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The Cupola of Logic
in the Unity of Sciences
– towards an Evolutionary Epistemology
Luís Moniz Pereira
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
“Doctor rerum naturalium honoris causa” ceremony
T.U. Dresden, 4 December 2006
Full text at: http://centria.di.fct.unl.pt/~lmp/publications/online-papers/EvPsyUniSci.pdf
Abstract
- We examine a non-traditional approach to unity of sciences, a challenging
articulation of views proceeding from Evolutionary Psychology, Logic and
Artificial Intelligence.
- This amalgam sets forth a consilience stance, wherefore the unity of
sciences is heuristically presupposed on grounds of pragmatic and
productive default assumptions.
- Thus scientific inquiry is conducted, consilience arising from a presumed
unity of objective reality, in itself a heuristic and pragmatic conception.
- The attending hinges to Artificial Intelligence suggest the emergence of an
innovative symbiotic form of evolutionary epistemology.
Consilience
• Arguments in favour of the unity of knowledge – consilience – have been
strongly put by Edward O. Wilson, author of Consilience – The Unity of
Knowledge (1998). He postulates there is a single physical nature, one
not persuadable through argumentation, whatever deconstructionists
may think. Science is not mere convention.
• Consilience, according to him, is the result of a co-evolution, involving
genes and memes (of which more later).
• Our cultural memes have a genetic support and cannot, in the long run,
stand against the genes who guarantee their survival, though such
attempts may exist, viz. through genetic manipulation.
Evolution and the Brain
• The first bipedal primates established the separation between human and
other simian. To fathom the abilities of the human brain, it is essential to
understand what exactly were the problems our primate ancestors were
solving that led them to develop an extraordinarily intricate brain.
• One cannot look at the modern human brain, with its ability to create
science, as if the millions of evolution-years that attuned it had never
taken place.
• Among the problems being solved one spots those of status, territorialism,
mating, gregariousness, altruism versus opportunism, the building of
artefacts, and the mapping of the external world.
Evolutionary Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology is a consummate example of successful
scientific unification, engendered by a deeply significant combination of
Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, Linguistics, Evolutionary Biology,
Neurosciences, and Artificial Intelligence (David Buss, 2005).
• Evolutionary Psychology has been studying behaviour and brain from an
integrated evolutionary perspective, thereby originating some extremely
relevant contributions.
• It has been strongly supported by Anthropological Archaeology, with its
empirical studies in the cultural evolution of mankind (Stephen Shennan,
2002).
Genes and Memes
• Humans
exhibit
two
reproductive
mechanisms:
one
is
sexual
reproduction, the other mental reproduction.
• Authors from Evolutionary Psychology have construed the notion of
“meme”, in complement and contrast to that of gene. Memes
substantiate the reproductive system executed in the brain. They are
mental units that complement the sexually transmitted genes.
• Memes gather in assemblies, in patterns, like genes gather in
chromosomes. Memes are patterned by, say, ideologies, religions, and
common sense ideas.
• Certain memes work together, mutually reinforcing each other. Others
not so. Hence correcting (and correctional) mechanisms may be
triggered.
Science Memes
• In this view, scientific thought emerges from distributed memetic
interaction, albeit it at a spacial and temporal distance, never in an
isolated way.
• It is erected by confluences, not constructed autonomously. It is
engendered by networks, processed in appropriate environments. One,
apropos, is Education – where we carry out memetic proliferation.
• Language is the instrument allowing us to fabricate knowledge together.
We may go so far as to state there is no isolated consciousness, that it is
distributed by language. Thus one should envisage it out of the single
brain and spread throughout culture.
Archaeology
• Archaeologists, cf. Steven Mithen in The Prehistory of Mind (1996), are
amassing evidence that our ancestors began with a generic intelligence,
such as we find in apes today.
• There is a broad discussion – reproduced in the Artificial Intelligence
community – whether intelligence is a general functionality or best seen
divided into specific ability modules.
• Mithen argues humans went from a first phase of simple general
intelligence, to a second phase of 3 specialized major modules:
– one for natural history and naïve physics – Knowledge of Nature
– one for Knowledge and Manufacture of Instruments
– one for Cultural Artefacts – the rules of living in society
Specialized Modules and General Cupola
• The
specialized
intelligences
were
separately
developed
and
uncommunicating.
• Only later – in Homo Sapiens with the appearance of spoken language –
a cupola module became indispensable to articulate the specific ones.
• How else can specialized modules globally and synergetically connect,
and people – as module envelopes – communicate among themselves?
• This need originated the generic cupola module, a much more
sophisticated form of general intelligence, the cognitive glue bringing the
specialized modules, and people, to communicate and cooperate.
The Evolution of Reason: Logic
• The formal systems of logic have ordinarily been regarded as
independent from biology, but recent developments in evolutionary
theory suggest that biology and logic are intimately interrelated.
• William S. Cooper (2001) outlines a theory of rationality in which logic
law emerges as an intrinsic aspect of evolutionary biology. This
perspective, though unorthodox at present, could change traditional
ideas about the reasoning processes.
• The foundational laws of decision theory, utility theory, induction, and
deduction can be reinterpreted as natural consequences of evolutionary
processes, ultimately resulting in a unified foundation of an evolutionary
science of reason.
Behaviour, Rational Decision, and Games
• Decision theory is the branch of logic that comes into most immediate
contact with the concerns of evolutionary biology. It addresses the
rational choices regarding the most reasonable courses of action and
behavioural patterns.
• This makes behaviour an interdisciplinary bridge approachable from both
the biological and the logical sides. It is the fulcrum over which
evolutionary forces extend their leverage into the realm of logic.
• On the heels of rational group behaviour, there emerged abstract rule-
following social games. Game rules encapsulate concrete situation
defining
patterns,
and
concrete
causal
situation-action-situation
sequencing, akin to causality-obeying physical reality.
Games, Logic, and Communication
• From games further abstraction ensued. There emerged the notions of
situation-defining concepts or predications; of general rules of thought
chaining; and of legitimate argument and counter-argument game moves
(John Holland, 1998).
• The pervasiveness of informal logic for capturing knowledge and for
reasoning, a lingua franca across cultures, rests on its ability to actually
foster rational understanding and common objectivity.
• Objective knowledge evolution dynamics, whether individual or plural,
follows ratiocination patterns and laws too.
The Cupola of Logic
• The human capacity for understanding logical reasoning was developed in
the course of brain evolution. Its most powerful expression today is
science itself, the ultimate reward for our mastery of language.
• Indeed, logic provides the overall conceptual cupola that articulates the
specific modules identified by evolutionary psychology.
• It is mirrored by the computational universality of computing machines.
These can execute any program, compute any computable function.
• Hence philosophical functionalism: logic can be implemented on top of a
symbol processing system, independently of its physical substrate.
• Once universality is achieved, abstract creativity bootstraps itself free of its
evolutionary roots, to enable arbitrary symbol erector sets with which to
model reality.
Our Stance on the Unity of Sciences
• Through a materialist heuristic to believe, so to say by default, it appears
that the unifying consilience of body and mind will be found.
• One is entitled to presuppose that the brains we have in common, and
received via evolution, are capable of ever extendable joint agreement
regarding the scientific view of our shared reality, especially in view of
those brains’ universal plasticity in communication and modelling.
• This said, one may therefore pragmatically assume that it is the very
unity of mind-independent Reality – a presumed given – which is
conducive to the unity of the sciences, viz. when Reality is examined in
the light of our joint cerebral abilities.
Epistemic Status
• What is at stake is ultimately a principle of action practice, and of thought
practice. The justification for our presuppositions is not evidential. It is
practical and instrumentalistic – pragmatic, in short. Procedural or
functional efficacy is its crux.
• Hence, our unity of sciences’ epistemic status is not that of an empirical
discovery, but that of an encompassing presupposition.
• Its ultimate justification is a transcendental argument from the very
possibility of communication and inquiry, as we typically conduct them.
Epistemic Toolkit
• In some cases, the cognitive tools and instruments of rationality will be
found hardware independent.
• Though there is no universal one-size-fits-all epistemological recipe,
agreement can be had on the relative success of any given tool kit.
• Understanding can be sought by building intelligent machines,
functionalism coming to the rescue in positing that the material substrate
is often not of the essence.
• The symbiotic entwining of human and machine being, therefore, the
most recent and foreboding step in evolutionary epistemology.
Artificial Epistemology
• Epistemology will acquire the ability to be shared: with robots, aliens or
any other entity that needs cognition to survive and program its future.
• Creating situated robots means carrying out our own cognitive evolution
by new means, thereby engendering symbiotic, co-evolving, and selfaccelerating loops.
• Computers can reify our scientific theories, making them objective,
repeatable, and part of a commonly constructed extended reality, built
upon multi-disciplinary unified science.
• Artificial Intelligence and the Cognitive Sciences provide highly
stimulating steps towards furthering Sciences Unity, through the very
effort of that construction.
References
David M. Buss, editor (2005), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology
John Wiley, 2005.
William S. Cooper (2001), The Evolution of Reason: Logic as a Branch of Biology
Cambridge U.P., 2001.
John Holland (1998), Emergence – From Chaos to Order, Addison-Wesley, 1998.
Steven Mithen (1996), The Prehistory of Mind, Thames & Hudson, 1996.
Stephen Shennan (2002), Genes, Memes and Human History – Darwinian
Archaeology and Cultural Evolution, Thames & Hudson, 2002.
Edward O. Wilson (1998), Consilience – The Unity of Knowledge
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
The End
and thank you for your attention