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Eugine_Nier comments on Evolutionary psychology: evolving three eyed monsters - Less Wrong
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I think a better analogy is to think of the brain as a computer that comes with an operating system and some programs pre-installed. It's possible to instal new programs, and possible although much harder to patch the operating system.
That could work, though i'm very wary of the software analogies. The software in general makes extremely poor analogy to software in form of learning algorithms like the neural networks.
The way I see it, there are certain cognitive modules - a small number of them, well identified - and instincts, emotions, reflexes. Parameters of those can be adjusted by evolution. The evolution can also adjust network properties, perhaps even with some specificity. At same time, evolution is not substantially better at creating specialized modules than at other morphology, and the pleistocene evolution to our psyche is comparable in extent to pleistocene evolution to our bodies - we could up or down regulate the anger, but we did not evolve new emotions, or new hard wired things to be angry about, or new hard-wired cognitive fallacies.
And we definitely shouldn't evoke evolution as explanation for everything, as per "Given the enormous number of adaptive problems our Pleistocene ancestors faced, Tooby and Cosmides estimate that the human mind consists of "hundreds or thousands" of such evolved modules (1995, p. 1189). Thus inspired, Evolutionary Psychologists postulate evolved modules for incest avoidance, sexual attraction, mate choice, jealousy, mate retention, allocation of parental resources, kin relations, alliance formation, aggressive threat, danger avoidance, food preferences, habitat choice, and so on for all manner of complex cognitive and behavioral functions (Tooby & Cosmides 1992, p. 110)."
(quoting from this review: http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/ep.htm )
Could you taboo the phrase "cognitive module".
When you start tabooing a phrase used by the argument you are arguing against, and rewording said argument, if that is at all effective for clarifying the situation you get accused of making strawmans. It'd be wonderful if I could taboo the word 'module' and then see what evolutionary psychologists tell in response.
But okay, i'll do that:
The gist of the evo-psych that I disagree with - and I don't even disagree with all of the evo-psych - is that the areas of neocortex are highly specialized, into hundreds, maybe thousands different patches that perform substantially different function, operating using domain specific innate knowledge that has evolved (and comes from DNA) to perform the function. The patches somehow well integrate together, albeit it is not made clear how.
There is a substantial disagreement among evolutionary psychologists as to number of, and nature of, the modules, sorry, specialized patches of the neocortex. In so much as there's such disagreement, the theories that propose smaller number of simpler adaptations should be strongly favoured because of the prior that evolution is less likely to produce more complex adaptations.
If there is a fact that gazelle sees backwards (from observed behaviour), the eyes being on the sides should be very strongly favoured over evolution of an extra eye on the back.
All I'm claiming is that we have built in biases (in the sense of inductive bias not cognitive bias) about
and that these biases are the result of evolution.
Maybe, if that had time to evolve. It is pretty ridiculous to expect this to evolve really quickly though.
Practical incest avoidance can evolve long before pleistocene, and work by smell; the jealousy can also be activated by penis detecting semen in the vagina (and inflaming by immune response, provoking much anger, or simply sending an unambiguous signal to the mind to act in jealous manner if it is a loved one). It's not a good sign if one finds that only the solutions which are hard to separate from culture do evolve.
edit: that is not to say one should search under the spotlight, but if you see a key-shape outside the spotlight there's far greater chance it is an error of visual system.
Incest avoidance probably uses imprinting.
But things like sexual jealousy use a similar mechanism that makes us feel sad if we find some we cared about died regardless of how we found out about it, and quite frankly possibly the same mechanism that causes us to believe Y after thinking about X->Y and X regardless of how we came to believe X->Y or X.
Yes, but wouldn't it be useful to have an effective, straightforward detector, to complement any detection by deductive methods of reasoning? (ala Sherlock Holmes finds that the wife is cheating at him (if he had one ofc)).
To be honest I am really dubious that DNA can code for the responses to products of high level deductive reasoning. It can code for overall proneness to depression, and proneness to anger. The deductive skills are learnt, why won't be the response learnt as well?
I'm not saying other methods don't exist, just describing what I believe to be the one most often used.
Then how come people are much more likely to get depressed in response to certain high level stimuli (e.g., loosing a job) than others (e.g., getting a promotion)?
It's impossible to have a learning system without inductive biases. Thus our initial inductive biases must be genetic. So why is it unreasonable to suppose that they've been adapted to some ancestral environment?
Because the learned meaning of 'losing a job' and 'getting a promotion' includes learned reference to the systems that should be activated (feel good / feel bad).
edit: here. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3812538?uid=3738480&uid=2&uid=4&sid=47698770891867
Let's pick example towards which we are neutral but majority of the world isn't: the future wife not being a virgin. Some cultures outright kill for that. edit: and another example: no underage sex, which we feel ultra strongly about but many other cultures (especially the ones that kill for not being a virgin) couldn't care less. edit: and to top that off, there's participation in killing of your own children for this reproductive 'offence', in some cultures. Note that it is not some infanticide by a male. That's destruction of a descendant on which massive amount of resources have already been spent.