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Evolutionary Psychology: Exploring the Mind in Action

Dive into the theoretical issues of psychology through the lens of evolutionary psychology, artificial life, and mind-body connection. Explore how cognition is embodied, embedded in the world, and extended beyond the boundaries of the individual. Understand the principles of adaptationism and alternatives to the traditional mechanical view of cognition.

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Evolutionary Psychology: Exploring the Mind in Action

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  1. Theoretical Issues in Psychology Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Mind for Psychologists B&LdJ

  2. Chapter 9 The extended mind • Evolutionary psychology: adaptation. • Brain, body and world: embodied and embedded. • A-life: bottom-up research. • Metaphors in the flesh. • Distributed cognition beyond the individual mind: social and cultural. B&LdJ

  3. Evolutionary psychology • Mental processes are behavioral • programs, like instincts promoting • survival of selfish genes. • To understand mind as adaptation, • we need biology. • The social science paradigm • (learning, social shaping) should be replaced by the • biological view (universal human nature). • Method: functional-adaptive thinking, a phenotypic trait • is a solution to an adaptive problem. • Mental archtecture is universal, modular and selected • for a hunter-gatherer society. B&LdJ

  4. Evolutionary psychology: some methodological principles • Mental archtecture is universal. • Is modular:Swiss army knife: separate mental tools for separate adaptive problems. • Is selected for a hunter-gatherer society, and unchanged since (cheater detection module, stereo-vision). But these principles are dubious, not supported by real evolutionary biology, nor experimental evidence. B&LdJ

  5. Gould & Lewontin’s metaphor of the ‘spandrel’ (S.Marco,Venice): byproduct, not designed/selected B&LdJ

  6. Adaptationism • Explain all phenotypic traits as adaptation; selected for adaptive function. • Also for human intellectual and psychological abilities (jealousy, altruism, language) there must have been selective advantages in their ancestral past (hunter-gatherer). • Problems with adaptationism: • Overgeneralizing of biological, functional-adaptive explanations. • not all traits are selected: some are by-products (‘spandrels’). • How-possible stories vs.how-actually stories. B&LdJ

  7. Artificial life: cognition from the bottom up • Life: evolution, self-reproduction, self-organization, and emergent behavior. • Synthetic ‘life’ in software (computersimulation), hardware (e.g., insect-like locomotion), wetware (biochemical). • Characteristic: bottom-up, distributed, local determination of behavior. Autonomous, adaptive, intelligent behavior – similar to cognition (?) B&LdJ

  8. Mind in action (1): embedded embodied cognition • Embodied: emphasizing the role of the body in (mindful) behavior, in contrast with mind-body dualism. • World-embedded: focus on organism–world coupling in adaptive behavior. (See also Chapter 8.3) • Thought and action unity: activity is an important ingredient in explaining mind, in contrast to the ‘onlooker’ or ‘spectator’ interpretation of mind, or mind as an exclusive ‘thinking’ • device (intellectualism). B&LdJ

  9. Mind in action (1): embedded embodied cognition, continued • Cycle of thought, perception and action. • Situated cognition to be studied in day-to-day activities in a real world. • On-line strategies employed by an organism in its adaptive world-embedded behavior, rather than controlled by pre-coded programs. • Emergent properties arising out of the coordinated activities • of many internal and external elements in an-organism- environment system. B&LdJ

  10. Mind in action (2): externalism • Externalism:the view that we have to explain mind by looking beyond the boundary of the skin (in contrast with internalism, or individualism). • Clark and Chalmers:extended mind example: Otto’s notebook intrinsic part of his memory, just like brain – • ‘extracranial cognition’. • vs. Adams and Aizawa real intrinsic cognitive processes occur exclusively inside the skin. B&LdJ

  11. Alternatives to the individualist mechanical view of cognition (1): embodiment • Dreyfus (phenomenology, Heidegger): • cognition is being-in-the world; • ‘what computers can’t do’: embodiment • rather than formal symbol manipulation; • cognition is know-how, not knowing-that. • Searle: ‘background’-knowledge we learn in activity; understanding language not in a mechanical way. • Lakoff and Johnson: Body in the mind, meta- • phorical structure of cognition. B&LdJ

  12. Alternatives to the individualist mechanical view of cognition (2): culture • Socially or culturally distributed cognition: cognitive operations which are taking place in systems larger than the individual. • Vygotsky: internalization: language and mental processes have social origin. • Wittgenstein: meanings not in the head, but in social exchange; ‘meaning is use’ in social context of language game; the brain does not think – only the whole person in context can think. • Hutchins: (‘cognition in the wild’), distributed cognition over different agents, supra-individual. B&LdJ

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