Category: Uncategorized

I don’t know.

Some notes to myself.

1. Cultural Analogs to Genes and Phenotypes

I’ve spent a fair amount of time off and on over the last two decades hacking away at identifying cultural analogues to biological genes and phenotypes. In the past few years that effort has taken the form of an examination of Dan Dennett. I more or less like the current conceptual configuration, where I’ve got Cultural Beings as an analog to phenotypes and coordinators as analogs to genes. As far as I can tell – and I AM biased, of course, it’s the best such scheme going.

And it just lays there. So what? I don’t see that it allows me to explain anything that can’t otherwise be explained. Nor does it have obvious empirical consequences that one could test in obvious ways. It seems to me mostly a formal exercise at this point. In that it is not different from any version of memetics nor from Sperber’s cultural attractor theory. These are all formal exercises with little explanatory value that I can see.

That’s got to change. But how? I note that dealing with words as evolutionary objects seems somewhat different from treating literary works (or musical works and performances, works of visual art, etc.) as evolutionary objects.

Issues: Design, Human Communication

2. Cultural Direction

Perhaps the most interesting work I’ve done in the past year as been my work on Matt Jockers’ Macroanalysis and, just recently, on Underwood and Sellers’ paper on 19th century poetry. In the case of Jockers’ work on the novel, he’d done a study of influence which I’ve reconceptualized as a demonstration that the literary system as a direction. In the case of Underwood and Sellers, they’ve found themselves looking at directionality, but they hadn’t been looking for it. Their problem was to ward of the conceptual ‘threat’ of Whig historicism; they want to see if they can accept the directionality but not commit themselves to Whiggishness, and I’ve spent some time arguing that they need not worry.

What excites me is that two independent studies have come up with what looks like demonstrations of historical direction. I take this as an indication of the causal structure of the underlying historical process, which encompasses thousands upon thousands of people interaction with and through thousands of texts over the course of a century. What shows up in the texts can be thought of as a manifestation of Geist and so these studies are about the apparent direction of Geist. Continue reading “Where I’m at on cultural evolution, some quick remarks”

The next Evolution of Language Conference will take place in New Orleans on March 21 -24, 2016.  The call for papers is now open.

The deadline for submissions is September 4th.  See the call for papers for more details.

This year there are some notable changes, including double blind reviewing, electronic proceedings and the possibility of adding supplementary materials.

I’m looking forwards to it already!

BBC radio 4 have a new radio programme about songbirds and human language including contributions from Simon Fisher, Katie Slocombe and Johan Bolhuis, among others.

You can listen here:

http://bbc.in/1KAO2Cq

And here’s the synopsis:

Could birdsong tell us something about the evolution of human language? Language is arguably the single thing that most defines what it is to be human and unique as a species. But its origins – and its apparent sudden emergence around a hundred thousand years ago – remains mysterious and perplexing to researchers. But could something called vocal learning provide a vital clue as to how language might have evolved? The ability to learn and imitate sounds – vocal learning – is something that humans share with only a few other species, most notably, songbirds. Charles Darwin noticed this similarity as far back as 1871 in the Descent of Man and in the last couple of decades, research has uncovered a whole host of similarities in the way humans and songbirds perceive and process speech and song. But just how useful are animal models of vocal communication in understanding how human language might have evolved? Why is it that there seem to be parallels with songbirds but little evidence that our closest primate relatives, chimps and bonobos, share at least some of our linguistic abilities?

And he more or less knows it; but he wants to have his cake and eat it too. It’s a little late in the game to be learning new tricks.

I don’t know just when people started casually talking about the brain as a computer and the mind as software, but it’s been going on for a long time. But it’s one thing to use such language in casual conversation. It’s something else to take it as a serious way of investigating mind and brain. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when computers and digital computing were still new and the territory – both computers and the brain – relatively unexplored, one could reasonably proceed on the assumption that brains are digital computers. But an opposed assumption – that brains cannot possibly be computers – was also plausible.

The second assumption strikes me as being beside the point for those of us who find computational ideas essential to thinking about the mind, for we can proceed without the somewhat stronger assumption that the mind/brain is just a digital computer. It seems to me that the sell-by date on that one is now past.

The major problem is that living neural tissue is quite different from silicon and metal. Silicon and metal passively take on the impress of purposes and processes humans program into them. Neural tissue is a bit trickier. As for Dennett, no one championed the computational mind more vigorously than he did, but now he’s trying to rethink his views, and that’s interesting to watch.

The Living Brain

In 2014 Tecumseh Fitch published an article in which he laid out a computational framework for “cognitive biology” [1]. In that article he pointed out why the software/hardware distinction doesn’t really work for brains (p. 314):

Neurons are living cells – complex self-modifying arrangements of living matter – while silicon transistors are etched and fixed. This means that applying the “software/hardware” distinction to the nervous system is misleading. The fact that neurons change their form, and that such change is at the heart of learning and plasticity, makes the term “neural hardware” particularly inappropriate. The mind is not a program running on the hardware of the brain. The mind is constituted by the ever-changing living tissue of the brain, made up of a class of complex cells, each one different in ways that matter, and that are specialized to process information.

Yes, though I’m just a little antsy about that last phrase – “specialized to process information” – as it suggests that these cells “process” information in the way that clerks process paperwork: moving it around, stamping it, denying it, approving it, amending it, and so forth. But we’ll leave that alone.

One consequence of the fact that the nervous system is made of living tissue is that it is very difficult to undo what has been learned into the detailed micro-structure of this tissue. It’s easy to wipe a hunk of code or data from a digital computer without damaging the hardware, but it’s almost impossible to do the something like that with a mind/brain. How do you remove a person’s knowledge of Chinese history, or their ability to speak Basque, and nothing else, and do so without physical harm? It’s impossible. Continue reading “Dennet’s WRONG: the Mind is NOT Software for the Brain”

At this year’s International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Glasgow, there is a special interest satellite meeting on the evolution of phonetic capabilities.

Title: The Evolution of Phonetic Capabilities: Causes, Constraints and Consequences

Date: Wednesday 12^th August 2015

Time: 13.30 – 18.30

Place: Glasgow SECC, Boisdale 1

Registration is £10, and can be completed through the ICPhS registration page under “Registration only with no accommodation”.

If you would like to register only for this meeting, without registering for the main ICPhS conference, you can do so by emailing contact@icphs2015.info

For any other queries, contact hannah@ai.vub.ac.be

About:

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in research in the evolution of language and speech. New techniques in computational and mathematical modelling, experimental paradigms, brain and vocal tract imaging, corpus analysis and animal studies, as well as new archeological evidence, have allowed us to address questions relevant to the evolution of our phonetic capabilities. The workshop will focus on recent work addressing the emergence of our phonetic capabilities, with a special focus on the interaction between biological and cultural evolution.

Program:

The Evolution of Phonetic Capabilities: Causes, Constraints and Consequences Wednesday 12th August – Glasgow SECC, Boisdale 1
13.50 – 14.00	Welcome
14.00-14.20	Introduction	Hannah Little
14.20 – 14.50	Laryngeal Articulatory Function and Speech Origins	John H. Esling, Allison Benner & Scott R. Moisik
14.50 – 15.20	Anatomical biasing and clicks: Preliminary biomechanical modeling	Scott R. Moisik & Dan Dediu
15.20 – 15.50	Exploring potential climate effects on the evolution of human sound systems	Seán G. Roberts, Caleb Everett & Damián Blasi
15.50 – 16.20	Coffee Break
16.20 – 16.50	General purpose cognitive processing constraints and phonotactic properties of the vocabulary	Padraic Monaghan & Willem H. Zuidema
16.50 – 17.20	Simulating the interaction of functional pressure, redundancy and category variation in phonetic systems	Bodo Winter & Andy Wedel
17.20 – 17.50	Universality in Cultural Transmission	Bill Thompson
17.50 – 18.30	Discussion Panel	Chaired by Bart de Boer

 

This coming week I’ll be at the Causality in the Language Sciences conference.  One of the topics of discussion will be how to integrate theories of causality into linguistic work.  Bayesian Causal Graphs are a core approach to causality, and seem like a useful framework for thinking about linguistic problems.  However, it’s not entirely clear whether all questions in linguistics can be represented using causal graphs.  In this post, I’ll discuss some possible uses of Bayesian Causal Graphs, and test the fit of some actual data to some causal structures.  (and please forgive my basic understanding of causality theory!)

Causal graphs are composed of states connected by edges.  A change or activation of a state causes a change in another.  States and causes can be categorical and absolute, or statistical and even complex in their relations.  Causal graphs are often introduced with the following kind of structure, taken from Pearl’s seminal book on Causality.  The season causes it to rain (in winter) and causes the sprinkler to come on (in summer).  Both the sprinkler being on and rain independently cause the grass to be wet.  If the grass is wet, the grass becomes slippery:

This example is easy to understand because each state is binary and (in this simple world) each causal effect is immediate and direct.  However, finding a similar example for linguistics is tricky.  Linguists may simply not agree on what the nodes are or what the edges represent.

Continue reading “Causality in linguistics: Nodes and edges in causal graphs”

A: Because it is daft.

Continue reading “Q: Why is the Dawkins Meme Idea so Popular?”