Читать книгу The Animal at Unease with Itself - Isaac M. Alderman - Страница 8

Cognitive science is the scientific interdisciplinary study of the mind, with its origins in computer sciences and Chomskyan linguistics, and drawing on technological developments, such a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). It should not be understood as a distinct discipline, but rather as the intersection of many disciplines. In order to see how the cognitive sciences are being used in biblical studies, it is necessary to outline some of the main approaches, themes and scholars working in cognitive science, how it is applied more broadly to the humanities, and the study of religion in particular.

Because many working in cognitive science are focused on different aspects and in numerous fields, they have various definitions or approaches to cognitive science. Also, because their readers may be unfamiliar with cognitive science, they regularly spend significant space on definition and explaining methods before outlining its role in their specific discipline. One very simple view of the work of cognitive scientists is to describe the brain as a machine or computer that they are trying to understand.^[4] In this approach, the focus is directed toward computation or information processing.^[5] Similarly, Justin Barrett defines cognitive science as “consider[ing] what the human mind is and how it functions; how people think.”^[6] While this definition could seem so broad as to cover almost all human behavior, it does not. For example, bodily functions such as sneezing and yawning would not be included in this definition.^[7] However, this still leaves much undefined. A more complete definition of cognitive science describes it as an attempt to explain

the kinds of perceptual and conceptual representations that the mental processing of sensory input allows, the memory, the transmission and transformations of these mental representations, the relationships among them, and the ways in which some of these mental representations become public.^[8]

Luther Martin goes on to elaborate the different aspects of mental function as non-conscious, conscious, and metarepresentational. An example of non-conscious mental functionings is our ability to see color through the discernment of the light-reflective qualities of objects in our environment and the construction of a mental representation coded for color.^[9] These functionings can also be conscious, as when we recognize and represent objects in our environment to others. We can also represent non-existent objects, such as those not present, those with no existence (e.g., unicorns), or those that only exist as future possibilities.^[10] Humans can even represent our own representations. This metarepresentation allows us to reflect upon our representations, categorizing and comparing them, making critical judgments and discerning fact from fiction.^[11] These definitions raise several issues that must be discussed in greater detail, namely the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science and the relationship between the mind and the brain or, even more broadly, the mind and body.

The origins of cognitive science lie in many fields. In fact, cognitive science should be understood as a collaboration rather than a discrete field of study. It is the “fruitful synergies” of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, computer science, anthropology, and neuroscience, none of which alone could hope to address the pressing open questions of cognitive science.^[12] While not everyone in these diverse fields who works on these issues would consider themselves scientists, they generally could be regarded as cognitive scientists when they utilize scientifically collected data to evaluate “claims and predictions about how humans think and the character of the human mind, and attempt to discover naturalistic explanations for the phenomena the data reveal.”^[13]

One of the constituent fields of cognitive science is neuroscience. Cognitive science and neuroscience are often used incorrectly as interchangeable terms, a lack of distinction that mirrors the equally incorrect interchangeability of the terms brain and mind. The rise of cognitive science is roughly contemporary with the development of personal computing and drawing analogies between the brain and the computer have proved very helpful.^[14] One can easily find many news articles referring to some aspect of human behavior as being ‘hardwired.’^[15] In this analogy, the brain is hardware, and the mind is software. While it is useful to know where in the brain certain types of processes occur, as Barrett points out, “cognitive science . . . isn’t really about brains at all. It is about minds.”^[16] However, just because the brain and mind are conceptually distinct, this does not mean that they are meaningfully separable.^[17]

Some of the greatest advances in cognitive science have occurred when brain injuries, surgeries, or non-neurotypical conditions have significantly impacted individual personalities or abilities. For example, a traumatic brain injury can cause a significant change in behavior, such as inducing pathological gambling.^[18] An example perhaps more to the point for this project, individuals on the autistic spectrum can find it difficult to understand the thoughts and intentions of others, an aspect of what we will discuss below as theory of mind. This skill, which is essential both for reading works of fiction and for developing religious beliefs, is frequently studied.^[19] But one does not even need to examine such significant examples to recognize the everyday experience of the body impacting the mind. Physical events and feelings affect the cognitive processing of information. Hunger and tiredness, or substances such as caffeine and alcohol can affect performance of simple tasks, memory, and personality. These are obvious examples that most of us have experience with. Others are less common and perhaps more surprising. For example, following Botox (botulinum toxin A) injections, subjects reading sentences that stimulate negative emotions process those thoughts more slowly than those who have not had their facial muscles impaired.^[20] An example that impacts all of us, but of which we are generally unaware, is the impact of gut bacteria on our brain, an area of research which is now exploding.^[21] Moreover, it is not only the body that affects the mind, the mind can also affect the body, as is seen in examples of anxiety-induced muscle tension or spasms. Here again I am reminded of the account cited in the introduction in which the act of reading induced vomiting. One of the foundational tenets of cognitive science asserts that the mind is embodied and affected by the body, particularly the brain. While the mind-body problem and its unsurprising spectrum ranging from monism to dualism is not the primary concern of our study, suffice it to say it is beyond question that our minds are both constrained and enabled by our bodies.^[22]

The theory of mind, sometimes called the theory of mind mechanism, is an essential concept within cognitive science and is a useful concept for work in the humanities as well. The theory of mind is the ability to attribute a mental state, also referred to as mentalizing, to oneself and to others.^[23] While my ability to recognize that other people are having their own thoughts that are distinct from my own might seem so obvious and simple as to need little attention, it is a very important ability that non-human animals largely lack. Even young children lack the ability to mentalize. To demonstrate the development of the theory of mind, much work has been done with both children and autistic individuals. One important demonstration of this ability is the false-belief test, which has many iterations but essentially runs as follows. A young child is shown a crayon box and asked what it contains. Crayons is the obvious answer. However, when the box is opened, it surprisingly contains candy. The experimenter puts the candy back in the box, closes it, and asks, “What did you first think was in the box?” Children three and under will generally respond that they had believed that the box contained candy. The child’s parent is brought into the room, and the child is asked, “What do you think mom thinks is in the box?” The child is unable to recognize that her mom would normally assume that a crayon box would hold crayons, and answers, “Candy.” By the age of four or five, children pass the test, recognizing that mom would expect crayons, even though her belief is wrong. By seven or eight, children can pass false belief tests to several orders. For example, they will know not only that mom is wrong about the crayons, but that she would wrongly believe that the child is wrong if she were to tell her that the box has candy. We can readily see the importance of this social skill. Not only does a child recognize the wrong belief, but understands that in expressing what is true, he will wrongly be thought to be wrong. The false belief test has garnered significant attention from literary scholars and is a great example of how the work of cognitive scientists has been productively used in literary analysis. As Boyd puts it, understanding “why others do what they do matters so much in both human life and literature.”^[24] One must be able to pass the false belief test to be a competent reader, for it is an essential skill to be able to navigate complex literary situations in which characters, including the narrator, have various levels of knowledge and accuracy of beliefs. While some animals, such as chimpanzees, can infer intentions from others’ behavior, only cognitively mature neurotypical humans have the ability of metarepresentational thought; in other words, only a human can think about what Sally thinks that John thinks about her, while knowing that John is wrong. A simple example from Genesis 27:18–29 shows the importance of being capable of passing the false belief test. The passage is meaningless to readers if they are unable to see through Jacob’s hairy disguise while also understanding that Isaac cannot.

Another important insight in the cognitive science of religion draws upon our knowledge of theory of mind and the attention humans pay to agency. We have already seen that children develop a theory of mind, in which they recognize that other humans have minds. Even earlier, even in the case of infants, another skill becomes present, that of agency detection. Infants very quickly develop categories in which they separate those things which have agency and those which do not. Once this has happened, they attend more closely to those which do. For example, infants are much more attentive to people and pets than they are to furniture. Moreover, they are easily startled when something that should not have agency appears to behave like an agent. This is easily demonstrated in studies, where infants are startled by objects that are made to appear to move on their own, such as a remote-control toy. The human agency detection device is a naturally selected trait with survival benefits. Assuming agency when encountering ambiguous stimuli can save a life if correct and has little downside if wrong. Agency detection sacrifices accuracy for speed which leads to over-identification of agency. For example, if hearing a noise in the bushes causes one to be on guard against a predator, it could save one’s life. Conversely, if the noise was simply the wind, there is little consequence to one’s being wrong. As one scholar puts it, “it’s better to have a fast device that occasionally gets it wrong than a slow device that is always accurate.”^[25]

In addition to natural agency detection, as children get older, they begin to impute teleological explanations and purposeful action where none exists.^[26] For example, when shown images of pointy rocks, they might explain that the rocks are pointy so that no one will sit on them. When agency detection has been activated, theory of mind comes into play because agents have minds.^[27] Barrett, like Pascal Boyer, has studied agency detection. Noting the human tendency toward liberal attribution of agency, he uses the term hypersensitive agency detection device.^[28] Our over-attribution of agency and our proclivity to attribute mental states come together in the belief in gods, ghosts, and other supernatural beings. We attribute mind to everyone and to many things, often including animals and objects.^[29]

Essentially, then, cognitive scientists are studying the embodied mind. This embodiment can cause complications, but one of the greatest assets humans have is the ability to recognize that others have minds, even when we only see their bodies. Moreover, we readily assign agency to movements and events, often even when no agency is involved. These concepts are essential for applying the insights of cognitive science in the humanities.