Another set of phenomena that made it difficult for me to communicate with the Pirahãs was the development of our bodies as well as different fears based on those bodies. Our bodies are built from different diets, different activities, different genes, and so on. I smelled different. The Pirahãs found it difficult to relate to a man who spent most of his day sitting and writing. They couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t give away all my canned food to them and supply my family’s needs by fishing and hunting—like any man should. They were much better able to withstand the bugs that were constantly biting all of us. They also knew their way around the jungle. They were not afraid of jungle cats, snakes, and so on, though they had a healthy respect for them. They saw me, therefore, as having little of relevance to say because of the apparent lack of relevance of what I did, what I feared, what I ate, and how I thought.
Though these differences between me and the Pirahãs only scratch the surface of the deep, wide gap I had to bridge if I were to communicate with them about values, the Bible, my own life, and so on, notice that the differences do not fall into a single category. Nor can we say that such differences are primarily due to contrasting sets of “memes” or ideas. Memes and ideas alone are unable to account for these differences for the simple reason that not all of these or other differences are able to be made explicit; not all of the differences I encountered are reducible to propositions; and many of the differences are negative, rather than positive—learning what not to do, rather than what to do. And many of our different conceptions came from different bodies and physical experiences. So whatever cultural contrast is, it ranges beyond a set of explicit ideas.
Perhaps more important than anything else I learned was that while I am able to summarize some Pirahã beliefs and values, as I partially do above, there is a huge amount of individual variation. And how does the individual engage with his society? Does an individual behave in a particular way because of his or her culture or because of his or her personal psychology? What is the role of culture in accounting for the behavior of the individual? Or for the individual’s psychology? Does each Pirahã participate in a collective intention to “live according to Pirahã values”? How is culture even possible? Or is it possible at all? Is a society living by a certain culture following rules like a football team? Or are they playing notes in harmony like an orchestra? How do cultures hang together at all, if they do?
Because I had no answer to these questions, I was ill equipped to do what I had set out to do. And largely (and fortunately, in retrospect), I failed. But my early years among the Pirahãs were by no means wasted. From these experiences came my desire and first empirical work to understand the intersection of personal psychology and cultural knowledge and values.
Eventually, I want(ed) to reach a theoretical understanding of the unspoken nature of culture and psychology—what Sapir called the “unconscious patterning” of society or Hall ([1959] 1973) referred to as “the silent language.” This book is the result of a long quest. My ideas come from field research on more than a dozen Amazonian and other societies, as well as from reading Kenneth Pike, Edward Sapir, Aristotle, Clifford Geertz, Robert Brandom, Michael Polanyi, and myriad other anthropologists, linguists, psychologists, philosophers, and biologists.
Though I knew what I wanted to write, I was nonetheless surprised as I reached the conclusion of this book to learn that the theory I have developed here of the self is mildly reminiscent of the Buddhist notion of anatman, the idea that humans have no nature and no self apart from the experiences they have united in their memories. As Flanagan (2013) and Albahari (2006) have shown, Buddhism is built on and develops a serious alternative to Western ideas on the philosophy of human selfhood and human nature. My conclusion is far from spiritual, however. It is that the “non-self” is fragile, as it follows experience, being a posteriori rather than a priori and thus can take many unforeseen twists and turns.
Another crucial component of the thesis of this study is that minds do not experience and do not know, and minds are not the repositories of tacit information. Individuals are. By this I mean that our brains are just organs of our bodies. (I will use mind and brain interchangeably, but with the caveat that the mind is just a way of talking about the brain.) The brain cannot escape its diet, its sleep patterns, unsafe conditions, its hormones, or its body.3 Our bodies learn (for example, with muscle memory; e.g., Bruusgaard et al. 2010) from our brains to our fingertips. Failure to take this fact into theorization has been one of the greatest shortcomings of the cognitive sciences. To repeat: Minds do not learn. Brains do not learn. Societies do not learn. Cultures do not learn. Only individuals learn. And what individuals learn is largely in the form of a culturally articulated dark matter. Brains are part of our bodies, so they play a role in the entire body’s ability to learn. It is the body that learns in this sense.
Consider the kinds of dark matter that direct human activities. One example, from Gellatly (1986), involves poultry farming. It was noticed early on that if it were possible to determine the sex of chicks as they hatch, this would be of economic benefit in sorting chickens into laying hens vs. edible roosters, and so on. According to Gellatly (1986, 4), “[In the] 1920s, Japanese scientists discovered a method by which this could be done based on subtle perceptual cues with a suitably held chick. It was, nevertheless, a method that required a great deal of skill, developed through practice. After four to six weeks of practice, a newly qualified chick-sexer might be able to determine the sex of 200 chicks in 25 minutes with an accuracy of 95 per cent, rising with years of practice to 1,000–1,400 chicks per hour with an accuracy of 98 per cent.”
Or consider remarks in a similar vein by Polanyi:
Following the example set by Lazarus and McCleary in 1949, psychologists call the exercise of this faculty [apprehending “the relation between two events, both of which we know, but only one of which we can tell”] a process of “subception.” These authors presented a person with a large number of nonsense syllables, and after showing certain of the syllables, they administered an electric shock. Presently, the person showed symptoms of anticipating the shock at the site of “shock syllables”; yet, on questioning, he could not identify them . . . He had acquired a knowledge similar to that which we have when we know a person by signs which we cannot tell. ([1966] 2009, 8ff)
Based on this type of case, some researchers on the mind likewise have argued that many of our thoughts and actions are heavily influenced by things we do not know we know, do not know how to say, or are simply unable to talk about. For example, Freud claimed that much of what guides the workings of the mind is unconscious, while Chomsky refers to the inborn, tacit knowledge of universal grammar that all Homo sapiens are born with.
In my own work, I have long referred to the invisible forces that act on our mind as the “dark matter of the mind.” Recently I was pleased to read that some psychologists, such as Joel Gold (Gold 2012; see also Gold and Gold 2014), also use this phrase:
The conscious mind—much like the visible aspect of the universe—is only a small fraction of the mental world. The dark matter of the mind, the unconscious, has the greatest psychic gravity. Disregard the dark matter of the universe and anomalies appear. Ignore the dark matter of the mind and our irrationality is inexplicable.
My view of dark matter is quite different, however, from Freud’s, Polanyi’s, Chomsky’s, or Gold’s, though there is some overlap. For example, Gold takes the dark matter to be essentially psychological. For me, however, it is found in the individual, in the individual’s nurturing culture, and in the connections between the two. Psychology alone is insufficient.
Dark matter is recognized in one way or the other by all who study humans. In fact, in one sense, all of psychology is a sustained attempt to understand the dark matter of the mind. For example, consider the recent research of Susan Carey (2009) on concepts, of Elizabeth Spelke (2013) on a range of inborn knowledge, and Alison Gopnik (2010) on children’s ability to learn thin
gs that may seem innate but are not, just to name a few. One of the pioneers of the study of dark matter, a source we will return to many times in the course of this book, was Edward Sapir (1884–1939), who spent his life researching the connection of individual psychology to cultural patterning. Unfortunately, psychology as it is currently practiced largely ignores that aspect of dark matter which most exercised Sapir and interests me—namely, how culturally directed unspoken knowledge, along with the structuring of apperceptions (the ways by which we process, make sense of, and assimilate our experiences), explicit learning, body memory, and so on, combine to form the individual. Culturally directed psychology was addressed perhaps most insightfully by Sapir, and the formation of the individual by Buddhism.
Philosophers have also written a great deal on tacit knowledge (similar to but not identical to my concept of dark matter), going back at least to the seminal work of Michael Polanyi. The works that deal with tacit knowledge directly range from Searle’s (1978) discussion of the “background,” to work by John McDowell (2013) and Robert Brandom (1998) on the implicit vs. explicit in concept formation, Bourdieu’s (1977) proposals on “habitus,” and others that we discuss in the course of this book.
Let me underscore again the caveat that dark matter is not to be confused with tacit knowledge. This will become more important as we proceed. Of course, some work in philosophy could be interpreted as making a case that tacit knowledge cannot exist. For example, according to Koster’s (1992) interpretation of Wittgenstein, knowledge is not a representation in the mind that can either be talked about or be ineffable, but it is action—what we “know” is a matter of what we do. I think that this position that knowledge is action has a good deal to commend it, but I also believe that falls short of a full theory for largely failing to recognize the continuity between apperception and memory (on which more below). And it seems to fail to tell us why and how actors act.4
Within my own area of specialization, linguistics, Noam Chomsky—one of the founders of the cognitive sciences and generative linguistics—was among the first intellectuals to develop a theory of the structure, meaning, and importance of dark matter, as he introduced the theories of deep structure and universal grammar.5 Another influential linguist was Kenneth L. Pike. Although Chomsky has been more influential across a broader swath of intellectual areas, linguist Kenneth Pike’s (1967) ideas on unspoken knowledge come closer to the dark matter that this essay addresses. Crucial to this study is Pike’s notion of emicization.
Emicization emerges from Pike’s work on the emic vs. etic. He coined these words based upon the widely used linguistic terms phonetic vs. phonemic. Phonetics (articulatory, acoustic, or auditory) is the study of speech sounds from the perspective of a non-native speaker, say, a physicist or linguist. Phonemics is the study of the set of phonetic sounds that native speakers perceive as single sounds—that is, the sounds that are important from the perspective of a native speaker, an insider.6 For example, English speakers all hear one sound, /p/, in the words park, spark, and carp, when in fact there are at least three sounds, all written as p in these words, namely, [ph], [p], and [], respectively.7 Native speakers thus know less explicitly about the sounds of their language than they tacitly know about them, since speakers in general never perceive the separate etic sounds but only the single emic sound that an etic sound is associated with. Yet they never confuse etic sounds in use. Thus even though native speakers lack overt knowledge of the distribution of the etic sounds of their language—for example, the three separate manifestations (technically, allophones) of /p/ in the examples just given—their own emic knowledge produces behavior that can be described as: “Use [p] in syllable-medial positions, [ph] in (some) syllable-initial positions, and [] in phrase-final positions.”
Extending this etic/emic contrast to culture, Pike (1967) makes a case—one that we will draw upon repeatedly throughout this book—that the insider (emic) vs. outsider (etic) perspective on cultural events, perception, and myriad other aspects of human behavior are possible only because of the crucial use of tacit knowledge, as this term will be developed here.8
What is needed, and what is attempted below, is a sustained argument in support of the hypothesis that our actions, beliefs, desires, values, and other behavioral or mental markers of the self emerge from the implicit knowledge and apperception that we acquire as members of particular social groups, from our families and tribes to our societies and nations. Unlike Hall’s silent language or Searle’s “background,” dark matter is multilayered, differentially manifested, and variously derived from the experiences of living.
Our discussion here is a microcosmic culture of its own—an arrangement of knowledge and apperceptions that are not quite like those of any other discussion. From this microculture, I hope that answers emerge for several questions of interest to cognitive scientists. Perhaps the broadest question it attempts to answer is how cultures and individuals shape one another. This is an old question but one still worth trying to come to grips with, in my opinion. Clearly, if you or I had been born in very different countries by the same parents or to different parents in the same country, we would not be “you” or “I,” but quite different people. In the former case I might still be redheaded and pale-skinned, but perhaps I would be taller or shorter, fatter or thinner, stronger or weaker, smarter or dumber, more tolerant or less tolerant, and so on, than I currently am. I would likely prefer different foods and react differently to pain, and different things would disgust me or please me. Most would acknowledge that none of us would be the same as we now are, physically, mentally, or morally, if raised in another culture. The crucial question is, how different would we be?
Our investigation of dark matter of the mind sets out to answer the question of what it means to be human from our perspective of apex social primates. It asks whether humans are so constrained by instincts or physics that our freedom is an illusion. It interrogates the very notions of culture, society, and the mind. For some (e.g., Tooby, as discussed below), culture is little more than collection of oddities—a lexicon of cues, values, and bits and pieces of knowledge. To these people, if we strip away this lexicon like some agglomeration of mental barnacles, we will find the same cognitive and emotional structures and functions in all humans. I disagree. I want to push back against the idea that humans are more alike around the world than they are different. In addressing the issues, many subsidiary questions and problems arise, such as how—if at all—cultural variation interacts with emotions, physical development, morality, death rates, cognition, and so on. Concerns with the cognitive-cultural contribution to a theory of Homo sapiens have been discussed for a long while. Edward Sapir was a pioneer of the study of mind-culture interaction. His premature death in 1939 lead to a decades-long hiatus in such studies.
To review a bit of the post-Sapirian work on cognition that emerged in the 1950s, there was a partial return to the study of the mind, but now as a computer rather than as part of a larger culture. The date most associated with this new “mental turn” is September 11, 1956. On that day, a gathering of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focused on the nature of the human mind, an event that Gardner (1987) and others refer to as the birth of the “cognitive revolution” (Boden [2006] provides a superb and comprehensive history of the cognitive sciences). I believe that this assessment is incorrect for various reasons, however. First, it was not a revolution in any sense, however popular that narrative has become. As I just stated, Sapir explicitly studied cognition and culture decades before this conference, no less insightfully than studies introduced in 1956 and subsequent years. Moreover, the “revolution” that emerged from this question asked fundamentally the wrong question, focusing on the mind as a disembodied knower (in the unfortunate Cartesian tradition). Nevertheless 1956 was unarguably a watershed year, a rebirth of studies of the mind, at least on the US side of the Atlantic. The personalities and works associated with the MIT conference were deeply influentia
l in the revival of interest in the mind. The presenters at the conference included George A. Miller, Noam Chomsky, Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, and Allen Newell. Many other philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, computer scientists, and linguists subsequently flocked to identify with the emerging cognitive sciences.
Following the 1956 conference, funding began to emerge for studies of the mental or, in the new buzz phrase, the “cognitive sciences.” In the early rounds of funding in the mid-1970s by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, grants were awarded to the University of California, San Diego; the University of Texas at Austin; MIT; Yale University; Brown University; and Stanford University. Later grants to further develop efforts were also awarded to Carnegie Mellon University; the University of Pennsylvania; the University of Chicago; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Rochester; and the Cognitive Neuroscience Institute. In these early awards and efforts by the different institutions (these grants coincided with my entry into linguistics as a student), there were conflicts over the very definition of cognitive science. What was cognitive science? Was it singular or plural (several cognitive sciences vs. a single cognitive science)? Who was really doing cognitive science as it should be done?
My own view is that no one was. In all of this funded research, this new energy, these brilliant ideas, there was nothing in the cognitive sciences that suggested that people were asking serious questions about the context in which the mind is formed—particular individuals situated in particular cultures. Culture was examined as a manifestation of the mind in most cases, even in so-called cognitive anthropology. Unfortunately, these studies were thus largely unidirectional, mind→culture, and they were dramatically myopic in their obsessive focus on computation and the metaphor of the mind as a computer. In retrospect, it seems that because of the newness of the computer at the time—the metaphor that drove the ’50s cognitive studies—continuing on to the present, these otherwise superb studies all failed to consider human emotions and the role of the individual as a whole (body and culture) in cognition, instead focusing narrowly on what they saw as the “computational” aspects of thinking. Yet emotions, muscles, hormones, even bacteria and the body—that is, the individual (if one believes as I do that there is nothing to an individual but one’s body)—are the portals to reasoning and cognition.9 No theory of cognition can hope to succeed without a focus on the entire individual—not merely their “minds” and their place in society. Cognitive scientists never examined in any detail the foundational relationship of culture to the mind, the mind as an outgrowth of culture. The reason seems to follow from the misleading idea that the mind is a digital computer, an evolved software running presently (but not necessarily) on neurological hardware. This metaphor is fragile, though. For example, unlike the brain and body, computer software doesn’t grow biologically from its hardware (see below and Dreyfuss 1965, 1994; Haugeland 1998; among others). Nor do computers possess emotions—one of the primary drivers of human cognition. And we cannot overlook the fact that the mind is shaped by its environment even when it is not attending to its environment per se, an ability beyond any current computer. These are just a few of the serious shortcomings—or at least, I will try to show below that they are—of the digital computer theory of the mind. Thus, from the perspective here, the entire cognitive sciences “revolution” took the wrong road, the wrong “turn,” as philosophers occasionally use that term.
Dark Matter of the Mind Page 2