113 items | 66 visits
A collection of bookmarks for my course Androids, Zombies and Brain (or Philosophy of Mind).
Updated on 2009-08-17
Created on 2008-06-19
Category: Science
URL:
"Language requires the coordination of perceptually grounded categories with a socially-negotiated set of shared linguistic conventions to express them; i.e. language is based on shared groups of meanings that arise from our perceptual interaction with the external world and the way in which we convey that relationship to other human beings. Deacon’s opinion is that neurological predispositions and socio-ecological constraints sponsored the development and evolution of language, and that the subsequent feedback system gave rise to a complex coevolution of the two. Founded neurological determinism within evolutionary and socio-ecological boundaries drives the core of his argument." « Neuroanthropology
"Humans are sometimes said to be distinguished as "The Symbolic Species." A Research Highlights note in Nature point to the work of Addessi et al., who show that capuchin monkeys, who diverged from the human lineage ~35 million years ago, can be trained to use and assign value to tokens (symbols) for different items of food." (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)
"Yes, we’re a lot like other primates, particularly the great apes, with whom we have more than 98 percent of our genes in common. Yet elaborate displays of apparent maternal grief like Gana’s may reveal less about our shared awareness of death than our shared impulse to act as though it didn’t exist." - NYTimes.com
The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain:
A Review of two contrastive views (Pinker & Deacon).
(Printed 2001 in Grazer Linguistische Studien GLS 55, 1-20)
Ken Ramshøj Christensen
Department of English, University of Aarhus
Stevan harnad
Kim Sterelney. The Baldwin Effect and Its Significance: A Review of Bruce Weber and David Depew (eds) Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered; MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass 2003, pp x, 341.
08.31.2008 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The Baldwin effect occurs, if it ever does, when a biological trait becomes innate as a result of first being learned. Suppose that some trait is initially absent from a population of organisms. Then a number of organisms succeed in learning the trait. There will be a Baldwin effect if this period of learning leads to the trait becoming innate throughout the population." David Papineau
"Our brains are well suited for language. But how did they get that way." Calvin's review of Deacon in the NYRB
NYT
Deacon's position is that the evolution of human minds is mainly about the evolution of language. So for him, explaining the evolution of language (and the brain features that support it) explains much of interest about humans.
Damasio, A. (2003) "Feelings of Emotion and the Self," Annals of the New York Academy of Science 1001, 253-261.
Preview of an article by Howard Gardner from The New York Review of Books, October 9, 1997
By Harold Kalant, Werner Kalow, Steven Pinker, Reply by Stephen Jay Gould
In response to Darwinian Fundamentalism (June 12, 1997) - The New York Review of Books
By Merlin Donald, Steven Mithen, Reply by Howard Gardner
In response to Evolutionary Psychology: An Exchange (October 9, 1997) - The New York Review of Books
Language is a spontaneously evolved emergent adaptation, not a formal computational system. Its structure does not derive from either innate or social instruction but rather self-organization and selection. Its quasi-universal features emerge from the int
113 items | 66 visits
A collection of bookmarks for my course Androids, Zombies and Brain (or Philosophy of Mind).
Updated on 2009-08-17
Created on 2008-06-19
Category: Science
URL: