Dark Matter of the Mind

by Daniel L. Everett

  6. A solution space is necessary for any learner.

  7. A simple nature-vs.-nurture dichotomy is wrong.

  8. The crucial focus of research is the learner’s job in acquiring competence in all specific and general tasks.

  Let’s consider each of these points in turn. I want to first list my principal objections to each point, then examine each one in more depth. Point 1 is the foundational problem, the primary mistake of the cognitive sciences (Panksepp and Biven 2012; Paul Churchland 2013; Searle 1980b; and many others). The mind is grounded in the physical world by the physical world. To say that the mind is computationally grounded misses the point of evolution, of emotions, of the physiology and hormones that are active in, present in our every thought. The brain is an organ. It does some computation. It does lots of other things. We would be less than human if the mind were simply grounded in the world by computation. In fact, this first point is simply a rehash of Cartesian dualism, which Damasio (2005)—among many others (especially see Patricia Churchland 2013)—correctly labels a mistake.

  Point 2 says nothing, really. Of course human brains are capable of things at birth. And the things that we are capable of distinguish us from other animals. The idea that humans learn to do things that other animals do not has long been recognized (Descartes goes on at length about this, for example, but so does the Bible). Thus humans must have a different biology than other animals or we would not be cognitive or physically different from them. Therefore this point adds nothing revolutionary that we did not know before. No one has ever denied—not even Locke or Aristotle, who were the principal sources of the metaphor of the human mind as a “blank slate”—that the human mind has innate characteristics in this sense. The question is not whether the mind is actually blank but how prespecified it is for higher cognitive functions; or to put it another way, where are the blank spots at and a few months prior to birth?

  Point 3 likewise says little. Linguists—before Chomsky and before the cognitive revolution—have long known that human languages have no upper limit and that this astounding linguistic virtuosity is a product of a finite mind (though some linguists would have said “of a finite mind and a specific culture”). Leonard Bloomfield (1933), Edward Sapir (1921), Franz Boas ([1940] 1982), Kenneth Pike (1967), and multitudes of other linguists would have said the same thing decades before this revolution.

  With regard to point 4, “universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures,” it is again not at all clear what kind of break with the past this statement represents, aside from the word “mechanisms.” It is nearly inconceivable that any scientist would believe that different populations of humans have radically different brains, any more than they have different bodies (i.e., three or four arms, two heads, etc.) “Mechanisms” is potentially different because of the computational metaphor it derives from (again, the foundational mistake of the cognitive revolution). There is a certain physiological and evolutionary foundation of the brain. It is even conceivable that the ancient foundation has been altered in subtle or major ways in modern populations, due to recent cultural or biological pressures that alter relative fitness within that particular population. My principal objection, then, to this thesis is that it reinforces the fundamental error (Damasio 2005; D. Everett 2012a) of the metaphor of the mind as a computer, rather than understanding it as a biological entity. The cognitive revolution avoids reference to the brain by and large via a Whorfian sleight of hand whereby proponents refer to the understanding of cognition via the brain and its physiology as “reductionism,” when in fact it is more appropriate to characterize talk of the mind as “additionalist.”

  The idea that a cognitive revolution took place is thus interesting because it is hard to see where it has claimed anything different from what we knew before—at least, according to the summary from Pinker (2003). But in one of the features I added to Pinker’s list, “solution space,” we can locate the cognitive revolution’s significant departure from past theories of cognitive abilities and the mind—several (but not all) of the leading lights (especially Miller and Chomsky) of this revolution claimed that there are highly specialized solution spaces for human cognitive capacities—a priori, hardwired “modules” (as they came to be called after Fodor [1983]). But there are many alternatives, such as Goldsmith (2015). The questions, of course, are how large the solution space needs to be, how many such spaces the brain has and so on. And my answer throughout our discussion has been that the solution space can be boot-strapped. There is simply no interesting application of the concept of “human nature,” other than physical attributes of humans, that make them stand out in a vertebrate lineup.

  Points 6 through 8 are accepted by most researchers in cognitive science and by researchers on human abilities long before the so-called cognitive revolution. They are important for understanding and making progress in the study of human cognition, but further illustrate that what we need to know about human thinking and mental capacities are the same kinds of things that researchers have long been aware of. With regard to point 6, no one seriously believes that learners search randomly. They must work with some a priori solution space before they can learn languages and other milestones in their intellectual development. But this of course does not mean that the solution space is innate or that this idea is revolutionary. It means, though, that understanding how learners limit their solution spaces (where to look for answers in learning tasks) is a problem for all researchers, as it long has been. Point 7 says in effect that whatever human cognition in particular domains turns out to be, human biology and the environment interact in numerous and complicated ways to produce such cognition. Point 8 is just the idea that learners need to learn things well across all the domains crucial to healthy interactions with their environments, whether social, linguistic, or physical environments.

  How does our behavior and talk reveal the dark matter in which our morality is formed and exercised? What is the source of our reactions and judgments to different situations, from gum chewing to disapproval reflexes and considered judgments? To propose a human nature, one must study the natures of a large variety of humans. For example, Margaret Mead’s fame initially resulted from her research, which contradicted the genetic determinism of her day. This determinism was rejected by Mead’s advisor (Franz Boas) and other colleagues as severely misguided, based on their field research, philosophies, and theories. Mead’s ([1928] 2001) findings that sexual activity in Samoa was dramatically different, healthier, and resulting from and contributing to a less oppressive society flew in the face of that determinism—just as her subsequent work and many others over the years still do. We earlier discussed contrastive views of the morality of poverty and wealth between US culture and caboclo culture of Brazil. Whereas wealth is seen as a sign of God’s blessing among many US Christians—or at least the result of dedication and shrewdness (“working smart”)—it is seen as a sign of dishonesty, laziness, and greed among caboclos. Morality is culturally determined, based on emotions and ranking of values.

  Further to point 8 above, consider Napoleon Chagnon’s work among the Yanomami of South America. Chagnon’s work is another attempt to support human nature. It purports to show a natural, gene-driven violence in human nature. And yet it fails to come to grips with the fact that similar societies of the Amazon, with similar material environments and shortages, lead very different lives, based on very different culture-apperception-dark-matter histories and rankings. Once we understand the basic biological and cognitive platforms of the species, the tasks that we need to perform, and the cultures in which we exist, it is easy enough to see that there is no need for instinct or human nature.

  Related to this is what we know about the human genome—namely, that humans have fewer genes than corn. In my opinion, corn has more genes because it has fewer choices and is unable to learn. Humans have fewer not because we have more modules and instincts, but because we have fewer. We are designed to be flexible.
We are the living creatures possessing the greatest degree of “free” will in the known universe. This is our evolutionary legacy and our greatest hope as a species.

  What, then, is the “nature of human nature?” Does it exist? Is it knowledge? Is it a priori knowledge? The arguments presented above are that there is no human nature, if by that we mean inborn knowledge or concepts (which are just special forms of knowledge). There could be an anemic idea of human nature that is acceptable; namely, the biological differences between humans and nonhumans, whatever those differences are—though they will not, if this book is correct, involve biologically determined knowledge of any kind.

  Conclusion

  We began this book with some provocative statements on knowledge and learning: (i) minds do not learn; (ii) brains do not learn; (iii) societies do not learn; and (iv) cultures do not learn. Only individuals learn. And what individuals learn is largely in the form of a culturally articulated dark matter.

  Our tripartite thesis, stated at the beginning of our discussion, was (i) that the unconscious of all humans falls into two categories, the unspoken and the ineffable; (ii) that all human unconscious is shaped by individual apperceptions in conjunction with a ranked-value, linguistic-based model of culture, and (iii) that the role of the unconscious in the shaping of cognition and our sense of self is not the result of instincts or human nature, but is articulated by our learning as cultural beings. In the above discussion, we offered and defended a novel conceptualization of the unconscious as “dark matter,” which we defined as follows:

  Dark matter of the mind is any knowledge-how or any knowledge-that that is unspoken in normal circumstances, usually unarticulated even to ourselves. It may be, but is not necessarily, ineffable.1 It emerges from acting, “languaging,” and “culturing” as we learn conventions and knowledge organization, and adopt value properties and orderings. It is shared and it is personal. It comes via emicization, apperceptions, and memory, and thereby produces our sense of “self.”

  What we have found is that culture articulates the unconscious via emicization, learning how and that, value rankings, knowledge structures, and social relations and roles across various groups. What has been most emicized is most deeply unconscious by and large. The etic parts are lost in the concrete of emic gestalts. So we do have both conscious and unconscious, yet the latter is not innately structured in ways that Bastian, Chomsky, Freud, and others would have had us believe. Rather, it is structured by doing, thinking, talking, experiencing, and then interpreting those experiences to ourselves. It is learning social constraints and the meanings behind those constraints (ranked values). These are not claims about representations. Paul Churchland’s recent work offers a direction for thinking about representations, should those be desired.

  We explored the thesis about dark matter by looking at the historical, philosophical development of the concept and how it was appealed to account for a range of phenomena that are often no longer accepted. But what does exist is the contrast between distinct historical traditions regarding tacit knowledge, the Platonic and the Aristotelian. We next investigated a new, ranked-value, linguistically based theory of culture and argued that this model enables us to account for a range of phenomena that other theories struggle with (such as some of Harris’s discussions about Indian agricultural families). From this the discussion moved to how the child learns about the world around it, attaching to its culture, via its mother, family, and wider connections, as a series of concentric circles. We showed how attachment precedes language and yet provides a range of profound apperceptions and exposure to culture that play a significant role in the construction of culture and a sense of self. Next, we examined how our thesis is supported by the visual, textual, and general interpretations of the world around us, looking in detail at Pirahã perception of two-dimensional figures. From this we moved to the purportedly most successful exemplar of the Platonic view of dark matter, Chomsky’s universal grammar, showing how this model seems to be wrong, and almost certainly superfluous in accounting for the emergence of grammars from individual-culture connections that are motivated by the emotional need to form social bonds, the “interactional instinct,” and cultural factors. We then examined an often neglected area of paragrammar, the use of gestures in language. We considered in detail the most comprehensive research program on gesture, the work of David McNeill and his colleagues, arguing that all of McNeill’s work can be embedded into a culturally articulated conception of dark matter, offering little support for nativism. In particular, we considered and rejected the idea that the homesigns studied by Goldin-Meadow and her colleagues offered support for the Platonic view of dark matter (that it is not learned) as opposed to the more plausible Aristotelian view (that it is learned). From this we came to the last two chapters in the book and made the case that the concepts of instincts and human nature hinder our understanding of human behavior, society, and cognition, urging us to move beyond these notions that our “designer bias” leads us very often to favor for no rational reason.

  Thus, we have seen that we learn things by the experiences we have from the womb to the coffin. Some of our learning begins as conscious engagement with etic experiences, eventually disappearing into the dark matter of our minds via emicization—building an insider perspective of a whole from outsider perspectives of its parts. By interpreting our experiences, by building a set of etic memories into an emically constructed whole, a gestalt being, we create ourselves. As Buddhism understands us to be the sum total of our thoughts, so we have arrived via our long, circuitous path through philosophy, visual perception, culture, linguistics, translation, and hermeneutics, at the understanding that our mental and social experiences lead to our emergent selves and that this vision is ill served by the proposal of mysterious genetically hardwired knowledge that only obscures and hinders our study of the individual in culture. Thus we must move beyond instincts and beyond human nature if we are to understand how our social lives and individual bodies work together to build our roles, understandings, values, knowledge structures, conventions, norms, and our very place in the world.

  I have argued that Sapirian and Pikean linguistics provides an insightful model for investigating our symbiotic relationship to culture, through Pike’s notions of etic, emic, slot, and filler.

  Our discussion has deliberately examined very different epistemological domains in order to demonstrate the pervasive influence of the articulated unconscious I refer to as dark matter of the mind.

  Notes

  Preface

  1. I should perhaps add to this introduction the prediction that anthropologists will almost certainly resist my postulation of culture as the centerpiece of cognition, just as linguists will oppose placing culture at the center of language, and psychologists will oppose the denial that individual cognition is all there is to the study of psychology. I can only hope to persuade some that the issues are worth exploring further and still others that the theory of culture and the mind developed in chapter 2 is worth pursuing further.

  Introduction

  1. On the surface, my definition of dark matter is reminiscent of Bourdieu (1977) and Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), among others. While there are clearly similarities and affinities with the work of Bourdieu and my theory of dark matter, his theory of habitus is not, in my opinion, articulated in the same way as dark matter and thus lacks the ability to capture some of the ranked values constraints, knowledge structures, and social roles as precisely as the current model.

  2. E.g., Majid and Levinson 2011; Polanyi (1966) 2009, 1974; Collins 2010; Gascoigne and Thorton 2013; Turner 2013.

  3. See Lakoff and Johnson 1980 and Lakoff and Nuñez 2001, among others.

  4. In the cognitive sciences, more generally, the idea of tacit knowledge has been around for a while. The online Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind offers a summary of much of the literature on this in philosophy: https://sites.google.com/site/minddict/knowledge-tacit.

  5. Often confuse
d, deep structure and universal grammar are not the same. However, the later theory of generative semantics did blur this distinction considerably for the lay reader by proposing that deep structure was in fact the same for all languages, what came to be known as the universal base hypothesis.

  6. These are both idealizations. Our understanding of “phonetics” seen, for example, in something so erstwhile objective or etic as the International Phonetic Alphabet, is shaped by our emic perspectives and most “etic” categories are themselves idealized (affected by researchers’ experience with emic categories) in cultural ways. So there is no truly objective vantage point, just ones less contaminated in ways we know of.

  7. The standard convention in linguistics is that slashes // are used to enclose phonemic sounds and brackets [] to enclose phonetic sounds.

  8. McQuown (1957) offers a critical review of Pike’s emic/etic distinction.

  9. See Panksepp and Biven 2012, LeDoux 2015, Bruusgaard et al. 2010, Sommer 1992, and Costandi 2012, respectively.

  10. Though others—e.g., Lieberman (2013)—refer to this work in less complimentary terms as “warmed over” phrenology. I must admit to some irritation at the co-opting of the term evolutionary in the label of this research program, suggesting as it does that other forms of psychology are not based on evolutionary theory or that it is, for that matter.

  11. Of course, authors as varied as Garfinkel (1991, 2002), Pike (1967), Boas ([1940] 1982), Rogers ([1961] 1995), Read (2011), Mead ([1928] 2001), Silverstein (2003, 2004), Tomasello (1999), Parsons (1970), Patricia Churchland (2013), White (1949), Coulter (1979, 1983), Bateson (2000), and Jesse Prinz (2002, 2011, 2014), among many others, have written on related topics. But their conclusions, evidence, and lessons learned also vary—usually profoundly—from the current work.