Review of “The Prehistory of the Mind” by Steven Mithen (original) (raw)
Related papers
Why Neanderthals hate poetry: A critical notice of Steven Mithen's The prehistory of mind
Philosophical Psychology, 2002
The signi cance of historical advances in human development has been widely debated within cognitive science. Steven Mithen's recent book, The prehistory of mind (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), presents an archeologist's attempt to explain the details of cognitive development within the framework of modern anthropology and cognitive psychology. We argue that Mithen's attempt fails for a number of different reasons. The relationship between the archeological evidence he considers and his conclusions is problematic. We maintain that it is dif cult to draw biological conclusions from strictly behavioral artifactual evidence. To buttress his claims, Mithen borrows heavily from the very cognitive science literature to which he hopes to contribute. As a consequence, his analysis of the archeological evidence cannot promote a particular cognitive theory, since his interpretation is only as strong as those theories from which he borrows. We are also concerned that the speci c details of Mithen's program are equally problematic. Mithen's claim that modular intelligences did not exist outside of hominid evolution is likely false and unwarranted. As a consequence, we argue that the central component of his claim that the uniquely human feature of our development, the move from modular to uid minds, depends on poorly de ned distinctions between a wide range of mental processes. Whether we can accept Mithen's characterization of these claims will depend, we argue, on how he chooses to clarify these terms. We suggest that the various choices will be dif cult to reconcile with his theory. Moreover, we suggest that the phenomena that Mithen hopes to explain in human development cannot be explained strictly in terms of analogical reasoning. We nevertheless nd Mithen's attempt at answering these questions to be both a constructive and fascinating foray into what is an under-explored topic.
The Explicable Emergence of the Mind
Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the …, 2010
The goal of the symposium 'Integrating Perspectives on the Relation between Mind and Brain' was to get people with different views and from different disciplines to open up a dialogue by focusing on answering a set of questions. In this paper I present a view of the relation between the mind and the brain that is informed by recent work in the philosophy of science. The basic idea is that the mind is more than the brain because mental states are identical to the activity of groups of organized neurons. Unlike the standard non-reductive materialism irreducibility is not seen as related to multiple realisability. The upshot is that we can bring the relation between the mind and the brain in line with other clear cases of ontological emergence, we can see how psychology can be an independent science, and yet how important explanatory connections can be made between psychology and neuroscience.
2004
A some time in the history of the universe, there were no human minds, and at some time later, there were. Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs, sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream. A sense of surprise is surely in order. How did that get here? If the origin of the human mind is mysterious, so too is its nature. There are, Descartes argued, two substances in the universe, one physical and the other mental. To many contemporary philosophers, this has seemed rather an embarrassment of riches. But no sooner have they ejected mental substances from their analyses than mental properties pop up to take their place, and if not mental properties then mental functions. As a conceptual category, the mental is apparently unwilling to remain expunged. And no wonder. Although I may be struck by a thought, or move...
The Origin of Cognition: Introduction
Introduction chapter to a book-length version of a paper of the same name presented at the 2011 TSC conference in Stockholm. The Origin of Cognition: The evolution of sentience mapped in incremental adaptations, from the boundary awareness of single-celled organisms, to the cognitive complexity of human brains.
The recently discovered "UNERTAN SYNDROME" consists of quadrupedal gait, severe mental retardation, and primitive language. This syndrome can be considered as devolution of human being, throwing a light into the transition from quadrupedality to bipedality with co-evolution of human mind. The genetic nature of this syndrome supports the punctuated evolution during transition from quadrupedality to bipedality. In light of Tan's psychomotor theory, accentuating the major role of the motor system in human mind, a new theory was suggested for the human evolution. Namely, the unique behavioral trait of man, the emergence of the habitual bipedality with Homo erectus (1.6 million and 250.000 tears ago) may be coupled with a resistive mind, which forced man to stand up against the gravitational forces with consequent success in tool making and hunting, using free hands for survival. The second stage in the evolution of modern human beings may be coupled with the emergence of language (circa 40.000 years ago), playing a major role in the origins of human mind.
Encyclopedia of Cognitive Psychology, 2012
The ‘triune brain’, conceived by Paul D. MacLean (1913–2007) in the late 1960s, has witnessed more attention and controversy than any other evolutionary model of brain and behavior in modern neuroscience. Decades earlier, in his book Elements of Neurobiology published in 1923 in La Plata, Argentina, neurobiologist Christfried (Christofredo) Jakob (1866–1956) had formulated a ‘tripsychic’ brain system, based on his deep understanding of biological and neural phylogeny. In a historical context, 1923 was also the year of publication of Sigmund Freud’s The Ego and the Id, whereby the founder of psychoanalysis solidified his tripartite model of the mental apparatus. Tripartite systems of the human mind have been surmised since Plato and Aristotle; they continue to our era, an example being Robert J. Sternberg’s triarchic theory of human intelligence. In view of the fact that both Jakob and MacLean invested a considerable part of their long and distinguished careers studying comparative, and particularly reptilian neurobiology, the present article revisits their neuroevolutionary models, underlining the convergence of their anatomical-functional propositions, in spite of a time distance of almost half a century.
Natural history of the human mind.pdf
Since the last common ancestor shared by modern humans, chimpanzees and bonobos, the lineage leading to Homo sapiens has undergone a substantial change in brain size and organization. As a result, modern humans display striking differences from the living apes in the realm of cognition and linguistic expression. In this article, we review the evolutionary changes that occurred in the descent of Homo sapiens by reconstructing the neural and cognitive traits that would have characterized the last common ancestor and comparing these with the modern human condition. The last common ancestor can be reconstructed to have had a brain of approximately 300-400 g that displayed several unique phylogenetic specializations of development, anatomical organization, and biochemical function. These neuroanatomical substrates contributed to the enhancement of behavioral flexibility and social cognition. With this evolutionary history as precursor, the modern human mind may be conceived as a mosaic of traits inherited from a common ancestry with our close relatives, along with the addition of evolutionary specializations within particular domains. These modern human-specific cognitive and linguistic adaptations appear to be correlated with enlargement of the neocortex and related structures. Accompanying this general neocortical expansion, certain higher-order unimodal and multimodal cortical areas have grown disproportionately relative to primary cortical areas. Anatomical and molecular changes have also been identified that might relate to the greater metabolic demand and enhanced synaptic plasticity of modern human brain's. Finally, the unique brain growth trajectory of modern humans has made a significant contribution to our species' cognitive and linguistic abilities.
Mental Organs and the Origins of Mind
Biosemiotics, 2012
I introduce a new hypothesis of the origin of complex mind through the emergence of "mental organs," populations of neurons that bear a speci fi c G-protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) on their surface. Mental organs provide a direct connection between mental properties (compassion, comfort, awe, joy, reason, consciousness), and the genes and regulatory elements associated with GPCR. Mental properties associated with mental organs have heritable genetic variation and are thus evolvable. Mental organs evolve by duplication and divergence. Over three hundred different GPCR are expressed in the human brain, providing a genetic and regulatory system that allows evolution to richly sculpt the mind. 1 Mental Organs There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a tri fl ing investment of fact. (Mark Twain-Life on the Mississippi) The human heart, mind, spirit, and soul emerged through the same process that created all of life: evolution by natural selection. In order to understand how the mind evolved, we must understand how it is structured, and how its structure is tied to genes. Here, I propose that "mental organs" (de fi ned as the population of neurons that bear a speci fi c receptor on their surface, such as serotonin-7, histamine-1, alpha-2C) provide the structure and genetic mechanisms that allow evolution to sculpt the mind. It should be noted that mental organs currently hold the status of a hypothesis that I am proposing. Their existence remains to be con fi rmed by rigorous experimental methods. This new hypothesis about a fundamental organizational principle