A Revolution in Cognitive Science

As an outsider, I'm glad to hear all the new developments coming from those who study human behavior. It would seem from my ignorant, non-expert, outside-of-the-field perspective that there is a revolution going on. Many have abandoned the platonic view of thought, the juvenile Freudian view of motivation, and the idyllic view of the blank slate. What has replaced these ideas is the realization that the human brain is a product of evolution - our mental world was molded by our history. It is full of tools or what some refer to as modules - a language module, a moral module, a simulation (future prediction) module, a desire module. All with the intent of giving us the tools to cope with the world, to cope with our peers and to trick ourselves in developing habits that unwittingly increase the number of our offspring. This trend away from idealism and towards the realization that the human mind is a complex product of evolution is best exemplified in Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate. But the change has been fueled by experimentation. Over the past decade those who are curious about the mind have gotten off their asses and have actually started to perform some really amazing experiments. And as usual, the world operates by rules that are quite different from what we previously thought.

Previously, I've described the work of two of these pioneer researchers, Dan Gilbert and Marc Hauser. Gilbert has undertaken experiments in order to analyze "what makes us happy" and has written a must read book on the subject Stumbling on Happiness. The main insight in Gilbert's work is that our tendency to delay our current happiness in order to attain a presumed future happiness is a trick we play on ourselves. It turns out that we are miserable at predicting what will make us happy. Every person is so obsessed with our future happiness that they never fully appreciate all the things given to us by our past selves. Thus we strive and work hard because we fool ourselves into believing that we will get the payoff later, but just like Sisyphus we keep pushing that rock up the mountain. Marc Hauser, in contrast studies morality. His book, Moral Minds, describes how humans have a module that computes morality. This module has its quirks as well. It deems certain activities as immoral and wrong because of our evolutionary history. For example it is taboo to actively kill someone even if it means saving the lives of five innocent bystandards. Now no one is saying that morality is relative or non-relative, but rather that humans are predisposed to certain moral ideals by their biology. No matter the culture, religion, age, sex or race, all humans have very similar rules to determine what constitutes moral and immoral behavior. We are also predisposed to treating those that breach these rules in a certain manner. But just like any other mental capacity, or indeed any biologically based systems, our morality module has certain quirks. And scientists have realized that the investigation of these quirks has led to insights that reveal how the module operates. And these idiosyncrasies are apparent in experiment after experiment. Society may modify our behavior, but often in a very particular way that is highly dependent on human nature.

So why am I bringing up this revolution in cognitive science? Well there are two recent items I stumbled into that I would like to share:

1) Yesterday I watched the latest installment of Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv between John Horgan (The End of Science) and Joshua Knobe, an experimental philosopher from UNC. Knobe is part of a new generation of philosophers who have turned the current ideal of philosophy on its head. The way to understand the human psyche is to experiment. And these philosophers, along with cognitive scientists, lawyers and psychologists are all involved in reexamining these old questions on the human psyche through the testing of hypothesis. Knobe also pointed to this satirical video of an armchair exploding to the anthem of experimental philosophy. Very apt - it's time we get off our asses and test our theories.

2) I've been reading (and enjoying) this new book by Gary Marcus entitled Kluge, the Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind. More then any other science writer, Marcus (who is in the Department of Psychology at NYU) points out how the human mind is full of quirks and weird design flaws that are a product of human evolution. Take any property of the mind -- say, memory or our ability to evaluate a situation -- our brain is just incapable of anything close to objectivity - and it has to do with how the brain was designed by evolution. It was constructed from bits and scraps here and there, it resembles what engineers have often called a kluge (rhymes with huge) - a haphazard inelegant solution that works. I haven't finished the book yet - and I have some problems with certain ideas, but overall it is a welcome addition to the ever changing view of the mind's inner workings.

So let me end here by saying that this whole topic is sure to encounter more fascinating phenomena, and as an experimentalist I'm glad that the study of the mind is being pushed not by those coming up with theories but by those testing our hypotheses. We now realize that through experimentation we can obtain a better understanding of the human psyche.

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You're always insulting Freud, but I'll bet you've never read any of his work. :P Am I right?

I hadn't heard of Kluge, but it sounds a lot like David Linden's The Accidental Mind, which came out last year. It also talked about how the brain shows strange organization as a result of evolving, and how that affects cognition.

OK, when I first read this post, I was really offended, but I took a break from it, came back, and now I just think it's rather sad. It's sad because of all the layers of irony born of ignorance.

First irony is that three of the people you picked, Pinker, Hauser, and Marcus, are Platonists. What's more, you described one of the fundamental aspects of their Platonism -- their belief in innate mental modules -- in your post! I don't actually know much about Gilbert's work, but Pinker and Hauser in particular are two of the more well-known Platonists (i.e., nativists, which means, ultimately, Chomskyans) in cognitive science, and Marcus is a former student of Pinker's.

Granted, you probably didn't mean Platonism in the sense that it's generally used in cognitive science and philosophy of mind these days, but in the more anachronistic sense of rationialism (as in Plato vs. Aristotle, or rationalism vs. empiricism), but that just leads to the second irony -- cognitive science has, since its founding in the 1950s, been heavily empirically based. In fact, one of the main problems with it is that, though it is heavily steeped in baggy philosophical paradigms (computationalism, connectionism, embodied cognition, dynamic systems theory, etc.), it has generally been and will continue to be criticized for its lack of over-arching theory. Instead, cognitive science is a bunch of experiments and more-or-less computational models with little theory to tie it all together. And you describe this as a revolution. You're 50 years late, I'm sorry to say.

Which leads to the third irony. The people you picked, especially Pinker, but also Hauser with the publication of Moral Minds, are notorious for being theory heavy without the data to back them up. Pinker, in particular, is a Platonist, in the anachronistic sense that you are using the label, and his books are largely based on speculative reasoning in Evolutionary Psychology. Hauser has done something similar with his nativism and modularism in the area of moral cognition. There's no unequivocal evidence for an innate moral module, it's just a theoretical interpretation of very sparse data. Granted, Hauser is an exceptioanl experimentalist, but you've chosen one of the two areas of his work (his theoretical work on language evolution being the other) where he's a Platonist in both senses of the word.

So, not only are you 50 years too late in your "revolution," but you've picked the some of the most Platonistic, least empirically-based theories and theorists as your examples. I'd be offended that you think cog sci has just now emerged from some dark age (by the way, did you know that Freud is making a comeback because of empirical data? oh, another layer!), but since it's so clear that it's based on abject ignorance, I'm just going to feel sorry for you for having written this.