The Delusions of Certainty

  197. Steven Pinker, Twitter post, October 16, 2012, 4:36 p.m., http://twitter.com/sapinker.

  198. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–50.

  199. Ibid., 449.

  200. See Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

  201. Georg Northoff, Minding the Brain: A Guide to Philosophy and Neuroscience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 176.

  202. Ladan Shams and Robyn Kim, “Crossmodal Influences on Visual Perception,” Physics of Life Reviews (2010), doi: 10.1016/j.plrev.2010.04.006.

  203. For a short encapsulation see L. E. Bahrick and R. Lickliter, “Perceptual Development: Intermodal Perception,” in Encyclopedia of Perception, ed. E. Goldstein (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010), 754–57. For an overview, see David J. Lewkowicz and Robert Lickliter, The Development of Intersensory Perception (New York: Psychology Press, 2013). For synesthesia in infancy, see Daphne Mauer, Laura C. Gibson, and Ferrinne Spector, “Synesthesia in Infants and Very Young Children,” in The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia, ed. Julia Simner and Edward M. Hubbord (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 46–63.

  204. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1951), no. 1130, line 3, p. 507; no. 1593, line 3, p. 660; and no. 785, lines 1 and 2, p. 382.

  205. For a clearly written paper on brain development and plasticity, see Bryan Kolb and Robbin Gibb, “Brain Plasticity and Behavior in the Developing Brain,” Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 20, no. 4 (2011): 265–76.

  206. K. Sathian and Randall Stilla, “Cross Modal Plasticity of Tactile Perception in Blindness,” Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience 28, no. 2 (2010): 271–81.

  207. M. Bedny et al., “Language Processing in the Occipital Cortex of Congenitally Blind Adults,” PNAS 108, no. 11 (2011): 4429–34.

  208. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 90. Pinker does not deny plasticity or learning, but he resists articulating what had become a commonplace among most neuroscientists at the time he wrote the book, which is that learning, especially during critical periods of development, does alter or “shape” the brain through synaptic connectivity. Learning and memory also appear to affect nonsynaptic plasticity, modifications in the ion channel in a neuron’s axon, dentrites, and cell body. This by no means suggests that genetic factors aren’t also at work. It seems clear that the problem is one of degree. Too much plasticity in the human cortex in relation to a person’s learning threatens to dismantle the innate modules hypothesis of evolutionary psychology.

  209. Jaak Panksepp and Jules Panksepp, “The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology,” Evolution and Cognition 6, no. 2 (2000): 111.

  210. Ibid.

  211. For recent views in interaction linguistics, see New Adventures in Language and Interaction, ed. Jürgen Streeck (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010).

  212. Michael Tomasello, “Language Is Not an Instinct,” review of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, Cognitive Development 10 (1995): 131–56.

  213. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 137.

  214. Ibid.

  215. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 59 (1950): 460.

  216. A. M. Turing, “Intelligent Machinery,” in Alan Turing: His Work and Impact, ed. S. Barry Cooper and Jan van Leeuwen (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2013), 511.

  217. Ibid.

  218. Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Standard Edition, vol. 1, 295.

  219. Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943): 115–33.

  220. Ibid., 115.

  221. Warren McCulloch, quoted in Gualtiero Piccinini, “The First Computational Theory of Mind and Brain: A Close Look at McCulloch and Pitts ‘Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,’ ” Synthese 141 (2004): 181.

  222. James A. Anderson, An Introduction to Neural Networks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 51.

  223. Walter J. Freeman and Rafael Núñez, “Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of Action, Intention, and Emotion,” introduction to a special issue, Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 11–12 (1999): xvi.

  224. Piccinini, 206.

  225. Karl Friston has proposed a new computational model of the brain based on a free energy principle (which he views as parallel to Freud’s dynamics of energy in his model of mind) and Bayesian inference, via Helmholtz’s unconscious inference. The brain in this model is a predictive and conservative (energy-saving) organ. It functions according to “priors”—earlier perceptions. Some have greeted this model with enthusiasm because it has a completeness few other models have and has the rigor that only mathematical calculation can offer. Whether this will lead to a new “logical calculus” for the brain or not is unknown. See Peter Freed, “Research Digest,” Neuropsychoanalysis 12, no. 1 (2010): 103–4.

  226. Karl H. Pribram, “A Century of Progress?” in Neuroscience of the Mind: On the Centennial of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology, ed. Robert M. Bilder and F. Frank Le Fever; Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 843 (1998): 11–19.

  227. I ran across the following statement at the end of a blog on Karl Friston’s ideas and their debt to Freud. It is just one person’s view, of course, but it provides a possible insight into the lasting fury about Freud’s thought: “Would it not be better to allow Freud’s terrible theory to just fade away? Do we really need to have people struggle with the myth that they have a sex crazed monster living in the cellar of their minds?” Janet Kwasniak, Thoughts on Thought: A Blog on Consciousness, September 10, 2010.

  228. Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 198.

  229. John von Neumann, “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” in Cerebral Mechanisms of Behavior: The Hixon Symposium, ed. Lloyd A. Jeffress (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1951), 1–14.

  230. Robert Herrick, “Upon Prue, His Maid,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry: Shorter Edition, ed. Arthur M. Eastman (New York: Norton, 1970), 116.

  231. Peter beim Graben and James Wright, “From McCulloch-Pitts Neurons Toward Biology,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 73, iss. 2 (2011): 263.

  232. Walter Pitts, quoted in Elizabeth Wilson, Affect & Artificial Intelligence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 118.

  233. There is a lot written about cybernetics, systems theory, and chaos theory in complex systems in books, papers, and websites, with subjects ranging from corporations to psychology to tourism. For a clear brief description, see Vladimir G. Ivancevic and Tijana T. Ivancevic, ed., Computational Mind: A Complex Dynamics Perspective (Berlin: Springer, 2007), 115–18.

  234. Keith Franklin and William M. Ramsey, ed., The Cambridge Book of Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 336–37.

  235. Hubert L. Dreyfus, introduction to the MIT edition, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), ix.

  236. David Deutsch, “Creative Blocks: The Very Laws of Physics Imply that Artificial Intelligence Must Be Possible. What’s Holding Us Up?” Aeon: Creative Blocks, October 3, 2012, aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial-intelligence/.

  237. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 450.

  238. Deutsch, “Creative Blocks.”

  239. John Searle, “Is the Brain a Digital Computer?” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 64, no. 3 (1990): 21–37. Please note that I have avoided retelling Searle’s Chinese room argument. I have read it so many times, have read objections to it so many times, that I am tired of it. I am more impressed with his critique in this essay.

  240. Dreyfus, xi–xii.

  241. Michael Pola
nyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 264.

  242. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 146.

  243. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 248.

  244. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 45.

  245. Ibid.

  246. Leonid Perlovsky, Ross Deming, and Roman Ilin, Emotional Cognitive Neural Algorithms with Engineering Applications: Dynamic Logic; From Vague to Crisp (Berlin: Springer, 2011), 4–5. There are a growing number of scientists and philosophers who do not regard emotion as a “cognitive” function. Emotion as cognitive is founded on the appraisal theory of emotion. For a lucid refutation of the appraisal theory, see Jesse Prinz, Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind (New York: Norton, 2012), 242–47.

  247. Craig Delancey, Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal About the Mind and Artificial Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 207.

  248. Rodney Brooks, “Intelligence Without Reason,” prepared for Computers and Thought, IJCAI-91, research for MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1991), 15. Brooks argues, “Only through a physical grounding can any internal symbolic system find a place to bottom out, and give meaning to the processing going on within the system.”

  249. Ibid., 17.

  250. Rodney Brooks, “Intelligence Without Representation,” Artificial Intelligence 47, iss. 1–3 (1991): 139–59.

  251. Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 159.

  252. Brooks, quoted in Joseph Guinto, “Machine Man: Rodney Brooks,” Boston Magazine, November 2014, www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/10/18/rodney-brooks-robotics.

  253. Brooks, Flesh and Machines, 158.

  254. Ibid., 156.

  255. Ibid., 5.

  256. Cynthia L. Breazeal, Designing Sociable Robots (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 27–37.

  257. Ibid., xiii.

  258. Breazeal subscribes to the appraisal theory of emotions. She admits that Kismet is not conscious and has no subjective feelings and no pattern of physiological activity. It does have “a parameter that maps to arousal level,” which she calls a simple “correlate to autonomic nervous system activity” (Ibid., 112). The correlate remains startlingly distant from a human autonomic nervous system, however.

  259. Ibid., 5.

  260. Ruth Feldman et al., “Mother and Infant Coordinate Heart Rhythms Through Episodes of Interaction Synchrony,” Infant Behavior and Development 34 (2011): 574.

  261. Breazeal, 234.

  262. Wilson, Affect and Artificial Intelligence, 53.

  263. Claudia Dreifus, “A Conversation with Cynthia Breazeal: A Passion to Build a Better Robot, One with Social Skills and a Smile,” The New York Times, June 10, 2003.

  264. David Gelernter, “Dream Logic, the Internet and Artificial Thought,” Edge Foundation, June 22, 2010, https://edge.org/conversation/dream-logic-the-internet-and-artificial-thought.

  265. Ibid.

  266. Niels Bohr, quoted in Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 48.

  267. John L. Heilbron, “The Mind That Created the Bohr Atom,” Seminaire Poincaré 17 (2013): 48.

  268. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, vol. 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 11.

  269. Ibid., 282.

  270. Niels Bohr, quoted in Heilbron, 38.

  271. Ibid.

  272. Ibid., 49.

  273. Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 109.

  274. Evelyn Fox Keller discusses Turing’s model and its legacy: “Turing’s foray into biology was of immense importance for the study of chemical systems, for the development of the mathematics of dynamical systems, even for many problems in physics. But not, it would seem, for developmental biology.” She goes on to say, however, that a rapprochement between mathematical and biological science would arrive later. See Evelyn Fox Keller, Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 90–108.

  275. A. M. Turing, “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences 237, no. 641 (1952): 37.

  276. Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, 58.

  277. William W, Lytton, From Computer to Brain: Foundations of Computational Neuroscience (New York: Springer, 2002), 88.

  278. For a clear explanation of how junk DNA is not junk, see Stephen S. Hall, “Hidden Treasures in Junk DNA,” Scientific American 307, iss. 4 (2012).

  279. Jonathan Swift, The Poems of Jonathan Swift, vol. 2 (Chiswick: Press of C. Whittingham, 1822), 86–90.

  280. Bernard de Fontenelle, quoted in Evelyn Fox Keller, “Secrets of God, Nature and Life,” in The Gender and Science Reader, ed. Muriel Lederman and Ingrid Bartsch (London: Routledge, 2001), 106.

  281. R. Howard Block, “Medieval Misogyny,” in Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy, ed. R. Howard Block and Frances Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 11.

  282. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 6.

  283. Ibid., 121.

  284. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (New York: Penguin, 2006).

  285. David Chalmers, “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 17, nos. 9–10 (2010): 9.

  286. David Pearce, “The Hedonistic Imperative,” 1995, www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm.

  287. Jeffrey L. Lacasse and Jonathan Leo, “Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect Between Advertisements and the Scientific Literature,” PLoS, November 8, 2005, doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0020392.

  288. Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1.

  289. “Gelernter, Kurzweil Debate Machine Consciousness,” transcript by MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. December 6, 2006, www.kurzweilai.net.

  290. Hans Moravec, “The Rise of the Robots: The Future of Artificial Intelligence,” Scientific American, March 23, 2009, 124.

  291. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 207.

  292. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149–81.

  293. Steven Weinberg, “Sokal’s Hoax,” in Facing Up (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 150. In his essay “The Boundaries of Scientific Knowledge” in the same collection, Weinberg addresses the conundrums of consciousness but argues, “All these problems may eventually be solved without supposing that life or consciousness plays any role in the fundamental laws of nature or initial conditions,” p. 81. Another physicist takes a different view. See Richard Conn Henry, “The Mental Universe,” Nature 436, no. 7 (2005): 29.

  294. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, in Essential Works of Descartes, trans. Lowell Bair (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 12.

  295. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), 38.

  296. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book 1, part 4, section 5 (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962), 289.

  297. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 188.

  298. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 21.

  299. Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, trans. Hugh Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 31–32.

  300.
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press, 2015), 119–36. Gibson also advocated the idea of “direct perception,” perception that is not aided by inference, memories, or representations but is essentially unmediated. It is not hard to understand why this is controversial. The debates on this subject are ongoing and often about degrees of immediacy. One need not accept direct perception, however, to be interested in the idea of affordance. See Harold S. Jenkins, “Gibson’s ‘Affordances’: Evolution of a Pivotal Concept,” Journal of Scientific Psychology (December 2008): 34–45.

  301. Weil, Lectures, 32.

  302. Vico, The New Science, 313.

  303. Ibid., 129.

  304. Ibid., 215.

  305. Andreas K. Engel, Pascal Fries, and Wolf Singer, “Dynamic Predictions: Oscillations and Synchrony in Top-Down Processing,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2 (2001): 704–16.

  306. Humberto Maturana, “Biology of Language: Epistemology of Reality,” in Psychology and Biology of Language and Thought: Essays in Honor of Eric Lenneberg, ed. George A. Miller and Elizabeth Lenneberg (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 61.

  307. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), 121.

  308. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and the Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 217.

  309. Francisco Varela, quoted in David Rudrauf et al., “From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela’s Exploration of the Biophysics of Being,” Biological Research 36 (2003): 38.

  310. Ibid., 39–40.

  311. Gerald Edelman, Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 87.

  312. Ibid.

  313. Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear, “First Person Methodologies: What, Why, and How,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 2–3 (1999): 1–14.