Be suspicious of overly bold claims in evolutionary psychology—check and mostly agreed, though see Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea for something that might slightly re-inflate the idea of good ev-psych.
But I don’t see how your suggestion to think about minds as “lined slates” follows. It seems to not follow even more after having read your argument. What reason do be have to think that our minds have evolved to be very flexible general learning processes? Your argument makes me imagine my mind as the opposite—after reading your argument, out brains look even more like they should be a bunch of wires, randomly attached.
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP6. “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky. “I am training a randomly wired neural network to play Tic Tac Toe”. “Why is the net wired randomly?” asked Minsky. “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play.” Minsky shut his eyes: “Why do you close your eyes?” Sussman asked his teacher. “So the room will be empty.” At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
A randomly wired network still can have different number of short range vs long range connections, vertical vs horizontal connections etc.
Brain is not randomly wired; it consists of cortical columns—a basic unit replicated over the brain—and some of the wiring is very specific. The axons can very accurately find their destinations. Different areas of brain can be built with different parameters of the network organisation. There are good reasons not to adopt tabula rasa—blank slate—that’s why i propose the slates prepared for specific work, in minor ways. We certainly can evolve different fur on different parts of our bodies—and so we can evolve different network properties in different areas of brain. But if you want to link specific sets of neurons in specific ways from the DNA to build a circuit that performs an evolved function—all chances are you can not do that, as there isn’t any genes which express just in those neurons.
The lined slate example is to make it clear that I am not arguing in favour of complete ‘tabula rasa’.
With regards to our brains being learning machines, the neuroplasticity is good evidence that parts of brain can learn the tasks not originally intended, at the levels of performance close to the normal, suggesting only minor innate specialization.
Be suspicious of overly bold claims in evolutionary psychology—check and mostly agreed, though see Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea for something that might slightly re-inflate the idea of good ev-psych.
But I don’t see how your suggestion to think about minds as “lined slates” follows. It seems to not follow even more after having read your argument. What reason do be have to think that our minds have evolved to be very flexible general learning processes? Your argument makes me imagine my mind as the opposite—after reading your argument, out brains look even more like they should be a bunch of wires, randomly attached.
A randomly wired network still can have different number of short range vs long range connections, vertical vs horizontal connections etc.
Brain is not randomly wired; it consists of cortical columns—a basic unit replicated over the brain—and some of the wiring is very specific. The axons can very accurately find their destinations. Different areas of brain can be built with different parameters of the network organisation. There are good reasons not to adopt tabula rasa—blank slate—that’s why i propose the slates prepared for specific work, in minor ways. We certainly can evolve different fur on different parts of our bodies—and so we can evolve different network properties in different areas of brain. But if you want to link specific sets of neurons in specific ways from the DNA to build a circuit that performs an evolved function—all chances are you can not do that, as there isn’t any genes which express just in those neurons.
The lined slate example is to make it clear that I am not arguing in favour of complete ‘tabula rasa’.
With regards to our brains being learning machines, the neuroplasticity is good evidence that parts of brain can learn the tasks not originally intended, at the levels of performance close to the normal, suggesting only minor innate specialization.