Topic: Cognitive Science

Quotes

Guy Claxton, Intelligence in the Flesh (2015)

• ‘Working memory’ is strongly associated with consciousness: not because ‘that is a place where the light of consciousness shines brightly’, but because the inhibitory effort required to keep tight control of internal events creates the kind of intense, corralled activation that is associated with the appearance of consciousness.#

Andy Clark, Mindware (2000)

• We transcend these limits [of being “good at frisbee, bad at logic”], in large part, by combining the internal operation of a connectionist, pattern-completing device with a variety of external operations and tools that serve to reduce the complex, sequential problems to an ordered set of simpler pattern-completing operations of the kind our brains are comfortable with.#
• Much of what matters about human-level intelligence is hidden not in the brain, nor in the technology, but in the complex and iterated interactions and collaborations between the two.#
• Our imaginative (intrinsic) capacities do indeed support “synthetic transformations” in which components retain their shapes but are recombined into new wholes, but lack the “analytic” capacity to decompose an imagined shape into wholly new components. This is because the latter type of case (but not the former) requires us to first undo an existing shape interpretation.#
• As users of words and texts, we command an especially cheap and potent means of off-loading data and ideas from the biological brain onto a variety of external media.#
• The neural representation of worldly events may be less like a passive data structure and more like a recipe for action. The driving force, once again, is computational economy. If the goal of perception and reason is to guide action (and it surely is, evolutionarily speaking), it will often be simpler to represent the world in ways rather closely geared to the kinds of actions we want to perform.#
• It is not at all obvious that (nonhuman) animal thought is systematic in the Fodor and Pylyshyn sense. . . . It is our experiences with public language that equip is to think such an open-ended variety of thoughts and hence cognitive systematicity may be both nonpervasive and rather closely tied to our linguistic abilities themselves.#
• Why shouldn’t [Searle’s] Chinese Room, or Block’s Chinese population, actually have real, and qualitatively rich, mental states? Our discomfort, I suggest, flows not from the bedrock idea that the right formal structure could guarantee the presence of such states so much as from a nagging suspicion that the formal structures that will be implemented will prove too shallow.#

Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture (2006)

• Learning and action are in an inverse relationship throughout the lifespan. We learn the most when we are unable to act. By the time we are able to act on the world, our ability to learn has dramatically diminished.#
• Even much of the reasoning offered as a rational basis for following the goals or valuations of others is itself imitative in its nature or origins. This is not to argue that there are no drives, desires, or needs intrinsic to human nature. It is to say that the need to eat, the need to procreate, and the need for physical self-defense are no more basic to human nature than the need for sensory stimulation, the need for affiliation, and the inclination to imitate.#
• Discomfort in the absence of sensory input and the pursuit of stimulation apparently for its own sake (i.e., stimulation without extrinsic utilitarian value) has led some investigators to consider stimulus seeking an inherent drive or motivation manifest in the sense of curiosity and the experience of play.#
• We have limited ability to see even prominent features of a new environment if those features were absent from our rearing environment.#
• The relationship between the individual and the environment is so extensive that it almost overstates the distinction between the two to speak of a relationship at all.#
• The evolutionary appearance of the limbic system is associated with the evolutionary appearance of parenting and other familial behaviors#
• Our biology is social in such a fundamental and thorough manner that to speak of a relation between the two suggests an unwarranted distinction. It is our nature to nurture and be nurtured.#
• The chemical mechanisms of neuronal growth and learning that are so active during childhood are much less evident in adult brains, and learning in adults depends largely on different cellular mechanisms.#
• The brain depends upon sensory stimulation to develop physically, and the functional and structural organization of the brain is strongly influenced by the nature of that stimulation.#

Clifford Geertz, ” The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind” (1962)

• A culture-less human being would probably turn out to be not an intrinsically talented though unfulfilled ape, but a wholly mindless and consequently unworkable monstrosity.#Quoted in Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture (2006)

Roy Baumeister & E.J. Masicampo, “Conscious Thought Is for Facilitating Social and Cultural Interactions: How Mental Simulations Serve the Animal–Culture Interface” (2010)

• Conscious thought is for incorporating knowledge and rules for behavior from culture. Over time, automatic responses then come to be based on that new input.#
• Division of labor can be achieved without theory of mind, as ant colonies show, but it must rely on fixed action patterns and therefore is limited.#
• Episodic memory may be a by-product of the capacity to simulate future events.#
• The mind is actively creating sensations, not merely attending to or noticing them. As Humphrey (2006) put it, sensations are not something that happens to a person but rather are something that a person does.#
• Phenomenal awareness is not just seeing what is there. Rather, the conscious experience has already had the benefit of extensive interpretive work, drawing on memory and knowledge to react appropriately to the incoming sensory data #
• The not entirely satisfactory answers regarding upright posture included freeing the hands for carrying things and making fire. (Extensive tool use came later.) The use of hands for gestural communication may well be a major part of the answer, however. Hominids who used their hands to communicate would then be able to use and share increasingly large quantities of information, which is what humans did. The proliferation of information would likely have created selection advantages for the larger brains—hence the subsequent expansion in brain size.#
• Early hominid communication may have used increasingly specific gestures (sign language) augmented by vocal sounds, which over time was reversed so that, as today, people communicate mainly by speech while still using hand gestures to enhance expression. The evolution of the human brain for speech may have caused the prevalent right-handedness that is normal among humans but not found in other species.#
• Conscious thought is often synonymous with reportable states.#
• Brains facilitate survival and reproduction by making helpful links between sensory input and motor output. . . . Therefore, the basic design problem for a brain is to link each stimulus to the relevant response—that is, to get the important incoming information about the environment connected to the proper place(s) in the brain where relevant knowledge is stored and optimal responses are prescribed. . . . As the brain becomes larger and more com- plex, with more different sets of information stored in various places, the difficulty of this problem (of linking stimulus to optimal response) increases exponentially#