Dialogue

I. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides Respond to Ellen Spolsky

Spolsky raises a number of interesting and important issues too wide-ranging to fully address here. However, the core of the disagreement between us boils down to her belief in the explanatory adequacy of a number of widely credited ideas that unrepentant and hard core believers in materialism and computationalism (like us) cannot accept. For example, for those attempting to construct computational models of the mind, Spolsky’s counterposing of “human, rather than machine processes”–and at other points, consciousness to algorithms, flexible processes to algorithms, context-sensitive and holistic processes to algorithms, and so on–exhibits dichotomies that we think are unsupportable. According to the computational view of the mind (which many find difficult to accept), there are nothing but “algorithms”–that is, some kind of cause-and-effect programming structure that implements all changes in representations. The whole cognitive science game is to take the high level capacities that we intuitively grant to minds–such as consciousness, agency, flexibility, context-sensitive interpretation, and so on–and to see what programming steps they are built out of. Although many resist this as an unwelcome nineteenth-century reduction of humans to deterministic, clanking machines, we see it as approaching humans at a very different level of description from the ordinary–raising many of the same conflicts that, for example, counterposing the chemistry of love to the experience of love does.