EDWARD'S LECTURE NOTES:
More notes at http://tanguay.info/learntracker
C O U R S E
Buddhism and Modern Psychology
Robert Wright, Princeton University
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C O U R S E L E C T U R E What Mental Modules Are Not Notes taken on January 18, 2016 by Edward Tanguay |
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if the conscious self is not the thing directing behavior and directing thought, then what is doing this?
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the answer that comes from the modular view of the mind is: nothing in particular
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this doesn't mean nothing, it just means no single thing
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rather, there are a number of things called modules
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they take turns exerting decisive on our thought, our feelings, and behavior
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there is no conscious self picking the module that gets to be in charge at any given moment
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it's more like the modules are competing and seizing control of the system in a kind of free-for-all, self-organizing system
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1980s modern evolutionary psychology
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critics of evolutionary psychology
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asking why we needed to talk of the role of genes in shaping the human mind
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the human mind is a blank slate
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a general-purpose learning machine
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response
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no, you have to have a number of built-in, functional mechanisms
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support from artificial intelligence
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AI has learning since the 1950s how hard it is to design into machine functions that we take for granted
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humans don't spend a lot of time puzzling over how we recognize people's faces, it seems to just happen
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Swiss army knife metaphor
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the brain has different modules to perform different tasks
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but there are three main ways in which the modular view of the brain is not like a Swiss army knife
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1. modules are not localized
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each blade defines a particular space and are individualized
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modules are not so localized in the brain
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the facial recognition module is not in one place and no where else
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it's a distributed network
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2. modules interact and communicate with each other
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if you see somebody you know, you also begin to interpret what they mean
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the semantic interpretation module takes over from the facial recognition module
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3. modules can be more than tools
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blades are just tools, if there is no user, they have no use
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but modules mobilize other modules
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if we find enough modules and find out how they work and how they work together, we may have a more useful concept of the self than the CEO consciousness