So I've been promising to talk about this thing called the modular view of the mind or the modular model of the mind, and I've suggested that maybe you could answer the big question which is if the conscious self is not the thing that's directing behavior and directing our thought, well then, what is doing that job? And, the answer that comes from the modular view of the mind, is nothing in particular. It doesn't mean nothing. It just means no single thing, is doing the job. Rather, there are a number of these things called modules, and they kind of take turns exerting decisive influence on our thought, our feelings, our behavior. And there's no conscious self kind of picking the module that gets to be in charge at a given moment. It's more like the modules are seizing control of the system. Here's the way it's been put by Michael Gazzaniga. All these modules are not reporting to a department head, it is a free for all, a self organizing System. And Michael Gazzaniga you may recall is the person who did the split brain experiments that we discussed in the previous lecture. And what he said there does capture the spirit of a lot of thinking about, the modular mind, but I want to emphasize these are early days in the development of these views. about, about modules in the mind. There's no consensus on a single, highly detailed modular model of the mind, and in fact different people may even mean slightly different things when they use the word module. So I want to spend a couple of minutes just looking at different things that the term module can mean by way of clarification. The, the emphasis on modules took shape back at the beginning of what you might call modern evolutionary psychology during the 1980s. Because there were critics of evolutionary psychology which think why do you need to talk about the role of, of genes in, in shaping The, the human mind, I mean the human mind is just basically a blank slate. Think of it as a general purpose learning machine. It comes into the world with very little in the way of contents, and then it gets filled up through learning, generalized learning processes and then you have a mature brain and you're done. in the evolutionary psychologists said no, no you have to have a lot of specific kind of built in functional mechanisms. And here they got some support from artificial intelligence, because AI had been learning since really the late '50s and '60s how hard it is to design into machines even functions that we kind of take for granted. Mental functions that seem just relatively simple like facial recognition, we don't spend a lot of time puzzling over how we manage to, to recognize people's faces. because it seems to just happen but these people in artificial intelligence had found to get a computer to do something like that, you need to build a lot of highly specialized software. And the evolutionary psychologists said that's the reality of it. As, as, as the brain has evolved over time, a lot of specific equipment has been added by natural selection. And they came to use a metaphor for this, the Swiss Army Knife. The idea was just look, just as a Swiss Army Knife has different blades for different functions The human mind has different modules to perform different tasks, and to that extent, the metaphor is valid, but I think that the metaphor has cons as well as pros, and in fact, I think there are so many ways in which modules aren't like the blades of a Swiss army knife, that, that the way I like to use the metaphor Is, is to drive home the, the senses in which it's misleading. So, I'm going to quickly list three senses in which modules are not like the blades on a Swiss army knife. First of all, if you look at the blades on this knife, each blade occupies a particular part of space. It's very well defined. Whereas, modules are not so localized. It's not like my facial recognition module is like right here and no one, nowhere else. It probably draws on other parts of the brain and in some cases we, we know this for a fact. there's, there's something known as the theory of mind module and this was actually hypothesized a few decades ago. By evolutionary minded physiologists, and the idea is that this is the machinery that let's us infer what people are thinking or feeling based on what they say, how they act, their body language, their expressions. And this idea has picked up a lot of support. In fact it looks increasingly as if, with autism one of the things that is happening is that this theory of mind module is not functioning normally. And they're done brain scans of people while they're performing, you know, theory of mind tasks, trying to infer what people are thinking. And it turns out that there is an identifiable part of the brain that is, that seems to get active when people are doing this. But it's no one part. It's, it's a distributed network across the brain. So, so modules are not these localized things. Okay, second sense, In which modules are not like the blades on a Swiss army knife. Is if you look at these blades, they're not interacting with each other, they're not communicating with each other. Whereas modules are going to have to do a certain amount of interaction and communication. So, for example, you know, if you see somebody you know, Well, your knowledge of them is probably going to be fed into the theory of mind module as you try to interpret anything that they now do or say. That means that there has to be some communication however indirect between the facial recognition and the theory of mind module. You know, once you've recognized The person somehow, knowledge about the person has to be fed into the theory of mind module, there's going to be interaction among modules. The third sense in which the blades on a Swiss army knife are not like modules; is if you look at these blades, they're all just tools right? If there's no user, if there's no person who decides how they're going to be used. They just sit there and don't do anything. They don't do anything at all by themselves. And, you know, if you remember what it is we're hoping to get out of, out of the modular view of the mind, this, this isn't enough, you know? I mean surely there are modules like this that are mere tools, but we're going to have to. Find some modules, if this theory is going to deliver what it promises, we're going to have to find some modules that are more than just tools. Modules that, determine how we behave, what we think, what we say, because after all, that's what we now think of the conscious self as now doing. So, if these modules can collectively perform the task we think the conscious self is performing. Then some of the modules going to have to be more than tools. They're going to have to mobilize some of the modules that are tools. You know like the facial, recognition module, right, I mean, as you, as you walk down the street. After all there's a number of faces you could, you could look at to see if you recognize them. Well something has to, has to decide which faces you're looking at men, women, old people, young people, who are you going to focus on? And then if you see somebody that you know, how are you going to react to that person? Okay, decisions have to be made. And if they're not being made by the self And the modular theory of the mind is going to explain how they are made. We're going to have to find some modules that are more than mere tools. So that's the question we're going to turn to in the next segment. We're going to start looking at some things that, that, that look like modules and could perform some of the tasks that we think of the conscious self as performing. And if we can find enough of these modules and, kind of, figure out how they work, maybe we'll wind up having no explanatory need for a, kind of, CEO conscious self at all. [BLANK_AUDIO]
