Phil_Goetz6 comments on The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary - Less Wrong

22 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 February 2009 04:44PM

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Comment author: Phil_Goetz6 13 February 2009 11:44:16PM 0 points [-]

"I think it really is important to use different words that draw a hard boundary between the evolutionary computation and the cognitive computation."

Does this boundary even exist? It's a distinction we can make, for purposes of discussion; but not a hard boundary we can draw. You can find examples that fall clearly into one category (reflex) or another (addition), but you can also find examples that don't. This is just the sort of thing I was talking about in my post on false false dichotomies. It's a dichotomy that we can sometimes use for discussion, but not a true in-the-world binary distinction.

Eliezer responds yes: "Anna, you're talking about a messiness of the human system, not a difficulty in drawing hard distinctions between human-style messiness and evolutionary-style messiness."

I can't figure out what that's supposed to mean. I think it means Eliezer didn't understand what she said. The "messiness" is that you can't draw that hard distinction.

The entire discussion is cast in terms that imply Eliezer thinks evolutionary psychology deals with issues of conscious vs. subconscious motivations. AFAIK it sidesteps the issue whenever possible. Psychologists don't want to ask whether behavior comes from conscious or subconscious motivations. They want to observe behavior, record it, and explain it. Not trying to slice it up into conscious vs. subconscious pieces is the good part of behaviorism.