I am addicted to ‘viewquakes’, insights which dramatically change my world view. (More) To my shame, I missed Tyler’s review of the 2018 book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. I often get asked what are good books to read, and who are contemporary intellectual heroes, and now I have good answers: this book and its author Cecilia Heyes.
I'm a bit puzzled by this. Two things: 1. The potential for acquiring social gadgets is indeed genetically encoded but this means in no way that the process needs to be fast, or infinitely malleable. 2. In zoo keeping, the gold standard for "getting it right" to raise animals in their optimal environment, is when they reproduce. Many species are very finicky about that and won't reproduce in captivity. Recent evidence shows that humans also don't reproduce well in modern environments. Which means, they're maladaptive. We appear to function well in them only if you ignore the missing reproduction function.
The discussion here seems vitiated by vagueness. It is obviously true that “the human mind is not infinitely pliable,” but what does it mean to add that it “was instead mostly fixed in our DNA hundreds of thousands of years ago . . . “? What metric is implicit in that ‘mostly’? It is unclear how to measure *degree of pliability*.
Some of our ancestors’ evolution preceded *homo sapiens*, some took place among the cave men, some has occurred more recently. All these have been important for the psyches of present people, but it is quite unclear how *degrees of importance* are to be measured. (Evolutionary psychologists treat the middle period as *most important* for the mental traits that interest them, but those are not *all* mental traits.)
I had a similar "viewquake" experience reading Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." I understand that the book is not well regarded today, but the idea of our current human cognition being the product of a VERY recent change was appealing as it suggested that our cognition might be capable of a similar leap within a cultural rather than a evolutionary time frame.
I saw this book was on audible and got it as a result of this post, so thanks. I've been leaning more towards cultural evolutionary explanations for various phenomena over the years myself. One area I became especially interested in of late is language.
Chomsky seems to have dominated the linguistic landscape for many decades but alternative perspectives on language that frame it more as a product of culture are gaining traction and, I think, are more plausible. If you haven't encountered it already, I'd recommend The Language Game by Christiansen and Chater.
Evolution shaped the genes that let the human mind work well in the ancestral environment. It didn't shape the mind, only the genes that express the behavior. The genes don't code for all possible environments. Only for the environment at hand. Evolution "saves effort" by presupposing the environment. And much more information can be in the environment than in the genes. This means that the environment can have a large influence. It also means that changes to the environment that are far from the ancestral environment can have very strage effects on the expressed behavior (being "out of distribution of the training sample"). Not many environment changes will ensure reproduction, but as the environment is now modified by humans, stable sub environments may evolve - or the whole thing collapse.
I could have sworn you already believed human nature is very flexible, and that culture is the main difference between humans and other apes. Was that wrong?
I knew you also thought the human brain was made of a lot of highly specialized areas and that you need to get lots of little fiddly details right to make a powerful intelligence. Which seemed in tensions with the previous points. Is this what changed?
“..Which implies that even with the aid of any technology...”
I think you meant “without”. It’s pedantic I know, but at last count, your writings get many years of good mileage. Thanks for the Intro to Cecilia’s work.
I'm a bit puzzled by this. Two things: 1. The potential for acquiring social gadgets is indeed genetically encoded but this means in no way that the process needs to be fast, or infinitely malleable. 2. In zoo keeping, the gold standard for "getting it right" to raise animals in their optimal environment, is when they reproduce. Many species are very finicky about that and won't reproduce in captivity. Recent evidence shows that humans also don't reproduce well in modern environments. Which means, they're maladaptive. We appear to function well in them only if you ignore the missing reproduction function.
The discussion here seems vitiated by vagueness. It is obviously true that “the human mind is not infinitely pliable,” but what does it mean to add that it “was instead mostly fixed in our DNA hundreds of thousands of years ago . . . “? What metric is implicit in that ‘mostly’? It is unclear how to measure *degree of pliability*.
Some of our ancestors’ evolution preceded *homo sapiens*, some took place among the cave men, some has occurred more recently. All these have been important for the psyches of present people, but it is quite unclear how *degrees of importance* are to be measured. (Evolutionary psychologists treat the middle period as *most important* for the mental traits that interest them, but those are not *all* mental traits.)
We are somewhat stiff and somewhat pliable.
This sounds very similar to the ideas Joe Henrich explores in The Secret of Our Success.
I had a similar "viewquake" experience reading Julian Jaynes' "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." I understand that the book is not well regarded today, but the idea of our current human cognition being the product of a VERY recent change was appealing as it suggested that our cognition might be capable of a similar leap within a cultural rather than a evolutionary time frame.
I saw this book was on audible and got it as a result of this post, so thanks. I've been leaning more towards cultural evolutionary explanations for various phenomena over the years myself. One area I became especially interested in of late is language.
Chomsky seems to have dominated the linguistic landscape for many decades but alternative perspectives on language that frame it more as a product of culture are gaining traction and, I think, are more plausible. If you haven't encountered it already, I'd recommend The Language Game by Christiansen and Chater.
typo: "group-based reasoning, and normatively." - normativity?
Is this really a meaningful statement: “cultural evolution is so much more powerful than DNA evolution”? I see no obvious way of measuring “power.”
Evolution shaped the genes that let the human mind work well in the ancestral environment. It didn't shape the mind, only the genes that express the behavior. The genes don't code for all possible environments. Only for the environment at hand. Evolution "saves effort" by presupposing the environment. And much more information can be in the environment than in the genes. This means that the environment can have a large influence. It also means that changes to the environment that are far from the ancestral environment can have very strage effects on the expressed behavior (being "out of distribution of the training sample"). Not many environment changes will ensure reproduction, but as the environment is now modified by humans, stable sub environments may evolve - or the whole thing collapse.
Shouldn't this impact your views on AI development?
Heyes thinks you can get cognitive gadgets with relatively few ingredients: attention, associative learning, and sociality.
Also – have you read Michael Tomasello "Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny"? You may find it useful.
I could have sworn you already believed human nature is very flexible, and that culture is the main difference between humans and other apes. Was that wrong?
I knew you also thought the human brain was made of a lot of highly specialized areas and that you need to get lots of little fiddly details right to make a powerful intelligence. Which seemed in tensions with the previous points. Is this what changed?
“..Which implies that even with the aid of any technology...”
I think you meant “without”. It’s pedantic I know, but at last count, your writings get many years of good mileage. Thanks for the Intro to Cecilia’s work.
I was very struck by the title of a baby book when we had our babies: "The scientist in the crib". We are born scientists..