Alison Gopnik, a conversation with Tyler Cowen (children as scientist, Freud & Piaget, AI)

Tyler Cowen, Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture (Ep. 265), Conversations with Tyler, Dec. 17, 2025.

The introduction:

Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at Berkeley, studying how children construct theories of the world from limited data. Her central insight is that babies learn like scientists, running experiments and updating beliefs based on evidence. But Tyler wonders: are scientists actually good learners? It’s a question that leads them into a wide-ranging conversation about what we’ve been systematically underestimating in young minds, what’s wrong with simple nature-versus-nurture frameworks, and whether AI represents genuine intelligence or just a very sophisticated library.

Tyler and Alison cover how children systematically experiment on the world and what study she’d run with $100 million, why babies are more conscious than adults and what consciousness even means, episodic memory and aphantasia, whether Freud got anything right about childhood and what’s held up best from Piaget, how we should teach young children versus school-age kids, how AI should change K-12 education and Gopnik’s case that it’s a cultural technology rather than intelligence, whether the enterprise of twin studies makes sense and why she sees nature versus nurture as the wrong framework entirely, autism and ADHD as diagnostic categories, whether the success of her siblings belies her skepticism about genetic inheritance, her new project on the economics and philosophy of caregiving, and more.

Kids as Scientists:

We have some good computational models of how scientific theory change works. It turns out that those apply to children as well. The specific thing that I’ve looked at is, what is it that scientists do? Here’s this big, hard problem. All we seem to get from the world are a bunch of photons at the back of our retina and disturbances of air in our ears, and yet, children know about people and things, and scientists know about quarks and quantum phenomena. How do we ever get from the data to the theory?

One subcategory of that is, how do we ever get causal structure which is so important in science? How do we ever figure out what causes what just from a bunch of data that we have?

What’s happened is that philosophers of science and computer scientists have found some systematic ways that you could talk about that. Scientists — I think, mostly, not necessarily consciously, but just as part of what they do — and little kids are looking at data and systematically figuring out what kind of structure out there in the world could have caused this pattern of data. That’s not the only thing, of course, that’s going on in science. There’re lots of other things, too, but it’s at least one central thing going on in science that we’ve started to really understand. [...]

If you asked a three-year-old, “Do you think that this pattern of conditional dependencies is giving you a confounding causal structure?” They would probably not give you a very sensible answer. Even when you ask scientists that, they don’t give you a very sensible answer. But when you look at their actual practice, what you see is that, in fact, kids, for example, are Bayesian, and so are scientists.

Now, the thing is that, in fact, in many respects, kids are better Bayesians than scientists, but a lot of it depends on your prior. If you have, as they say, a very peaked prior, you have a lot of experience, you have a lot of reason to believe that this prior assumption is right, then it’s rational not to change it when you just have a little bit of evidence. You should require a lot of evidence to overturn something that you have a lot of confirmation for.

It’s interesting that the kids, actually, are better at solving problems that involve unusual outcomes than the scientists are. I think what happens in science — we’ve just been doing some work about this — is that there’s also a social factor, where having a big distribution of people who are more likely to go with the prior versus people who are more likely to go with the evidence, which seems to be true in science, that collectively can get you to the right answer. There’s no arbitrary principle you can have about when should you abandon the theory and when should you hold onto it. [...]

One thing you can do, which is like what you’re describing about the money supply, is just make little changes to what you already know. That’s what you mean about moving in the predictable direction. You’re just changing things a little bit. Then seeing, “Okay, if I change it a little bit, is it doing a better job of accounting for the data?” That’s what people think of as a low-temperature search. The other kind of search you can do, the high-temperature search, is just bounce around the space. Try wild, crazy things. Exactly as you were saying, have just a more random walk.

The strategy that you see in computer science, this annealing, is start out with this wild, crazy, out-of-the-box, high-temperature search through the space, and then cool off and just fill in the details. If you think about your four-year-old, who do they sound like? Do they sound like the creature that’s just moving a little bit, or do they sound like they’re noisy and bouncy and random and doing all sorts of weird things? The four-year-old seemed to be a really good idea of this kind of random search. [...]

I think you see both things happening. When you get big paradigm shifts, as Kuhn said, when you get big changes in science, a lot of times it’s because someone found an idea that looked like it was improbable. The nice thing about kids is, because they don’t have to worry about grant proposals, they can be off in the wild space all the time.

[...]

With scientists, we underestimate how much that — we sometimes dismissively call it a fishing expedition — how much that very general experimentation is playing a role in scientific progress. In the grant, you’re supposed to say, “Here’s my three hypotheses, and here are the four experiments I’m going to do to test them.” But I think in practice, a lot of times, scientists are being like the little boy with the avocado and the spoon. They’re saying, “I don’t know, what will happen if I try this? What will happen if I try that?” Then they write the grant to get money to do the things that they’ve already done by doing all these experiments.

FWIW, I've known about simulated annealing for years, a couple of decades at least. For awhile I was one of my go-to metaphors/analogies, though I've not used it recently. In terms that I've been developing in other posts and in some working papers, high-temperature search is ludic (Homo Ludens) while low-temperature filling-in-the details is economic (Home Economicus).

LLMs tend to be used in economic ways. All those benchmarks are based on specific problems in well-specified domains. That's why they aren't particularly creative. My series of blog posts on humans in the loop contains case studies of three of my own ludic explorations.

Sabrina Hossenfelder looks at Claude 3.5 Haiku and discovers that it lacks self-awareness

In this video Hossenfelder examines a paper recently published by Anthropic: On the Biology of a Large Language Model. She has a number of interesting observations. After reiterating that the underlying LLM is in the business of next token prediction, she reviews an example of arithmetic reasoning starting at about 1:54. After following the example more or less step by step she observes (c. 2:45):

It’s basically a heuristic text-based approximation. It’s doing maths by free-associating numbers until the right one just sort of vibes into place. But here is the kicker. If you ask Claude how it arrived at that result it says “I added the ones (6+9=15), carried the 1, then added the tens (3+5+1=9), resulting in 95.” Which is not what it did, not even remotely. It answers this question separately, giving you again, a text prediction for the answer. And I think that this shows very clearly that Claude has no self-awareness. It doesn’t know what it's thinking about. What it tells you it’s doing is completely disconnected from what it’s actually doing.

That makes sense to me. Claude really "doesn’t know what it's thinking about." Why would we think otherwise? Well, I suppose, because it tells us what it did and we treat that statement as equivalent to what humans do when they report how they accomplished some task. The thing is, humans don't necessarily know what they're doing either.

Consider and example from Piaget's 1976 book, The Grasp of Consciousness. Here's how I reported that experiment in a paper I published some years ago, First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction (2000):

Let us begin with an experiment conducted by Jean Piaget as part of an investigation into consciousness. In this experiment children were asked to crawl for about 10 meters and then to describe what they had just done (Piaget, 1976, pp. 1 ff.). Four-year olds generally said either that they first moved one arm, then the other, then one leg, then the other, or legs first and then arms. Piaget called this a Z pattern. That is not, in fact, how any of them actually crawled. What they actually did was either to first move one arm, then the opposite leg, then the other arm, then the opposite leg, or the same pattern beginning with a leg. Piaget called this an X pattern. It isn't until children are seven or older that they can describe this X pattern. [...]

What is striking is that the younger children's verbal account of such a basic act is simply wrong. In order to execute the crawl there must be some brain tissue devoted to schemas regulating the appropriate actions; for crawling isn't a spinal reflex. But those regulating schemas must in some way be distinct from the schemas underlying the younger children's verbal accounts, otherwise those accounts would be more accurate. My first point is simply that we are here dealing with two different neural schemas for the same action and that one of them is grossly simplified and thus incapable of actually regulating the behavior it represents.

There are many ways in which the behavior of these four-year olds is quite different from Claude's, but I see no need to list them all. They're obvious enough. The basic point, as I say in that second paragraph, is that the young children got it wrong. And, while older children do get it right, there is a separate body of research that shows that the kind of behavior those four-year olds exhibit is common in various domains.

That research is about what is called the introspection illusion, which Wikipedia characterizes as follows:

The introspection illusion is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others' introspections as unreliable. The illusion has been examined in psychological experiments, and suggested as a basis for biases in how people compare themselves to others. These experiments have been interpreted as suggesting that, rather than offering direct access to the processes underlying mental states, introspection is a process of construction and inference, much as people indirectly infer others' mental states from their behaviour.

Notice that last statement, “introspection is a process of construction and inference.” Isn't that what Claude was doing? It provides a plausible account of its activity, not on the basis of some examination of that activity, but rather, based on what it knows about how arithmetic is (supposed to be) done. Claude doesn't have introspective awareness of what it is going, but then neither do humans, at least not in some wide variety of cases.

Let’s return to Hossenfelder, who goes on to assert: “I’d say that self-awareness is a precondition for consciousness.[1] So this model is nowhere near conscious.” I agree with her that Claude is not conscious, but not for the reason she gives. Those four-year olds in Piaget's experiments were certainly conscious, but they lacked (a certain kind of) self-awareness. I'm inclined to think that self-awareness and consciousness are distinct mental phenomena. On consciousness, I favor the view expressed by William Powers in his 1973 book, Behavior: The Control of Perception. Powers’s account is subtle, more than I can explain here (I do explain it in a post from 2022). Suffice it to say that Powers’s account is grounded in the behavior architecture of the brain. LLMs simply don't that the required architecture. They may well talk as though they’re conscious, but they’re just faking it. It’s empty talk. 

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[1] FWIW, I suspect that this mistaken belief is widespread.

Claude and I discuss the idea of progress in the arts, from Hazlitt to Bloom on Shakespeare, and concluding with Arthur Danto and Ernst Gombrich

This is from an ongoing discussion I have been having with Claude. For this discussion I had uploaded the paper that David Hays and I wrote on cognitive evolution, which is our basic paper of cultural ranks, and Max Tabarrok’s post, Romae Industriae, which poses the question of why Rome didn’t have an industrial revolution. I have posted earlier segments of this conversation: 1) Why didn’t Rome have an industrial evolution? and 2) where I argued that the printing press did not play the role in cultural history that is usually assigned to it.

The general idea of cultural ranks came out of my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins. I took a course on the Scientific Revolution, where we read Thomas Kuhn’s famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In another course I learned that the novel emerged as a literary form in roughly the same time frame. In yet another course I read Centuries of Childhood, by Philippe Aries. He argued that the conception of childhood that is familiar to us, a distinct phase in human development, was not a “natural” concept, but rather emerged, yes, again within roughly the same time period. In a course on the theatre, taught by Dick Macksey, I read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which concocted a story about the historical emergence of tragedy in ancient Greece which made it seem as though the Athenians had “swallowed” an older society and put it on the stage. Ritual celebrants in the older social formation became the principle characters in tragedies while the general popular of that formation became the chorus.

During my sophomore year I’d taken a course in developmental psychology where I was introduced to the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget theorized that children’s mental development progressed through a series of more or less distinct stages, where each stage is characterized by specific cognitive capabilities, with later stages building on earlier ones. He also applied this concept to the history of ideas, e.g. in Genetic Epistmology, which read while working on an MA thesis. That’s also when I read Walter Wiora’s The Four Ages of Music. It was a slim volume in which Wiora argued that the first age emphasized rhythm, the second added an intense development of melody, then came harmony (emerging in Europe) and the contemporary phase, which involved exploration of new forms and methods. I read that and posed a question: Isn’t everything like that, four stages?

I took that question with me to SUNY Buffalo, where I enrolled for a PhD in the English Department, but also spent a great deal of time discussing computational linguistics, cognitive science, and cultural evolution with David Hays in Linguistics. That’s where we developed the idea of cultural ranks. I included an account of narrative development in my 1978 dissertation, “Cognitive Science and Literary Theory.”

I note, then, that while the scientific revolution certainly played an important role in my thinking about cultural evolution, the arts played perhaps an even more important role in developing the idea. However, the ranks idea only accounts for the overall shape of development. What about development within a given rank? I have some preliminary notes about that in a recent post, Confabulation, Dylan’s epistemic stance, and progress in the arts: “I’ll let you be in my dreams of I can be in yours.”

The rest of this post consists of a conversation I had with Claude 3.7 on March 3, 2025. As always, my comments are set in bold type while Claude’s are plain.

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Hazlitt on progress in the arts

While it is common to say that there is progress in the sciences and technology, it’s less common to think of progress in the arts. William Hazlitt published a well-known essay in 1814, Why The Arts Are Not Progressive, and that’s remained the standard view. He observed:

“What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: what is not mechanical or definite, but depends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary or retrograde, and loses more than it gains by transfusion. [...] The greatest poets, the ablest orators, the best painters, and the finest sculptors that the world ever saw, appeared soon after the birth barbarous. Those arts, which depend on individual genius and incommunicable power, of these arts, and lived in a state of society which was, in other respects, comparatively have always leaped at once from infancy to manhood, from the first rude dawn of invention to their meridian height and dazzling lustre, and have in general declined ever after.”

I see you're interested in exploring the contrast between progress in sciences/technology versus the arts. This is a fascinating philosophical question that bridges cultural evolution, aesthetics, and the nature of human creativity.

Hazlitt's essay presents the classic view that the arts, unlike sciences, don't experience linear progress. His central argument distinguishes between domains that are "mechanical, reducible to rule" (sciences) versus those dependent on "genius, taste, and feeling" (arts). He suggests artistic achievements often peak early in civilizations and then stagnate or decline.

The two documents you've shared offer interesting frameworks to consider this question: From "Cognitive Evolution," Benzon and Hays propose a four-rank model of cognitive development across cultures:

1. Rank 1: Abstraction through metaphor (preliterate societies)
2. Rank 2: Rationalization through metalingual definition (literate societies)
3. Rank 3: Theory through algorithm (Renaissance onward)
4. Rank 4: Model building through control (20th century)

They argue these cognitive advances shape all cultural domains, not just science. While they don't specifically refute Hazlitt's view on art, their model suggests that artistic expression would also evolve with new cognitive tools.

The "Romae Industriae" document examines why Rome didn't achieve an industrial revolution despite its technological sophistication. The author concludes cultural factors, particularly the lack of a printing press and the disdain for mechanical arts in slave-based societies, were key constraints rather than just technological limitations.

What's interesting is how these perspectives might inform a response to Hazlitt. Could we argue that while individual artistic genius may appear at any time, the evolution of artistic forms and movements does show a pattern of development tied to cognitive and cultural evolution? For example, the Renaissance's perspective techniques in painting required Rank 3 thinking about algorithmic representation of space.

Would you like to explore this tension between Hazlitt's view and the cognitive evolution framework more deeply, or focus on another aspect of these materials? 

Bloom, Shakespeare, the novel

Ah, yes, this ranks business. Benzon has published on both the evolution of narrative and the evolution of music using ranks theory and Hays has published on expressive culture in general. Perhaps one day I’ll upload those papers for you to examine. I note, though, that they don’t address the issue of progressive change within individual ranks. For example, I suspect that there is expressive change in the novel, from the 18th century up through the end of the 19th century, but that’s entirely within Rank 3 culture, and I’d think the progress continues in the 20th century. [...] And then we have Harold Bloom’s assertion that Shakespeare, in some sense, “invented” the human, but which I think he means that Shakespeare was the first writer to give voice to certain aspects of human behavior and mental life. But I don’t think Bloom ever systematically developed that idea, not even in is book on the Western canon or in his Shakespeare book.

[...] You raise an excellent point about progressive change within individual ranks that wasn't fully addressed in the paper. The progression of the novel within Rank 3 culture is a perfect example of this phenomenon. From Defoe and Richardson through Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, and on to James and Conrad, we see remarkable development in narrative technique, psychological depth, and formal complexity—all while remaining within the algorithmic thinking characteristic of Rank 3.

This intra-rank progression continues into the 20th century with modernist innovations by Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner, who pushed the boundaries of what the novel could express while still operating within Rank 3 cognitive structures. Then perhaps writers like Pynchon and DeLillo begin to engage with Rank 4 model-building approaches to fiction.

Regarding Bloom's assertion about Shakespeare "inventing the human," this does seem to suggest a kind of progressive leap in artistic representation. Bloom never fully systematized this idea, but it appears to indicate that Shakespeare's achievement wasn't just artistic excellence but a cognitive breakthrough in representing human interiority. In ranks terminology, one might say Shakespeare was pushing against the upper limits of Rank 2 representation toward something like early Rank 3 thinking about human psychology, even before the scientific revolution had fully taken hold.

In which I ask Claude 3.5 about sexual shame and confusion in humans

As far as I know, there is no standard account of why humans find sexuality so problematic. It’s not as though no one’s thought to investigate it. They have. But so far no one’s come up with a good account, at least not in thoroughly modern terms, not so far as I can see. So I decided to ask Claude 3.5 Sonnet about it and to suggest my own speculative approach to the problem. 

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I query Claude about present thinking

I believe that sexual shame is unique to animals. Our primates, monkeys and apes, do not insist on copulating in private. They are willing to copulate where others in the group can observe. Is this correct?

From a scientific perspective, this is an oversimplification. While many non-human primates do engage in mating behaviors openly within their social groups, the relationship between privacy and mating varies significantly across species and contexts.

Research in primatology has documented that some primate species do seek varying degrees of seclusion during mating. For instance, orangutans often mate away from other group members, and some gorilla groups show preferences for more secluded locations during breeding behaviors.

The concept of "sexual shame" as we understand it in human terms is complex and involves cultural, psychological, and social dimensions that are difficult to attribute directly to other species. What we observe in other primates is better understood as different patterns of social organization and mating strategies that have evolved to serve various biological and social functions.

Additionally, privacy-seeking behaviors in human societies show considerable variation across cultures and historical periods, suggesting that much of what we consider "sexual shame" is culturally constructed rather than being a universal biological trait.

Would you be interested in learning more about the specific mating patterns and social behaviors observed in different primate species?

That’s OK for now. And I understand that privacy-seeking behavior varies across cultures. In a culture where everyone lives in the same tent, for example, finding privacy is going to be quite different from a culture where everyone has their own sleeping room. Is there any standard reason why humans usually insist on privacy of some sort?

The human preference for private sexual activity appears to stem from several key factors that emerged during our species' development. From an evolutionary perspective, privacy during mating likely provided advantages in mate selection and pair bonding. Private sexual encounters allowed pairs to strengthen their emotional connections without interference or competition from other group members.

From a social perspective, humans developed complex systems of kinship, marriage, and social organization that regulated sexual behavior. These systems often included norms about appropriate contexts for sexual activity, which typically emphasized privacy. This privacy served practical purposes: it helped maintain social order, reduced conflict over mates, and supported the formation of stable family units.

Additionally, humans developed sophisticated cognitive abilities that include advanced theory of mind and heightened self-awareness. This led to complex emotional responses to being observed during intimate activities, which may have further reinforced preferences for privacy.

These biological and social factors appear to have co-evolved with human cultural development, resulting in widespread (though not universal) cultural norms around sexual privacy. While the specific manifestations of these privacy norms vary significantly across societies, the underlying tendency toward some form of privacy during sexual activity appears to be a common human trait.

Would you like to explore any particular aspect of these evolutionary or social dynamics in more detail?

OK. This is consistent with what I’m thinking: “humans developed sophisticated cognitive abilities that include advanced theory of mind and heightened self-awareness. This led to complex emotional responses to being observed during intimate activities, which may have further reinforced preferences for privacy.” Is there a standard reason why sexuality is so problematic for humans?

Human sexuality's complexity appears to stem from several interconnected factors. The development of advanced cognitive abilities that you referenced has made human sexuality uniquely intricate compared to other species.

Our capacity for complex emotional attachments and social relationships means that sexual behavior becomes deeply entwined with personal identity, emotional well-being, and social status. This creates multiple layers of meaning beyond the basic biological drive.

The human brain's sophisticated ability to process symbolic meaning and create cultural narratives transforms sexuality into something that carries significant social and psychological weight. Sexual behavior becomes linked to concepts of morality, identity, and social standing in ways that can create internal conflicts and anxieties.

Additionally, the extended period of human development and the importance of stable family units for child-rearing has led societies to develop elaborate systems for regulating sexual behavior. These cultural systems, while serving important social functions, can sometimes conflict with biological drives, creating tension between instinct and social expectations.

Furthermore, humans' heightened self-awareness means we can anticipate others' judgments and internalize social standards about sexuality, potentially leading to psychological stress that other species likely don't experience. Our ability to imagine future consequences and remember past experiences adds layers of complexity to sexual decision-making.

Would you like to explore any of these specific aspects in more detail? 

I speculate about why humans are bedeviled by sex

Here’s my highly speculative explanation. It has to do with the nature of human development. When humans are born a whole range of biological ‘drives’ and ‘desires’ are active. They’re necessary for the infant to live and thrive.

But cognitive capabilities are quite primitive. They develop relatively slowly, over a matter of years. As that happens the basic biological drives remain active. The way they are dealt with, organized into behavior, will change as cognition becomes more sophisticated. And then adolescence hits. Two things happen.

On the one hand abstract thought emerges (Piaget). On the other hand, adult sexuality matures. But it’s completely new. It hasn’t been a part of the process of behavioral elaboration and maturation that the other biological ‘drives’ and needs have been, hunger and thirst, sleep, exploration, etc. It’s just there. I’m thinking that if it emerges significantly after abstract thinking, the abstraction system (if you will) is more likely to conceive of it as some foreign object, some strange Other, but an Other that’s trapped there inside the body. That makes it very problematic. If on the other hand sexuality arrives first, then the abstraction system can more easily treat it just like any of the other biological motivations.

Your hypothesis presents an intriguing developmental perspective on human sexuality's unique challenges. Let me analyze several key aspects of this framework.

10 Influential Books [Updated, once again]

I've just been watching this conversation between Howard Gardner and Steven Pinker and was reminded of Erik Erikson. His book, Childhood and Society was very important for me. It made Freudian ideas more intelligible than Freud himself had done. Anyhow, that's why I'm once again bumping this post to the top of the queue.

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The "10 Influential Books" meme seems to be making the rounds again. I originally published this back in March of 2010. Here it is again, without revisions.

Urged on by a reader, Tyler Cowen seems to have started a books meme: What 10 books have influenced you the most? This sort of thing is something of a crap-shoot, yadda yadda, but why not? I’ve limited my list to non-fiction.

My Teacher

David Hays, Cognitive Structures (HRAF Press 1981). Hays was my teacher, and most of what I learned from him I learned directly from him. His aim in this book was to integrate the analog and servomechanical model of William Powers (see below) with the propositional and digital style of his own earlier work in computational linguistics. It is embodied cognition before the term was coined and gained currency. I believe this is the most profound such attempt to date (Hays wrote the book in the Spring of 1976), but, of course, I am biased. It is also, alas, rather obscure in points, no bias.

Some Others

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. I’ve read a good deal of Lévi-Strauss, and this wasn’t the first. But it has had the most lasting effect on my thinking, which I’ve already discussed. Lévi-Strauss sees that there is a rigorous, but hidden, logic to a body of South American myths. He evokes this hidden logic by careful comparisons between myths, while discussing them in their larger socio-cultural context.

John Bowlby, Attachment. I read this in typescript under the tutelage of the late Mary Ainsworth when I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Bowlby set out to reconstruct psychoanalytic object relations theory using systems models (TOTE from Miller, Gallanter, and Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior) and evidence from ethology, especially of primates. This became my model of biologically-based psychology.

Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. I’ve read a good deal of Piaget, and this wasn’t the first (most likely that was The Origins of Intelligence in Children.) Though now somewhat eclipsed, his concept of developmental stages was enormously useful and, I believe, still holds water. But be careful. (Given its subjects, this book connects nicely with an interest in literature.)

Lev Vygotsky, Language and Thought. Vygotsky argued that children acquire language by completely internalizing that started as interaction with another. First the parent uses language to direct the child’s attention and behavior. Over time the child becomes able, first to use his own speech for those tasks, and then becomes able to dispense with external speech entirely.

Karl Pribram, Languages of the Brain. Pribram was a champion of the notion that the brain processes and stores information holographically. You’ll find that idea here, plus much more besides. Pribram was, and remains, one of our most comprehensive thinkers about the brain and its mind. But this book’s a tough read.

 

Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. Medievals and Early Moderns didn’t think about children as we do, which Ariès argued from paintings, diaries, and other sources. The basic idea is that people way back when didn’t think and act about something very basic in the way we do. Children are children, no? Well, biologically, yes. Culturally, no.

William Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception. Powers has two ideas, both from control theory (& one of them is more or less given in his title), and both quite elegant. This is how to go about theorizing, be as clear as you can and use elegant examples. FWIW, Powers was an engineer and very much concerned with building real things.

Philosophers

Except for the Powers, all of the above books came to me within a minute or two. Then I drew a blank for a couple of minutes. “But you know,” says I to myself, “I was quite influenced by some philosophers early on, even if I no longer read philosophy. Oo why not mention them.” So I will. That I had to kick Merleau-Ponty into the omissions pile, rather than one of these, is somewhat arbitrary.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Two things got me, the rigorous order of the whole affair, each proposition numbered in outline form. And the mysticism.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. Read a lot of Nietzsche too. But his account of the birth of tragedy linked up with other things in a powerful (including two of the books in the omissions pile.) And, of course, the Apollonian and Dionysian.

Omissions

Since the exercise limited us to ten I didn’t list The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn) The Phenomenology of Perception (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), The Four Ages of Music (Walter Wiora, Has anyone else ever heard of this one, much less read it?) or Art and Illusion (Ernst Gombrich). The more I think about this, the longer this list will get.

EDIT: Jeeze, how did Freud not make the list? I only thought of him when I read someone else’s list just minutes ago (and 2 hours after I first posted this). & Gregory Bateson, Bertrand Russell. Well, I know why Russell didn’t make the list. I read a lot of his stuff in my mid-teens, but not after. I hadn’t started “serious” thinking when I left off reading him. And then there's Charlie Keil's Urban Blues (1966).

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These are comments I made to responses back at The Valve (now defunct):

I find it interesting that you list a number of books from high school & earlier, Luther. I didn't list any from my high school years, which is when I read most of the Bertrand Russell, his popular stuff, not the technical philosophy and logic. Love your comment about Norman Brown. & perhaps I should have listed Suzanne Langer among my philosophers; Feeling and Form was a key work for me. I used both her and Nietzsche in my music book (Beethoven's Anvil, 2001).

Interesting, Rohan, what we take "influence" to mean. Without so much as a thought otherwise I took it to mean "influential in my research." If I'd construed the term more broadly, as you did, I'd have a somewhat different list. That list might have included, for example, Peter Pan (the Golden Books version via Disney), Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy, and Holling Clancy Holling, Lucille Webster Holling, Pagoo (just look at those illustrations).

Piaget, Reflective Abstraction and the Evolution of Literary Criticism

While Piaget is best known for investigating conceptual development in children, he also looked at conceptual development on the historical time scale. In both contexts he talked of reflective abstraction “in which the mechanisms of earlier ideas become objects manipulated by newer emerging ideas. In a series of studies published in the 1980s and 1990s the late David Hays and I developed similar ideas about the long-term cultural evolution of ideas” [1]. I think lots of intellectual disciplines are undergoing such a process and that it’s been going on for some time.

It’s certainly what I think is going on in literary studies. The discipline initially constituted itself from in America philology and literary history; that happened in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. Then interpretive criticism moved to center-stage after World War II and ran into problems in the 1960s. Interpretation wasn’t producing reliable results from one scholar to another? What to do?

The discipline became intensely self-conscious and reflected on its own methods, and then sort of gave up. In the process a number of distinctions collapsed and practical criticism, critical theory, and theory of literature became one thing, with new historicism trotting alongside. That’s the story I told in the early part of this working paper, but without reference to Piaget.

What I’m wondering is if “form” is the name of a CONCEPTUAL MECHANISM in the old/current regime that is in the process of becoming an OBJECT OF THOUGHT under a new emerging regime. Along these lines, I just barely have a conception of what philology is. It’s not something I studied, though some of my undergraduate teachers were certainly versed in it (I’m thinking particularly of Don Cameron Allen). But I’ve recently come across web conversations about it, have seen an article or two explaining it, and note that last year saw the publication of James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton), which one the 2015 Christian Gauss Award and is blurbed from here to Sunday. Until the middle of the 20th century, that’s what literary scholars did. But now it’s slid so deep into the past it has itself become an object of study.

Is this vague? Yes, thinking about thought is treacherously difficult. The point is, though, that there is a long-term historical process going on. And we’re not just slipping from one épistème to another. We’re moving to a new KIND of épistème.

* * * * *

[1] The quote is from a relatively short working paper, Redefining the Coming Singularity – It’s not what you think: https://www.academia.edu/8847096/Redefining_the_Coming_Singularity_It_s_not_what_you_think

Here’s a somewhat fuller statement from that paper:

When the work of developmental psychologist Jean Piaget finally made its way into the American academy in the middle of the last century the developmental question became: Is the difference between children’s thought and adult thought simply a matter of accumulated facts or is it about fundamental conceptual structures? Piaget, of course, argued for the latter. In his view the mind was constructed in “layers” where the structures of higher layers were constructed over and presupposed those of lower layers. It’s not simply that 10-year olds knew more facts than 5-year olds, but that they reasoned about the world in a more sophisticated way. No matter how many specific facts a 5-year old masters, he or she cannot think like a 10-year old because he or she lacks the appropriate logical forms. Similarly, the thought of 5-year olds is more sophisticated than that of 2-year olds and that of 15-year olds is more sophisticated than that of 10-year olds.

This is, by now, quite well known and not controversial in broad outline, though Piaget’s specific proposals have been modified in many ways. What’s not so well known is that Piaget extended his ideas to the development of scientific and mathematical ideas in history in the study of genetic epistemology. In his view later ideas developed over earlier ones through a process of reflective abstraction in which the mechanisms of earlier ideas become objects manipulated by newer emerging ideas. In a series of studies published in the 1980s and 1990s the late David Hays and I developed similar ideas about the long-term cultural evolution of ideas (see appendix for abstracts).

Sexual Shame (aka Araki 2)

This topic, sexual shame, was once again on my mind. So I thought I'd bump this old post to the top of the cue. Why's the topic on my mind now? I've been thinking about Darwinian literary criticism and evolutionary psychology. I'm not aware that either have really addressed this issue, though I assume that the evolutionary psychologists have something to say. I'd think it would be front and center with the critics, but I'm not holding my breath.

* * * * *

Thinking about the Akaki exhibit set me to thinking about something that’s puzzled me for a long time: sexual shame. Why are humans secretive about our sexual activity? Animals are not. In particular, our primate relatives are not. But we are. Why?

(To be sure, the way sexual privacy is staged depends, in part, on physical living arrangements. But not matter how sparse those arrangements may be, privacy is honored in one way or another.)

I assume that there are non-theological answers to this question here and there, but I’m not aware of any. Nor have I come up with any that I like.

I approached something like this topic in an old post on Sex and Metaphysics, where I said this:

The basic circuits for sexuality, like other biological drives, is located deep in the core of the brain in the limbic system. Except for sexuality, those drives are active from birth. But much of the brain is quite immature at birth, especially the neocortex, which is phylogenetically the newest part of the brain. And it’s where our ‘higher’ capacities are more or less localized. All the other emotional and motivational equipment becomes integrated into the ever more sophisticated patterns of thought, desire, and action that are realized in the maturing cortex.

Along comes adolescence and WHAM! the whole system becomes unglued. All of a sudden distinctly new feelings and motivations have to be integrated into one’s repertoire of thoughts and actions. Even if you grow up in a culture that more or less “makes room” for sexuality, it still comes as a shock. Knowing it's going to happen, play-acting at more adult behavior when you're a child, that doesn't really prepare you for having to deal with a whole new hormonal riot. What’s new and confusing is the riot itself.

This leads me to the notion that there is some subtle instability in the overall dynamics of the human nervous system and that sexual privacy is a way of protecting us against that instability.

I go on in that post to speculate about the developmental timing as between the emergence of sexuality and the emergence of abstract thought (in Piaget’s sense). Perhaps that’s where the instability lies. Or maybe it has to do with specifically human sociality which, as I’ve argued in Beethoven’s Anvil, is a bit different from, in addition to, the sociality we’ve inherited from our primate ancestors.

Araki’s sexual imagery, then, stresses these neurodynamics. The images are on public display. We are with others when we see them. But they call for privacy.

Just where ARE those images in social space? What's the connection between sexuality in our lives and in our notions of art?

10 Influential Books, aka What goes around comes around

Back in 2010, at the urging of one of his readers,, Tyler Cowen seems to have started a books meme: What 10 books have influenced you the most? I posted my answer back then (you can find it tacked to the end of New Savanna's "Bill Benzon" page) and now I'm reposting it.  My list is limited to non-fiction.

My Teacher

David Hays, Cognitive Structures. Hays was my teacher, and most of what I learned from him I learned directly from him. His aim in this book was to integrate the analog and servomechanical model of William Powers (see below) with the propositional and digital style of his own earlier work in computational linguistics. It is embodied cognition before the term was coined and gained currency. I believe this is the most profound such attempt to date (Hays wrote the book in the Spring of 1976), but, of course, I am biased. It is also, alas, rather obscure in points, no bias.

Some Others

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. I’ve read a good deal of Lévi-Strauss, and this wasn’t the first. But it has had the most lasting effect on my thinking, which I’ve discussed at The Valve. Lévi-Strauss sees that there is a rigorous, but hidden, logic to a body of South American myths. He evokes this hidden logic by careful comparisons between myths, while discussing them in their larger socio-cultural context.

John Bowlby, Attachment. I read this in typescript under the tutelage of the late Mary Ainsworth. Bowlby set out to reconstruct psychoanalytic object relations theory using systems models (TOTE from Miller, Gallanter, and Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior) and evidence from ethology, especially of primates. This became my model of biologically-based psychology.

Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. I’ve read a good deal of Piaget, and this wasn’t the first (most likely that was The Origins of Intelligence in Children.) Though now somewhat eclipsed, his concept of developmental stages was enormously useful and, I believe, still holds water. But be careful. (Given its subjects, this book connects nicely with an interest in literature.)

Lev Vygotsky, Language and Thought. Vygotsky argued that children acquire language by completely internalizing that started as interaction with another. First the parent uses language to direct the child’s attention and behavior. Over time the child becomes able, first to use his own speech for those tasks, and then becomes able to dispense with external speech entirely.

Karl Pribram, Languages of the Brain. Pribram was a champion of the notion that the brain processes and stores information holographically. You’ll find that idea here, plus much more besides. Pribram was, and remains, one of our most comprehensive thinkers about the brain and its mind. But this book’s a tough read.

Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood. Medievals and Early Moderns didn’t think about children as we do, which Ariès argued from paintings, diaries, and other sources. The basic idea is that people way back when didn’t think and act about something very basic in the way we do. Children are children, no? Well, biologically, yes. Culturally, no.

William Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception. Powers has two ideas, both from control theory (and one of them is more or less given in his title), and both quite elegant. This is how to go about theorizing, be as clear as you can and use elegant examples. FWIW, Powers was an engineer and very much concerned with building real things.

Philosophers

Except for the Powers, all of the above books came to me within a minute or two. Then I drew a blank for a couple of minutes. “But you know,” says I to myself, “I was quite influenced by some philosophers early on, even if I no longer read philosophy. Oo why not mention them.” So I will. That I had to kick Merleau-Ponty into the omissions pile, rather than one of these, is somewhat arbitrary.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Two things got me, the rigorous order of the whole affair, each proposition numbered in outline form. And the mysticism.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy. Read a lot of Nietzsche too. But his account of the birth of tragedy linked up with other things in a powerful (including two of the books in the omissions pile.) And, of course, the Apollonian and Dionysian.

Omissions

Since the exercise limited us to ten I didn’t list Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, Walter Wiora, The Four Ages of Music, or Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion. The more I think about this, the longer this list will get. Some Freud belongs on the list (The Interpretation of Dreams?). Charlie Keil, Urban Blues. And Gregory Bateson, Bertrand Russell. Well, I know why Russell didn’t make the list. I read a lot of his stuff in my mid-teens, but not after. I hadn’t started “serious” thinking when I left off reading him.

Whatever happened to Jean Piaget? And where’s the mind?

I learned about Piaget as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. He had a profound influence on me. The idea of learning how the mind works by studying how it develops had intuitive appeal and Piaget’s systematic exploration and exposition of mental mechanisms gave a sense the mind was not just an inchoate box full of processes and miasmatic desires but that there was a complex and highly structured “device” at work.

Furthermore Piaget 1) considered himself a structuralist and wrote a little book about it, 2) and quite explicitly argued that the mind constructs reality. He even addressed himself to the history of the mind, under the heading of genetic epistemology through analysis of the historical development of mathematical and causal concepts.

Even then, it was apparent that, if he was a structuralist, is was a different kind of structuralist from, say, Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. However much they were interested in the mind, Piaget had much more to say about it. He did not see it as a profusion of signs variously chasing, eluding, and opposing one another. And, alas, his ideas were not of much use for critique. And THAT, I suspect, is why he never really made the team for humanist discourse, though a large, ingenious, and industrious body of psychologists has been busily at work extending, amending, revising, and critiquing his work.

Not that I think that a knowledge of Piaget alone would plug the hole I see in Latour’s thinking and that of his students, the object-oriented philosophers. But such knowledge would at least give them a sense of “thickness” to the mind, a sense that there’s something more than a bunch of signs playing hide-and-go-seek.

Sex and Metaphysics

It may be a bit of an exaggeration to say that we humans are obsessed with sex, but only a bit. The question is: Why? Yes, sex is necessary for reproduction and, in consequence, sexual feelings are very strong and insistent. Sex is often, though not always, pleasurable.

But that’s not enough. Oh, it may be enough for evolutionary psychologists, but they don’t demand much of their psychology. Even at that, the biological rules of sex are, still, a bit obscure. The cultural games we play with them, they are infinitely varied.

Take that Shakespeare sonnet I’ve been exploring, 129, The expense of spirit. That’s about sex. But it’s also about desire, pleasure, guilt, will and reason. All of those things intermingled. It’s about metaphysics.

There’s the rub: How’d sex become metaphysical? Just what is the knowledge in carnal knowledge?

Consider this Wikipedia passage about Tantric ritual; notice all the technical terms (in Sanscrit):

When enacted as enjoined by the Tantras, the ritual culminates in a sublime experience of infinite awareness for both participants. Tantric texts specify that sex has three distinct and separate purposes—procreation, pleasure, and liberation. Those seeking liberation eschew frictional orgasm for a higher form of ecstasy, as the couple participating in the ritual lock in a static embrace. Several sexual rituals are recommended and practiced. These involve elaborate and meticulous preparatory and purificatory rites. The sexual act itself balances energies coursing within the pranic ida and pingala channels in the subtle bodies of both participants. The sushumna nadi is awakened and kundalini rises upwards within it. This eventually culminates in samadhi, wherein the respective individual personalities and identities of each of the participants are completely dissolved in a unity of cosmic consciousness.

What are they talking about? Liberation — from what? Cosmic consciousness — what’s that? What’s this about dissolving? Whatever this is, it isn’t monkey glands on overdrive, it’s something else. Those Tantra adepts are using biology for something that transcends biology. But what?

‘Transcend’ — that’s a term that comes up often in such discussions, along with ecstasy, union, dissolution. All are common to the discourse of mysticism as well. Sex and mysticism, two peas in a pod — whoops! there’s a biological metaphor. Mystics use sexual metaphors, and sexuality drives even the prosaic among us to the edge of mysticism.

* * * * *

I’ve got two guesses. One: While ecstasy and transcendence are available anytime, anywhere, while doing anything — so sayeth the Zen masters ZAP! — they’re most likely to sneak up on us during sex. If so, then, one would like to know why.

My other guess is not unrelated to the first, but it’s more complicated.

The basic circuits for sexuality, like other biological drives, is located deep in the core of the brain in the limbic system. Except for sexuality, those drives are active from birth. But much of the brain is quite immature at birth, especially the neocortex, which is phylogenetically the newest part of the brain. And it’s where our ‘higher’ capacities are more or less localized. All the other emotional and motivational equipment becomes integrated into the ever more sophisticated patterns of thought, desire, and action that are realized in the maturing cortex.

Along comes adolescence and WHAM! the whole system becomes unglued. All of a sudden distinctly new feelings and motivations have to be integrated into one’s repertoire of thoughts and actions. Even if you grow up in a culture that more or less “makes room” for sexuality, it still comes as a shock. Knowing it's going to happen, play-acting at more adult behavior when you're a child, that doesn't really prepare you for having to deal with a whole new hormonal riot. What’s new and confusing is the riot itself.

Now, let’s put sexuality aside for a moment and look at cognitive development. Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist, worked out the theory of stages on cognitive development starting with sensorimotor, then pre-operational, concrete operations, and then, at adolescence, formal operations. Formal operations allows for abstract thought, thoughts about god and country, but also mathematics and philosophy.

And that leads to my second guess. Sex becomes intertwined with metaphysics because our sexual impulses become active during the same period in development that abstract thought emerges. For reasons I've never really attempted to work out, I suspect that if the capacity for abstract thought becomes established before hormonal puberty, there's a chance that the new feelings and motives will be treated as foreigners, strangers that have taken refuge in one's own body.

And that's what's so freaky about sex. None of our feelings and emotions are under control of the will. But they’re all familiar to us as we move into adolescence. We’re used to them. They have their homes in our lives, their paths and hangouts. We know them even if we cannot control them.

Sexuality is a stranger.

In that strangeness it, more than any other behavioral system, links our most basic and primitive capacities with our most abstract. At once act and thought, deed and desire, it is metaphysics in life.

Note: These two posts aren't quite about sex. But they're in the same neighborhood: bundling, romantic love.