This study just appeared in my inbox:

“For many people, there’s an automatic assumption that the Internet is bad. This is one of the first studies to show that there’s a psychological benefit of Facebook,” Hancock said.

In the study, 63 Cornell students were left alone in the university’s Social Media Lab; they were seated either at computers that showed their Facebook profiles or at computers that were turned off. Some of the off computers had mirror propped against the screen; others had no mirror.

Those on Facebook were allowed to spend three minutes on the page, exploring only their own profiles and associated tabs. They were then given a questionnaire designed to measure their self-esteem.

Those in the mirror and control groups were given the same questionnaire. While their reports showed no elevation in self-esteem, those who had used Facebook gave much more positive feedback about themselves. Those who had edited their Facebook profiles during the exercise had the highest self-esteem.

Interesting stuff. My first thought was to post it on Facebook, of course. Rather than doing that, however, I started thinking about the effect Facebook has on my life. I quickly decided that I’m probably a borderline/full-blown Facebook addict.  I spend an inordinate amount of time on the site, often at the expense of other work I could be doing. If I see something funny or interesting on the web my first thought is to post it on Facebook. When there’s a lull in conversation I get out my iPhone and check it (in fact I have been known to do this mid-conversation which is pretty rude of me). I use Facebook as my main source for news stories, despite the fact that I’m quite clearly missing out on a lot of stuff because of this; I used to use my iGoogle homepage (with its varied and comprehensive stock of RSS feeds) everyday for this but I’ve recently just focussed on Facebook.  In fact a couple of weeks ago I asked my girlfriend to change my password so I couldn’t go on it for an evening when I had some serious work to get done. It was an odd experience. Part of me kept getting frustrated that I couldn’t check Facebook, but another part of me was really glad… it felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I was the most productive academically that I’ve been in quite some time. As soon as I’d finished the essay, however, I was straight back on Facebook.

This is all most likely caused because Facebook is so good at elevating self-esteem. It is an effortless and simple way to get a quick self-esteem fix. As the article says, “This is probably because Facebook allows them to put their best face forward, says Jeffrey Hancock, associate professor of communication; users can choose what they reveal about themselves and filter anything that might reflect badly”. This removes much of what makes actual face-to-face social interaction (you know, the kind they used to have in the old days) a bit tricky. The complexities of social interaction are well documented and its magnanimous importance for humans is well known; people who experience developmental difficulties comprehending social interaction (i.e. those on the autistic spectrum) are effectively severely disabled. Those who are hypersensitive to social stimuli are more likely to develop social anxiety disorder (as I mention in my post “Mental illness or cognitive style?”) which can be equally as crippling as autism (my use of the term “disorder” may seem hypocritical given what I argued for in said post – I use it merely out of convenience, which is how those terms should always be used, not as to reflect an actually existing “condition”). Facebook allows us to get our social kicks without so many of the difficulties navigating things such as body language and linguistic intonation. You don’t have to think on your feet – you can spend as long as you want composing a reply. If you want to lie to someone you can do it with ease. Your eyes or body language will never betray you. You can put up pictures that show only your good side. This is what boost our self-esteem. Everyone thinks we’re really attractive, witty, and astute, because they never have to see us in the morning or when we’re feeling angry, tired or upset.

But this is really bad, surely? What we put on Facebook may reflect our personalities, yes (as this study shows) but they don’t reflect the entirety of our personality – just a positive slice (as that study shows, actual levels of neuroticism do not correlate with Facebook-neuroticism). This can’t be good. It means that those of us who spend a lot of time on Facebook will be getting a warped view of our “friends”, and they will be getting a warped view of us. Speaking from my own experience I know that there are some people who I can have great discussions with on Facebook but who I find difficult to talk to face-to-face. This is likely because we can filter out our negative traits on Facebook but cannot do so as easily in real life, thus making actual conversation a bit more difficult to navigate.

Personally, I think the reason I gain such a boost from Facebook is that I have occasional issues with social anxiety yet at the same time I am actually quite extroverted at times. The internet is a haven for the social anxious because the cues for the anxiety (usually subtle negative social cues, e.g. a flash of negative emotion in the eyes or a tone of voice that implies a lack of interest in what you are saying) aren’t present online. I can chat with people over Facebook with ease, but when I actually speak to them I can get anxious and say things that aren’t quite so eloquent. However, I still need to get my regular social fix to placate the extrovert inside me. A reliance on Facebook for social interaction was pretty much bound to happen.

And yes, I’m well aware of how ironic it is for me to post this on Facebook. But this is actually one of the true benefits of Facebook: it is a great promotional tool. Furthermore, Facebook events are actually very personally useful to me. Without them I wouldn’t hear about a large chunk of the gigs/parties/plays/birthdays/etc. that I would be interested in knowing about. And despite my reliance on it, I have heard about many genuinely fascinating things and had many interesting discussions because of it. Spontaneous outings have happened because of a comment made on someone’s status. A particularly interesting link has sparked off large debate during face-to-face social interaction.

All these things have enriched my life. Overreliance, however, has quite clearly damaged it. As the site I linked to earlier about Facebook addiction mentions, however, “While a cocaine addict can put down his drug and an alcoholic his drink, you can’t preach abstinence to a student society that functions on Internet usage. What you can do is practice control”. Whilst this statement seems to make light of cocaine and alcohol addiction somewhat (after all, in a society where alcohol is so ingrained in all social events it’s not just a case of putting down the drink) it does carry a grain of truth: Facebook is truly ingrained in our society and it makes no sense to just “quit”. It’s all about control. Unfortunately, control is something I find extremely hard to exercise…

Ah well. Back to Facebook.

P.S. I checked Facebook 6 times whilst writing this.

Early study

I chose to study philosophy at A-level on what was basically a whim – I knew little about the subject beyond vaguely remembered names like Plato and Kant and I had grown up in a cultural environment where philosophy was… well, not quite treated with disdain, but seen as a little bit pointless. My other three subjects, psychology, maths and English language, were in my mind way more useful and worthy of study. Philosophy was just a mildly intriguing subject that sounded more interesting than geography or chemistry, which I – after 5 years of study – was well and truly sick of. Little did I know that I’d still be studying it 9 years later.

Right from the start, philosophy had a completely unprecedented effect on my life that no other subject has come close to. I began asking myself questions I had never asked myself before… questions I never even realised had existed. I distinctly remember those initial moments of seriously considering the arguments for the existence of god for the first time, and how it seemed that my world had suddenly become brighter, fuller and full of purpose. There were these huge questions out there that I had never even thought about! Worst of all, there were billions of people who’d never thought about these questions either! My life’s purpose became quite clear: 1) find the answers to these amazing questions and 2) teach these questions to everyone who would listen.

Philosophy of religion made me question how I felt about religion for the first time in my life. I’d been brought up Christian. I had a bible, went to Sunday School (well… I went once), attended a CofE primary school, regularly prayed and sang hymns, went to a Christian youth group… but throughout all of this I’d never once seriously thought about any of it. It was just there, you know? I was more interested in playing my guitar and my N64. Philosophy made me look deep into myself and think about the reasons for all of this. I quickly realised that I was an atheist. The idea of god seemed totally nonsensical to me. All the arguments for god’s existence were weak, and the evidence against god’s existence was very strong. A militant Dawkins-esque atheism was born inside me. I just could not understand how anyone could possibly think these arguments were any good, or how anyone couldn’t see that the problem of evil was devastating to the Christian conception of god. I went on the rampage. I even made a Christian girl cry and run out of the classroom, an act I am pretty ashamed of these days.

As you can probably guess my early study of ethics lead to something similar. How can people not see that abortion is always acceptable? What is wrong with people who believe in the death penalty? How can you eat the meat of an innocent murdered creature? (Yes, I became a vegetarian after reading Singer’s “All Animals are Equal”). I was so certain that these were the right answers. I was also certain that a lifetime of philosophical study was important to justify them against their critics. Despite the fact I was very good at psychology and that my psychology teacher (and my parents) recommended I study it at university, I chose to study philosophy instead. Looking back on it now I can see that I might have made the wrong choice. Here’s why.

University

Initially, my fervent passion for the subject remained intact. First year philosophy is basically no different from A-level philosophy, so I was re-treading ground. I have fond memories of arguing passionately with friends in halls about vegetarianism and Marxism, arguments which usually consisted of me being a bit of a smart-arse and second guessing every criticism they would level at my stance. I think I annoyed quite a few people, but I didn’t particularly care. I was so convinced I was right.

Something changed in second year. The philosophy became more advanced. We started exploring the issues in greater detail and the arguments became more sophisticated. The more I studied the more I could see the obvious cracks in my previously solid arguments. Worst of all I began to be able to see why people might have argued for the opposing views in the first place. The arguments for the opposition had always seemed so obviously wrong. Now they were more complex and cleverly avoided any obvious criticisms levelled at them. This gradual realisation was devastating. I have a very distinct memory of reading an essay about value pluralism that had been slotted into the backend a course on normative ethics and having a horrible eureka moment that shattered the foundations of my philosophical drive: different ethical intuitions are based on different fundamental values that are in conflict with each other but yet – crucially – are equally correct. If they were all equally correct then it was impossible to choose between them, and so the surface moral intuitions were all equally correct and impossible to choose between. For a while I thought it might be possible to maintain a pluralism of ethical beliefs within myself, trying my best not to see this as a problem (I justified it with the knowledge that everyone displays a kind of moral pluralism; no one’s moral intuitions are streamlined and devoid of contradictions. Some circumstances feel like they call for a utilitarian response, some a Kantian. This is just life).

Unfortunately if one has a good reason to stop believing in there being one right way of doing things then it seems kind of pointless trying to argue for one right way of doing things. All my convictions – vegetarianism, straight edge, Marxism, etc. – came crashing down one by one. I became a moral relativist. Value pluralism seemed attractive but ultimately felt lacking. If different moral stances are dependent on different yet equally correct foundational values then the moral stances themselves are all equally correct – there is no single objective right way to act. So why believe in one moral stance? What’s the point? They’re all equally correct anyway.

My lack of belief in an objective moral truth started to generalise across philosophical subject boundaries. All political positions seemed equally correct. After all, what justifies democracy? As a system, it strikes a balance between equality and freedom. It is seen as being more just that the alternatives. But what’s so good about equality? What’s so good about freedom? They have intrinsic qualities that people feel are attractive, but they are both clearly fundamental values which are equally correct. There’s value pluralism here too, and hence – in my eyes – political relativism.

This (coupled with the sudden end of a 3 ½ year relationship) caused me to go off-the-rails somewhat. When both of the most important things in your life desert you, it takes quite a strong person to bounce back, and it turned out I wasn’t that strong. I totally stopped caring about morals, politics, religion and philosophy in general. I behaved in a pretty horrible way and did some things I now regret. After a year or so of this I calmed down slightly (thanks to finally settling down with a new girlfriend) but my faith in philosophy was shattered. I scraped through to the end of my degree and graduated with a 2:1. Not bad for someone who really didn’t care about the subject anymore.

Post-grad

I thought I was done with philosophy for good. I worked a few jobs, paid the bills, wrote some songs, and generally had an ok time, but philosophy never once entered my consciousness. I rekindled my interest in intellectual pursuits, however, and realised a few things. It had become apparent to me that philosophy wasn’t going to answer the big questions in life. Why was that? Well, philosophers will never stop arguing. There is always a counter-argument to any philosophical stance. The problem comes from the method philosophers use to arrive at the truth: armchair theorising. Armchair theorising definitely has its place (in the initial stages of scientific theorising, for example), but it cannot be the sole method via which people attempt to arrive at the truth. For what can possibly count as a proof in an armchair discussion? What can a philosopher say that will convince other philosophers they have the final, absolute answer?

Just look at the history of philosophy: thousands of years after the founders of modern philosophy wrote their first works we are still arguing about whether they were right. Plato is still a major focus of modern philosophy. We have spent thousands of years essentially going round in circles, retreading the same ground with no obvious markers of progress. The history of science, however, is markedly different: modern scientists aren’t still discussing Aristotle’s medical theories, for example. They are an interesting historical curiosity, yes, but they are clearly and demonstrably wrong. This sort of progress just hasn’t happened in philosophy, and it probably never will.

After the realisation that the problems of philosophy will never be answered (and probably cannot be answered) my intellectual focus began to shift slightly. I became intrigued as to why people were even asking these questions in the first place. My interest in morality shifted from asking what was morally right to asking how and why people think certain things are morally right or wrong. My interest in religion shifted from asking whether god exists to asking why people think god exists and what possible function this (seemingly strange) belief could have. My interest in aesthetics shifted from asking what art is beautiful to asking why people think art is beautiful. These questions can be answered. They are scientific questions that call for the acquisition of data, coupled with careful critical discussion. The best way to answer these questions is, of course, through the study of psychology, the love of which I rekindled during this time. I also began reading books on evolutionary theory, and realised that so much about humanity and the world we inhabit (and all the questions of morality, religion and art I had begun to find fascinating) could be understood through an evolutionarily informed study of psychology. The important thing for me was that I could see markers of progress in this domain. I could see what counted as adequate supporting data for a theory and I could see how it was possible to answer some of the questions in the field.

I took an Open University course in psychology with the intention of taking a post-graduate psychology conversion course with the aim of pursuing a career in academic evolutionary psychology. Unfortunately, however, I discovered that much of contemporary evolutionary psychology is problematic (in fact I have devoted a substantial part of my thesis to this problem). The research programme is not fundamentally flawed, however – it is only the way that many current researchers in the field carry out their studies that is problematic. In time this will improve.

During this time I discovered the existence of experimental philosophy and the critique of philosophical method (http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/). This struck a massive chord with me – these were philosophers who obviously had the same problems I had with philosophy and who believed a much more meaningful direction for intellectual study lay with gathering data and conducting experiments. They also suggested a very plausible reason why armchair philosophical theorising was doomed to failure: the whole endeavour consists of manipulation of intuitions, and intuitions cannot be the basis for fact. Many experiments showed that intuitions to certain philosophical theories regarded as straightforwardly correct in the West (of which there are very few, e.g. the Gettier problem for justified true belief, which was widely regarded as a serious problem for the theory that knowledge = justified true belief: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem) actually varied substantially across the world. This furthered my belief that it is impossible to give anything resembling a proof in philosophy – if the Gettier problem is as close as we are going to get to something straightforwardly correct in philosophy but intuitions towards it vary wildly across the world, then we are pretty much doomed to failure.

I was all set to enrol on my psychology conversion course when by chance I happened to notice that The University of Sheffield (where I did my undergrad) was offering a brand new masters in a subject called Cognitive Studies; a subject based in the philosophy department but heavily inter-disciplinary in nature, exploring the nature of the mind from various different academic perspectives, including psychology, linguistics and archaeology. It sounded absolutely perfect, so I cancelled my application to the psychology conversion course and enrolled.

My masters year was great – I felt intellectually alive again. I was finally able to study the questions that had been going round my head for the past year or so with people from various backgrounds (some philosophy, some psychology and some from other disciplines) who were intellectually in a similar place to me. Half way through the year I was accepted by The University of Nottingham to study for a PhD as part of the AHRC Aesthetics and the sciences programme, which I am currently almost half way through.

Where I am now

Whilst I am very grateful to be where I am (actually being paid to study for the first time in my life) doing this PhD has proved very challenging, and not just for the obvious reasons (e.g. the prospect of having to write a 90,000 word document). I am regularly involved in aesthetics related events and the people I work with are aestheticians first and foremost. As you may have gathered, I am not an aesthetician. This doesn’t mean I am not interested in art. I am musician who performs in several bands and is actively involved in the underground music scene. I read plenty of books and regularly visit galleries. I find art fascinating. Unfortunately I have exactly the same problems with philosophy of art that I have with every other area of philosophy.  The questions I am interested in are questions about why people like art, why it has such a hold over so much of the human species. I am interested in the evolutionary, anthropological and psychological answers to these questions. There is very little philosophy has to offer here. In fact much of the evidence I have been discussing in my thesis can be used to mount a well-informed attack on the foundations of philosophy art, something I intend to do in the final chapter. I am particularly interested in the idea of fundamental aesthetic disagreement, i.e. aesthetic disagreement that persists even if both parties have access to exactly the same facts. This is a situation that is likely to exist and has implications for aesthetic realism, the idea that aesthetic value judgements are either correct or incorrect (a similar argument is underway in moral philosophy, as Stephen Stich discusses in this lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EU5LiJAaCQ&feature=PlayList&p=E30B374F1F0C0460&index=0&playnext=1).

I actually still see myself as a philosopher (to a point). I feel like my job is to do several things; 1) draw together theories and data from across various disciplines which are potentially related to the same questions about human psychology, 2) criticise the methods of psychologists and their interpretations of certain results, and 3) criticise traditional analytical philosophical methods using relevant scientific data. I am not doing traditional philosophy, but neither am I doing actual science. I’m somewhere in-between. There are a burgeoning number of people in this “field” – cognitive scientists and anthropologists with an interest in philosophy, experimental philosophers, and traditional philosophers doing their best to defend their subject.

Funnily enough I have a difficult time explaining to people what I do… I normally just say philosophy if a short answer is needed, but I give the longer answer of “interdisciplinary work in the evolution of art and aesthetic psychology” if I can. I think we need a subject heading for this kind of work. I guess “cognitive studies” is as good as anything?

Why do philosophy at all?

I wish to finish this piece on a positive note. I have painted a very negative picture of philosophy throughout, but in truth it still has a large place in my heart. Without it I would never have begun seriously questioning the world around me and expanding my mind. This is the true benefit of philosophy: not arriving at ultimate truths, but providing people will the tools to adequately question the world around them. In the age of mass media and “reality” TV this is more needed than ever before. It is heartening, therefore, to see that philosophy is taught in a very basic form in some primary schools (http://philosophyforkids.com/) and that philosophy is now included as part of secondary school religious education. The general intellectual wealth of humanity would be increased if every schoolchild was taught a small amount of philosophy throughout their time in education and if every university student had to take a small module of philosophy every year of their degree. The kinds of reasoning skills developed by philosophical investigation are unmatched by any other subject. The truth-seekers out there, however, should avoid pinning their hopes on philosophy. You won’t get any closer to it. You will gain some very powerful critical skills in the process but you will be left no closer than you were before you started.

Long ago I came to the conclusion that mental illness could not exist in the way that influenza or cholera can. Firstly, both these illnesses can be demonstrated to have a specific cause (viral, bacterial) and their mechanisms of action are fully understood. Patients may display different symptoms, but a group of similar symptoms exist for every person who has the illness. Mental illness cannot be traced back to a specific identifiable source, their underlying neural mechanisms are not understood and symptoms may vary wildly between individuals with the same mental illness. Rarely does a patient display symptoms that make them a perfect fit for a diagnostic category.  Major depression, for example, is rarely displayed as just major depression – often various anxieties, phobias, or other disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder are also diagnosed.

An obvious response to this would be to argue that this difficulty in ease of diagnosis stems from how young (modern) clinical psychology is as a science; given more research and time diagnostic categories will better fit actual human suffering. Looking at the history of clinical psychology, however, leads me to believe that this is not the case. Definitions of disorders change wildly over time to meet current social trends (the declassification of homosexuality as a disorder in 1973 is a great example of this), and pharmaceutical companies have a disturbing influence on the prevalence of certain disorders (the huge recent increase in diagnoses of depression is without a doubt fuelled by the companies who manufacture SSRIs, especially fluoxetine). I am not alone in this worry. In fact, James Scully (medical director of the American Psychological Association, the group who produce the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, otherwise known as the DSM) puts it: “The DSM will always be provisional; that’s the best we can do.” APA research chief Darrel Regier says, “The DSM is not biblical. It’s not on stone tablets.” Gary Greenberg (in his recent article “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness”, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_dsmv/all/1) states “The real problem is that insurers, juries, and (yes) patients aren’t ready to accept this fact. Nor are psychiatrists ready to lose the authority they derive from seeming to possess scientific certainty about the diseases they treat. After all, the DSM didn’t save the profession, and become a best seller in the bargain, by claiming to be only provisional.”

Greenberg also says that “for patients to accept a diagnosis, they must believe that doctors know—in the same way that physicists know about gravity or biologists about mitosis—that their disease exists and that they have it. But this kind of certainty has eluded psychiatry, and every fight over nomenclature threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the profession by revealing its dirty secret: that for all their confident pronouncements, psychiatrists can’t rigorously differentiate illness from everyday suffering. This is why, as one psychiatrist wrote after the APA voted homosexuality out of the DSM, ‘there is a terrible sense of shame among psychiatrists, always wanting to show that our diagnoses are as good as the scientific ones used in real medicine.’”

Rather that stemming from the youth of the profession or the difficulties stemming from corruption by pharmaceutical companies, I think the problem of adequately defining diagnostic criteria for mental illness comes from a fundamental flaw in the concept itself. Basically I find the concept of mental “illness” as the binary opposite of mental “normality” to be rather suspect. There seems to be no simple point where a person becomes mentally “ill” after previously being mentally “normal”. Clinical psychology ignores this issue altogether, preferring to stick to the idea that if you have several of a group of symptoms for a disorder, then you have that disorder. Greenberg states: “descriptive psychiatry also has a major problem: Its diagnoses are nothing more than groupings of symptoms. If, during a two-week period, you have five of the nine symptoms of depression listed in the DSM, then you have “major depression,” no matter your circumstances or your own perception of your troubles.” It is likely, however, that you would have had perhaps one or two of the symptoms for some time and during other times in your life may have been quite sad, possibly on the cusp of a diagnosis, but never quite matched the amount of symptoms needed for one.

I, for one, know that my social anxiety disorder didn’t just spring up overnight. It didn’t present itself suddenly with all symptoms apparent. It was a steady process of cognitive change, underlined by a psychological predisposition to react to certain social situations in certain maladaptive ways causing me – over a period of many years – to develop a series of crippling cognitive and physiological responses to both negative and positive social stimuli. I didn’t just become ill. Other events in my life lead me to believe that I should probably seek medical help, and so I received a diagnosis. The problem, however, had been festering for many years previously.

Labelling these cognitive idiosyncrasies as “illnesses” or “disorders” is likely what has lead to patients needing their doctors to be as certain with their diagnoses as they would be had the patient had influenza or cholera. The general public believes that mental illness is analogous to physical illness. Unfortunately this is the not the case and never has been. It seems to me that a more accurate way of looking at mental “illness” would be to see such “illnesses” as manifestations of extreme versions of certain cognitive styles. For example, one of the major obstacles to autism research has been identifying exactly what the main cognitive deficit is. One recent account (Happé, 1999) argues that individuals with autism have weak “central coherence”. Central coherence is a wide-ranging cognitive ability whereby individuals are able to filter out information deemed unnecessary to the task at hand. This can be perceptual, verbal and visuospatial. People who have normal levels of central coherence can pick out contextual meanings of metaphorical constructions in social language, remember the “gist” of a story rather than every last detail, and focus on aspects of a highly cluttered visual field that are relevant to the practical demands of their current situation (such as navigating through the middle of a busy city centre). Autistic individuals, however, are more likely to focus on the literal meanings of metaphorical constructions in language, remember the entirety of a story verbatim, and attend to all aspects of a cluttered visual field, thus suffering from perceptual overload. Interestingly, however, autistic individuals can have savant abilities in certain areas, such as music and visual art. Furthermore, weak central coherence appears in the immediate families of autistic individuals. Fathers of children with autism are overrepresented in engineering professions and it appears that in their case weak central coherence is a benefit rather than a burden. For these reasons Happé claims that we should see weak central coherence as being a cognitive style rather than a cognitive deficit. For Happé, there might be a normal distribution of cognitive style from weak central coherence involving preferential processing of parts to strong central coherence involving preferential processing of wholes.

An extreme lack of central coherence will quite obviously be maladaptive and cause many social learning problems. A person with such a cognitive style will be unable to filter irrelevant social information from relevant information and is likely to suffer from perceptual overload through an inability to filter out irrelevant perceptual stimuli. Importantly, however, this is not a mental illness – it is just a style lying at the edge of a normal distribution curve of central coherence abilities.

It is likely that there are other things going on with the autistic individual. Weak central coherence may be just one of several issues. If it is the most substantially important of these, however, and it is just one kind of cognitive style that exists on a continuum, then it seems strange to label it a mental illness. Perhaps something similar is happening in other mental illnesses. Social anxiety disorder, for example, is characterised by chronic extreme sensitivity to negative social stimuli. It is possible that sensitivity to social stimuli is a cognitive trait that exists on a continuum – some are highly sensitive, some are less sensitive. Ketay et al. (2007) argue that highly sensitive people comprise about a fifth of the population and process social information more deeply and thoroughly than most people. Belsky and  Pluess (2009) show that individuals vary in their sensitivity to experiences or qualities of the environment they are exposed to. Some individuals are more sensitive to such influences than others; not just to negative but also to positive ones. There seems to be a basic difference in social sensitivity between individuals, which seems likely to exist on a continuum. Socially anxious people are more likely to attenuate to negative social stimuli, however, separating them from highly socially sensitive people who do not focus on negative stimuli. It seems likely, however, that a socially sensitive temperament coupled with a higher degree of negativity bias (which is in itself a basic human cognitive heuristic) could, over time, lead to increased levels of social anxiety.

Furthermore, social anxiety (not social anxiety disorder) is actually highly prevalent. Most children are socially anxious at times, especially when meeting new people. Most adults get socially anxious at times around people to who they are attracted, or just before giving a speech, for example. Wakefield et al. (2004) argue that many people labelled as having social anxiety disorder are just temperamentally high in social anxiety rather than suffering from a disorder per se.

Fundamentally, it seems that labels such as “depression”, “anxiety” etc. are merely useful fictions, created initially to help those who desperately need help but with little relation to psychological reality. Undoubtedly, diagnosis and treatment of mental illness helps many people. Unfortunately, diagnoses and treatment also harms many people, perhaps because of the inaccuracies inherent in the very concept of mental illness itself. They may be many things: cognitive styles, temperaments, etc., but they are not illnesses. 

References

Belsky, J., & Pluess, M. (2009). “Beyond Diathesis-Stress: Differential Susceptibility to Environmental Influences”. Psychological Bulletin, 135(6), 885-908.

Greenberg, G. (2010) “Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness”, Wired magazine, December 2010: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/12/ff_dsmv/all/1

Happé, F. (1999) “Autism: cognitive deficit or cognitive style?” in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 6, p. 216-222

Ketay, S., Hedden, T., Aron, A., Aron, E., Markus, H., & Gabrieli, G. (2007). The personality/temperament trait of high sensitivity: fMRI evidence for independence of cultural context in attentional processing. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Memphis, TN. Summary by Aron (2006): “A functional study comparing brain activation in Asians recently arrived in the United States to European-Americans found that in the nonsensitive, different areas were activated according to culture during a difficult discrimination task known to be affected by culture, but culture had no impact on the activated areas for highly sensitive subjects, as if they were able to view the stimuli without cultural influence.”

Wakefield, J.C., Horwitz, A.V., Schmitz, M.F. (2004) Are We Overpathologizing the Socially Anxious? Social Phobia From a Harmful Dysfunction Perspective. Can J Psychiatry 49:736-742.

When I’m not playing music I write about it, currently for the website Kicking Against The Pricks but hopefully for more publications in the coming year.

I’ll be back with some academic stuff at a later time. For now, I hope some of you enjoy these various musical projects.

http://www.gopetition.com/petition/37997.html

Here is the preamble from the petition website:

We believe that the too-restrictive National Curriculum needs to be significantly expanded to allow more creativity and innovation in the teaching of core cognitive skills.

To that end, we believe introducing Philosophy lessons in the classroom from a very early age would have immense benefits in terms of boosting British school kids’ reasoning and conceptual skills, better equipping them for the complexities of life in the 21st century where ubiquitous technology and rapid social change will be the order of the day.

There is a growing body of evidence that Philosophy can be of huge importance in opening up young minds. Reasoning skills and habits improve learning in other subjects on the curriculum and do not require purchasing expensive equipment and classroom resources.

We believe that in a time of changes in the way education is being delivered, combined with imminent profound cuts in budgets at a national level, now is the ideal time for schools to look for innovative ways to extend the National Curriculum.

Michael Hand and Carrie Winstanley’s ‘Philosophy in Schools’, published in 2008, had academics and education experts calling for Philosophy to be taught in schools – not just as a way for children to learn to communicate more with each other and grow in confidence, but as an academic subject with thinking and reasoning skills at its core.

In 2008, UNESCO published a study looking at the benefits of teaching Philosophy at pre-school and primary levels, concluding, “[We] consider the teaching of Philosophy to be necessary and something to be reckoned with.” Meanwhile, a 2007 study by Dundee University suggested that confronting core philosophical debates as the nature of existence, ethics and knowledge can raise children’s IQ by up to 6.5 points, as well as improve emotional intelligence. The research also found that Philosophy in schools promotes certain speaking and listening skills, as well as sustained reasoning skills over time. Confidence and concentration also improved, along with teacher’s questioning skills.

Reasoning skills arrived at through Philosophy are also a proven and cost-effective way of boosting pupil brain power and engagement across the curriculum. Thus an Ofsted report from 2010 on the teaching of Philosophy at St Winifred’s Infants School in Lewisham noted: “Lessons in Philosophy encourage pupils to reflect and think more deeply. This has a direct and positive impact on [St Winifred’s] curriculum”.

Philosophy is often valued for the way it can provide the most able students with an outlet for their intelligence and creativity, say witnesses. But another major-plus point is we find Philosophy nurtures the abilities of students labeled difficult and low-achieving, who really enjoy the stimulus of discussion and argument. “Philosophy has developed our more able, but also given great confidence to those children who struggle with the more conventional curriculum,” comments Headmistress Mrs Palmer at Eliot Bank Primary school.

(From http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/08/harvard_confirms_scientific_mi.php)

Greg Laden writes:

Harvard Confirms Scientific Misconduct by Marc Hauser

I am sad to report that it is indeed confirmed by official sources that primatologist Marc Hauser engaged in several instances of what is being termed misconduct while carrying out experiments in his lab.

Dean Michael Smith issued the following letter to members of the Harvard community today:

This is a postgraduate seminar talk I will be presenting at Nottingham uni tomorrow, entitled “Protean cognition, Machiavellian Intelligence and multiple aesthetic natures”:

Introductory notes

Before I begin, I just want to note that I will be using many complex terms from evolutionary biology throughout this talk. I will do my best to stop and explain them, but should I let one pass without explaining it please put your hand up and I’ll stop to clarify things.

Firstly, a brief outline of the talk. Several theorists working on the psychology of art have, of late, presented (or assumed) a theory of a universal aesthetic psychology, grounded in evolutionary psychological reasoning about human nature. In this talk I will criticise this theory by arguing that we should expect to see mixed strategies in creative displays (of which the most obvious is art) which serve as costly hard-to-fake displays of protean cognition. If these mixed strategies are maintained as balanced polymorphisms in protean cognition both across and within individuals, then there is not a single universal aesthetic psychology.

Aesthetic Universalism

So, what is a universal human aesthetic psychology? Some philosophers and psychologists working on an evolutionarily informed account of aesthetic psychology (such as Denis Dutton 2002 & 2009, Ellen Dissanayake, 1992, Ramachandran & Hirstein, 1999) have, in recent times, focussed on, and attempted to defend, the concept of aesthetic universalism. This is not a simple concept to unpack, but there are two broad trends in this research: claims about psychological universals and claims about cultural universals. Dutton argues that there are universal features of art, and that similar kinds and contents of art are appreciated cross-culturally. Dissanayake argues that artistic practices can be situated in a wider cultural behavioural context, that of “making special”, along with various other cultural practices that humans display the world over. These are claims about culture rather than psychology. Dutton and Dissanayake are also, however, constructing an evolutionary psychological account of the human aesthetic response. The basic idea behind their claims is that art occurs in all human societies and make us feel good. Things that are universal and intrinsically pleasurable tend to be the products of evolutionary forces. For evolutionary psychologists, then, underlying these cultural universals (and generating these cultural universals) are human psychological universals. Ramachandran takes a slightly different route. He argues that, rather than having a specific adaptive function per se, art is pleasing because (most) works adhere to one or many of his “eight laws of aesthetic experience” rules, each of which has its own adaptive function. Again, however, he is assuming an underlying universal human nature. These eight laws apparently explain all human aesthetic experience. He just doesn’t see art as being an adaptive complex like Dutton and Dissanayake.

So, I need to unpack the concept of a universal human nature. Tooby and Cosmides (1990) argue that all humans share the same complex cognitive adaptations, which they refer to as “universal human nature”. Tooby and Cosmides are interested in what aspects of the human mind can be seen as species-typical design, in an approach analogous to theories of species-typical adaptations in evolutionary biology. On this view, all humans share essentially the same kinds of genetic “developmental programs” for cognitive structures and hence will all, after various critical periods of learning, develop into adults with the same kind of cognitive structure – a species-typical universal cognitive architecture. (Note it is commonplace to refer to these cognitive structures as “mental modules”, but I want to avoid this term as it is liable to cause a lot of philosophical disagreement). Moving on, this does not mean that all human minds are the same; there is obviously a great degree of variance between the cognitive abilities of different people. Tooby and Cosmides argue that phenotypic diversity in cognition does not arise because of fundamental differences in human genotypes, but rather through the process of different environmental circumstances affecting the outcomes of universal developmental programs. This process is called adaptive plasticity, and – for Tooby and Cosmides – is responsible for all phenotypic psychological diversity in human populations. Evolutionary biologists, however, do not consider adaptive plasticity to be the only mechanism via which phenotypic diversity can occur. Another mechanism that can lead to phenotypic variation is genetic polymorphism (Ford, 1940). My argument hinges on showing that there are likely to be polymorphisms underlying an essential component of aesthetic psychology, namely creativity. Essentially, if there are polymorphisms underlying our creative faculties, then these polymorphisms are complex enough to mean that Tooby and Cosmides’ claim that adaptive plasticity is the only mechanism underlying human psychological variation is false. I will return to this mechanism later.

What this all means, according to evolutionary psychology, is that underlying artistic production and appreciation is a universal human aesthetic nature, i.e. the cognitive adaptations responsible for our appreciation of art and our desire to produce art are universal in the species. Any surface variation is caused by environmental variation affecting the development of these species-wide cognitive adaptations. This is the thesis of aesthetic universalism that I will be focussing on in this talk and I will attempt to show it to be problematic by arguing that there are polymorphisms in our creative abilities.

Sexual Selection

I need to begin my argument by defining sexual selection, sometimes called Darwin’s “forgotten” theory. Natural selection is the well known mechanism via which much genetic change in a species occurs. Genetically unfit individuals (and the genes which contribute to their lack of fitness) are more likely to be removed from the gene pool because they are less likely to survive than individuals with beneficial genes, who tend to survive, have more offspring, and pass on these beneficial genes to their offspring. The other major mechanism via which genetic change in a species occurs is sexual selection. Sexual selection is the mechanism which explains how individuals are able to pass on their genes in the first place; it argues that certain traits or signals an individual possesses can be seen as attractive by individuals of the opposite sex, and that those who possess the most attractive traits or signals are likely to pass the genes for these traits/signals on, thus increasing their incidence in the population. Natural selection is about survival and genes beneficial to survival. Sexual selection is about sex and genes beneficial to being able to have sex.

In general, sexually selected traits are reliable indicators of fitness. By reliable, I mean they are hard to fake. For if any old person can fake a desirable trait, then that trait no longer serves to reflect something beneficial about that individual. For example, a person can signal their monetary wealth by buying a very expensive car; only those with a lot of money can buy these cars, so possessing an expensive car is an honest signal of monetary wealth (unless, of course, the car has been stolen). Selection seems to usually achieve this in accordance with the handicap principle, developed by Amotz Zahavi (1975). For an individual to signal to other individuals that he or she is genetically fit, what is needed is an elaborate and costly signal which seems very wasteful. If an individual is able to maintain this handicap effectively, then receivers know that the signal indicates quality because inferior quality signallers cannot afford to produce such wastefully extravagant signals. This is what we find in many other species (for example, the mating displays of birds of paradise, and the large antlers of moose, or the peacock’s tail). Geoffrey Miller (1997) argues that displays of human creativity (in humour, in story-telling, and, of course, art) count as costly reliable signals of imaginative abilities, being dependent, as they are, on the healthy functioning and distinctive size of the human brain. For our brains take many years to grow to maturity, and are extremely costly to maintain in terms of their energy requirements (accounting for 40% of the body’s glucose consumption, for example). In addition, Miller thinks, there was probably sexual selection in hominids for honest advertisements of protean cognition, of which the most obvious are partly-random displays of creative thought. Protean cognition is genuinely random cognition, i.e. cognition which is not consciously random but rather occurs via some mechanism unknown to the individual. For example, many animals show protean behaviour. Rabbits escape from predators in a random zigzag pattern, a behaviour which is instinctual. Certain creatures randomly change colours when faced with a predator in order to confuse the predator’s perceptual expectations (sometimes called search images). These escape strategies are protean, and their genuine randomness is what makes them adaptive – the predators cannot predict the prey’s behaviour.

Protean differences

I now need to introduce the concept, borrowed from evolutionary game theory, of frequency-dependent selection. This is perhaps best described through examples. The Hawk-Dove game is a game where contestants play either a Hawk of Dove in competing for a resource worth 40 points (points here are “fitness points” – a way of quantifying fitness in a game theoretical model). Hawks are always aggressive until seriously injured. Doves produce a threatening display but never attack and retreat if attacked by an opponent. Doves, then, always lose to Hawks. But let’s assume Hawks have a 50% chance of defeating another Hawk and Doves have a 50% chance of defeating another Dove. Also, assume that a serious injury costs -60 points and wasting time and energy in a very long contest costs -10 points.  I won’t go into the maths, but given the fitness costs and benefits in this simple model, selection favours an evolutionary stable mix of 75% Hawks and 25% Doves in a population. If this number shifts, then the model predicts that the numbers of Hawks and Doves in a population would rapidly fluctuate until it, again, reached this evolutionary stable mix. Too many Hawks or too many Doves is an unstable strategy – what works best, in this case, is what is known as a mixed strategy.

If behaviours have frequency-dependent fitness, like in the Hawk-Dove game, then “selection often maintains a particular proportion of alternative variants” (Buller, 2005, p. 40). When this happens, it is referred to as frequency-dependent selection. Stable mixes of genotypes in a population are referred to as stable polymorphisms. The garter snake has highly variable colour patterns, ranging from stripes to mottled blotches (Brodie, 1990, 1992). The snake’s colour seems to be coupled with differences in escape strategy – striped snakes flee in a straight line, creating a visual illusion which makes it difficult to pinpoint the exact position of the snake, and mottled snakes remain motionless, using the mottles as camouflage. Paracerceis sculpta is a marine isopod crustacean which has males of three different sizes (Shuster, 1987). The large males guard harems of females, and thus secure their copulations in this fashion. Medium sized males resemble females and are able to mimic the female courtship display and fool the large males into allowing them into the harem, where they are able to copulate with the females. Small males are small enough to sneak past unobservant large males and enter the harem, securing copulations. These various strategies all have equal success and are a clear case of a stable complex cognitive polymorphism being maintained in a population. Furthermore, the genes underlying them have been identified.

The Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis presents us with a good potential set of balanced cognitive polymorphisms in creative abilities; more specifically in protean cognition (Miller, 1997). The hypothesis itself suggests that apes and humans have evolved special cognitive adaptations for predicting and manipulating the behaviour of other individuals (Humphrey, 1976; Byrne & Whiten, 1988; Whiten & Byrne, 1988) which are all grouped together under the umbrella term “Machiavellian Intelligence”. These adaptations are postulated to include a “Theory of Mind” module for attributing beliefs and desires to others, to better predict their behaviour (Leslie, 1994; Baron-Cohen, 1995; Dennett, 1988). Suppose the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis is right. It seems unlikely that evolution would stop there, allowing every individual to manipulate every other individual. This would be an unstable strategy. What seems more plausible is that certain defences to exploitation would evolve. Miller suggests that a potential defence against Machiavellian exploitation is protean cognition, or genuinely unpredictable cognition.

Let’s talk about animals again for a second. In terms of animal fleeing behaviour, unpredictability can be useful at many levels. When threatened, octopi, cuttlefish, and sea pansies use “colour convulsions” across the fast-response chromataphores on their skin, quickly going through different colour patterns to defeat the search images (perceptual expectations) used by their predators (Driver & Humphries, 1988). Would unpredictability still prove adaptive if we shift attention from trajectories through physical space to more abstract trajectories through the space of possible social behaviours? When would “social proteanism” be selected?

Well, what if an individual could behave in a way similar to a threatened octopus when faced with the prospect of Machiavellian exploitation? The Machiavellian succeeds when the individual’s behaviour and cognition is predictable and ordered. If genuinely random cognition is possible, then the Machiavellian would not be able to predict and exploit. This cognition would have to be genuinely random, and the best way of achieving this would be by making the individual themselves unaware of the processes generating the random cognition. It’s almost like a double-blind. The individual, then, cannot give away clues as to what their behaviour will be when this behaviour is caused by protean cognitive processes.

I have been talking as though protean cognition would mean that an individual displays a certain amount of random and unpredictable behaviour. Clearly, individual unpredictability would make it difficult for a Machiavellian individual to exploit someone. People are not entirely unpredictable, however. In fact, people are, in many ways, quite predictable. If individuals were totally unpredictable then this would be disastrous for social cohesion. You need to be able to trust that the person you’ve paid to paint your house will actually paint it and not set it on fire, and that your girlfriend or boyfriend will not one day just suddenly decide to kill you. Clearly, if protean cognition exists, then, it is unlikely to be displayed solely as unpredictable variation in the individual over time. Individual unpredictability over time may exist, and may be an important way of resisting exploitation, but it is unlikely to be the whole story.

So how is protean cognition to be fully understood? Miller has argued in a previous paper (Miller & Cliff, 1994) that animal pursuit and evasion contests are likely to result in mixed strategies between pursuer and evader. This work is based on complex game theoretical models that I won’t go into here, but the conclusion appears to be that there is no one single best strategy in many different kinds of contests between pursuer and evader. The kinds of strategies used by either party tend to be dependent on the behaviour of the other party, i.e. the strategies show frequency-dependence. It seems plausible to see evasion of Machiavellian exploitation as an example of a pursuit and evasion contest. So we should expect to see mixed strategies in individual’s responses to Machiavellian exploitation. As Maynard Smith (1982) has pointed out, any frequency-dependent balance can be implemented either between individuals, as a genetic polymorphism, or within an individual, as unpredictable strategic variation over time.

Social strategies which show wide degrees of intra-individual variation are often subject to frequency-dependent selection between individuals. Examples include the balance between aggressiveness and bluffing in the Hawk-Dove game (Maynard Smith, 1982), between deceptive and honest signals in animal signal theory (Zahavi, 1975; Dawkins & Krebs, 1976), and between extroversion and introversion in evolutionary personality psychology (Buss, 1991; Wilson, 1994). As I have just argued, unpredictable variation in an individual’s response to Machiavellian exploitation is unlikely to be the whole story. Thus, we are also likely to see unpredictable variation across individuals as well as within an individual. So this means that proteanism is sometimes likely to be displayed as different personalities and behaviours distributed across a population. The randomness aspect comes from not being able to predict whether a particular individual one meets will have a certain personality or display a certain behaviour. Furthermore, in order to retain the genuinely random aspect of this distribution, the individual themselves would need to be unaware of the source of their behaviour so as not to give away any clues to the Machiavellian. This seems to be what we see in actual human behaviour: people are notoriously bad at introspection and understanding the sources of their behaviours (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).

Furthermore, Clarke (1962) postulated that “apostatic selection” (in which predators overlook rare prey types while consuming an excess of abundant ones) in favour of low-frequency body types and behaviours could maintain substantial morphological and behavioural polymorphism in a species. For example, birds have more trouble finding and eating snails in species with high levels of polymorphism in shell colour and pattern, because the birds’ perceptual expectations don’t work as well. The same argument may apply to polymorphism at other levels: the predictive power of Machiavellian intelligence may favour greater diversity in personality (i.e. stable social strategies). Buss (1991) and Wilson (1994) recognize that frequency-dependent selection can maintain genetic variation in personality traits, but they neglect this possible apostatic effect. Consider how much easier social interactions would be if every individual one encountered had exactly the same-personality — i.e. the same social-strategic repertoire, the same goals, the same tastes in mates and friends, the same thresholds for anger or gratitude, etc. Social complexity is not just a function of the number and quality of social relationships in a group (Dunbar, 1993), but also of the inter-individual variations in personality that must be perceived, remembering, and strategized about. Given Machiavellian intelligence, apostatic selection may favour a rapid diversification of personality types, and may maintain behavioural polymorphisms at higher levels than they would otherwise attain.

Sexy creativity

Suppose, then, that protean distribution of personalities and individual protean cognition have become an aspect of human social intelligence. Insofar as divergence in personalities, along with individual protean cognition, contributed to competitive success, along with size, strength, health, and social skills, we might expect that mate choice mechanisms would evolve to favour exaggerated displays of proteanism. Zahavi’s (1975) handicap principle might predict that only proteanism-displays that are costly would be reliable, so proteanism-displays would probably become elaborated and specialized, leading to special “protean courtship displays” that might bear little resemblance to the original social protean tactics. Proteanism-displays in courtship, then, may evolve to be quite distinct from social proteanism in competition, and their informational features may become elaborated (e.g. into unpredictability at higher and higher levels of cognitive or strategic performance). We should expect to see some elaborate way for individuals to display 1) their individual protean abilities and 2) their differences to others in the population.

It seems to me that art is a prime candidate for this role. Artists who toil and strive for hours and months and years over works seemingly irrelevant to their immediate survival could be displaying an exaggerated form of their individual protean cognitive abilities and their personality to prospective sexual partners in a highly costly hard-to-fake fashion. As with most displays, the link may not seem obvious. All that would have to be the case is that their artworks are highly individual and strikingly different to many other kinds of artworks in existence, because, as explained earlier, unpredictable variation is likely to exist between individuals as well as within individuals, if not to an even greater extent. Art, then, serves as an exaggerated display of one’s polymorphic protean abilities and differences to other individuals. (Note that artistic output is clearly influenced by ones contemporaries, historical influences and the overall social and historical context in general in which the art is situated. I don’t wish to deny this. What I am saying, however, is that quite a large part of what makes art art (creativity and individuality) could stem from its functioning as a display of protean personality distribution and cognition). As mentioned before, the link between art and personality is not obvious, and, more importantly, should not be obvious (for it to be a costly, hard-to-fake signal). Based on Zahavi’s logic, the display is likely to be exaggerated and highly idiosyncratic. This is what we tend to see in art.

It seems likely, then, given the individuality of these displays (stemming from underlying polymorphisms) that there will be multiple kinds of aesthetic psychology, or, perhaps, multiple art instincts, with various artists (and art appreciators) preferring various different kinds of art, for it is within this variation that we see the protean distribution of personalities and their associated displays wrought large.

Polymorphism and adaptive plasticity

It’s time now to return to Tooby and Cosmides’ argument that the only mechanism that can lead to human psychological variation is adaptive plasticity. Adaptive plasticity, remember, is the process of different environmental circumstances affecting the outcomes of universal developmental programs. As I have argued, however, there are likely to be polymorphisms in protean abilities, and, therefore, in protean courtship displays, e.g. art. Biologically, polymorphisms are encoded in an individual as a genetic switch, set very early on in development. This is the crucial difference between polymorphisms and adaptive plasticity; the ultimate phenotypic differences caused by adaptive plasticity are caused by the same genotype acting under different environmental conditions, whereas polymorphic phenotypic differences are due to actual differences in the genotype, caused by genetic switches that shunt development irreversibly down one of several pathways. Say for the purposes of this discussion that there are ten distinct protean polymorphisms. This means there are ten distinct ways a genetic switch can be set, shunting development irreversibly down one of these ten pathways. The important thing to note here is that the individual, once the switch is set, can never change to a different polymorphism – the environment cannot have an effect on the kind of polymorphic ability they eventually show (of course, the environment can have an effect on how well this ability is eventually displayed, for example given both inadequate nourishment and human interaction an individual would display very stunted psychological growth, and thus their protean abilities could seem indistinct from the abilities of any other individual). What this all means is that – given that polymorphisms exist for protean distribution of personalities – there cannot be a single set of universal developmental programs for cognitive architecture. Differences are encoded in the genotype. Given that protean courtship displays such as art are products of this protean distribution, which likely to be polymorphic, there is not likely to be a universal aesthetic psychology.

An objection and a conclusion

Suggesting that art is a protean courtship display captures the originality aspect of art. It explains why we like very original and creative art – it shows the artist to have a highly individual personality and highly protean cognition, meaning that they are less likely to be susceptible to Machiavellian exploitation. Art, however, is also respected for many other reasons: things like technical prowess and moral and political messages. Isn’t analysing art as a protean courtship display missing many things that are very important about art?

Well yes, it is. But I do not wish to claim that a protean courtship display is all that art is. Much more can be said about art as a cultural or psychological phenomenon that this analysis just doesn’t touch. My aim, however, was only to present one possible way of criticising the theory of a single universal aesthetic psychology. Perhaps it will be possible to show that other aspects of our aesthetic psychology are universal. I have my doubts, however. I can’t discuss exactly why in this talk, but come back to me in a few years time when I’ve finished my thesis and I’ll have some answers.

References

Baron-Cohen, S. 1995. Mindblindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Brodie, E. D. I. 1990. Genetics of the Garter’s getaway. Natural History, 45-51.

Brodie, E. D. I. 1992. Correlational selection for colour pattern and antipredator behaviour in the Garter Snake Thamnophis ordinoides. Evolution, 46, 1284-129.

Buller, D. J., 2005. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Buss, D. M. 1991. Evolutionary Personality Psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 42, 459-491.

Byrne, R. & Whiten, A. (eds). 1988. Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes and Humans. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Clarke, B. C. 1962. The evidence for apostatic selection. Heredity, 24, 347-352.

Dawkins, R. & Krebs, J. R. 1978. Animal Signals: Information or manipulation? Behavioral Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach. 2^nd edn, ed. J. R. Krebs & N. B. Davis, pp. 282-309. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications.

Dennett, D. 1988. The intentional stance in theory and practice. Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes and Humans, ed. R. W. Byrne & A. Whiten, pp. 180-202. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Dissanayake, E. 1992. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. New York: Free Press.

Dunbar, R. 1993. Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 681-735.

Dutton, D., 2009. The Art Instinct. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Ford, E. B. 1940. Polymorphism and taxonomy. J. Huxley, The new systematics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Humphrey, N. 1976. The social function of intellect. Growing Points in Ethology, ed. P. P. G. Bateson & R. A. Hinde, pp. 303-17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leslie, A. 1994. ToMM, ToBY, and Agency: Core architecture and domain specificity. Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture, ed. L. A. Hirschfield & S. A. Gelman, pp. 119-148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Maynard Smith, J. 1982. Evolution and the Theory of Games, Cambridge University Press.

Miller, G. 1997. Protean Primates. Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations, ed. A. Whiten, & R. W. Byrne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Miller, G. F. & Cliff, D. 1994. Protean Behaviour in Dynamic Games: Arguments for the co-evolution of pursuit-evasion tactics. From Animals to Animats 3, Dave Cliff, Philip Husbands, Jean-Arcady Meyer & Stewart W. Wilson, eds. MIT Press.

Mithen, S. 1998. The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science, Pheonix.

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. 1977. Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, Vol. 84, Issue 3, p. 231-259.

Ramachandran, V.S. & Hirstein, W. 1999. The Science of Art. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, No. 6-7, pp. 15-51.

Shuster, S. M. 1987. Alternative Reproductive Behaviors: Three Discrete Male Morphs in Paracerceis sculpta, an Intertidal Isopod from the Northern Gulf of California, Journal of Crustacean Biology, Vol 7, No. 2, pp. 318-327.

Tooby, J.  and Cosmides, L. 1990. On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: the role of genetics and adaptation. Journal of Personality 58, 1.

Whiten, A. & Byrne, R. 1988. Tactical deception in primates. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 11, 233-273.

Wilson, D. S. 1994. Adaptive Genetic Variation and Human Evolutionary Psychology”, Ethology and Sociobiology 15, p. 219-235.

Zahavi, A. 1975. Mate selection – a selection of handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53, 205-214.

…

I have been thinking a lot recently about the cognitive science of religion, something which I wrote about in great depth for my MA dissertation. I have been considering applying to present a shorter version of my dissertation at a conference (I won’t say which one because I haven’t quite made up my mind yet) but as I have yet to present a paper I still feel a little terrified at the prospect and as such I am putting it off slightly. Just in case I don’t manage to pluck up the courage, I thought it best to post here a “brief” summary of what I have so far (note that this is only brief given context – the original is 14,000 words. Sorry if this is a little too much to take in at once!)

On the cognitive origins of religion: the global workspace, personal identity and memes.

Abstract

In this piece I attempt to develop an account of the cognitive origins of religion; firstly, by arguing that the emergence of modern human consciousness during the “creative explosion” of 30,000 – 60,000 years ago caused the fusing of several human cognitive adaptations, an event which led to a sense of personal identity and a susceptibility to certain kinds of cultural ideas, and secondly, by invoking the concept of “memes” to explain why, following the initial emergence of religious ideas (brought on by “sparks” of creativity, i.e. novel multi-modular idea development), certain kinds of ideas become more successful at “exploiting” the susceptibility of the human mind, and hence remained numerous in the meme-pool. My theory is an attempt at a “third-way” – a theory based on the insights of spandrelist arguments, but one which invokes ideas which are generally seen as incompatible with spandrelist arguments (i.e. memes). I argue that such a synthesis is possible, and that the assumption of incompatibility stems from misunderstanding of certain terms.

Introduction

Many aspects of human cognition provide obvious functional benefits for our species. For example, social cognition enables us to perceive and understand the intentions of others, thus enabling us to navigate the social world and create, maintain and develop social ties with others. The evolutionary functions of religion, however, are not so obvious. Religious cognition and behaviour is elaborate and costly. If one assumes that gods do not actually feature as part of the physical world, then the existence of such costly cognition and behaviour is rather puzzling. Religious people are known to take part in bizarre, painful rituals, invest in expensive architecture and objects, go celibate for their entire lives, wage war against other religions, and misperceive the world as filled with spiritual entities, including angels, demons, ghosts and gods. Furthermore, religions exist in some shape or form in every single known human society. What could possibly be the evolutionary benefit of such cognition/behaviour, and why is it so prevalent?

Currently, answers to this question tend to fall into one of two camps: adaptation theories and spandrel theories. Adaptation theories of religion argue that religion evolved for a specific purpose – an answer book to life’s riddles, an existential purpose generator, a solution to problems of social exchange, and many others. For adaptation theorists, religion is a coherently “designed” system which emerged to solve one (or several) ecological problems faced by early humans. Spandrel theories of religion argue that religion has no adaptational function per se but is rather a collection of side-effects of other adaptations; a “spandrel”. Religious beliefs may arise from innate cognitive heuristics and biases that in themselves are adaptations, but taken as a whole lead to a propensity for seemingly irrational belief systems. There are many fascinating theories within these two camps, and it would take too much time to properly discuss them here. For the purposes of this piece, I will briefly discuss a couple of theories which fall into the spandrel camp.

Hyperactive agent detection device

Justin Barrett argues that humans possess a hyperactive agent detection device (HADD) which animates the world with human-like agents, even where there are none. This is, again, the over-zealous application of a cognitive ability – in this case, the ability to recognise persons, which is a useful cognitive ability and an essential building block of theory of mind. Hyperactive agent detection occurs in many situations. For example, people see faces in the clouds, a man on the moon, and the face of Jesus in their toast. People anthropomorphise their pets, toys, cars, and computers. People see ghosts in darkened rooms, elves out the corner of their eyes, and aliens flying through the skies. Most of the time, however, we see actual people – our friends, co-workers, spouses etc. The agency detection device seems to work just fine in the vast majority of situations. We are perfectly able to tell the difference between human beings and other animals, plants, insects and inanimate objects. In fact, the over-zealous agency detection is relatively uncommon. Because it is uncommon, however, it stands out to us.

Assuming that selection has worked to improve our ability at recognising persons, then it seems strange that it would misfire in these ways. There are certain benefits, however, to having a slightly over-zealous system. Firstly, it is much more dangerous to detect an agent 9 times out of 10 than 11 times out of 10. That 1 time out of 10 where you don’t detect an agent could mean that you end up dead. Secondly, it incurs extra cognitive costs to hone a very accurate agent detection device. If the over-zealous application of agency detection is harmless, then there is no reason to incur the extra cognitive costs of an entirely accurate system. It is better to have a system which detects all possible agents and a little bit more than a system which either only detects 90% of agents or is entirely accurate, should the hyperactive agent detection prove to be harmless. It is a rule of thumb.

The HADD can explain why people are liable to see ghosts, elves and other strange supernatural entities in the environment. It can also explain why people are liable to see things which empirically “confirm” their religious beliefs, i.e. Jesus on toast, or god’s face in the clouds. I have heard anecdotal reports of children who believe that distantly observed rays of sunlight shining through gaps in the cloud cover are shining because god has performed a miracle there.  The clouds, in this case, take on the form of a powerful agent in the eyes of the child.

Minimally counter-intuitive structures

Pascal Boyer notes that a defining feature of any religious idea or symbol is its minimally counter-intuitive content. Religious concepts minimally violate our intuitions of how natural kinds are expected to be. “Minimal” in this sense means that only several of our relevant intuitions are violated while most of our intuitions regarding natural kinds are left intact. Many gods both ancient and modern are portrayed as being very human-like, but unlike humans they possess one or several unnatural abilities which break the laws of nature in startling ways. The Christian god is usually portrayed as a white, bearded, middle-aged male who also happens to be the all-powerful creator of the universe. The Hindu god Ganesha has fewer powers than the single Christian god (he is able to remove and place obstacles in the paths of those deserving of this) but he is usually depicted as having the head of an elephant. All religious symbols appear to be minimally counter-intuitive in this way – this is what makes them memorable. A religious idea which violates too many intuitive concepts, e.g. god as described by many professional theologians and philosophers, is unlikely to be easily remembered, even by those who have studied such work extensively.

It makes adaptive sense to be surprised by something counter-intuitive. Things that violate your expectations of the world could easily be dangerous, and if you are surprised by such things then they are more likely to be paid attention to. This then diverts cognitive resources to assessing the counter-intuitive object and deciding whether it is likely to be dangerous or beneficial. This can explain why religious ideas take on the forms they usually do. It may seem initially quite baffling that someone would believe in an elephant headed humanoid god, but it seems to make more sense in light of this. Of course, actually believing in something is different to just remembering the concept because it is minimally counter-intuitive. Boyer, however, does not claim that the theory of minimally counter-intuitive structures is the only explanation for religious cognition. It is just another aspect of human cognition which – along with other select cognitive adaptations – leads to the emergence of religion.

There are many other theories which could be discussed here (Deborah Kelemen’s theory of promiscuous teleology for example). These various cognitive “quirks” are adaptational in their own right but are hypothesised to work together to lead to the emergence of religious cognition and behaviour. Each one individually cannot explain the entire phenomenon.

The problem with spandrel theories of religious cognition

The various modules I have discussed so far all plausibly play a part in religious cognition. As I have described, various aspects of religion activate each module in some way. They each contribute to the “naturalness” of certain religious ideas, i.e. we find these ideas “make sense” because of the workings of these various modules. What, though, does this actually allow us to conclude about the origins of religion? Well, not actually very much. Firstly, no spandrel theorist (to my knowledge), has presented a case as to how spiritual cognition actually emerged as a side-effect. In fact, Boyer makes this explicit in Religion Explained, when he states that “…note how all this is not so much caused as made more likely by the cognitive processes I described” (p. 343). The usual strategy has been to unearth as many cognitive systems and sub-systems that could be linked to religious cognition as possible, and then argue that, following this, it is wholly explicable that religion would emerge as a side-effect. Religious ideas, on this view, just occur “naturally” as a side-effect of “normal” cognition. But there is just no obvious reason that they would. It seems that the only conclusion that can legitimately be drawn from this evidence is that if religious ideas exist, then human minds are particularly receptive to them. Spiritual ideas seem to resonate with human minds because of the aforementioned mental modules, i.e. humans have a predisposition to finding religious ideas “natural” or easy to believe. This does not, however, explain the evolutionary origin of such ideas.

A technical note: modularity

Evolutionary psychologists claim that the mind is a collection of mental adaptations, or mental “modules”. For the purposes of the rest of this piece it will be useful to use the language of modularity. As I have just argued, spandrel theorists argue that there are many discrete innate cognitive systems at work when spiritual thinking occurs. For evolutionary psychologists, these innate cognitive systems are modules. Modules are computational systems that are hypothesised both to aid and constrain cognition. The paradigm example of a module is the language acquisition device which was postulated by Noam Chomsky to explain several striking features of language learning and use.  Children learn language very quickly, with little or no explicit tuition and from relatively little data. Furthermore, once a child has learned a language and grown into an adult, the task of learning a second language becomes extremely difficult and the process becomes very slow, with lots of explicit tuition and a need to be exposed to very large amount of linguistic data. Chomsky argued that this could be explained by an innate mechanism that contains a large amount of grammatical parameters and directs the learning of a pre-linguistically competent child towards important features of the linguistic data available to them in the first few years of life. This is referred to as the “critical period” for language learning. Once it has passed, the language acquisition module becomes inactive, making it very difficult to learn a language later in life.

For evolutionary psychologists, the ability of humans to use language is a cognitive adaptation which evolved to meet the communicative needs of the human species. Cosmides and Tooby hypothesise that many other aspects of human cognition and behaviour are similar to language in this sense – i.e. they believe that underlying the overt behaviour and cognition of humans are a set of modules, the basic structures of which are innate, heavily constrain our learning, and are evolutionary adaptations.  The innate cognitive systems that spandrel theorists argue give rise to spiritual thinking, then, are part of many cognitive modules that have evolved to meet specific ecological problems faced by humans in our evolutionary past.

My “third-way” theory

Now I have set the stage, it’s time to develop my own theory. This theory is a “third-way”, in the sense that I am not claiming that religion is an adaptation or a spandrel, but something else altogether. I will be using the insights into the cognitive aspects of religiosity provided by spandrel theorists but, however, that doesn’t mean that my theory is a spandrel theory.

Global workspace theory

Bernard Baars has proposed a theory of consciousness entitled “global workspace theory” which argues that consciousness might help to mobilize and integrate brain functions that are otherwise separate and independent. The subjective experience of consciousness, on this view, is essentially a spotlight of selective attention. This selective attention has a limited capacity, within which only one kind of consistent content can be visible at any given moment. Input into this spotlight of selective attention comes from one of the many specialised networks (modules) of which the brain is constituted. Once information enters the spotlight, it is globally broadcast across the brain, allowing communication across many different modules. The limited capacity spotlight, then, is a central information exchange, allowing certain regions (such as the sensory cortex) to broadcast their information to many different areas of the brain.

The spotlight is referred to as the global workspace because globally broadcast information can affect the actions of unconscious processes occurring in the specialised local networks. The result of this is that any information that enters the global workspace can affect behaviour, essentially allowing us to exert executive control and voluntary action.

It is only recently that this theory has garnered any actual scientific evidence, with the advent of modern brain imaging techniques. Even now, designing experiments to test consciousness is notoriously tricky.  One such experiment  has been conducted recently. In this experiment, neural activity was recorded directly from the brains of epileptic participants who had previously had neural implants inserted because of impending neural surgery. They were looking to test the global workspace theory, by seeing whether conscious processing of words ignited coherent neural activity all across the brain. They used a visual masking paradigm, which has been used in many behavioural and brain-imaging studies over the last 30 years. Words were flashed briefly into the participants’ vision before being “masked” by nonsense syllables. In this condition, the words were only visible for 29ms before being masked. In another condition, words were flashed for 29ms but then were not masked. In this “unmasked” condition, words were consciously reportable, and were categorised better than chance in a categorisation task on the emotional valence of words, in which participants were forced to choose between several categories. Masked words were actually processed, albeit non-consciously. This was observed in multiple cortical areas, mostly within an early time window, but without coherent long-distance neural activity. In contrast, unmasked words were consciously processed, and this conscious processing was characterised by the convergence of four distinct neurophysiological markers: sustained voltage changes, particularly in prefrontal cortex, large increases in spectral power in the gamma band, increases in long-distance phase synchrony in the beta range, and increases in long-range Granger causality.

This experiment appears to support the idea that consciousness involves the global broadcast of information, and that conscious processing involves distinctly different coherent neural activity to unconscious processing.

The creative explosion: the emergence of consciousness?

Stephen Mithen, in The Prehistory Of The Mind argues that the crucial thing which set modern humans apart from other humans is that cognitive domains, which had previously been separate, became fused together and allowed for “cognitive fluidity”. Previous human species had highly developed modules for many different adaptational problems, but these modules were independent of one another and so information could not flow readily between them. Mithen uses this hypothesis to explain several intriguing aspects of the archaeological record of early humans. Early Homo sapiens did not make tools out of bone or antler. Mithen argues that this is because whilst early humans had advanced domains of technical and natural history intelligence, there was no connection between the two. Therefore, pre-cognitive fluidity, it was not possible for early humans to think of using animal parts to make tools. Early humans also did not make multi-component tools, or specialised tools for taking down specific animals. Mithen argues that these oddities also make sense if one considers that the technical and natural history domains were not linked in any way.

The archaeological record shows that there was relatively little human cognitive or cultural development for an extremely long period of time (I wish to stress the word “relatively” here – it is only relative in relation to what was to come). When considering early humans in the Lower Palaeolithic (the period spanning from about 2.5 million years ago to about 100,000 years ago) the technological evidence in the archaeological record is one of prolonged monotony, patterns of technological traditions being maintained for tens of thousands of generation. However, the period about 60,000 to 30,000 years ago, referred to by John Pfeiffer as “the creative explosion”, was a period of enormous change for human beings. During this time, the archaeological record becomes suddenly saturated by an abundance of artistic and religious artefacts. This period is, arguably, when religion appeared in human societies. It is during this time when we first begin to see elaborate burials, the manufacture of bone artefacts, cave paintings, and artefacts designed for personal decoration, amongst many other things.

During the creative explosion, then, previously separate modules were fused and allowed for cognitive fluidity. Mithen argues that artefacts such as totems (human bodies with animal heads) demonstrate the integration of natural history and technical domains. Similarly religion, for Mithen, arises out of an integration of social and natural history domains. Whilst I think that Mithen is basically on the right lines, he does not explain how the integration occurs, nor how new ways of thinking emerge from domain integration. He does, however argue that “consciousness adopted the role of an integrating mechanism for knowledge that had previously been ‘trapped’ in separate specialized intelligences”. He seems, then, to be anticipating the role of the global workspace in facilitation of domain integration.  Retaining Mithen’s main argument, we can see that the creative explosion is the period where the consciousness of modern humans arose – the separate specialised networks began to fuse and transfer information in a central information exchange. Domains could finally be integrated in a way necessary for the development of modern human artefacts. The question now is: how specifically does consciousness lead to the creation of novel ideas, such as religious ideas?

Creativity

The stage is now set for the initial emergence of religion. As I mentioned previously, spandrel theories have so far focussed on explaining how religious ideas are likely to seem “natural” to humans. No specific theories have been put-forward to explain how religious ideas arose in the first place.  Whilst normal cognition may make people receptive to religious ideas, it cannot account for their initial creation. Rather, what is needed is the initial spark of creativity.

Creativity – that is, the ability of humans to invent, entertain, and transmit multi-domain ideas – appeared during the creative explosion because of the fusing of modules. Crucially, “true” creativity involves the creation of novel multi-domain ideas, i.e. ideas which have not been entertained by others previously (this is, to a degree, what is valued in artists). This kind of creativity is also essential for progress in other domains, for example the initial development of scientific theories, or the initial spark of an idea for a new engineering design. Why and how this “spark” occurs is a particularly puzzling question, but there is a possibility that it may occur during the mental representation of ideas in the global workspace. For example, say you entertain the idea of an elephant in your mind. An image of an elephant pops up into your consciousness, and thus enters the global workspace. In the global workspace, this image is broadcast across the brain, and multiple modules take the image as input. Now, the longer you consciously consider this image, then the more the likelihood that various mental modules unrelated to the normal processing of the concept of “elephant” will process the information, and churn out something odd as output, which also enters the global workspace. You thus have a brief flash of an elephant-but-not-elephant in your consciousness, perhaps, for example, a human with an elephant head. If this particular idea grabs your attention (which it would do, if it is truly novel to you, because it is a minimally counter-intuitive idea), then you are likely to further consider it. It, too, will eventually be subject to sparks of creativity – multi-modular workings taking the same input and churning out strange modified images as the output.

Personal identity and existential angst

Whilst globally broadcasting information would allow for novel ways of thinking, it would not guarantee the spontaneous emergence of specifically religious ideas. There would have to be a particular reason for the various modules involved in spiritual cognition to work together.

The continual stream of consciousness equates with our feeling that there is an individual persisting over time. The “spotlight” of consciousness, then, is effectively the same as our sense of personal identity, i.e. the feeling that there is an “I” rather than just a series of causally related cognitive events. This definition of personal identity is the one espoused by John Locke, who argues that a person is a being who can “consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it: it being impossible for anyone to perceive, without perceiving, that he does perceive” (Essay II.27.9). He further argues: “Nothing but consciousness can unite remote existences into the same person; the identity of substance will not do it, for whatever substance there is, however framed, without consciousness, there is no person” (Essay II.27.23).

The fusing of mental modules was important for many reasons, but one of its most profound effects was to develop in humans a sense of personal identity and self-awareness. We are aware that we exist. We can conceive of ourselves in the future, present and past. We can do the same for others around us. An unfortunate consequence of this, however, is that we can conceive of ourselves dying, and can do the same for those around us. We can also conceive of ourselves as a materially existing being, occupying a place in the world. This, however, means we can also wonder why we occupy our place in the world. We can wonder why we do the things we do. Scott Atran refers to this as the “tragedy of cognition”, and that name seems rather apt. Humans, in gaining personal identity and self-awareness, gained something unfortunate as a side-effect: existential angst.

We can see now why religions prove so appealing. One of the adaptational candidate functions of religion is that it may function as an answer book to the complex existential questions of life. Religions around the world do indeed provide metaphysical explanations for the existence of life, the universe and everything. They explain that when you and your friends die, you don’t truly die, because your spirit or soul remains alive. They explain that you are in the world for a specific purpose (although this varies from religion to religion). They explain that all the apparent disorder and randomness in the world is caused by an agent or agents, and the world itself exists because it was created by an agent or agents. The existential questions which arise after the emergence of consciousness and personal identity are answered strikingly well by religious ideologies, and are answered in a way which resonates with many of our innate cognitive mechanisms – mechanisms whose workings are unified in the central information exchange, allowing us to consciously entertain religious ideas in a way which would have been impossible had the central information exchange not existed. It was existential anxiety, then, which drove the initial “need” for metaphysical answers to these questions, and the particular form which these answers take (i.e. spiritual thinking) is a result of these forms of answers seeming particularly “natural” to human beings.

Cultural transmission: memetics

Religion, then, is neither a coherent solution to an ecological problem nor is it a useless side-effect. Rather, natural selection left us with a kind of cognitive need for particular kinds of ideas – ideas which could eventually be supplied by the kind of creativity allowed by the global workspace.

Memetics is the study of memes (a concept first postulated by Richard Dawkins). A meme is a hypothetical element of cultural information, transmitted from one individual to another through various imitable methods (e.g. rituals, gestures, speech). In the same way that a gene is the basic unit of biological heredity, a meme is hypothesised to be the basic unit of cultural heredity. A gene works with many other genes to develop specific traits in a body (or, as Dawkins refers to it, a “survival machine” for that gene), be it physiological or psychological. If a particular gene happens to contribute to the development of a trait which causes the survival machine to have a better chance at surviving, then that survival machine is more likely to pass on its genes to its offspring thus increasing the chance that the gene will survive in another individual. In this fashion, certain genes happen to increase in frequency in a population. Memes are hypothesised to function in a similar fashion – they are also replicators which form the building blocks of bodies. Bodies, in the case of memes, are theories, songs, pictures, plays, etc., and the term for a memetic body is memeplex. A particular meme may help to make its memeplex attractive to a human being in some way, and – if successful – the human thus takes on the cultural information and memorises it. If the memes constructing the information have done their job particularly well, then that person is likely to transmit this aspect of culture to their friends. The memes which compose this aspect of culture may then go on to form the buildings blocks of new pieces of cultural information, and may “mutate” either a) through human creativity, or b) through errors in transmission of cultural information. Memes, then, are more likely to survive if they help construct cultural “bodies” which have elements that prove attractive to human minds. What a meme does, essentially, is exploit certain aspects of human minds. If it can do so, it is more likely to be internalised and transmitted, and thus increase in frequency in the meme pool.

What is the appeal of meme-based arguments? Well, they seem to fit very well with everything I have been describing about religious ideas. For example, one of the main aims of memetics is to ask why certain cultural ideas are so “sticky”, i.e. why certain ideas become so popular and predominant within a culture. Religious memes may be sticky because they resonate with the various mental modules I have been discussing. Religious ideas “tap into” specific kinds of cognition which arise from the workings of these modules, and are thus memorable. For example, humans have a tendency towards over-zealous intention-based reasoning and remembering minimally counter-intuitive structures, so a cultural idea about everything in the world being created by a creator god (who is like a human but much more powerful) is more likely to “stick” and be passed on to others. Thus the memes which compose this particular idea are more likely to survive and form the basis of subsequent cultural ideas which will most likely be very similar to this original cultural idea, but (thanks to mistakes and invention) may differ in some way. Hence the reason that religious ideas are so widespread, but so different in many ways.

The main appeal of memetics, for me, is that regardless of the usage of the term “meme”, cultural ideas are either successful or unsuccessful at catching on. Some ideas die out, some flourish. The ones that flourish must do so because they are particularly appealing to humans in some way. Certain ideas become linked to other ideas and either flourish more because of it or become less popular because of it. This is all relatively uncontroversial. Using the term “meme” simply makes it explicit that ideas are subject to selection according to how well they adapt to their environment (or how well they adapt their “bodies”, or memeplexes to the environment). Regardless of whether you want to use the term meme, ideas still die out or flourish depending on whether or not people find them interesting in some way. It just seems to me that using the term meme makes a lot more sense.

Why have memes fallen out of favour? A re-assessment of the criticism

Meme-based arguments are generally seen as being incompatible with religion-as-spandrel arguments (both Boyer and Atran make this claim). Atran refers to memetics as a “mind-blind” theory, and this appears to be his main reason for dismissing the role of memetics in religion. By “mind-blind”, he means that memetics is apparently unable to take into account cognitive constraints on religious belief and practice. As I have been discussing, there are many reasons to believe that certain cognitive mechanisms make human minds more likely to be receptive to religious ideas. If a theory cannot this aspect of the mind into account, then I agree with Atran that the particular theory is likely to be false. Memetics, however, can take this into account, and has done all along. One important aspect of memetics is that certain memes are attractive to human minds because of the design of human minds. Memes can only be successful if they can “exploit” certain features of human cognition so that they prove attractive. Religious memes, then, prove particularly attractive because they activate many specific aspects of the human mind – specifically, the cognitive mechanisms I have been describing in this essay. What Atran does not realise is that memes are entirely dependent on human minds for their success, and so memes are not “mind-blind” at all. In fact, memes which “understand” the human mind better than other memes are the ones that are likely to be successful and remain in the meme pool.

Atran’s other main argument against memetics is a standard one, which is that memetic transmission introduces errors at an extremely fast rate – too fast, apparently, for selection to take place. I have seen this argument repeated often in various places and I am still confused as to what the problem is. Yes, memetic mutation occurs at a much faster rate than genetic variation. But isn’t it also possible that memetic selection occurs at a much faster rate than genetic variation? If a memeplex is transmitted and several memes miss out because of errors in transmission, then selection is at work. Every single time a memeplex is transmitted, there is mutation and error. Memes are added, memes miss out. Surely this is selection in action? The memes within the memeplex which don’t miss out during transmission are being selected for each time information is transmitted. This is, indeed, rather fast. It is significantly faster than genetic transmission. But no one argued that mimetic transmission had to occur at the same speed as genetic transmission. They are entirely different units of selection.

This does not mean, however, that memetic selection occurs entirely independently of genetic selection. Brains are constructed by genes, even though the cultural information within them is made up of memes. As I argued previously, memes are entirely dependent on the genetic construction of the human mind because is it this that they need to exploit. The speed of selection at each level though is very different, and so it is unlikely that meme selection can have an effect on gene selection. The kinds of memes that are selected for, however, will be the ones that have appropriately adapted to the effects of genetic selection on the minds of humans. Memetic selection is, foundationally, dependent on genetic selection.

The emergence of the first meme

Dawkins argues that the first gene arose as a basic biological replicator, a simple entity that was only remarkable in the sense that it was able to make copies of itself. It was a very improbable event that such a thing should arise by accident, but when considering timescales of millions of years, the occurrence of such improbable events does not seem so strange, especially considering that it only had to happen once. Once it came into existence, it began to make copies of itself. Over time, copying errors gradually crept in. Soon, there were various different kinds of replicators, each with an affinity for its own kind. He completes this story by explaining how such replicators would inadvertently end up “competing”, simply because the ones that didn’t compete would disappear. The ones that were left, then, became a gradually more and more competitive bunch.

A similar story can be told for the origin of the first meme. I have argued that the development of the global workspace during the creative explosion led to multi-modular mental representation and thus sparks of creativity. These sparks of creativity, then, created the first memes. This only had to happen once. These memes were then passed on to others, who mutated them and/or created their own memes. Memes inadvertently ended up competing with one another, because the ones that didn’t disappeared from the meme pool. Thus, by natural selection, memetic competition for the best way to exploit the human mind was born.

In sum: my “third-way” theory

Global workspace theory argues that consciousness involves the collective operation of widely distributed neural networks all fusing into a single stream. During the creative explosion, previously separate and evolutionarily old mental modules became linked through a central information exchange. This linkage of modules led to the fusing of various kinds of information, a novel development which allowed for disparate and unrelated modules to trade information. “Sparks” of creativity, caused by multi-modular idea representation, cause the initial development of novel ideas. The “stream” of consciousness links disparate cognitive events into a single unifying entity: personal identity. The existential questions which arise after the emergence of consciousness and personal identity are answered strikingly well by religious ideologies, and are answered in a way which resonates with many of our innate cognitive mechanisms – mechanisms whose workings are unified in the central information exchange, allowing us to consciously entertain religious ideas in a way which would have been impossible had the central information exchange not existed. Religious ideas are selected for because they exploit several aspects of the human mind, and hence are memes. Religious memes, then, prove particularly attractive because they activate many specific aspects of the human mind – specifically, the cognitive mechanisms I have been describing in this piece.

Anyway, that is all for now. Hopefully there will be a lot more activity here from now on.