Sex at dawn: The prehistoric origins of modern sexuality. New York: Harper.

Thornhill, R., & Gangestad, S. W. (2008). The evolutionary biology of human female sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wrangham, R., & Peterson, D. (1996). Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

 

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[1] Hrdy claims that despite abundant evidence for intergroup conflict within the past 10-15,000 years, “there is no evidence of warfare in the Pleistocene” (p. 19). Rather, homicidal violence among hunter-gatherers “tend to involve individuals who know each other rather than warfare between adjacent groups” (ibid.).

[2] Hrdy also points out tha “cooperative breeding occurs in a taxonomically diverse array of anthropod, avian, and mammalian species, including some 9 percent of roughly 10,000 species of birds and at least 3 percent of all mammals” (p. 177).

[3] The latter book has a more aggressive and less scholarly tone than the former, but both are challenging similar elements of the standard monogamous sex-contract narrative.

[4] See (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996).

Review of Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy Frost

Hoarding is a fascinating psychological malady where the compulsion to hoard things becomes so strong that it eventually starts interfering with the well-being of your life. Randy Frost’s recent book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things is a riveting look into the lives of hoarders and what drives them to manifest such seemingly irrational behavior. The book is chock full of curious anecdotes and interviews of hoarders that helps you get a sense of what it is like to be so absorbed in the life of things. Hoarding is interesting because we all remember traces of it in our own childhood collecting fads. When I was young I collected everything from soda tabs to pokemon cards. But it never became obsessive. That’s the difference with hoarders: they take a normal childhood tendency to collect things and go completely overboard to the point where they can no longer live safely in their own homes.

Frost goes into some detail outlining possible causes of hoarding and he finds that many hoarders suffered from some kind of emotional trauma early in life such as distant parents. He speculates that this lack of affection in people might have drove people to find comfort in the world of things. Hoarding also has a lot of commonalities with OCD. But the disease is complex and multifaceted and shouldn’t be reduced to just a few factors. There also might be interesting evolutionary reasons behind the hoarding instinct, but how deep into our history it goes is unknown since there are really no close analogues in animals such most animals hoard food not objects.

Hoarders are an interesting bunch. They are often highly intelligent with a good memory for details and a knack for telling stories about the histories of their objects. But their minds are so disorganized that they are unable to use their intelligence for much good. Their involvement in their things prevents them from leaving a normal life, and maintaining relationships becomes difficult when your homespace is completely unlivable. Hoarding places great burdens on children and spouses who have to live with it.

What I found really interesting about Frost’s account of hoarding is that it is very compatible with current research on the extended mind hypothesis. Hoarders often use their collection of stuff as an external memory source. They can remember the details of when they brought each object into their home. To throw away these objects would be tantamount to throwing away their own memories. Moreover, it is not just their memory that is externalized but their very personal identity. William James thought we all had a “material self” that bleeds into our personal possessions, but with hoarders this sense of self extends into ALL their objects, and not just special ones. They feel like their objects are part of their basic self-hood, to the point that it becomes emotionally traumatic to throw away a piece of useless trash. Hoarders often have deep personal histories with each of their objects, and what might look like junk to an outsider could be to the hoarder a treasure worth cherishing. Hoarders are also interesting because they seem to enjoy aesthetic qualities in everyday objects that normal people might only experience on psychedelic drugs. The stained pattern on an old milk carton might be beautiful to a hoarder and they just can’t imagine throwing it away.

What’s also interesting is the commonalities of objects collected by hoarders. One of the most common items is newspapers and magazines. Apparently many hoarders think of themselves as information junkies, to the point of saving every scrap of information they have ever come across. What’s interesting from an extended mind perspective is that these hoarders often don’t even read the newspapers or magazines. It’s just enough to possess that information, “just in case” they might need it in the future. They feel like just owning the information makes it “theirs” despite not reading it. In effect, these hoarders have externalized their knowledge into their collections of newspapers and they have accepted the externality of that information as a replacement for actually reading it. This kind of “just in case” mentality is extremely common in hoarding. Many hoarders see potential uses in objects than most people would simply discard. This “just in case” mentality leads many hoarders to buy multiples of items even if they don’t need it, like having 36 bottles of the same shampoo. They feel great anxiety if they are not prepared for the worst case scenario. But while some hoarders can’t throw away things because of a perceived potential, others can’t throw away things because they feel anxious by the thought of wasting something.

Hoarding is a complex and interesting affliction that effects millions of people around the world. Randy Frost’s book Stuff is an excellent introduction to the phenomenon that’s easy to read and filled with interesting stories and anecdotes. Frost also reports on the latest research designed to help hoarders with their problems. Unfortunately, hoarding is known as being extremely difficult to cure. Cities waste millions of dollars cleaning out the apartments of hoarders only to have them filled back up in a matter of months. By investigating into effective treatment programs, researchers will hopefully be able to help hoarders beyond the quick fix of heavy duty cleaning. All in all, I highly recommend Stuff.

Overall rating: 4.8/5 stars.

Short review of Jonah Lehrer's new book Imagine: How Creativity Works

I recently had to spend all day at an airport coming home from the Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference on Consciousness in Boston (which was a great success and a lot of fun, btw). Looking for something to read, I picked up Jonah Lehrer’s new book Imagine: How Creativity Works. I finished the book on the airplane, which clearly speaks to its readability. If Lehrer is anything, he is a compelling storyteller, and the stories he told in Imagine had that nice page-turning quality that makes for a bestseller. But behind the catchy prose and narrative was a lot of good science writing. Although Lehrer rarely dwells on any philosophical point, he definitely has a comprehensive knowledge of contemporary mind sciences, including both psychology and neuroscience. So Imagine is chock full of all the latest research on creativity, and if you are interested in getting a quick introduction to that literature,  Imagine is well worth reading.

To anyone somewhat familiar with the field, there won’t be any groundbreaking research discussed that hasn’t already been widely talked about. For example, one of the chapters was about the physicist Geoffrey West’s work on cities, and if you have heard the Radiolab episode on this, there will be nothing  that new in the book. But I must say that even if some of the research Lehrer talked about was already familiar, I’d still say the book is well worth reading for the way in which Lehrer is able to weave a theoretical connection between all these strands of research that is both plausible and very intuitive. You come away from the book with a better understanding of both what creativity is and how best to structure your mind and your environment in order to make creative insights more likely to happen. And for that reason alone, I highly recommend the book.

Overall rating: 4.5/5 stars

On the idea of massive modularity, or, coming around to computationalism

I feel weird saying this, but I am actually coming around to the idea of “modularity”, particularly the “massive” kind argued for by people like Peter Carruthers. Last week I started reading Carruthers’ highly ambitious 2006 book The Architecture of the Mind. As someone who has resisted representationalism, computationalism, and modularity for many years, I find myself agreeing  with Carruthers more often than not, which is a kind of novel experience for me, since usually such language strikes me as problematic and I am constantly thinking “No!”. Granted, I still have to perform a mental substitution for some of his terminological preferences in order to read his claims without thinking them vacuous, but that I am able to always make a plausible interpretation of his claims speaks to the power of his overall vision, and the depth of encyclopedic knowledge on display.

First, what does Carruthers mean by “modularity”? In general, modularity refers to the way a functional system can be broken down into dissociable components and subcomponents. For example, you can exchange the tires on a car without effecting the the functionality of the engine, or you can replace a speaker in a Hi-Fi system without damaging the rest of the system. The car is thus modular in the sense that it is made out of exchangeable parts that can break down independently of the functionality of other parts of the system. Crucially, modules must be understood in terms of their functionality, not in respect to their anatomical or physiological structure (although knowing that structure is of course helpful for understanding the function, and likewise). In the case of brain modules, we can’t simply point to one clump of neural tissue and say that’s a module; we have to examine the function of that tissue to determine where the modular components come apart, since they are defined along functional, not anatomical, lines. It also crucially important to note that for Carruthers, “modular” doesn’t necessarily mean “innate” or “genetically determined”, since the functionality of any module can be changed by development, and development itself can lead to the learning of new functional capabilities (especially with the imitative abilities of humans). Moreover, an important part of a modular functional system is that it can be understood in terms of input/output with particular kinds of computations done on the input in order to generate output. And as Carruthers defines it, “The input to a system [is] the set of items of information that can turn the system on.“

Normally, I am quite opposed to the idea of using a computational “input/output” framework to explain the mind because it ends up falling prey to the Myth of the Given whereby the “input” is raw and meaningless, leading to passive forms of linear processing chains that miss the action-perception cycling that makes perception fundamentally meaningful all the way down at the input level. But Carruthers definition of input avoids these problematic passive-Cartesian assumptions and is in fact compatible with my own preferred mental metaphysics of “reactivity”. My basic idea is that the organic system is reactive, with the nervous system realizing a particular kind of reactivity. The organism reacts to the environment, reacting to its own reactions, with reactivity all the way down.

Accordingly, Carruthers’ definition of input is compatible with a metaphysics of reactivity in the following way. We can understand computations in terms of the chains of neural reactivity cascades in response to a perturbation of the system from either an external or internal source, with external and internal understood, not epistemologically, but in terms of the boundary of the organism’s membranes. The input to a module is simply that set of information that causes the module to “turn on”, i.e., to start reacting in particular and functionally specific ways. The reaction to the input is the “computation” that is carried out by the module, and the end-result of the reaction is the output, which can act as input to other modules, i.e. it can cause patterns of reactivity in other parts of the brain. Hence, the output of some modules can actually come back around and influence the reactivity of modules that are causally closer to the source of the perturbation, allowing for “top-down” effects. I think that this definition of input/output and computation is perfectly compatible with the “enactivist” tradition, which has traditionally been critical of the input/output paradigm on account of it missing the circular nature of action/perception cycles.

On my reading, Carruthers avoids these problem by defining the input as that which turns the system on, which can be cashed out in a biologically plausible way. Moreover, since Carruthers defines input as the kind of information contained in the stimulus which turns the module on, this is also compatible with a Gibsonian affordance ontology wherein it is the information about affordance-properties contained in the raw stimulus which actually effects the perceiver in such a way as to constitute perception (as opposed to merely sensation, which is noninformative). Hence, we could say that information about affordances in the ambient optic array turn on the modules that are evolutionarily designed to react to that information in adaptive ways. This avoids the Myth of the Given since that affordance information isn’t necessarily raw. And since the response to affordances is cashed out in an ontology of reactivity, we avoid the internalism and foundationalism of traditional computational approaches inspired by Locke.

So when applied to the brain, Carruthers’ thesis is that the brain(and hence the mind) is massively modular. How is this different from the classic modularity thesis put forward by people like Jerry Fodor? Carruthers radically differs from Fodor in the sense that Fodor only thought that the shallow perceptual processes such as vision were modular. When it comes to “general” cognitive systems like reasoning or believing, Fodor thought that these processes were not modular, but general. Carruthers’ thesis is radical in the sense that he thinks that even the most abstract, general, multi-modal, and intellectual of human cognitive processes are modular i.e. capable of being broken down into dissociable functional components. I read this thesis as compatible with a kind of Dennettian theory wherein there is no “general” place where it “all comes together”. There is simply a complex and messy “kludge” of functional components and subcomponents, which run their functions more or less independently from other processes (although as I mentioned above, the output of one particular module can be the input to another, so there is still communication and interaction between different modules rather than complete encapsulation as normally assumed by modular stereotypes). However, it is important to note that Carruthers, as he should, argues that there does seem to be exception to the normal independence of modules in the function of narratological and reflective consciousness in human adults. In this case, it seems necessary to talk about a more “global” neural interactivity (probably realized over the default mode network). But this is compatible with the overall thesis of massive modularity, since there still is an awful lot of domain-specific reactivity in the brain, particularly for prereflective cognition. Even if a global consciousness function is not modular in the sense that mouse vision is modular, it doesn’t follow that there isn’t a massive amount of modularity in all animals, including humans.

I like the massive modularity thesis because it seems in accordance with the Jaynesian principle that what is to be found in higher-order cognitive processes must first be found in the lower-order cognitive processes, and the functionality of those higher-order cognitive processes doesn’t require a general theater where it “all comes together” to slowly evolve as a distinct neurological center. Rather, the higher-order processes come into being through exaptions and readaptions of previous modules, often buffered by mechanisms of neural plasticity. It is the multiple and widely distributed functionally reactive/modular networks of neurons that realize the higher-order processes rather than some general-purpose CPU that does all the higher-order work in a fashion completely different from lower-order networks, which make up the vast majority of neural tissue in the brain. As Jaynes says, there is nothing in reflective consciousness that was not first found in behavior. And as Carruthers argues, rather than suppose that the human mind is becoming less modular and “more general” as we increase our cognitive powers across evolutionary time, we should instead see the human mind as becoming more modular as it evolves, corresponding with the increase in the functional specificity of modern living in a complex social-political-technological world. The number of modules and submodules we need to automatically cope with everything from driving a car, navigating websites, taking tests, playing sports, constructing a skyscraper, programming a computer, farming, hunting, etc. is truly astronomical in comparison with the functional specificity and developmental “niches” of other species. So, instead of massive modularity indicating biological primitiveness, supermassive-modularity indicates supreme functional development on both the biological and sociological scale.

Thoughts on Cordelia Fine's new book Delusions of Gender

I just finished Cordelia Fine’s new book Delusions of Gender: How our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. It was a fun read and I consumed it in a few days. I must say, however, that I found her over-the-top snarkiness and sarcasm to be a little annoying at times. Which isn’t to say I disagreed with her main thesis. I found the book’s overall argument to be solid, although I’m biased because I was largely sympathetic with “neuroconstructivism” going into the book. Fine does a remarkable job of showing the extent to which society can influence the brain/mind, both implicitly and explicitly, and thus have effects on the genderfication of children. What is genderfication? It’s the process of learning to categorize the social world in terms of boys and girls as well as coming to understand “I am a girl” or “I am a boy”. Learning how to apply the categories correctly is made easy with the widespread gender norms enforcing everything from which color clothes to wear, what toys are appropriate to play with, or even what “essential differences” there are between boys and girls in terms of personality, behavior, and natural ability.

Fine spends a lot of time in the book debunking the “sexual differences” science literature that has grown over the years, along with the popular “folk psychology” of the Men are from Mars type found in most pop psychology magazines. Most people are familiar with these popular conceptions, and Fine does an admirable job of showing just how widespread and implicitly ingrained they are in our society. If I showed you two lists: (A) strong, ambitious, courageous, logical (B) tender, loving, empathic, nurturing, which would you associate with females and which with males? (A) is male and (B) is female, right? But why? If you asked a nativist or an essentialist, they would tell you that (A) and (B) make sense as categories because females really are more empathic than men, and men really do think more logically as a result of their innate essence. And sure enough, when we run questionnaires on males and females, the females tend to self-identity as being more empathic than males. But one of Fine’s major points throughout the book is that these types of tests don’t prove the nativist conclusion since it’s possible that females aren’t actually any more empathic than males, but rather, only think they are more empathic, which then has actual effects on the use of empathy. And likewise, most men are under the assumption that they are less empathic or “tender minded” than women, and thus could actually be less empathic, not because it’s “in their genes”, but because their brains have been molded by a society with widespread and powerful gender norms.

But what happens when you actually test for differences in empathy in simulated tasks of empathy? You can often point to a slight tendency for females to do better. But why? Is this because they actually are more empathic than males or is it because they have social expectations to the effect that they are better, and this gives them more confidence such that they are better in testing situations (often under the explicit assumption that they are expected to perform better on the test)? If the difference arose from empathy skills being “hard wired” into female brains, then we wouldn’t expect that manipulations of the social context would be able to circumvent the difference in empathy skills shown between men and women. Fine does a great job describing a multitude of experiments in which the manipulation of social context and expectation is able to turn the “hard wired” empathy skills of women into something a little more plastic. It turns out that if you control for the social expectations in empathy tasks, the differences in empathy between the men and women become remarkably hard to find. There are many ways to manipulate the outcomes for these “differences” tasks. This indicates that the things scientists thought was hardwired, is actually “softwired” and variable in response to context, both neural and social.

This idea of “essential differences” found between the abilities and personality characteristics of men and women once having been thought “hard wired”, and then found out to be malleable, is the general motif of Delusions of Gender. At this point the skeptical reader is probably thinking, “But science has overwhelmingly shown there to be differences between males and females!” Naturally, Fine acknowledges this. Of course there are some anatomical differences. However, the task of showing that anatomical differences lead to important psychological differences is steeped with difficulties. It is one thing to point out that the male brain is statistically different in some way from the female brain, it is quite another to provide evidence that this difference actually leads to differences in behavior that actually matter for success in modern living. Fine doesn’t deny that there are differences in the brain between men and women, and that these differences might actually lead to nontrivial differences in psychology. It’s just that Fine wants to raise the standard of evidence needed to actually demonstrate that having “whatever it is that makes males physically different from females” leads to an inability to be successful at traditional male vocations or male skills e.g. math, science, leadership. Fine goes out of her way to make fun of the rampant circular logic involved in these types of arguments (“Women are worse at spatial reasoning because women are worse at spatial reasoning”). And likewise, the standard of evidence needs to be raised for demonstrating that “whatever makes males different from females” renders males excusable for not being a nurturing father, showing empathy to people, or helping with housework and childrearing. It isn’t enough to speculate that “the male brain has feature X and the female brain doesnt, therefore males are logical and nonempathic and females are illogical and empathic”.

Before such statements can confidently be made, one would need a working theory of how the brain functioned. Think of the simplicity of the tasks studied in neuroscience. Studies often involve massive simplifications of real world behavior, for good heuristic reasons. But complex, nested behaviors like “being a scientist” or “being a good caregiver”, just don’t easily reduce to lacking a “female” gene, or having this tiny difference in volume in some particular module or region of the brain. Fine reminds us that it isn’t easy to predict largescale behaviors from raw anatomical data. We aren’t really sure what anatomical features correlate with such broad characteristics as “aptitude for science and analytic thinking”. We would first have to have a working theory of how philosophy and math are actually performed by the brain. Given that scientists are still working on how the brain perceives colors and shapes, I think we are a long way before we can confidently assert that female brains are essentially unfit for productive careers in science and analytic thinking. Without a working theory of how the brain makes math and science even possible, how can we assert with confidence that female brains are essentially unfit for such fields by virtue of some vague anatomical difference?

But given everything we already know about how brains work, I am confident that we can now throw away the very idea that there is an “essence” to the male or female brain. The only way of testing what the male and female brains are really capable of would be to raise them in a gender-neutral society. But that is an impossibility. Gender saturates our social world and it likely isn’t going away anytime soon. Until that time, we really don’t know what male or female brains are capable of. Maybe 1000 years in the future there will be an equal amount of male and female physicists, philosophers, and computer scientists, or maybe, for some reason, more females in traditional male-led fields. The well-documented plasticity of the brain and the human specialization for long gestation periods, sensitivity to environmental conditions, and staggering amounts of social learning make the future of human psychology impossible to predict. One thing is for sure though: gender norms have been changing, are changing, and will continue to change in response to new developments both biological and cultural. The only thing “essential” about the female and male brain is the essential tendency to change, adapt, and robustly respond to varying environmental conditions.

Robert Sapolsky on Major Depression in U.S.

Great lecture; very informative. Sapolsky nicely compresses a lot of research and integrates it into a comprehensive bio-social-psychological model.

Sunday Pragmatism, part III: James on Habits and Will; a Mental Taxonomy

Pragmatism Series

Part I
Part II

William James’ Principles of Psychology is a remarkable book. One of the most striking chapters is chapter IV, “Habit”. It starts by claiming

When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits. (104)

This is one of James’ most famous expressions. It represents, I think, a powerful argument against Cartesian psychology. Indeed,

The strongest reason for believing that [attention and effort] do depend on brain-processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law. (126)

That our mental life is undoubtedly structured by asymmetric rules of psychology provides a powerful abductive argument against the Cartesian — ultimately Platonic —  taxonomy of Reason above and against base emotions and habits. After James, Heidegger was perhaps the most systematic critic of the dualisms stemming from Descartes, Locke, and Kant. Like James, Heidegger inverted the traditional mental hierarchy by placing greater emphasis on factical thrownness and our “falling” into habit, idle chat, and the socially scripted comportments of Das Man and the they-self.  All this is evidence against the dualist hypothesis. An analytic of humanity must be finite for indeed,

the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed. (105)

We see in James a clear statement of naturalistic philosophy of mind, an attempt to embody the mind and ground it in natural reality. It’s curious that Husserl accused Heidegger of also trying to naturalize consciousness in his marginalia of Being and Time. Moreover, James’ broad understanding of cognition seems to me light-years ahead of his time. We see in this chapter a lucid account of what was considered a modern neuroscientific fact: brain plasticity and Hebbian learning (“fire together, wire together”):

The only thing [nervous currents] can do [to brain matter], in short, is to deepen old paths or to make new ones; and the whole plasticiy of the brain sums itself up in two words when we call it an organ in which currents pouring in form the sense-organs make the extreme facility paths which do not easily disappear. (107)

The most complex habits, as we shall presently see more fully, are, from the same point of view, nothing but concatenated discharges in the nerve-centres. (108)

Moreover, James’ mental metaphors were far ahead of his time. He had already clearly saw the importance of homeostatic equilibrium and the basic ideas of dynamic systems theory and how they theoretically apply to cognitive function. The image is vague, but the substance is there:

…[W]e can only fall back on our general conception of a nervous system as a mass of matter whose parts, constantly kept in states of different tension, are as constantly tending to equalize their states.

I won’t go into the details, but it seems clear that James’ understood the idea of phase state changes and Deleuzian singularities, albeit abstractly. Speaking of Deleuze, I am really looking forward to taking John Protevi’s Deleuze class in the Fall; it’s going to rock! (I’m planning on digging into Deleuze this summer with Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and Protevi’s Political Physics and Political Affect.)

Anyway, James’ chapter on Habit is also brilliant in regards to its understanding of child development and the process of mastering embodied skills. He quotes at length a Dr. Carpenter from 1874 who said

It is a matter of universal experiences that every kind of training for special aptitudes is both far more effective, and leaves a more permanent impress, when exerted on the growing organism that when brought to bear on the adult. (110)

This kind of stuff is bread and butter to the Dreyfusian Heideggerians. It’s no surprise to me that many people accuse such scholars of reading Heidegger in terms of American pragmatism. Often this is seen as a narrow reading, but this critique only works if one assumes that James’ understanding of humanity was itself narrow. On the contrary, James’ mental taxonomy was phenomenologically rich, perhaps more so than the purely “formal indication” of Heideggerian phenomenology. Indeed, in developing a mental taxonomy, he says

Most of the performances of other animals are automatic. But in [humanity] the number of them is so enormous, that most of them must be the fruit of painful study. (113)

From this, James’ extracts a general principle: “habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts our performed.”

One may state this abstractly thus: If an act require for its execution a chain, A, B,C,D,E, F, G, etc., of successive nervous events, then in the first performances of the action the conscious will must choose each of these events from a number of wrong alternatives that tend to present themselves; but habit soon brings it about that each event calls up its own appropriate successor without any alternative offering itself…(114)

This might not sound obviously Heideggerian, but upon close inspection, we can see that it is.

We all of us have a definite routine manner of performing certain daily offices connected with the toilet, with the opening and shutting of familiar cupboards, and the like. Our lower centres know the order of these movements, and show their knowledge by their “surprise” if the objects are altered so as to oblige the movement to be made in a different way. (115)

From this passage, we can see that Heidegger’s phenomenology of the ready-to-hand was not original; it had been anticipated by American pragmatism decades earlier. Like Heidegger, James says that our primary mode of interaction with the world is characterized by familiarity. We are intimately familiar with the usability of our surroundings and how they afford us opportunities for acting. We become so familiar or “at home” in our dwelling that when something familiar doesn’t work how it normally works, readiness-to-hand “breaks down”, or we become “surprised”, as James put it. The mental taxonomies are roughly isomorphic.  However, I think James’ taxonomy is more accurate, because it has a phenomenological account of initiation and voluntary will that Heidegger is either unable or unwilling to address. Indeed, James says

A strictly voluntary act has to be guided by the idea, perception, and volition, throughout its whole course. In a habitual action, mere sensation is a sufficient guide, and the upper regions of brain and mind are set comparatively free….

In habitual action…the only impulse which the centres of idea or perception need send down is the initial impulse, the command to start.(115-116)

The only psychologist I know who captured this notion of “initial commands” as well as James did is Julian Jaynes and his notion of “structions” or “neural instructions”. Furthermore, Jaynes’ notion of “behavioral reactivity” and his distinction between automatic nonconscious cognition and volitional conscious narratization is drawn from Jamesian mental taxonomies as well. A post on Jaynes and James will probably be forthcoming soon…

After laying out his taxonomy of habit and will, James’ uses this to provide some moral lessons from which we can rethink education of the young. I will end this post with one one of my favorite passages ever:

Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast. (127)

Reading James' Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, Chap. 1 "The Scope of Psychology"

After attending the incredibly stimulating Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson, AZ, I have become convinced that I need to read Williams James more carefully to determine the influence he had on German phenomenology, particularly Husserl, and Heidegger from Husserl. I had originally read him before I studied phenomenology closely but now I think a fresh reading in light of my current knowledge will be useful for establishing historical precedent, considering James’ international renown during his hey-day. This is slightly ambitious, but I think it would be helpful to my research to work through The Principles of Psychology chapter by chapter and write up a corresponding blog post. Forcing myself to write a summary for each chapter and make my associations explicit will help me internalize James so that I can work him into my research vocabulary.  These summaries will not purport to capture everything James’ had to say. Instead, I want to pull out key quotations and then comment on them in relation to contemporary findings in phenomenology and cognitive science.

Chapter 1

Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and their conditions. (PP 1)

Right away we see the necessity  of phenomenology, the science of phenomena, for psychological science. James rightly understands the futility of trying to understand neural conditions without knowing what exactly is being conditioned. The explanandum must be lived experienced itself. A phenomenologically blind neuroscience is does not know what it is trying to explain. Julian Jaynes said the same thing:

Even if we had a complete wiring diagram of the nervous system, we still would not be able to answer our basic question. Though we knew the connections of every species that ever existed, together with all its neurotransmitters and how they varied in its billions of synapses of every brain that ever existed, we could never — not ever – from a knowledge of the brain alone know if that brain contained a consciousness like our own. We first have to start from the top, from some conception of what consciousness is, from what our own introspection is. We have to be sure of that, before we can enter the nervous system and talk about its neurology. (OC 18)

Next, James discusses the two most influential schools of thought on explaining psychological behavior, the Soul theory and the “associationist” theory.  I assume the Soul theory of consciousness is well-known to most of my readers, so I will not elaborate here. The associationist theory however, is worth commenting on. Such a theory is

a psychology without a soul by taking discrete ‘ideas’, fain or vivid, and showing how, by their cohesions, repulsions, and forms of succession, such things as reminiscences, perceptions, emotions, volitions, passions, theories, and all the other furnishings of an individual’s mind may be engendered. (PP 1-2)

However, James’ points out that an explanation at this level of ideality is practically useless when it comes to explaining why memory works better under particular conditions, or why the mind is irrational and prone to sloppy error.

Such peculiarities seem quite fantastic; and might, for aught we can see a priori, be the precise opposites of what they are. (PP 3)

I take this critique of “ideas” theory to be transferable to modern cognitivist theories of representations. Saying that perception is explained by something “standing for something else” in the brain does not explain much of anything until you show how that function actually works without resorting to circular arguments. If you explain the representations by their causal role in aiding functionality, then you need to show why we cannot just explain the entire system in causal terms, rather than saying one thing stands for another — a devishly vague statement. Instead of resorting to ideas,

The fact that the brain is the one immediate bodily condition of the mental operations is indeed so universally admitted nowadays  that I need spend no more time in illustrating it, but will simply postulate it and pass on. The whole remainder of the book will be more or less of a proof that the postulate was correct. (PP 4)

This sounds like a modern precursor to Merleau-Ponty, Gibson, and Varela. James’ emphasis on the embodied nature of cognition is reinforced by

the general law that no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change. (PP 5)

Cognition is for changes in the body. Moreover, James’, like Jaynes, seems to establish a dual-process theory of consciousness wherein there can be intelligent nonconscious operations. Indeed,

Standing, walking, buttoning and unbotting, piano-playing, talking, even saying one’s prayers, may be done when the mind is absorbed in other things. The performances of animal instinct seem semi-automatic. (PP 5)

I take this to be a historical precedent to the Jaynesian idea that cultural zombies are possible. I have recently argued this in my latest paper, “What Is It Like To Be Nonconscious?“. I take this to mean that there are two levels of consciousness. One is intelligent and embodied, grounded in action. I call this the “Reactive mind”, following Jaynes notion of “behavioral reactivity”. The reactive mind constitutes the normal cognitive state of humans and nonhumans alike. This was the mentality that humans were in for probably 99% of their evolutionary development (until the rise of civilization). The other level of consciousness is consciousness proper, that operation wherein narratization occurs within a virtual mindspace opened up by metaphorical processes of spatialization. The question then is

Shall the study of such machine-like yet purposive acts as these be included in Psychology? (PP 6)

The answer is of course yes. A proper psychology must “[take the] mind in the midst of all its concrete relations” (PP 6). Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity has a similar methodological approach. For Heidegger, as for Jaynes and James, we must examine lived human experienced in terms of it concrete finitude. But phenomenology is methodologically a priori in that we must first uncover the phenomena to be studied before we objectify and neurologize.

Given there are intelligent nonconscious acts, what is their nature? James’ answer is that they are directed towards an end with varying means. He uses an example of iron filings being attracted to a magnet. A teleological (means/end) explanation (like “Iron loves magnets) is only useful as a metaphor, because if you put a card between the filings and the magnet, the filings will never move around the card in order to satisfy their desire.

Romeo and Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces against its opposite sides like the magnet and the filings with the card. (PP 7)

This is the crucial phenomenological difference between living and nonliving things. And insofar as phenomenology is ontology (according to Heidegger), teleological behaviors marks an ontological distinction between tables and humans.

The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon. We all use this test to discriminate between an intelligent and a mechanical performance. We impute no mentality to sticks and stones, because they never seem to move for the sake of anything, but always when pushed, and then indifferently and with no sign of choice. So we unhesitatingly call them senseless.(PP 8 )

Anyone who is familiar with Heidegger will recognize the bold sentence as familiar.

We have interpreted worldhood as that referential totality which constitutes significance. In Being-familiar with this significance and previously understanding it, [humans let] what is ready-to-hand be encountered as discovered in its involvement. In Humanity’s Being, the context of references or assignments (of worldly things) which significance implies is tied up with human’s ownmost Being — a Being which essentially can have no involvement, but which is rather that Being for the sake of which Dasein itself is as it is…significance, as worldhood, is tied up with the existential “for-the-sake-of-which”. (SZ 123)

But how can teleological explanations by accepted in scientific discourse? James has an eloquent answer.

In the lengthy discussions which psychologists have carried on about the amount of intelligence displayed by lower mammals, or the amount of consciousness involved in the functions of the nerve-centres of reptiles, the same test has always been applied: Is the character of the actions such that we must believe them to be performed for the sake of their result? The result in question, as we shall hereafter abundantly see, is as a rule a useful one, — the animal is, on the whole, safer under the circumstances for bringing it forth. So far the action has a teleological character; but such mere outward teleology as this might still be the blind result of vis a tergo.

We thus arrive at a Jamesian  principle, echoed in Heidegger, Gibson, Jaynes, and Charles Taylor:

no actions but such as are done for an end, and show a choice of means, can be called indubitable expressions of Mind.

A Thing Of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

I am super excited to begin an online reading group for Lee Braver’s A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. My copy hasn’t arrived in the mail yet, but I got a sneak peak at a few chapters on google books, and from what I have read, I am going to have a beef to pick with some of the things he says about Heidegger. This is not surprising given that I have a rather unorthodox interpretation of early Heidegger, especially in regards to the exegesis of Being and Time.

That I disagree with pretty much everyone (with few exceptions) concerning what Heidegger was actually arguing for and against is becoming increasingly apparent to me as I read more and more shallow attempts to assimilate him into a convenient historical box without taking seriously the radical implications that his critiques of Descartes, Locke, and Kant have for reconceptualizing philosophy of “mind.” Most scholars working with Heidegger seem to only be discussing Heideggerian philosophy on the surface level and subsequently fail to see his work as a plausible alternative to the tradition of Western metaphysics/epistemology. Instead, people seem to see Heidegger as only reacting against that history,working within those very frameworks and never being able to actually move past the stale dialectics that define the history of philosophy with its “scandal” of knowledge concerning a body-external world. On my view then, it is a shallow and theoretically naive reading of Being and Time to say that early Heidegger remained completely within the conceptual schemes of Kant. I firmly believe that if we  “updated” Heidegger jargon into a more contemporary theoretical framework, we would see that, well, actually, Heidegger overcame Kantian thought as early as Being and Time and no, he wasn’t a transcendental idealist in the same vein as Husserl. To think otherwise is to ignore Heidegger’s potent critique against the interalist representationalism of modern philosophy.

It seems to me then  that the only reason the radicalized implications of Heideggerian philosophy haven’t been more widely discussed is that philosophers haven’t found a more intelligible theoretical foundation to interpret Heidegger in terms of. So while scholars like Dreyfus understand very well just what Heidegger is arguing against, and have a vague understanding of what he is arguing for, they do so completely within the vocabulary of “Heideggerese.” In my opinion, we will never make progress on incorporating Heideggerian insights into contemporary philosophy of mind so long as we are bent on “preserving” Heidegger into his own historical niche, treating him like just another dead white philosopher who said some pretty radical things, but shouldn’t be taken so seriously because of all his jargon and strange word plays.

Wrong! Heidegger utilized wordplay because he realize that the analytic of Dasein, indeed the very conception of what constitutes Dasein, will always been an evolving enterprise given that shifting nature of our metaphors and self-interpretations concerning cognition and the mind. In contemporary philosophy of mind we shouldn’t be trying to understand how Heidegger-language is an alternative to Kantian vocabulary (although it is); we should we trying to understand how Heidegger-language is an alternative to the computationalism of contemporary cognitive science! This is the real meat and potatoes of good Heideggerian philosophy and I am glad that people like Andy Clark and Alva Noë are beginning to work our the consequences of this (the concluding section of Clark’s recent book is entitled “The Heideggerian Theater”).

What is great is that a lot of phenomenologically oriented cognitive scientists are starting to realize this and have  been reaching haphazardly for a suitable theoretical foundation to “translate” Heidegger into. If you have ever read anything on this website, you will probably know that I already think there is such a framework in the work of James Gibson and his ecological approach to visual perception. But I will rant about that some other time.

Coming back to Lee Braver’s book, I am exicted by project of finding a common theoretical framework to discuss Heidegger and the continentals in relation to both the history of analytic and continental philosophy alike; seeing in just what respect Heidegger agrees and disagrees with the metaphysical tradition. Although I suspect I will have to argue heavily in favor in re-categorizing Heidegger (I think he supports Braver’s R1 Independence thesis, contrary to Braver), I am looking forward to this discussion as it might potentially elevate the level of Heideggerian discourse past convenient platitudes and shallow summaries typical of most scholarship and into a real discussion of his revolutionary rejection of traditional accounts of cognition.

edit: I got the book in the mail today and have been reading the early Heidegger section more closely to see what Braver has to say about Heidegger and R1.  It seems like Braver is confusing the issue when he says (rightly) that for Heidegger, “present-at-hand objects are real” and then a few pages later that being is dependent on Dasein, so therefore he must be rejecting the Mind-Independence thesis, despite holding that present-at-hand objects “really” exist. It is plainly obvious from reading any Heidegger that being (that which determines entities as entities, to us i.e. the basic act of explicit, interpretive perception) is dependent on Dasein. This is clear. As Heidegger defines it, being has to be Dasein dependent because no other animal has explicit interpretation of objects as objects e.g. a tree as a tree, a pen as a pen, my child as my child, with all the referential holism tied into that perceptual relationship tacitly.

But, as Braver framed it, R1 implies that “the world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects.” On this view, provided we understand Heideggers ontic/ontological distinction between the “physical world” and the lifeworld we cope in, Heidegger would be perfectly fine saying that the brute, physical-behavioral world is independent of us according to R1. And this is where Braver gets confused about Heidegger’s critique of Kant’s nouema because Heidegger only has problems with the traditional account of how we basically interact with the world (representational perception) and not the fact that there is an external, objective world at all. Of course there is an external world! I don’t know how post-Darwinian thinking could ever deny this.

So yes, Braver is right to say that Heidegger rejects the noumena, but misunderstands Heidegger’s reasons for doing so. It isn’t because there is no mind-independent reality “out there,” its because Kant claimed our perceptual access was mediated by representations. See Being and Time pg 51 for his critique of Kantian representationism as being circular. Thus, Dreyfus is right to say that the proper level of analysis for understanding Heidegger’s critique of Kant is through representational perception versus non-representional “direct” perception. Heidegger is thus a realist, but not a metaphysical realist per se, but rather a “direct realist” in the tradition of Reid. Braver seems to miss this by ignoring the fundamental importance for Heidegger of getting our account of perceptual acces right.