misc. notes

from tonight's e-mail to Sandy:
"quick update on my progress: I've found the secret cache of papers that talk about exactly what I'm looking for. I haven't grabbed them all from the library yet, but have been reading the ones available on-line. So it looks like a few people have already done exactly the sort of critique of modularity using developmental evidence that I was thinking of doing. On the one hand, it's slightly annoying to have been scooped once again. On the other hand, it must be a good idea if other people are doing it. On the third hand, maybe they didn't do a good job of it, and I'll be able to find some ways of saying something new. It seems like it's a fairly small set of papers that are on this topic, so it's likely that there is more to be said."

the Elman paper mentioned below seems to be the main thing I need to find. The Samuels paper that led me there was an assigned reading for Edouard's class. The bibliography wasn't included in what we got, but I've asked him to bring the book in tomorrow, so that I can follow up on the references. then I'll head to the library and see of I can find them. I already looked around on-line for a bunch of them, but without the paper names, it was rough going, although i found some different papers that might be useful. Stupidly, I didn't grab their bibliographic info from JStor, so I'll have to type it all up later.

I've got some notes written up from the Samuels paper in my notebook that i'll transfer here later. now some notes on the papers i've been looking through...

P.S. Churchland & T.J. Sejnowski paper (the wrong one):
Neural Representation and Neural Computation
Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 4, Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind (1990), 343-382
about the metaphor of mind-brain as computer, comparing symbolist and connectionist models.
thought as a language-like or logic-like procedures = beliefs and desires as propositions = folk psychology
for many well-known reasons (to anyone versed in cog sci), this view has major problems
the paper is about mental representation, so isn't really relevant. i think they have another one that's more about modules.


S.R. Quartz paper:
Toward a Developmental...
the main point: why evolutionary psychology should pay attention to development.
- human cognitive architecture as a hierarchically organized control structure, where this hierarchical organization is evident both evolutionarily and developmentally
Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994 -> another modularist target
developmental cognitive neuroscience (Elman et al., 1996; Johnson, 1997; Quartz, 1999)
- human development is both more protracted and more sensitive to environmental signals than nativist
cognitive psychology supposed
- discovery of homeobox genes and their striking conservation (reviewed in Hirth & Reichert, 1999; Reichert
& Simeone, 1999). Given the enormous differences in neuroanatomy between vertebrates and
invertebrates, their brains were long thought to be unrelated with little obvious homology. However, at a
deeper, molecular level they are remarkably similar in that homologous regulatory genes have been
identified that control regionalization, patterning, and identity in embryonic brain development.
Raff 2000 for review of evo-devo
- although cortex size (relative and absolute) varies widely across mammals, its organization into 6 horizontal levels is the same across species. differences in behaviour and cognition relate to underlying differences in the interconnectedness between layers.
- for structural brain modules to develop, neurogenesis must be dissociable between different structures -> prediction that different species might have brain structures of different relative sizes. results say that over 131 species studied, brain structure sized are highly correlated, with the exception of the olfactory bulb. -> highly conserved homeotic starting point for all mammal brains. the order of neurogenesis is also highly conserved across species.
...
more later

Additions to Bibliography

Clark, A. (1989). Microfunctionalism: Connectionism and the Scientific Explanation of Mental States. In Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Parallel Distributed Processing. MIT Press.

Eliasmith, C. (2003). Moving Beyond Metaphors:Understanding the Mind for What it is. Journal of Philosophy. C(10):493-520.

Quartz, S.R. (2001). Toward a Developmental Evolutionary Psychology: Genes, Development, and the Evolution of the Human Cognitive Architecture. In Evolutionary Psychology: Alternative approaches, Scher, S. and M. Rauscher (Eds). Kluwer.

Samuels, R. (2000). Massively modular minds: Evolutionary psychology and cognitive architecture. In Evolution and the Human Mind, Carruthers, P. (Ed). Cambridge University Press.

and there are a bunch from the Samuels paper that I should try to find the bibliography for:
Churchland, Sejnowski 1992
Quartz, Sejnowski 1994
Samuels 1998b
Elman et al 1996 (against domain-specific circuitry)
Segal 1996 (distributed brain structures) Theories of Theories of Mind, Carruthers and Smith Eds
Scholl 1997 (how modular is the brain?)
Leslie, Firth 1988 (autism, williams syndrome) British Journal of Developmental Psychology 6

cited by Elman:
O’Leary 1993
O’Leary, Stanfield 1989
Friedlander, Martin,... 1991
Killackey... 1994
Frost 1982, 1990
Pallas, Sur 1993
Muller 1997 (transplant sites in devo)
Gilbert 1994 (“)

fodor's modules

from my recent report handout:

Fodor is vague, but can perhaps be pinned down to some general claims:
He doesn’t get much more specific than saying that modules are “input systems”.
Says they’re not to be thought of as touch, smell, sight, hearing, taste, plus language. Instead something “more in the spirit of” Gall’s phrenology.
He will commit to saying...
- they’re domain specific,
- their operation is mandatory,
- their representations are mostly inaccessible to central systems,
- they’re fast,
- they’re informationally encapsulated,
- they have shallow outputs,
- they’re associated with fixed neural architecture,
- they exhibit characteristic breakdown patterns.
All of this seems like it’s difficult to argue with, partly because it’s vague, partly because it seems like it must be true to some degree, based on computational efficiency, basic knowledge of brain anatomy, and intuition/experience...

The more interesting part is where he talks about central systems. Basically it’s the familiar argument that if all this other stuff is encapsulated, there must be domain-general capacities (a little man) that pull it all together. These central systems, he says, are non-modular.
- Belief fixation is a process of “rational nondemonstrative inference”.
- Central processes are “Quinean/isotropic”.
This seems to mean that a central process like belief fixation takes into account all other beliefs and their global properties, but we don’t understand how it works. Somehow it gets around issues like the Frame Problem. The way this is accomplished is through unstable, instantaneous connectivity, and diffuse, changing neural connections.

Conclusion:
- perception and language are encapsulated, and have fixed neural architecture.
- “thought” is all-knowing, connected to everything, and has flexible architecture.
So if I want to argue against this idea, I just have to show that thought and perception/language don’t have such different neural architecture, and/or there is no rational all-knowing central processing in this sense.

more on modules:
In section III.6, which is ostensibly about how input analysers have 'shallow' outputs, he spends a long time talking about language and categorization and whether context matters. Contextual influences on language understanding would constitute breaches in informational encapsulation. he gives some of the (now) typical examples about how we make observations and comments like "there's a dog" or "there's a chair" much more often than ones like "there's a miniature poodle" or "there's a piece of furniture" (so at a meduim level of abstraction rather than more specific or more general). he links this to the idea that in communication we have to balance how informative our utterances are with how much effort it takes to generate them. he makes the claim that modularity is somehow tied in with this sort of preference of medium-abstraction contexts. like they're the ones that require the least amount of contextual information and can be done most quickly. the long and the short of it is that he thinks that this sort of quick understanding/recognition of categories gets at what kinds of modules there are, and that it's done without any top-down information.

The obvious objection to this, without even getting into any facts about neurophysiology or development, is that in different contexts, the categories that are recognized quickly and automatically shift. like when at a dog show, a judge would automatically identify dogs by breed, while in his/her normal day to day life, he/she probably would make observations more on the dog level. or a chess player automatically seeing a board in terms of the moves rather than it just being a chess board, depending on if the arrangement is one that makes sense in a game context. Maybe Fodor could defend his theory saying that for different people, like experts or not, the most salient categories would be different in different people, but stay the same within each individual. I don't think that's true. Any kind of priming experiment would suggest otherwise.

autism and scientology

i talked a bit with jackie last week about my project and she mentioned a couple of guys who i should look up:
Steve Quartz - a paper on modularity and neuroscience he gave at some Pitt Biology or Centre for Philosophy of Science conference...
Jesse Prince - something about folk psychology experiments...

I looked up Steve Quartz, but haven't found any papers on-line yet. I ordered his book. it was $2 used. I've also downloaded a few papers that he's using for a course he's teaching (or already taught) on neurophilosophy. now i'm checking out some of the readins from a course he (or his lab?) is teaching on autism. maybe autism would fit into this project somehow. perhaps in a similar way to Williams Syndrome, it's explained as a developmental disorder where a "mental module" is missing. I hadn't thought about connecting this project to autism, but since it is a favourite topic of mine, that might work out well. I guess I was conceiving of the neuro-development work I'd be getting into as being more fine-grained. but looking at more coarse grained problems would probably work a lot better if i'm starting from Fodor, since his modularity of mind theory is at a high level. If I get too into the nitty gritty, there would be a big gulf between what I'm supposed to be critiquing and the evidence I'm looking at. I also ordered a cheap used book about synaptic connections and how they create/are/whatever our "selves" or our sense of self or something. unrelated to this project, but it would be good to read that sort of palatable science book about neurochemistry before i dive into serious course work on those topics (probably next semester).

all i've found so far about Jesse Prince is that someone with that name used to be the 2nd in command of the church of scientology. hopefully the wrong guy.

ok. i found the Quartz paper Jackie was talking about. her website came up in my google search and the name of the paper was in there.

now to do some reading.