Evolution and Cognition

Minds and Machines

The Astonishing Hypothesis

• “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

- Francis Crick, “The Astonishing Hypothesis”

Brain Gives Rise to Mind Hypothesis

Intelligence, cognition, mind, etc. are all a function of the brain

Cognition = f(Brain)

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Human Intelligence

http://www.wimp.com/alienhuman/

Early Organisms: Perception and Action, but no Cognition

Sense Act

Environment

Agent (No Brain)

Cognition

CognitionSense Act

Environment

Agent (Brain)

Next Step?

Think!Sense Act

Environment

Agent (BRAIN!)

Wallace’s Paradox

One Possible Answer to Wallace’s Paradox: Exaptationism

• Our ancestors from a hundreds of thousand years ago *did* need big brains.– Social Brain Hypothesis: our ancestors increased

social relationships to keep track of and reason about

• Later, all this brain power was put to a different use.– Mathematics– Science– Philosophy

Sense, Plan (Think), Act

CognitionSense Act

Environment

Agent (brain)

Situated Cognition

• Situated (or Embodied) Cognition is the view that we have to take into account the body and the environment in trying to explain, and think about, cognition.

• Situated cognition objects to the classical ‘Sense, Plan, Act’ model of cognition, which many cognitive scientists, most AI researchers, have assumed in their view of cognition:

• Instead, Situated Cognition proponents say, perception and action are integral to cognition.

Catching a Fly Ball

Copying Blocks Experiment

Original Copy

Bins

Task:Subjects have to make acopy of the configuration ofblocks on the left by ‘grabbing’ individual blocks from the bins at the bottom and placing them on the right

Results Blocks Experiment

• The finding was that subjects would look at the original, then select a block, then look back at the original, and finally place the block.

• On the traditional view of cognition, the third step would be a surprise. But, on the situated view, it makes sense.

‘Epistemic moves’:Moves that are not part of a solution,but help find one

Rotating

Slamming

No Opposable Thumbs …

The World as External Memory

• Situated Cognition people say that the brain often uses the environment as a kind of ‘external memory’. Examples:

– Taking apart your computer: how do you lay down the pieces to get it back together?

– Notes you write to yourself

– Planners, calendars, cellphones, laptops

Language: Our Best Tool?

• Language seems to be an especially powerful tool that we use to enhance our cognitive abilities:– Expressions of language can be used to represent

information and thus serve as external memory (see examples before)

– Expressions of language can be manipulated and thus reasoning and decision-making can take place (logic, mathematics, science)

Cultural Evolution:Memes

• Once culture is in place, cultural evolution can work on components of cognition.

• For example, such cognitive ‘building blocks’ as concepts or ideas, but also fashions and values can be passed from organism to organism, where they ‘compete’ for existence (certain ideas strike us as better ones than others’, and can get mutated or combined with others: all the ingredients that an evolutionary process requires.

• Richard Dawkins coined the term ‘memes’ for these kinds of entities that are subject to cultural evolution.

Calculus

Leibniz Newton

(building on the work by Archimedes, Kepler, Fermat, Roberval, Cavalieri, Descartes, Lagrange, Huygens, Barrow, and many others …)

Newton: “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Evolution

Darwin Wallace

E = mc2

• Einstein (1905) of course!• Conceptually, however, he was not the first to

show a relationship between light, energy and and mass– Newton (1717): Matter and light are “convertible into

one another”– Swedenborg (1734): matter is disposition of “pure and

total motion”• Sure, but what about the equation?

– Poincare (1900): Eem = memc2

Back to Wallace’s Paradox

• Remember that the assumption implicit in Wallace’s paradox is the view that our cognitive capacities are the result of our brain alone.

• However, as argued in previous slides, our cognitive capacities may be partly derived from the artifacts (tools, language, and in particular science and math) we have created around us and pass along from one generation to the next.

• Moreover, the cultural evolution of cognitive building blocks such as concepts and ideas works *much* faster than genetic evolution.

• Neil deGrasse Tyson was right … and wrong!– Our brains are indeed not all that different– But difference in intelligence is not merely due to differences in brain

Next Step!

Process

Sense Act

Environment

Agent 1 Tool

ActSense

Agent 2

Tools to Enhance Cognition

• To become smarter, then, we don’t need bigger brains, but better interactions with our environment.

• Indeed, we can see the use of tools as a straightforward example of enhancing our abilities, so why not have cognitive tools?

Blind-Cane-Man

• Bob is blind, and uses a cane to feel around.• Is the cane part of Bob?• It isn’t part of Bob as a biological being.• But is it part of Bob as a cognitive being?

– There is a cognitive agent here, perceiving the world, thinking about the world, etc.

– Is the cane part of the cognitive agent, or part of the world?

• (Is Bob a cyborg?)

Hammer-Man!

Hammers don’t hit Nails,People Do!

“If all you have is a hammer,everything becomes a nail”

- Bernard Baruch

The Google Effect

• The Google effect is that people forget those things that they can ‘Google’.

• Some people lament this, saying that people have become ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’, not unlike how the calculator has made people worse at basic arithmetic.

• But in reality, this was in fact a very smart move of the brain. Incorporating the internet as external memory is not ‘lazy’, but efficient. And while brain alone = less smart, brain + internet = smarter!

• Most importantly, the brain naturally integrates its environment if it makes sense: we don’t control this!

Copying Blocks Experiment II

Original Copy

Bins

Same task as before.However, original is hidden bysquare, and you have to click onit to reveal the original. Moreover,it takes a certain amount of timefor original to appear.Result: the more time it took fororiginal to appear, the more subjects started to rely on internalmemory (brain).

How our Brain Integrates Technology: Perception

(Click on pic for vid)

How our Brain Integrates Technology: Action

(click on pic for vid)

Quiz 1

• True or False? Leibniz and Newton coming up with calculus at the same time and without any contact between them is an amazing coincidence

• A. True• B. False

Quiz 2

• True or False? According to Situated Cognition, we perceive the world around us, carefully figure out and plan the best action to take, and then act in accordance to that plan.

• A. True• B. False