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Rudy Garns

Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species | john hawks weblog - 0 views

  • the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities.
  • the brain has a strongly innate ability to learn language, so much so that the grammars of natural languages are confined to a small range of possibilities. But also intrinsic to Chomsky is the idea that the neural underpinnings of language were not themselves selected for their function in language but instead for some other function.
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  • The second approach is that of Steve Pinker, who basically takes Chomsky at face value--namely, that there is an innate brain capacity for learning natural languages--and claims that language function itself was the target of selection.
  • when behaviors like symbol use or language fall within the range of some individuals in the population, the rest of the population may well be able to learn them. As the population changes behaviorally to learn these skills, natural selection can begin to act on the genetic variation that may be related to them, either because the genes underly the behaviors themselves or the ability to learn the behaviors.
  • innate features of the brain
  • grammatical organization
  • symbols are logically connected to other symbols in an interlocking set of relationships.
  • But Deacon argues that Universal Grammar is unnecessary. In his view, innate assumptions are not the only way to create learning biases that enable the acquisition of grammar rules. Biases in learning might instead stem from the constraints that young children typically face in interpreting speech. In his view, children ignore many of the details of syntactic relations in their initial attempts to interpret speech. Using a top-down approach, they focus on those elements that are readily understood and later fill in the details.
  • What is essential in terms of human evolution is the overall expansion of the neocortex, and much less so the relative sizes of different parts, although the changes in relative extent in the parietal association areas and some specifically language-related features such as Broca's area may be even more important.
  • Deacon has told a story that makes sense, but there is no strong empirical evidence that supports this view as opposed to other possible ideas about language evolution.
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    Deacon's position is that the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language. So for him, explaining the evolution of language (and the brain features that support it) explains much of interest about humans.
Rudy Garns

Terrence Deacon on the symbolic species - 0 views

  • language is not merely a mode of communication, it is also the outward expression of an unusual mode of thought—symbolic representation
  • [In] indexical association, [t]he word (iconically associated with past occurrences of similar utterances) and the object (iconically associated with past occurrences of similar utterances) and the object (iconically associated with similar objects from past experiences) and their past correlations enable the word to bring the object to mind .
  • [T]he major structural and functional innovations that make human brains capable of unprecedented mental feats evolved in response to the use of something as abstract and virtual as the use of words ... [T]he first use of symbolic reference by some distant ancestors changed how natural selection processes have affected hominid brain evolution ever since.
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  • [S]ymbolic reference itself must have been the prime mover for the prefrontalization of the brain in hominid evolution. Language has given rise to a brain which is strongly biased to employ the one mode of associative learning that is most critical to it.
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    Neuroscientist Terence Deacon argues that the emergence of symbolic capacities unique to language were a key factor in the evolution of the human brain, and are a key to distinguishing human from animal forms of communication, ways of learning and brain s
Rudy Garns

Cognitive Evolution and the Definition of Human Nature (pdf) - 0 views

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    Cognitive Evolution and the Definition of Human Nature. Philosophy of Science Monographs, Morris Foundation, Little Rock, Arkansas, 2000, 31pp.
Rudy Garns

Merlin Donald on the evolution of human consciousness - 0 views

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    Canadian psychologist, Merlin Donald, explains the evolution of humans' uniquely collective mind as he outlines his theory of the evolution of human consciousness:
Rudy Garns

What makes us human - Pasternak - 1 views

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    What makes us human? There are at least as many answers to this provocative and searching question as there are authors of this compendium. In the various articles you will find suggestions that include the 'spirit of man', referring particularly to religion, speech and not just language, imitation and 'mimetics', cooking, high levels of cognitive ability, causal belief, that humans are symbolic creatures, innate curiosity and the desire to know, mental time travel, and the ability to read other's minds. These all have cognitive ability as a common thread and, deriving from this, high-level development of language and cultural transmission.
Rudy Garns

Ardipithecus ramidus - 0 views

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    In its 2 October 2009 issue, Science presents 11 papers, authored by a diverse international team, describing an early hominid species, Ardipithecus ramidus, and its environment. These 4.4 million year old hominid fossils sit within a critical early part of human evolution, and cast new and sometimes surprising light on the evolution of human limbs and locomotion, the habitats occupied by early hominids, and the nature of our last common ancestor with chimps.
Rudy Garns

Ability to use symbols appeared 35 million years ago? - 0 views

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    "Humans are sometimes said to be distinguished as "The Symbolic Species." A Research Highlights note in Nature point to the work of Addessi et al., who show that capuchin monkeys, who diverged from the human lineage ~35 million years ago, can be trained to use and assign value to tokens (symbols) for different items of food." (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)
Rudy Garns

Feet hold the key to human hand evolution - 0 views

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    Scientists may have solved the mystery of how human hands became nimble enough to make and manipulate stone tools.
Rudy Garns

Consciousness in Human and Robot Minds (Dennett) - 0 views

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    "The best reason for believing that robots might some day become conscious is that we human beings are conscious, and we are a sort of robot ourselves. That is, we are extraordinarily complex self-controlling, self-sustaining physical mechanisms, designed over the eons by natural selection, and operating according to the same well-understood principles that govern all the other physical processes in living things: digestive and metabolic processes, self-repair and reproductive processes, for instance."
Rudy Garns

Qualia (Tye) - 0 views

  • something it is like
  • I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character.
  • a mental picture-like representation
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  • its content and its intrinsic, non-representationational features
  • relations to sensory objects
  • identified with neural events
  • irreducible
  • intrinsic, consciously accessible features that are non-representational
  • introspection
  • counterparts
  • intrinsic properties of experiences that are also ineffable, nonphysical, and ‘given’ to their subjects incorrigibly
  • something it is like for you subjectively to undergo
  • The phenomenal character of an experience is what it is like subjectively to undergo the experience.
  • experience of understanding a sentence
  • some thoughts have qualia.
  • desires
  • feeling angry that the house has been burgled or seeing that the computer is missing
  • Mary acquires certain abilities,
  • Talk of the ways things look and feel is intensional.
  • provide further support for the contention that some sort of representational account is appropriate for qualia.
  • qualities represented by experiences
  • belong to external things
  • qualia are really representational contents of experiences into which the represented qualities enter
  • just as meaning is something a word has
  • there can be differences in the representational contents of experiences without any phenomenal difference.
  • Phenomenally, our experiences are all very much alike, notwithstanding certain higher-level representational differences
  • This content is plausibly viewed as nonconceptual. It forms the output of the early, largely modular sensory processing and the input to one or another system of higher-level cognitive processing
  • properties represented by experiences.
  • my current visual experience of a red object not only represents the object as red (this is my focal awareness) but also represents itself as red
  • Representationalists about qualia are often also externalists about representational content
  • If these differences in content are of the right sort then, according to the wide representationalist, microphysical twins cannot fail to differ with respect to the phenomenal character of their experiences.
  • Qualia are not intrinsic qualities of inner ideas of which their subjects are directly aware, qualities that are necessarily shared by internal duplicates however different their environments may be. Rather, they are representational contents certain inner states possess, contents whose nature is fixed at least in part by certain external relations between individuals and their environments
  • qualia are supposedly one and the same as certain representational contents.
  • qualia are one and the same as certain representational properties of experiences;
  • experiences have the same representational content but different phenomenal character
  • experience of one sort or another is present but in which there is no state with representational content.
  • deny that there really is any change in normal tracking with respect to color,
  • The sensory state that nature designed in your species to track blue in the setting in which your species evolved will continue to do just that even if through time, on Inverted Earth, in that alien environment, it is usually caused in you by looking at yellow things.
  • feeling pain or having a visual sensation of red are phylogenetically fixed
  • Swampman is not human
  • His inner states play no teleological role.
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    "Philosophers often use the term 'qualia' (singular 'quale') to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives. In this standard, broad sense of the term, it is difficult to deny that there are qualia. Disagreement typically centers on which mental states have qualia, whether qualia are intrinsic qualities of their bearers, and how qualia relate to the physical world both inside and outside the head. The status of qualia is hotly debated in philosophy largely because it is central to a proper understanding of the nature of consciousness. Qualia are at the very heart of the mind-body problem."
Rudy Garns

Study traces the evolution of the human brain - 0 views

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    "The research in the journal Nature Neuroscience by Professor Seth Grant, Head of the Genes to Cognition Programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, suggests that it is not size alone that gives more brain power. Instead, he found that, during evolution, increasingly sophisticated molecular processing of nerve impulses - notably by providing more connections in the brain - allowed development of animals with more complex behaviours. " (Telegraph)
Rudy Garns

Cyber Sapiens - 0 views

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    "..We will no longer be Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens--a creature part digital and part biological that will have placed more distance between its DNA and the destinies they force upon us than any other animal ... a creature capable of steering our own evolution..."
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