Analogies contribute to many kinds of human thinking, including problem solving, decision making, explanation, persuasion, and entertainment. An analogy is a systematic comparison between a source analog and a target analog, where information about the source is used to generate inferences about the target. The major stages of analogical thinking are (a) obtaining a source analog by memory retrieval or other means, (b) mapping the source to the target, (c) adapting the source to inform the target, and (d) learning by generalizing source and target into a schema. Most theories of analogy have used verbal representations, but a much broader appreciation of analogical thinking can be gained with semantic pointers. Analogies often use words, but they can also operate with visual, auditory, and other sensory modalities, all of which can contribute to all stages of analogy.
Emotions serve not only to stand for things in the world but also to indicate their value. Decision, action, and many kinds of problem solving require determining how the world should be, not just how it is. Humans and other animals evolved with emotions as part of their innate biological machinery to guide action and inference. Emotions are patterns of neural firing that result from binding three different factors that are complementary rather than conflictive. A verbal or sensory representation of a situation can be bound both with a representation of the physiological states that the situation elicited and a cognitive appraisal of the import of the situation. Cognitive appraisal can also incorporate social factors because of the contributions of social goals and the culturally established associations of emotional words.
The self is a complex of mechanisms at multiple levels that include the molecular and the social. Semantic pointers are crucial to the self with respect to various phenomena, including how one represents oneself to oneself and to others, as well as in how one evaluates oneself. Also explained are operations that the self does to itself in efforts to achieve short-term goals such as self-control and long-term goals such as self-fulfillment. Semantic pointer explanations of images, concepts, and other mental representations are important for understanding how selves accomplish their goals. Representations of the self via semantic pointers can recursively be bound into semantic pointers for beliefs, desires, and intentions. Discussion of the social mechanisms relevant to the self begins to connect neural and mental mechanisms with discussions of social sciences and professions.
Rather than define the concept of mind, this chapter gives it a “three-analysis” in terms of standard examples such as various people’s intelligence; typical features such as perception, problem solving, emotions, and consciousness; and explanations such as why people behave as they do. Competing explanations of how the mind works have identified it as soul, computer, brain, dynamical system, or social construction. Cognitive science explains mind as operating with mental representations and processes. These mental mechanisms are compatible with a broader account that includes social, neural, and molecular mechanisms. Mechanisms are combinations of interconnected parts that produce regular changes, and complex mechanisms can have emergent properties that belong to wholes but not to their parts.
Brains make minds because mental representations and processes are performed by neural mechanisms. Mental representations work by patterns of firing in neural groups. More complicated representations that go beyond sensory experience can be formed by binding representations together, combining patterns of firing into new ones. In particular, binding can produce semantic pointers that coalesce and compress different kinds of information, including sensory, motor, emotional and verbal information. Semantic pointers retain connections to sensory and motor experience while also acquiring the autonomy that is usually attributed to symbols. Eliasmith’s semantic pointer hypothesis shows how neural cells can interact to produce high-level thinking. Different representations compete with each other to provide accounts of what is going on in the world through a parallel process of satisfaction of multiple constraints. Neural networks can learn by changing the synaptic connections between neurons.
A convenient point of departure for a consideration of the evidence in favour of cognition and imagery in animals is the controversy which existed in learning theory. At that time the view had emerged and, in the interest of scientific respectability for the new psychology, had gained wide acceptance, that behaviour was best explained solely in terms of observable stimulus and response events. A representational system need not be limited to relating a series of locations to each other in space but can operate upon behavioural and environmental events, organizing them in terms of the temporal and/or causal relationships which exist between them. An important part of the environment for the majority of animals consists of other animals, and salient characteristics of these other creatures are potentially available for inclusion into representational frameworks. Effective modelling of a social group should include a representation of the modeller himself as his own presence and actions affect group dynamics.
This chapter aims to develop the intuition into an idea about the activity of an organ of the body, because evolutionary biology is about organic evolution, and the evolutionary biology of mind must be about the organic basis of mind. Darwinism has traditionally been a doctrine about phyletic history, about the origin and change of species. The chapter reviews the nature of mind from a perspective that lends itself to evolutionary analysis. That perspective emphasizes a role for perceptual-motor and cognitive integration. The chapter discusses the hierarchical organization of very large nervous systems in effecting the integration. It also reviews the evolution of mind as the history of encephalization – the history of the enlargement of the brain beyond the grade expected from trends towards the evolution of larger bodies. The chapter compares anagenetic with cladistic evolution in order to put the evolution of mind into an appropriate evolutionary perspective.
