Notes on 《How the Mind Works》Ch.1 —— Standard Equipment

The rationale for reverse-engineering living things comes from Charles Darwin.

• In forward-engineering, one designs a machine to do something;
  
• in reverse-engineering, one figures out what a machine was designed to do. Psychology is engineering in reverse.

Evolutionary psychology brings together two scientific revolutions:

1. the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s: helps us to understand how a mind is possible and what kind of mind we have.
2. evolutionary biology of the 1960s and 1970s: helps us to understand why we have the hnd of mind we have.

How to connect the ethereal world of meaning and intention, the stuff of our mental lives, with a physical hunk of matter like the brain? The computational theory of mind resolves the question:

• beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as configurations of symbols
• The symbols are the physical states of bits of matter
• symbols bump into symbols, one belief give rise to another belief, eventually, the bits of matter bump into bits of matter connected to the muscles, and behavior happens.
• the content of brain activity lies in the patterns of connections and patterns of activity among the neurons.
• Minute differences in the details of the connections may cause similar-looking brain patches to implement very different programs.
• The same basic neural tissue embodies all of these programs

The mind is not a general problem solver. The mind has to be built out of specialized parts because it has to solve specialized problems.

To say that the mind is an evolutionary adaptation is not to say that all behavior is adaptive in Darwin's sense. Because:

1. selection operates over thousands of generations.Our brains are adapted to that long-vanished way of life, not to brand-new agricultural and industrial civilizations.
2. Our minds are designed to generate behavior that would have been adaptive, on average, in our ancestral environment, but any particular deed done today is the effect of dozens of causes.

The gene-centered theory of evolution does not imply that the point of all human striving is to spread our genes.

• Our goals are subgoals of the ultimate goal of the genes

• our goals are about health and lovers and children and friends.
• gene's goals are replicating themselves.
• By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the genes reach their goal
  

The three supposed implications of an innate human nature are wrong:

1. an innate human nature implies innate human differences, this is no implication at all.
2. if our ignoble motives are innate, they can't be so bad after all. (It is the naturalistic fallacy, that what happens in nature is right.). Happiness and virtue have nothing to do with what natural selection designed us to accomplish in the ancestral environment. They are for us to determine.
3. Blaming bad behavior on our genes, to understand is not to forgive.
   

Many computational faculties engineered by natural selection is our best hope for a grasp on how the mind works that does justice to its complexity.