Welcome to Gaia! ::

Well, since I was sitting by him the only time he's gotten laid, and I personally know the other person and her sexual history, and neither one of them has any STDs, then he has no STDs. And he doesn't do it for a living.

Yeah, mods that lurk make me think they're out to get me. POGO, QUIT SINGING ALONG TO BLOODHOUND GANG'S SONG NEW v****a!

My six-page paper is due today at 2 P.M. I started two hours ago. I just finished my first page.

I'm shitting my pants right now.

Why aren't you working on your paper?
I was actually about to do some school work ranting as well.
I have a play that's due I don't know when. Sometime soon. I also have to read eight chapters. I haven't done any of this because I working on stuff for another class and going to work. Oi, I hate the end of the semester.

aww... poor JoVo... I'll help with that nasty paper... wait... I can't... *weeps*

This is my paper so far... because I want desperately to flood this page:

The Mind as a Computer

The architecture of the mind continues to be hotly debated. The mind is often compared to a number of different things in order to help explain its form: switchblades, sponges, cathedrals, the list goes on ad infinitum, limited only by the creativity of the researcher. The idea of the mind as a computer gained popularity after the arrival of the first digital computers in the 1940s (Boden, 198 cool . Since then, a number of leading researchers in the field of computational psychology have come up with varied ways of explaining in what ways the mind resembles a computer.

The computer is a remarkable innovation, and its capabilities have sparked the imagination of many people trying to uncover the secrets of the human mind. Still, there is very little in which computational psychologists agree, and Boden (198 cool lists three shared philosophical assumptions about what they are looking for when they draw up their hypotheses. In the first place, computational psychologists hold that every mental state is defined in terms of its causal role with regard to other mental states and observable behavior. In other words, every psychological phenomenon is "generated by some effective procedure, some precisely specifiable set of instructions defining the succession of mental states within the mind" (ibid., 5).

Second, "computational psychologists conceive of the mind as a representational system, and see psychology as the study of various computational processes whereby mental representations are constructed, organized, interpreted, and transformed" (Boden, 1988, 5). Finally, they view neuroscience in a very computational way. They would far rather ask what "the brain does that enables it to embody the mind" than "what it is in itself as a physical system" (ibid., 6). In general, computational psychologists believe that knowing "what" the brain looks like will be less significant to learning about the human mind than learning "how" it does what it does. This latter assumption is being contested today as more and more computational psychologists discuss whether or not the physiological architecture of the brain actually affect the "software" with which computational psychology generally concerns itself.

Despite the arguments within the field and the lack of agreement on some of the issues, there is still a general agreement between computational psychologists that the mind is modular and highly specialized. An example of this specialization was given by Noam Chomsky when he showed that language is modular and specialized. While Chomsky's goal was not intended as a computer model for the study of language, his format led to the creation of computer models that have helped researchers to understand the concept of language a great deal more fully than it had ever been understood before.

Four aspects of Chomsky's work led computational psychologists to consider it a suitable frame for a computer model useable for the study of language. First, like a computer language, Chomsky showed that language is a formally specifiable generative system. Second, Chomsky described language in terms of recursion, "in which a function is defined in terms of itself," at a time "when early computer models of problem-solving were showing that recursive procedures could be applied in practice to generate structures on distinct hierarchical levels" (Boden, 1988, 89). Third, Chomsky held that syntax was encapsulated, like a computer module, and "this could be used to justify a programme of research that promises some advance" (ibid., 90). Finally, Chomsky's work "alerted psychologists to the possibility of specifying the nature and order of the processes by which sentences are actually generated and/or understood" (ibid., 90).

Language first evolved to facilitate interaction between conspecifics. It allowed meaningful utterances to be made that could be communicated to others. But how can we argue that this vehicle for communication evolved as an encapsulated module? This is the subject of the next section.

Updating the Software of the Mind through Evolution

The innate modules that form the architecture of the human mind are genetically encoded, domain-specific, and universal (Samuels, 199 cool . They each act like small programs that deal with a very specific function within the human mind, and every human has them. Because they are genetically encoded, they must have evolved, but how does a computer program evolve inside of an organism? The argument for this is developed most effectively by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (Mithen, 1996).

Cosmides and Tooby, unlike the computational psychologists we have been discussing until now, consider themselves evolutionary psychologists. They argue that the modules of the human mind each evolved under the selective pressures that our ancestors faced in the hunter-gatherer societies of the Pleistocene. The pressures indicated are called adaptive problems by Cosmides and Tooby, that is, "an evolutionary recurrent problem whose solution promoted reproduction, however long or indirect the chain by which it did so" (Samuels, 1998, 584). In their own words:



Because of its superior efficiency at solving adaptive problems, nature will select for domain-specific modules in order to promote reproductive success.

Adaptive problems may have occurred in greater frequency during the Pleistocene Epoch. For instance, let us assume that there was a great draught in the place where a particular hominid social group had been living. The draught would have killed a great many animals and a large amount of the plant life population, seriously decreasing the amount of available food for the social group's consumption. Now, let us assume that one primate had developed a technical module that allowed it to use a rock as a tool to smash open a coconut. This primate would be the only one capable of doing so, presumably, and it would have plenty of food so long as the coconuts survived the draught. When the primate returned to the social group's resting place, it may share its coconut-smashing ability with those it is fond of. Because of its larger potential to survive the draught, and because of its sudden ability to help save other, self-interested conspecifics, its rank in the group may rise, giving the primate a larger selection of females to choose from for a mate. Its reproductive success would have increased, and it would be most likely to pass on its genetic code. Thus, nature would have selected for the technical module.

Taking on Chomsky's language module, we can observe how a specific module might have evolved instead of a more general-purpose mechanism. Language originally developed for the purpose of communication among conspecific. Non-human primates live in close communities and must be able to communicate with each other in meaningful ways in order to survive as a social group. To accomplish this task, non-human primates employ the task of grooming. As Robin Dunbar has argued, primates began to join together in larger groups as they continued to evolve. Eventually, group size among primates may have become such that grooming would have been more and more ineffective in enabling communication among conspecifics.

In order to resolve this adaptive problem, a primate may have begun to grunt at enemies and make soft utterances at friends. The former may have been used in order to frighten the enemy and force him to back away. The latter may have been used because it promoted sentiments of kindness and affection toward the primate that first began to make these noises. Because of this primate's new ability to communicate with its conspecifics, it may have become more reproductively successful among its social group, and it may have passed on its genetic code. After several generations, many of the primates in the group might be using grunts and soft noises in order to communicate. A new utterance module would have developed. Over time, adaptive problems may have required this module to become more complex, and it would have continued to evolve until it should become what it looks like today.

Computational Creativity



Mithen (1996) attempts to refute the idea of the computational, modular mind by alluding to computers' inability to be creative. He alludes to his experiences with his own children, which have led him to believe that computers would not react in the same way. In order to counter Mithen's argument, I will employ the assistance of Margaret Boden. In her book, The Creative Mind (1991), Boden attempts to bridge the gap between creativity and the natural sciences, and she uses computational psychology to do it. Boden argues that the mistaken assumption that computers lack creative powers carries with it one of three assumptions, and it can be challenged in three ways.

The first assumption is the idea that computers are completely irrelevant to human creativity and cannot help us to understand it. Boden (1991) responds by saying that "it is computational concepts and theories, not computers as such, which are crucial for psychology" (ibid., 266-267).



For example, a computer program may be created that mimics and performs a well-known musical composition by, say, Mozart. The computer may not have created the composition from scratch, but its ability to perform it gives us a clue as to how a human may be able to do the same.

That's it for now. I still need another page and a half. I have fifteen minutes. God, this is shoddy work. I swear I usually write better than this.

JoVo: Good luck! Really!

HOORAY!