My paper offers a new interpretation of Reid’s account of social operations of the mind. I argue that it is important to acknowledge the counterpart structure of social operations. By this I mean that for Reid every social operation is paired with a counterpart operation. On the view that I ascribe to Reid, at least two intelligent beings take part in a social operation and the social operation does not come into existence (...) until both the social operation and its counterpart operation have been exercised and the relevant mental thoughts made known to the other being by words or signs. (shrink)

Politics and Modernity provides a critical review of the key interface of contemporary political theory and social theory about the questions of modernity and postmodernity. Review essays offer a broad-ranging assessment of the issues at stake in current debates. Among the works reviewed are those of William Connolly, Anthony Giddens, J[um]urgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Roy Bhaskar. As well as reviewing the contemporary literature, the contributors assess the historical roots of current problems in the works (...) of Nietzsche and Max Weber. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Convention for Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with Regard to the Application of Biology and Biomedicine: Convention on Human Rights and BiomedicineCouncil of EuropePreambleThe Member States of the Council of Europe, the other States and the European Community signatories hereto,Bearing in mind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 (...) December 1948;Bearing in mind the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 4 November 1950;Bearing in mind the European Social Charter of 18 October 1961;Bearing in mind the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 16 December 1966;Bearing in mind the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data of 28 January 1981;Bearing also in mind the Convention on the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989;Considering that the aim of the Council of Europe is the achievement of a greater unity between its members and that one of the methods by which that aim is to be pursued is the maintenance and further realisation of human rights and fundamental freedoms;Conscious of the accelerating developments in biology and medicine;Convinced of the need to respect the human being both as an individual and as a member of the human species and recognising the importance of ensuring the dignity of the human being; [End Page 277]Conscious that the misuse of biology and medicine may lead to acts endangering human dignity;Affirming that progress in biology and medicine should be used for the benefit of present and future generations;Stressing the need for international co-operation so that all humanity may enjoy the benefits of biology and medicine;Recognising the importance of promoting a public debate on the questions posed by the application of biology and medicine and the responses to be given thereto;Wishing to remind all members of society of their rights and responsibilities;Taking account of the work of the Parliamentary Assembly in this field, including Recommendation 1160 (1991) on the preparation of a Convention on bioethics;Resolving to take such measures as are necessary to safeguard human dignity and the fundamental rights and freedoms of the individual with regard to the application of biology and medicine;Have agreed as follows:Chapter IGeneral provisionsArticle 1. (Purpose and object)Parties to this Convention shall protect the dignity and identity of all human beings and guarantee everyone, without discrimination, respect for their integrity and other rights and fundamental freedoms with regard to the application of biology and medicine.Each Party shall take in its internal law the necessary measures to give effect to the provisions of this Convention.Article 2. (Primacy of the human being)The interests and welfare of the human being shall prevail over the sole interest of society or science.Article 3. (Equitable access to health care)Parties, taking into account health needs and available resources, shall take appropriate measures with a view to providing, within their jurisdiction, equitable access to health care of appropriate quality. [End Page 278]Article 4. (Professional standards)Any intervention in the health field, including research, must be carried out in accordance with relevant professional obligations and standards.Chapter IIConsentArticle 5. (General rule)An intervention in the health field may only be carried out after the person concerned has given free and informed consent to it.This person shall beforehand be given appropriate information as to the purpose and nature of the intervention as well as on its consequences and risks.The person concerned may freely withdraw consent at any time.Article 6. (Protection of persons not able to consent)1. Subject to Articles 17 and 20 below, an intervention may only be carried out on a person who does not have the capacity to consent, for his or her direct benefit.2. Where, according to law, a minor does not have the capacity to consent to an intervention, the intervention may only be carried out with the authorisation of his or her representative or an authority or a person or... (shrink)

How does cultural knowledge shape the development of human minds and, conversely, what kind of species-specific social-cognitive mechanisms have evolved to support the intergenerational reproduction of cultural knowledge? We critically examine current theories proposing a human-specific drive to identify with and imitate conspecifics as the evolutionary mechanism underlying cultural learning. We summarize new data demonstrating the selective interpretive nature of imitative learning in 14-month-olds and argue that the predictive scope of existing imitative learning models is either too (...) broad or too narrow to account for these findings. We outline our alternative theory of a human-specific adaptation for ‘pedagogy’, a communicative system of mutual design specialized for the fast and efficient transfer of new and relevant cultural knowledge from knowledgeable to ignorant conspecifics. We show the central role that innately specified ostensive-communicative triggering cues and learner-directed manner of knowledge manifestations play in constraining and guiding selective imitation of relevant cultural knowledge that is both new and cognitively opaque to the naive learner. (shrink)

In contrast to dominant approaches to human reason involving essentially a logical and instrumental conception of rationality easily modeled by artificial intelligence mechanisms, I argue that the specific capacities of the human mind are meta-analytic in nature, understood as irreducible to the analytic or the logical, or else the computational. Firstly, the assumption of a meta-analytical level of rationality is derived from key insights developed in various branches of the social sciences. This meta-analytical level is then (...) inferred from Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. On these bases, and with the help of psychological approaches to consciousness, I argue that human rationality may be characterized as the capacity to make meaningful use of signs. (shrink)

The article presents a new theory for the subdivision of human thought into four domains that are experientially and operationally discrete and are elaborated by activity in four anatomically definable areas of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. I propose that these areas constitute the Social, Material, Temporal anddivisions of the mind and that their sequential maturation accounts for the cognitive stages of childhood. The Social Mind ) is responsible for our emotional intelligence. The Temporal Mind (...) enables us to contemplate the future in terms of a sequence of manageable sub-goals. The Material Mind is responsible for our practicality. The Abstract Mind enables us to comprehend possibility and generate hypotheses. Because recent neurogenetical studies show the powerful influence of genes in controlling the size of the areas of Brodmann, I suggest further that variation in the size of these areas provides an explanation for the genetic basis of personality and many of the so-called cultural differences apparent between long-isolated human populations. (shrink)

As a continuation of this author’s previous cosmological neuroscience papers on the hypothesized Soul of Multiverse and its possible laws, the present work examined the social aspects of four of these laws. The following key aspects were recognized: (1) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Coexistence in Diversity can let our mind respect not only the endless diversity of human beings but also the cohesive force of space-time in which all are connected. This may help realizing the (...) superiority of cooperation for shared goals over competition for gaining by harming others. (2) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Truth in Complexity can ready our mind to confront the problems of societies with the understanding that these problems are much more complex than generally thought. This may help initiating the needed intellectual renaissance of the 21st century. (3) Knowing about the cosmic Law of Divine - Evil Asymmetry can make our mind appreciate the slight yet sufficient supremacy of divine over evil. This may help restoring faith in the eventual creation of a just society, where social justice is defined as an administrative mechanism providing the right conditions for every human being to accomplish his or her Conscience-led Mission throughout life, while allowing each of these accomplishments to be reciprocated with the gratitude it induced in the involved social systems, small or large, to let equal opportunities in life coexist with due diversity in welcomed, not abused, social recognitions. And (4) knowing about the cosmic Law of Lives to Transcend can empower our mind to build on these advances. This may help moving evolution towards the human species worthy of its origin and destination. (shrink)

This book sheds new light on the problem of how the human mind evolved. Harry Smit argues that current studies of this problem misguidedly try to solve it by using variants of the Cartesian conception of the mind, and shows that combining the Aristotelian conception with Darwin's theory provides us with far more interesting answers. He discusses the core problem of how we can understand language evolution in terms of inclusive fitness theory, and investigates how scientific and (...) conceptual insights can be integrated into one explanatory framework, which he contrasts with the alternative Cartesian-derived framework. He then explores the differences between these explanatory frameworks with reference to co-operation and conflict at different levels of biological organization, the evolution of communicative behaviour, the human mind, language, and moral behaviour. His book will interest advanced students and scholars in a range of subjects including philosophy, biology and psychology. (shrink)

The understanding of the interrelationship between brain and mind remains far from clear. It is well established that the brain's capacity to integrate information from numerous sources forms the basis for cognitive abilities. However, the core unresolved question is how information about the "objective" physical entities of the external world can be integrated, and how unifiedand coherent mental states (or Gestalts) can be established in the internal entities of distributed neuronal systems. The present paper offers a unified methodological and (...) conceptual basis for a possible mechanism of how the transient synchronization of brain operations may construct the unified and relatively stable neural states, which underlie mental states. It was shown that the sequence of metastable spatial EEG mosaics does exist and probably reflects the rapid stabilization periods of the interrelation of large neuron systems. At the EEG level this is reflected in the stabilization of quasi-stationary segments on corresponding channels. Within the introduced framework, physical brain processes and psychological processes are considered as two basic aspects of a single whole informational brain state. The relations between operational process of the brain, mental states and consciousness are discussed. (shrink)

ArgumentNeuroscience research has created multiple versions of the human brain. The “social brain” is one version and it is the subject of this paper. Most image-based research in the field of social neuroscience is task-driven: the brain is asked to respond to a cognitive (perceptual) stimulus. The tasks are derived from theories, operational models, and back-stories now circulating in social neuroscience. The social brain comes with a distinctive back-story, an evolutionary history organized around three, interconnected (...) themes: mind-reading, empathy, and the emergence of self-consciousness. This paper focuses on how empathy has been incorporated into the social brain and redefined via parallel research streams, employing a shared, imaging technology. The concluding section describes how these developments can be understood as signaling the emergence of a new version of human nature and the unconscious. My argument is not that empathy in the social brain is a myth, but rather that it is served by a myth consonant with the canons of science. (shrink)

How does cultural knowledge shape the development of human minds and, conversely, what kind of species-specific social-cognitive mechanisms have evolved to support the intergenerational reproduction of cultural knowledge? We critically examine current theories proposing a human-specific drive to identify with and imitate conspecifics as the evolutionary mechanism underlying cultural learning. We summarize new data demonstrating the selective interpretive nature of imitative learning in 14-month-olds and argue that the predictive scope of existing imitative learning models is either too (...) broad or too narrow to account for these findings. We outline our alternative theory of a human-specific adaptation for ‘pedagogy’, a communicative system of mutual design specialized for the fast and efficient transfer of new and relevant cultural knowledge from knowledgeable to ignorant conspecifics. We show the central role that innately specified ostensive-communicative triggering cues and learner-directed manner of knowledge manifestations play in constraining and guiding selective imitation of relevant cultural knowledge that is both new and cognitively opaque to the naive learner. (shrink)

Spinoza attributes mentality to all things existing in nature. He claims that each thing has a mind that perceives everything that happens in the body. Against this panpsychist background, it is unclear how consciousness relates to the nature of the mind. This study focuses on Spinoza’s account of the conscious mind and its operations. It builds on the hypothesis that Spinoza’s panpsychism can be interpreted as a self-consistent philosophical position. It aims at providing answers to the (...) following questions: what is consciousness, for Spinoza, and what are the causes that determine its presence in nature? How can human and non-human individuals be distinguished on account of their mentality? How can Spinoza conceive of the human mind as consisting entirely of conscious perceptions? And how, according to Spinoza’s mind-body parallelism, is the content of consciousness determined so that it reflects in thought the order and connection of the actions and passions of the body? To address these questions, I first determine what Spinoza’s notion of “consciousness” is and how he uses it. Then, I investigate whether he has a theory of recognition capable of accounting for specifically human behaviour and mentality. Further, I examine his description of memory and the way in which memory shapes the framework of human conscious thought. Finally, I look for an account of discursive reasoning, capable of explaining the existence of activities of the mind that, by operating on the content provided by memory, preserve themselves through time and change. (shrink)

Sir Geoffrey Lloyd presents a cross-disciplinary exploration of the unity and diversity of the human mind. He discusses cultural variations with regard to ideas of colour, emotion, health, the self, agency and causation, reasoning, and other fundamental aspects of human cognition. He draws together scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical arguments in showing how our evident psychic diversity can be reconciled with our shared humanity.

The study of human evolution has attracted scientists of various disciplines, judging by the attendance of the conferences devoted to it, and by the publications concerned. In the course of years I became amazed about the seeming absence of a synthesis of the available information. This article presents an attempt to combine some results of the various publications.The study of human evolution has become particularly focussed on the emergence of language and human consciousness with respect to the (...) social behaviour and mental capacities of our closest relatives: the apes. Social relations imply communication, and mentation underlies the ability to communicate. The more it becomes apparent that the social behaviour of the apes resembles that of man in many respects, the greater the danger that typically, and perhaps even uniquely, human traits are ascribed to anthropoids. Anthropomorphic descriptions of animal behaviour tend to prevent a clear view on animal mentality. (shrink)

Humans are moral creatures. Among all life on Earth, we alone experience rich moral emotions, follow complex rules governing how we treat one another, and engage in moral dialogue. But how did human morality evolve? And can humans become morally evolved? -/- In A Better Ape, Victor Kumar and Richmond Campbell draw on the latest research in the biological and social sciences to explain the key role that morality has played in human evolution. They explore the moral (...) traits that humans share with chimpanzees; how a more complex moral mind enabled Homo sapiens to arise and out-compete other human species; and the place of morality alongside historic revolutions in technology and social organization. Throughout the book, Kumar and Campbell argue that morality co-evolved with intelligence and complex sociality. Morality prevents societal collapse and enables complex knowledge. -/- After unearthing the ancient origins of human morality, Kumar and Campbell use evolutionary theory to deliver profound insights about how to advance moral progress and resist moral regress, such as reducing animal suffering on industrial farms; capitalizing on the recent revolution in gay rights to foster a nascent revolution in transgender rights; opposing intersectional inequality that impacts women and people of color in lower socioeconomic classes; and addressing major problems of global inequality, especially impending crises of injustice caused by anthropogenic climate change. Understanding how we evolved--and how we continue to evolve--can help us become a better ape. (shrink)

Global development, diffusion and implementation of the human-centredness paradigm can be performed at best when supported by a study of our mental activity. By analysing our mental operations, we can understand how human needs, interests, values and creativity take form, what each consists of, how it is possible to expand, modify and generate them. The proposed model of mental activity is based on attentional movement. The new opportunities, both ethical and social, offered by such a study (...) are presented. (shrink)

This paper presented during the Physis: Inhabiting the Earth conference, Florence, Italy, October 28?31,1986 examines how new brain research, by radically expanding our knowledge of the physiological foundation for empirical social science, makes possible a new understanding of the nature of higher mind and the place of the human being in evolution. It reports research supporting a model of right, left and frontal brain interaction in forecasting. It also describes development of measures and methods indicating a primarily (...) frontal brain guidance system for higher mind consisting of futures, systems, social, moral, and managerial sensitivities. Driving and shaping this guidance system, and thereby human cultural evolution, appears to be the function of our dialectical construction of the Image of the Future. (shrink)

Machine learning-based AI algorithms lack transparency. In this article, I offer an interpretation of AI’s explainability problem and highlight its ethical saliency. I try to make the case for the legal enforcement of a strong explainability requirement: human organizations which decide to automate decision-making should be legally obliged to demonstrate the capacity to explain and justify the algorithmic decisions that have an impact on the wellbeing, rights, and opportunities of those affected by the decisions. This legal duty can be (...) derived from the demands of Rawlsian public reason. In the second part of the paper, I try to show that the argument from the limitations of human cognition fails to get AI off the hook of public reason. Against a growing trend in AI ethics, my main argument is that the analogy between human minds and artificial neural networks fails because it suffers from an atomistic bias which makes it blind to the social and institutional dimension of human reasoning processes. I suggest that developing interpretive AI algorithms is not the only possible answer to the explainability problem; social and institutional answers are also available and in many cases more trustworthy than techno-scientific ones. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to address the question: Can an artificial neural network (ANN) model be used as a possible characterization of the power of the human mind? We will discuss what might be the relationship between such a model and its natural counterpart. A possible characterization of the different power capabilities of the mind is suggested in terms of the information contained (in its computational complexity) or achievable by it. Such characterization takes advantage of (...) recent results based on natural neural networks (NNN) and the computational power of arbitrary artificial neural networks (ANN). The possible acceptance of neural networks as the model of the human mind's operation makes the aforementioned quite relevant. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cognitive Error and Contemplative Practices:The Cultivation of Discernment in Mind and HeartWesley J. WildmanBrains are amazing organs in all creatures with central nervous systems and especially in human beings. But they are not perfect. Without forgetting the larger success story of cognitive evolution, I want to explore the way that cognitive biases sometimes produce errors in both religious and secular social settings and how such errors (...) can be diagnosed and corrected when they occur. This will involve noticing that error diagnosis and correction is a process that certain social groups have a vested interest in resisting or neglecting, in some respects, while the very same social groups may furnish resources that support the detection of cognitive errors, in other respects.This presents a moral quandary for both secular and religious groups. Should we educate children to be fully aware of their cognitive vulnerability to advertising, thereby learning how to resist and eventually become immune to one of the fundamental power sources of modern market economies? Should religious groups explain to young people their cognitive tendencies to posit the action of supernatural beings whether or not any such action exists, even though this may disrupt the power of religious groups to forge bracing social togetherness that supports psychologically useful coping skills? While I do not seek to answer such complex moral questions in this paper, I do argue that knowledge of cognitive biases and the resulting tendencies to cognitive error, self-defeating behaviors, and self-deception should be made available to those individuals and groups who are interested in promoting a high degree of critical self-awareness in the analysis of beliefs and behaviors in both secular and religious contexts.The term "error" is a potentially problematic one in that it misleadingly suggests that there might be a uniquely correct way in which cognition should work. I do not wish to suggest such a binary opposition. After all, biases exist in the human cognitive system either because they have been selected in the evolutionary process for their survival benefits or because they are side effects of other traits selected for their usefulness. My concern is with the wondrous human discovery that we can analyze [End Page 61] our behaviors and beliefs with such precision that we can sometimes detect when our cognitive biases produce mistaken beliefs and self-defeating behaviors. This forms the basis for my contention that cognition can often work better than it does—more accurately, less self-destructively—when tendencies to cognitive error are diagnosed, corrected, and perhaps even systematically resisted.The profound irony here is that the very same social groups (secular and religious) with an obvious vested interest in resisting such enlightenment in some respects can also promote processes of discernment and insight in other respects. Existing literature in the cognitive psychology of religion rarely bothers with such subtleties. It is common to assume that simply to notice the operation of cognitive biases in religion—say, in supporting belief in supernatural entities who providentially interact in human affairs, or in establishing and reinforcing people's willingness to defer to certain kinds of religious authority—is at the same time to establish the presence of rampant cognitive error, massive resistance to diagnosing and correcting it, and thus the infliction of pernicious cruelties on young children who have no way of escaping the resulting irrational indoctrination.This moral reflex to condemn religious groups because of their characteristic reluctance to acknowledge the role of cognitive biases in their beliefs and practices is understandable given the irrationality, ignorance, or denial that such reluctance suggests. I frankly acknowledge that I share this moral concern. But the actual complexities of religious practice demonstrate that the situation demands a subtler evaluation. Resistance to awareness of cognitive biases exists both inside and outside religious groups; economic and political practices in all eras and of all types have every bit as much to gain from neglecting to enlighten people about their cognitive operations as religious groups do—just consider the techniques employed in commercial advertising and political campaigns. Moreover, religious groups also promote methods of discernment and self-awareness that have historically been, and continue to be, the dominant method by which... (shrink)

In a study drawing from both evolutionary biology and the social sciences, evidence and argument is assembled in support of the comprehensive appli- cation of selfish gene theory to the human population. With a focus on genes giving rise to characteristically-human cooperation (“cooperative genes”) in- volving language and theory of mind, one may situate a whole range of pat- terned behaviour—including celibacy and even slavery—otherwise seeming to present insuperable difficulties. Crucially, the behaviour which tends to propa- (...) gate the cooperative genes may be “at cost” to the genes of some who may be party to the cooperation itself. Explanatory insights are provided by Trivers’ parent-offspring conflict theory, Lack’s principle, and Hamilton’s kin selec- tion mechanism. A primary observation is that cooperation using language and theory of mind is itself interdependent with full human conceptualization of a world of objects and of themselves as embodied beings. Human capaci- ties inhering in, or arising out of, the ability to cooperate are also responsible for a vitally important long-term process, the domestication of animals and p- lants. The approach illuminates the difference between animal and human sexual behaviour, and the emergence of kinship systems. Again, recent pat- terns of population growth become much more explicable. It is argued that the gene is the single controlling replicator; the notion of the meme as a sec- ond independent replicator is flawed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal Mind in its Early Years, 1876–1920:An IntroductionThomas W. StaleyAt its inception, and in the succeeding decades, the journal Mind was a publication of singular significance. Founded in 1876 by Alexander Bain, it was the first of its kind: the pioneering "philosophical journal" in the Anglophone world, to use Bain's own description.1 Close on the heels of Nature, the hugely successful periodical established seven years earlier (...) to address progress in the natural sciences, Mind would devote itself to another important domain of intellectual work in Britain and worldwide. At the time, science and philosophy were as yet poorly demarcated areas, and the primary ground on which this distinction was negotiated was the study of the human mind and its role in social phenomena.2 Especially under its first two editors, George Croom Robertson (serving from the foundation to 1891) and G. F. Stout (from 1892 until 1920), the journal bore witness to a wholesale transformation of scholarly activity regarding these subjects.The purview of Mind was advertised on its opening page by Croom Robertson.3 This introductory offering bears close scrutiny as an indication of how the journal would develop. Foremost, in his mission statement, Robertson elaborated his position in terms of a series of dichotomies that [End Page 259] Mind would bridge. As both an "organ for... original researches" and a "critical record," the journal would be an announcer for and a judge of new work on the phenomena of "subjective consciousness" as well as "objective" physiological operations. On the side of psychology, it would deal with such "natural" mental productions as language as well as the "abnormal mental phases" of insanity. It would treat the mental character of animals in addition to that of humans, employing a relative methodology encompassing "much of... Anthropology and all that is meant by Comparative Psychology." In its philosophical aspect, Mind would range from the theoretical ground of "ultimate questions" to applications in educational practice and "Logic, Aesthetics, and Ethics." It would deal with the historical background of philosophy and with "what is being done or left undone in the present day." While an obvious focus was expected on the intellectual community in Britain itself, attention would be granted to work "on the Continent and in America" and the reader was assured that "Mind will not be the organ of any philosophical school."Mind's masthead, formally unchanged until 1972, denominated it as a "Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Psychology" but Robertson's comments indicate that it would encompass far more than this phrase might immediately suggest. Explicitly at issue was a wide range of controversies then current in Britain. Late Victorian culture was characterized by a self-conscious examination of its own status and prospects. Especially vital concerns included the secularization of knowledge-making institutions4; shifts in the role of public social movements5; the reshaping of scholarship to accommodate new modes of inquiry, fostering in the process new relationships between literature and science6; and the morality of scientific practice7—all items of substantive interest for Mind and its founding editor. [End Page 260]As detailed in a pair of articles written for the journal's centennial in 1976, Mind under its first two editors gradually transformed into an exclusive forum for academic philosophy, shedding its aspirations to chronicle scientific psychology as well as its other broader goals for social reform.8 However, for a significant period, it continued to pursue the ambitious program of inquiry indicated on its very first page. In Robertson's introduction, Mind's territory was effectively defined to cover all of what was then known alternately as "moral philosophy" or "moral science." At the moment of the journal's foundation, this was a field undergoing wholesale transformation. An examination of the project of the new periodical provides a window into many important changes underway in intellectual activity at the time. That this project would be centered on problems of "mind" was hardly a surprise. The dominant orientation of British philosophy since the Enlightenment work of Locke and Hume had been directed toward issues of human society by way of an inquiry into individual mental operations. However, with... (shrink)

This article synthesizes the current theoretical attempts to understand human-machine interactions and introduces seven premises to understand our emerging dynamics with increasingly competent, pervasive, and instantly accessible algorithms. The hope that these seven premises can build toward a social theory of human-AI cocreation. The focus on human-AI cocreation is intended to emphasize two factors. First, is the fact that our machine learning systems are socialized. Second, is the coevolving nature of human mind and AI (...) systems as smart devices form an indispensable part of our cognitive scaffolds, thus, shaping how we perceive the world and ourselves. The seven premises include: primacy of social structures; human’s desire for freedom and autonomy; AI systems will form inseparable parts of our cognitive/affective scaffolds and can change our self-understanding; philosophy and humanistic foundations on human flourishing as a guide to human-AI interaction; mindsponge information-filtering process; acculturative process of how values change and emerge from human-AI interaction; overlapping Venn diagram of the human-human, human-nature, and human-machine interactions. This article concludes with a discussion on human agency in our entanglements with socialized machines and the illusoriness of the Cartesian agent view of the mind. (shrink)

Expert systems have had little impact as computing artifacts. In this paper we argue that the reason for this stems from the underlying assumption of most builders of expert systems that an expert system needs to acquire information and to control the interaction between the human user and itself. We show that this assumption has serious linguistic and usability flaws which diminish the likelihood of producing socially acceptable expert systems. We propose a reversal of this paradigm, for the design (...) of expert systems, by assuming that it is the human user who needs to acquire information and to control the interaction between themselves and the system. (shrink)

The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind (...) operates prior to any particular conscious or unconscious cognition and provides the “framing” or interpretation of that cognition. Central to this framing is the concept of intentionality, which distinguishes intentional action (caused by the agent’s intention and decision) from unintentional behavior (caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agent’s decision). A second important distinction separates publicly observable from publicly unobservable (i.e., mental) events. Together, the two distinctions define the kinds of events in social interaction that people attend to, wonder about, and try to explain. A special focus of this chapter is the powerful tool of behavior explanation, which relies on the folk theory of mind but is also intimately tied to social demands and to the perceiver’s social goals. A full understanding of social cognition must consider the folk theory of mind as the conceptual underpinning of all (conscious and unconscious) perception and thinking about the social world. (shrink)

This paper provides a historical overview of cognitive psychology and computational theories in cognitive science. Critiques of the computational model are discussed. The perspective of the evolution of mind and brain provides an alternative model such as that presented by Merlin Donald in terms of the “Hybrid Mind.” This “naturalist” model is also consistent with what we know of cognitive development in childhood. It provides a better understanding of cognition in situated context than the computational alternatives and is (...) a better fit as a model of mind for the social sciences, including for economic decision making. (shrink)

Humans have long wondered whether they can survive the death of their physical bodies. Some people now look to technology as a means by which this might occur, using terms such 'whole brain emulation', 'mind uploading', and 'substrate independent minds' to describe a set of hypothetical procedures for transferring or emulating the functioning of a human mind on a synthetic substrate. There has been much debate about the philosophical implications of such procedures for personal survival. Most participants (...) to that debate assume that the continuation of identity is an objective fact that can be revealed by scientific enquiry or rational debate. We bring into this debate a perspective that has so far been neglected: that personal identities are in large part social constructs. Consequently, to enable a particular identity to survive the transference process, it is not sufficient to settle age-old philosophical questions about the nature of identity. It is also necessary to maintain certain networks of interaction between the synthetic person and its social environment, and sustain a collective belief in the persistence of identity. We defend this position by using the example of the Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhist tradition and identify technological procedures that could increase the credibility of personal continuity between biological and artificial substrates. (shrink)

SUMMARYThe cognitive science of religion is a multi-disciplinary research program that attempts to integrate the study of religion with behavioural sciences such as cognitive sciences. Such integration raises several methodological questions that concern, for example, the nature of the relationship between psychology and social life, the autonomy of the study of religion and the role of causal explanations in social sciences. This article examines the methodological assumptions of the cognitive science of religion and analyses possible drawbacks as well (...) as advantages of a naturalistic study of religion. Finally, this article argues that we should allow different kinds of methodological frameworks in the study of religion. (shrink)

The growing field of feminist disability studies explores how human bodies are interpreted through cultural values and expectations surrounding physical and mental ability. This paper contributes to and expands upon this conversation by examining how the ideal of “able-mindedness” functions to maintain racial divisions and inequalities through attributions of cognitive and psychiatric disability to bodies of color. Drawing upon contemporary examples from popular social media, public policy, and academic discourse, the author shows how racialized and nonnormatively gendered bodies (...) are identified and interpreted through norms of able-mindedness and used as markers against which the ideal of the able mind is upheld. This “discourse of pathology” operates insidiously within academic theorizing by remaining largely invisible because it tracks our deeply ingrained assumptions about the undesirability of cognitive and psychiatric disability. The author argues that because of the entanglement of race with disability, so long as the normalizing and privileging of the ideal of able-mindedness goes unchallenged and we maintain the myth that there exists a normal mental state, both racism and ableism remain very much alive, including within the academy. (shrink)

This is a transcription of a debate on the concept of a person conducted in Moscow in 1983. David Bakhurst argues that Evald Ilyenkov's social constructivist conception of personhood, founded on Marx's thesis that the human essence is 'the ensemble of social relations', is either false or trivially true. F. T. Mikhailov, V. S. Bibler, V. A. Lektorsky and V. V. Davydov critically assess Bakhurst's arguments, elucidate and contextualize Ilyenkov's views, and defend, in contrasting ways, the claim (...) that human individuals are socially constituted beings. Issues discussed include: the concepts of activity and community and their relevance to the notions of mind and personhood; self-consciousness and its relation to personal identity; naturalism in Soviet thought. Translated from the Russian. (shrink)

The Cognitive Basis of Science concerns the question 'What makes science possible?' Specifically, what features of the human mind and of human culture and cognitive development permit and facilitate the conduct of science? The essays in this volume address these questions, which are inherently interdisciplinary, requiring co-operation between philosophers, psychologists, and others in the social and cognitive sciences. They concern the cognitive, social, and motivational underpinnings of scientific reasoning in children and lay persons as well (...) as in professional scientists. The editors' introduction lays out the background to the debates, and the volume includes a consolidated bibliography that will be a valuable reference resource for all those interested in this area. The volume will be of great importance to all researchers and students interested in the philosophy or psychology of scientific reasoning, as well as those, more generally, who are interested in the nature of the human mind. (shrink)

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of (...) the brain were hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more. From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique. (shrink)

The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind (...) operates prior to any particular conscious or unconscious cognition and provides the “framing” or interpretation of that cognition. Central to this framing is the concept of intentionality, which distinguishes intentional action (caused by the agent’s intention and decision) from unintentional behavior (caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agent’s decision). A second important distinction separates publicly observable from publicly unobservable (i.e., mental) events. Together, the two distinctions define the kinds of events in social interaction that people attend to, wonder about, and try to explain. A special focus of this chapter is the powerful tool of behavior explanation, which relies on the folk theory of mind but is also intimately tied to social demands and to the perceiver’s social goals. A full understanding of social cognition must consider the folk theory of mind as the conceptual underpinning of all (conscious and unconscious) perception and thinking about the social world. (shrink)

Little attention has been paid to the fact that Thomas Reid's epistemology applies to ‘political reasoning’ as well as to various operations of the mind. Reid was interested in identifying the ‘first principles’ of political science as he did with other domains of human knowledge. This raises the question of the extent to which the study of human action falls within the competence of ‘common sense’. Our aim is to reconstruct and assess Reid's epistemology of the (...) sciences of social action and to determine how it connects with the fundamental tenets of his general epistemology. In the first part, we portray Reid as a methodological individualist and focus on the status of the first principles of political reasoning. The second part examines Reid's views on the explanatory power of the principles of human action. Finally, we draw a parallel between Reid's epistemology and the methodology of Weberian sociology. (shrink)

This is a transcription of a debate on the concept of a person conducted in Moscow in 1983. David Bakhurst argues that Evald Ilyenkov's social constructivist conception of personhood, founded on Marx's thesis that the human essence is the ensemble of social relations, is either false or trivially true. F. T. Mikhailov, V. S. Bibler, V. A. Lektorsky and V. V. Davydov critically assess Bakhurst's arguments, elucidate and contextualize Ilyenkov's views, and defend, in contrasting ways, the claim (...) that human individuals are socially constituted beings. Issues discussed include: the concepts of activity (dejatel'nost') and community (obenija) and their relevance to the notions of mind and personhood; self-consciousness and its relation to personal identity; naturalism in Soviet thought. Translated from the Russian. (shrink)

Are there any such things as mind viruses? By analogy with biological parasites, such cultural items are supposed to subvert or harm the interests of their host. Most popularly, this notion has been associated with Richard Dawkins’ concept of the “selfish meme”. To unpack this claim, we first clear some conceptual ground around the notions of cultural adaptation and units of culture. We then formulate Millikan’s challenge: how can cultural items develop novel purposes of their own, cross-cutting or subverting (...) human purposes? If this central challenge is not met, talk of cultural ‘parasites’ or ‘selfish memes’ will be vacuous or superfluous. First, we discuss why other attempts to answer Millikan’s challenge have failed. In particular, we put to rest the claims of panmemetics, a somewhat sinister worldview according to which human culture is nothing more than a swarm of selfish agents, plotting and scheming behind the scenes. Next, we reject a more reasonable, but still overly permissive approach to mind parasites, which equates them with biologically maladaptive culture. Finally, we present our own answer to Millikan’s challenge: certain systems of misbelief can be fruitfully treated as selfish agents developing novel purposes of their own. In fact, we venture that this is the only way to properly understand them. Systems of misbelief are designed to spread in a viral-like manner, without any regard to the interests of their human hosts, and with possibly harmful consequences. As a proof of concept, we discuss witchcraft beliefs in early modern Europe. In this particular case, treating cultural representations as “parasites” – i.e. adopting the meme’s eye view – promises to shed new light on a mystery that historians and social scientists have been wrestling with for decades. (shrink)

The United States Government does not mandate that US based firms follow US social and environmental law in foreign markets. However, because many developing countries do not have strong human rights, labor, and environmental laws, many multinationals have adopted voluntary corporate responsibility initiatives to self-regulate their overseas social and environmental practices. This article argues that voluntary actions, while important, are insufficient to address the magnitude of problems companies confront as they operate in developing countries where governance is (...) often inadequate. The United States can do more to ensure that its multinationals act responsibly everywhere they operate. First, policymakers should define the social and environmental responsibilities of global companies. They must consistently make their expectations for global business clear – and underscore that this objective can often be accomplished without mandates. Second, the US should closely examine the policies that undermine global Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and address the many conflicting signals sent by policymakers. Third, the President should make the US government a CSR model by examining how to use its purchasing power to promote human rights. Finally, the US government should require pension funds to report on the social and environmental consequences of their investments. In these ways, Americans can mind our business – and thus make sure that US based firms do not undermine social and environmental progress when they operate in the developing world. (shrink)

This book proposes a theory of human cognitive evolution, drawing from paleontology, linguistics, anthropology, cognitive science, and especially neuropsychology. The properties of humankind's brain, culture, and cognition have coevolved in a tight iterative loop; the main event in human evolution has occurred at the cognitive level, however, mediating change at the anatomical and cultural levels. During the past two million years humans have passed through three major cognitive transitions, each of which has left the human mind (...) with a new way of representing reality and a new form of culture. Modern humans consequently have three systems of memory representation that were not available to our closest primate relatives: mimetic skill, language, and external symbols. These three systems are supported by new types of “hard” storage devices, two of which (mimetic and linguistic) are biological, one technological. Full symbolic literacy consists of a complex of skills for interacting with the external memory system. The independence of these three uniquely human ways of representing knowledge is suggested in the way the mind breaks down after brain injury and confirmed by various other lines of evidence. Each of the three systems is based on aninventivecapacity, and the products of those capacities – such as languages, symbols, gestures, social rituals, and images – continue to be invented and vetted in the social arena. Cognitive evolution is not yet complete: the externalization of memory has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think. This is changing the role of biological memory and the way in which the human brain deploys its resources; it is also changing the form of modern culture. (shrink)

A psychiatrist who has received international recognition for her research on the neural basis of primate social cognition, Leslie Brothers, M.D., offers here a major argument about the social dimension of the human brain, drawing on both her own work and a wealth of information from research laboratories, neurosurgical clinics, and psychiatric wards. Brothers offers the tale of Robinson Crusoe as a metaphor for neuroscience's classic notion of the brain: a starkly isolated figure, working, praying, writing alone. (...) But the famous castaway of literature, she notes, came from society and returned to society. So too with our brains: they have evolved a specialized capacity for exchanging signals with other brains--they are designed to be social. This can be seen in the brain's sensitive attunement to the meanings of facial expressions and physical gestures and the way it assigns mental lives to physical bodies--a feat we too often take for granted. Brothers describes fascinating case studies that show that certain kinds of brain damage can destroy a patient's ability to interpret faces, leaving him or her with the sense that they are surrounded by zombies. She takes us down to the level of the individual neuron, exploring the response of brain cells to social events. Perhaps most important, she connects neuroscience, psychiatry, and sociology as never before, showing how our daily interaction creates an organized social world--a network of brains that generates meaningful behavior and thought. Our emotions and our sense of self have no existence outside of a social context. Brothers conducts her argument with grace and style. By broadening our approach to the brain, this groundbreaking book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the human mind. (shrink)

From the medieval worldview to the modern outlook, this work presents a sweeping intellectual history in one volume. The emphasis is on ideas in their historical setting, on how modes of thought emerge, grow, influence and react to one another, and die. The result is a grand synthesis of the main currents in western thought, bringing together religion, philosophy, politics, science, economics, literature and the arts, and the social and behavioral sciences- all the diverse systems man has devised in (...) his effort to understand, interpret, and shape human experience. (shrink)