Thanks for this pointer to Cisek. And for the Dewey footnote.
It sounds like Cisek is retelling the story of how the human mind works that you'll find in Principles of Psychology and in what gets called the Chicago School. Not the one with economists in the 1950s. The one with social scientists, including Dewey, in the 1890s.
The idea of a stream of consciousness and the notion that language is a process or technology that humans use to adapt to their environment were new, post-Darwinian ideas when James pulled it all together. Ben Breen, who writes at Res Obscura newsletter, is writing what sounds like an amazing book about how James's approach to studying the mind lost out to people like Galton, who prefer to measure things as precisely as possible and speculate from there.
As someone who would desperately love to see these ideas revived outside the weird group of historians and an even smaller group of philosophers who think about this stuff, I'm thrilled that there is someone I can point to who speaks the language of twenty-first neuroscience.
Always excited when you comment, Rob. What's interesting is that Cisek actually contrasts Dewey with James in another lecture. I'm saving exploration of that for a future post! You might need to be involved. :)
The great Richard Bernstein said that what pragmatists are up to is not like the idealized sort of conversation philosophers imagine as philosophy. Pragmatism is "a conversation more like the type that occurs at New York dinner parties where there are misunderstandings, speaking at cross-purposes, conflicts, and contradictions, with personalized voices stressing different points of view (and sometimes talking at the same time)." That is what is so great about it, and why it resists being turned into a movement or school.
Can't wait to see what you're going to add to the conversation.
The cognitive model you describe is Cartesian and it was subject to numerous philosophical critiques throughout the 20th century but without much apparent impact. Cartesian approaches in neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI trundle on despite having much in the way of credible responses to their various well-documented failings. Hubert Dreyfus has joked that cognitive science and AI bought a philosophical lemon just as philosophers were dumping it. But current discussions of AI make very little reference to these critiques. There appears to have been much more of a debate on these matters in the 1980s and 1990s. I am not sure why that is the case.
I had not encountered Paul Cisek's work until your post so I'm not sure what to make of it. I'd be interested to know more about how he connects his work to Dewey and Vygotsky. I have added a link to a paper by Rom Harre on Vygotsky and AI. The title is a bit misleading. It's one of several critiques he discusses. As you are citing neuroscientists as an antidote to irrational AI exuberance, another work, which I have not read, but is often cited in this context is Bennett and Hacker's book attacking Cartesianism in modern cognitive neuroscience.
Bennett, M. R., and P. M. S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. 2nd edition. Wiley-Blackwell, 2022.
Harré, Rom. “Vigotsky and Artificial Intelligence: What Could Cognitive Psychology Possibly Be About?” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 15, no. 1 (1990): 389–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.1990.tb00224.x.
Thanks for the comment Alan, and the references. Cisek agrees with you that the cognitive model is Cartesian, and this in general seems to be one of the main complaints of those who like the idea of "embodied cognition" -- I'm thinking of Annie Murphy Paul's book The Extended Mind, where she really unloads on poor Rene.
I must confess I don't share the sentiment that by believing that something is happening mentally in our brains, I'm therefore embracing a mind-body dualism that separates the two. Some of this may be touched on in the essay I may or may not write next week, tentatively titled "Why not both?" Stay tuned.
I think there is something happening in our brains --I am not sure that is in question--but just what exactly it is and how it relates to everything else is the question.
In “Twenty-Five Theses against Cognitivism" Jeff Coulter writes: "No one in his right mind thinks that brains can ride bicycles or drive cars. These are things that (able) people can do. However, the projection onto brains of person-level capacities and activities (viz., their personification) is a central feature of much cognitivist theorizing, subserving the computational conception of brains as physical-symbol manipulators and information-processors. Brain functions properly described in the logically appropriate terms of biochemistry, electrophysiology and anatomy do indeed facilitate persons’ doings and accomplishments, but they do not engage in parallel ‘activities’ of, for example, parsing utterances, contextualizing behaviors, following rules, calculating distances and the myriad phenomena theoretically ascribed to them in a host of cognitivist models. Such purely conjectural attributions to brains and central nervous systems are made in complete independence of their actually satisfying the logical criteria for such ascriptions." (https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407086789)
As a veteran High School teacher (19yrs) who has also spent 15 yrs in the tech sector, I have shocked by the aggressive push to place GenAI into edu. My shock fairly quickly turned into "no duh" when I realized all of this is ordinary and well aligned with Capitalism and the political purpose of state sponsored edu. (Raised to Obey, Agustina Paglayan). I say this because it is essential to understand the the political purpose of education - social control - in writing about education. Without that, it is, IMHO, impossible to understand why so many are pushing GenAI with little more than FOMO to justify their efforts.
That said, I perked up when I saw explore/exploit in one of the Cisek diagrams. This pair has driven a lot of the ideas behind my pedagogy. In formal education beyond the first few grades we have largely given up on "Explore" and have inserted lecture and what Freire calls "banking" or information deposits. The trade off between explore and exploit and the development of insight and intuition are the external attributes of learning that I think are the most profitable to focus on. AND, it is critical, IMHO, we NOT use the simplistic input --> output model of cognition.
Studying Explore/Exploit in children has lead to breakthroughs in robotics but we haven't bothered trying to use that research to help in the development of humans.
I think Cisek points to brain development creating changes in behaviour, thus evolution occurs.
And we measure behavioural change in our students, based on how they progress in what they know, how well they are able to do certain things, and applications of practice to different experiences.
Behavioural change also impacts the learning environment, so new experiences emerge.
I'm not wed to the concept, but I think the symbiotic nature of it and your observation of cognitive evolution make for interesting bed partners.
It's funny, I was doing some classroom planning today and thinking about how I might get my Year 12 students, in particular, to think about what learning is. I fairly confident no one has done this. The following is part of where I got to, and your article took me back to how I was grappling with the cognitive function that is learning. Turns out, and this is what interested me most, that experience of the environment is a significant driver. Here's the guts of what I'm going to get them to work over, perhaps they'll learn something.
Learning can be defined as “a relatively permanent change in behaviour based on an individual's interactional experience with [their] environment” (Hansbøl et al., 2016).
Breaking this down, we can see that change is expected; that, that change, affects behaviour; that it is individual because it is based on an experience that causes that changed behaviour, and it has to do with the environment that the person is in - in other words, there are complex influences from multiple contexts.
Learning is individual. In the context of the class:
1. The individuals doing the learning,
2. Why they are learning - what behavioural change is expected,
3. What is being learned - the learning intentions and the success criteria that indicates learning has taken place,
4. How do they learn.
(Engeström, 2001).
From what Paul Ramsden says, we can expect that the change in behaviour is a visible account that illustrates where students “expand and test knowledge” (Cited in Laurillard, 2012, p. 11).
“The goal of education is better conceived as helping students to develop the intellectual tools and learning strategies needed to acquire the knowledge that allows people to think productively about history, science and technology, social phenomena, mathematics, and the arts” (Bansford, Brown, and Cocking cited in Laurillard, 2012, p. 25).
.....
Because LLMs are not sensory, and as you point out, we need to contribute cultures and social structures to cognitive development, it's hard to see how they can in fact 'learn'. They haven't really learnt how to execute advanced mathematical formulae and string sentences together, they have been programmed to do that, albeit at a highly advanced level.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment Dr. Price, lots to think about here. I'm not familiar with Hansbøl, but I'm a little nervous defining learning as exclusively (?) a change in behavior -- this of course was B.F. Skinner's claim, at least to my understanding. This may be tautological, but I'm inclined to think of learning as "an enduring change to one's cognitive capabilities." (Riley, just now.)
Thanks for this pointer to Cisek. And for the Dewey footnote.
It sounds like Cisek is retelling the story of how the human mind works that you'll find in Principles of Psychology and in what gets called the Chicago School. Not the one with economists in the 1950s. The one with social scientists, including Dewey, in the 1890s.
The idea of a stream of consciousness and the notion that language is a process or technology that humans use to adapt to their environment were new, post-Darwinian ideas when James pulled it all together. Ben Breen, who writes at Res Obscura newsletter, is writing what sounds like an amazing book about how James's approach to studying the mind lost out to people like Galton, who prefer to measure things as precisely as possible and speculate from there.
As someone who would desperately love to see these ideas revived outside the weird group of historians and an even smaller group of philosophers who think about this stuff, I'm thrilled that there is someone I can point to who speaks the language of twenty-first neuroscience.
Always excited when you comment, Rob. What's interesting is that Cisek actually contrasts Dewey with James in another lecture. I'm saving exploration of that for a future post! You might need to be involved. :)
The great Richard Bernstein said that what pragmatists are up to is not like the idealized sort of conversation philosophers imagine as philosophy. Pragmatism is "a conversation more like the type that occurs at New York dinner parties where there are misunderstandings, speaking at cross-purposes, conflicts, and contradictions, with personalized voices stressing different points of view (and sometimes talking at the same time)." That is what is so great about it, and why it resists being turned into a movement or school.
Can't wait to see what you're going to add to the conversation.
LLMs also lack interiority
The cognitive model you describe is Cartesian and it was subject to numerous philosophical critiques throughout the 20th century but without much apparent impact. Cartesian approaches in neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI trundle on despite having much in the way of credible responses to their various well-documented failings. Hubert Dreyfus has joked that cognitive science and AI bought a philosophical lemon just as philosophers were dumping it. But current discussions of AI make very little reference to these critiques. There appears to have been much more of a debate on these matters in the 1980s and 1990s. I am not sure why that is the case.
I had not encountered Paul Cisek's work until your post so I'm not sure what to make of it. I'd be interested to know more about how he connects his work to Dewey and Vygotsky. I have added a link to a paper by Rom Harre on Vygotsky and AI. The title is a bit misleading. It's one of several critiques he discusses. As you are citing neuroscientists as an antidote to irrational AI exuberance, another work, which I have not read, but is often cited in this context is Bennett and Hacker's book attacking Cartesianism in modern cognitive neuroscience.
Bennett, M. R., and P. M. S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. 2nd edition. Wiley-Blackwell, 2022.
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Philosophical+Foundations+of+Neuroscience%2C+2nd+Edition-p-9781119530978
Harré, Rom. “Vigotsky and Artificial Intelligence: What Could Cognitive Psychology Possibly Be About?” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 15, no. 1 (1990): 389–99. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.1990.tb00224.x.
Thanks for the comment Alan, and the references. Cisek agrees with you that the cognitive model is Cartesian, and this in general seems to be one of the main complaints of those who like the idea of "embodied cognition" -- I'm thinking of Annie Murphy Paul's book The Extended Mind, where she really unloads on poor Rene.
I must confess I don't share the sentiment that by believing that something is happening mentally in our brains, I'm therefore embracing a mind-body dualism that separates the two. Some of this may be touched on in the essay I may or may not write next week, tentatively titled "Why not both?" Stay tuned.
I think there is something happening in our brains --I am not sure that is in question--but just what exactly it is and how it relates to everything else is the question.
In “Twenty-Five Theses against Cognitivism" Jeff Coulter writes: "No one in his right mind thinks that brains can ride bicycles or drive cars. These are things that (able) people can do. However, the projection onto brains of person-level capacities and activities (viz., their personification) is a central feature of much cognitivist theorizing, subserving the computational conception of brains as physical-symbol manipulators and information-processors. Brain functions properly described in the logically appropriate terms of biochemistry, electrophysiology and anatomy do indeed facilitate persons’ doings and accomplishments, but they do not engage in parallel ‘activities’ of, for example, parsing utterances, contextualizing behaviors, following rules, calculating distances and the myriad phenomena theoretically ascribed to them in a host of cognitivist models. Such purely conjectural attributions to brains and central nervous systems are made in complete independence of their actually satisfying the logical criteria for such ascriptions." (https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407086789)
What Coulter is discussing is what Peter Hacker calls the mereological mistake. He discusses this in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMcmQPdi0Fs?t=240s
As a veteran High School teacher (19yrs) who has also spent 15 yrs in the tech sector, I have shocked by the aggressive push to place GenAI into edu. My shock fairly quickly turned into "no duh" when I realized all of this is ordinary and well aligned with Capitalism and the political purpose of state sponsored edu. (Raised to Obey, Agustina Paglayan). I say this because it is essential to understand the the political purpose of education - social control - in writing about education. Without that, it is, IMHO, impossible to understand why so many are pushing GenAI with little more than FOMO to justify their efforts.
That said, I perked up when I saw explore/exploit in one of the Cisek diagrams. This pair has driven a lot of the ideas behind my pedagogy. In formal education beyond the first few grades we have largely given up on "Explore" and have inserted lecture and what Freire calls "banking" or information deposits. The trade off between explore and exploit and the development of insight and intuition are the external attributes of learning that I think are the most profitable to focus on. AND, it is critical, IMHO, we NOT use the simplistic input --> output model of cognition.
Studying Explore/Exploit in children has lead to breakthroughs in robotics but we haven't bothered trying to use that research to help in the development of humans.
I think Cisek points to brain development creating changes in behaviour, thus evolution occurs.
And we measure behavioural change in our students, based on how they progress in what they know, how well they are able to do certain things, and applications of practice to different experiences.
Behavioural change also impacts the learning environment, so new experiences emerge.
I'm not wed to the concept, but I think the symbiotic nature of it and your observation of cognitive evolution make for interesting bed partners.
K
It's funny, I was doing some classroom planning today and thinking about how I might get my Year 12 students, in particular, to think about what learning is. I fairly confident no one has done this. The following is part of where I got to, and your article took me back to how I was grappling with the cognitive function that is learning. Turns out, and this is what interested me most, that experience of the environment is a significant driver. Here's the guts of what I'm going to get them to work over, perhaps they'll learn something.
Learning can be defined as “a relatively permanent change in behaviour based on an individual's interactional experience with [their] environment” (Hansbøl et al., 2016).
Breaking this down, we can see that change is expected; that, that change, affects behaviour; that it is individual because it is based on an experience that causes that changed behaviour, and it has to do with the environment that the person is in - in other words, there are complex influences from multiple contexts.
Learning is individual. In the context of the class:
1. The individuals doing the learning,
2. Why they are learning - what behavioural change is expected,
3. What is being learned - the learning intentions and the success criteria that indicates learning has taken place,
4. How do they learn.
(Engeström, 2001).
From what Paul Ramsden says, we can expect that the change in behaviour is a visible account that illustrates where students “expand and test knowledge” (Cited in Laurillard, 2012, p. 11).
“The goal of education is better conceived as helping students to develop the intellectual tools and learning strategies needed to acquire the knowledge that allows people to think productively about history, science and technology, social phenomena, mathematics, and the arts” (Bansford, Brown, and Cocking cited in Laurillard, 2012, p. 25).
.....
Because LLMs are not sensory, and as you point out, we need to contribute cultures and social structures to cognitive development, it's hard to see how they can in fact 'learn'. They haven't really learnt how to execute advanced mathematical formulae and string sentences together, they have been programmed to do that, albeit at a highly advanced level.
Thanks for the stimulating article.
K
Thanks for this thoughtful comment Dr. Price, lots to think about here. I'm not familiar with Hansbøl, but I'm a little nervous defining learning as exclusively (?) a change in behavior -- this of course was B.F. Skinner's claim, at least to my understanding. This may be tautological, but I'm inclined to think of learning as "an enduring change to one's cognitive capabilities." (Riley, just now.)