Extended Implicit Bias: When the Metaphysics and Ethics of Implicit Bias Collide

It has recently been argued that to tackle social injustice, implicit biases and unjust social structures should be targeted equally because they sustain and ontologically overlap with each other. Here I develop this thought further by relating it to the hypothesis of extended cognition. I argue that if we accept common conditions for extended cognition then people’s implicit biases are often partly realized by and so extended into unjust social structures. This supports the view that we should counteract psychological and social contributors to injustice equally. But it also has a significant downside. If unjust social structures are part of people’s minds then dismantling these structures becomes more difficult than it currently is, as this will then require us to overcome widely accepted ethical and legal barriers protecting people’s bodily and personal integrity. Thus, while there are good grounds to believe that people’s biases and unjust social structures ontologically overlap, there are also strong ethical reasons to reject this view. Metaphysical and ethical intuitions about implicit bias hence collide in an important way.

Māori Orality and Extended Cognition: A cognitive approach to memory and oral tradition in the Pacific

<p>Though philosophers have long held that interpretive anthropology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR) are opposed, this thesis offers an extended empirical assessment of the issues surrounding the implications of utilizing ethnographic material within a cognitive study of religious transmission. Using case studies from the Pacific, I consider a core question arising in both interpretative and cognitive disciplines, namely: how have oral cultures been able to preserve and transmit bodies of sacred knowledge cross-generationally without any external administrative tools (i.e. text)? First, I focus on the historical and ethnographic details of traditional Māori orality. I look at how orally transmitted knowledge was managed through the external cognitive resources associated with religious ritual. Here I find evidence within Pacific oral traditions that the problem of managing knowledge was overcome through tools and strategies that augmented memory and oral skill. I give special attention to the traditional Māori structuring of learning environments. Next I consider how macro-spatial tools – such as landmarks, and place names – helped support working memory and information management, and show that orientations to landscape are vital to ensuring collective memory. This thesis also demonstrates how culturally learned tools and strategies support the stability of religious cultural transmission. The use of external cognitive resources implies the complexity of managing and organizing sacred knowledge. Put simply, focusing on the historical accounts from the Pacific reveals a rich suite of culturally evolved tools and strategies for the transmission of religious knowledge. I show that tools such as ritual, myth, mnemonic techniques, and artifacts enable and stabilise such transmission. I hold, that such cultural environments constitute cognitive tools that are meaningfully described as cultural cognitive systems. Thus, combining descriptive accounts with the theoretical orientations of the cognitive sciences motivates what I call a ‘cognitive ecological’ model of mind. I argue that the cognitive ecological model is important because it orients researchers to the role that culturally evolved tools play in: (1) dramatically extending the human brain’s power to reckon with its surroundings and: (2) coordinating such knowledge across social groups and over time. The cognitive ecological model of mind I propose in this study is important for three reasons: First, it challenges the received view within the CSR – what I call the ‘Standard Internal Model’ (SiM) – which holds that the transmission of religious representations carries low cognitive demands (i.e. it is cognitively optimal). In contrast to SiM, the Pacific materials discussed here suggest that the oral transmission of sacred knowledge is cognitively demanding, culturally costly, and locally contingent. Second, my thesis demonstrates that historical and ethnographic evidence contains information that is vital for progress in the CSR since qualitative resources document how niche specific cultural practices often facilitate the acquisition and coordination of the complex knowledge resources over time. The ethnographic data supports the local optimality contention. Third, my thesis reveals that formulating tractable models for cultural transmission within the CSR is benefitted by an interdisciplinary approach. Such a prospect, I urge, is vital for intellectual progress between the humanities and the CSR. As such, and contrary to received opinion, my thesis shows how the CSR and the cultural anthropology of religion share a common intellectual fate.</p>

Māori Orality and Extended Cognition: A cognitive approach to memory and oral tradition in the Pacific

<p>Though philosophers have long held that interpretive anthropology and the cognitive science of religion (CSR) are opposed, this thesis offers an extended empirical assessment of the issues surrounding the implications of utilizing ethnographic material within a cognitive study of religious transmission. Using case studies from the Pacific, I consider a core question arising in both interpretative and cognitive disciplines, namely: how have oral cultures been able to preserve and transmit bodies of sacred knowledge cross-generationally without any external administrative tools (i.e. text)? First, I focus on the historical and ethnographic details of traditional Māori orality. I look at how orally transmitted knowledge was managed through the external cognitive resources associated with religious ritual. Here I find evidence within Pacific oral traditions that the problem of managing knowledge was overcome through tools and strategies that augmented memory and oral skill. I give special attention to the traditional Māori structuring of learning environments. Next I consider how macro-spatial tools – such as landmarks, and place names – helped support working memory and information management, and show that orientations to landscape are vital to ensuring collective memory. This thesis also demonstrates how culturally learned tools and strategies support the stability of religious cultural transmission. The use of external cognitive resources implies the complexity of managing and organizing sacred knowledge. Put simply, focusing on the historical accounts from the Pacific reveals a rich suite of culturally evolved tools and strategies for the transmission of religious knowledge. I show that tools such as ritual, myth, mnemonic techniques, and artifacts enable and stabilise such transmission. I hold, that such cultural environments constitute cognitive tools that are meaningfully described as cultural cognitive systems. Thus, combining descriptive accounts with the theoretical orientations of the cognitive sciences motivates what I call a ‘cognitive ecological’ model of mind. I argue that the cognitive ecological model is important because it orients researchers to the role that culturally evolved tools play in: (1) dramatically extending the human brain’s power to reckon with its surroundings and: (2) coordinating such knowledge across social groups and over time. The cognitive ecological model of mind I propose in this study is important for three reasons: First, it challenges the received view within the CSR – what I call the ‘Standard Internal Model’ (SiM) – which holds that the transmission of religious representations carries low cognitive demands (i.e. it is cognitively optimal). In contrast to SiM, the Pacific materials discussed here suggest that the oral transmission of sacred knowledge is cognitively demanding, culturally costly, and locally contingent. Second, my thesis demonstrates that historical and ethnographic evidence contains information that is vital for progress in the CSR since qualitative resources document how niche specific cultural practices often facilitate the acquisition and coordination of the complex knowledge resources over time. The ethnographic data supports the local optimality contention. Third, my thesis reveals that formulating tractable models for cultural transmission within the CSR is benefitted by an interdisciplinary approach. Such a prospect, I urge, is vital for intellectual progress between the humanities and the CSR. As such, and contrary to received opinion, my thesis shows how the CSR and the cultural anthropology of religion share a common intellectual fate.</p>

The Evolution of Moral Cognition

<p>Many modern approaches to the evolution of mind have claimed that the fundamental drivers of our cognitive capacities and cultures are genetically specified psychological adaptations, which evolved in response to evolutionary pressures deep within our lineage's history. Many of our cognitive capacities are innate. Recent approaches to moral cognition have similarly argued that moral cognition is innate. In this thesis, I argue that even though our capacity for moral cognising is an adaptation, it is a learned adaptation. Moral cognition is not innate. In arguing this thesis I will question many of the assumptions of traditional cognitive science and evolutionary approaches to the mind. By incorporating theory and evidence from cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, I apply the explanatory frameworks of embodied and extended cognition to the domain of morality: moral cognition is both embodied and extended cognition. This places particular importance on the role of our bodies and world in the fundamental structuring and scaffolding of the development and execution of moral cognition. Putting this in an evolutionary framework, I develop a dual inheritance model of the non-nativist evolution of moral cognition focusing on the roles of niche construction, biased learning and active learning in the transfer of moral phenotypes between generations. Morality is a learned adaptation that evolved through the dynamic and reciprocal interaction between genes and culture.</p>

The Evolution of Moral Cognition

<p>Many modern approaches to the evolution of mind have claimed that the fundamental drivers of our cognitive capacities and cultures are genetically specified psychological adaptations, which evolved in response to evolutionary pressures deep within our lineage's history. Many of our cognitive capacities are innate. Recent approaches to moral cognition have similarly argued that moral cognition is innate. In this thesis, I argue that even though our capacity for moral cognising is an adaptation, it is a learned adaptation. Moral cognition is not innate. In arguing this thesis I will question many of the assumptions of traditional cognitive science and evolutionary approaches to the mind. By incorporating theory and evidence from cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, I apply the explanatory frameworks of embodied and extended cognition to the domain of morality: moral cognition is both embodied and extended cognition. This places particular importance on the role of our bodies and world in the fundamental structuring and scaffolding of the development and execution of moral cognition. Putting this in an evolutionary framework, I develop a dual inheritance model of the non-nativist evolution of moral cognition focusing on the roles of niche construction, biased learning and active learning in the transfer of moral phenotypes between generations. Morality is a learned adaptation that evolved through the dynamic and reciprocal interaction between genes and culture.</p>

Visuospatial integration: Paleoanthropological and archaeological perspectives

The visuospatial system integrates inner and outer functional processes, organizing spatial, temporal, and social interactions between brain, body, and environment. These processes involve sensorimotor networks like the eye–hand circuit, which is especially important to primates, given their reliance on vision and touch as primary sensory modalities and the use of the hands in social and environmental interactions. At the same time, visuospatial cognition is intimately connected with egocentric memory, self-awareness, and simulation capacity. In the present article, we review issues associated with investigating visuospatial integration in extinct human groups through the use of anatomical and behavioral data gleaned from the paleontological and archaeological records. In modern humans, paleoneurological analyses have demonstrated noticeable and unique morphological changes in parietal cortex, an area crucial to visuospatial management. Archaeological data provides information on hand-tool interaction, the spatial behavior of past populations and their interaction with the environment (e.g. in domains like landscape use and navigation, the spatial relations implicit in social networks, etc.). Visuospatial integration may represent a critical bridge between extended cognition, self-awareness, and social perception. As such, visuospatial functions are relevant to the hypothesis that human evolution is characterized by changes in brain–body–environment interactions and relations, which enhance possibilities for integrating inner and outer cognitive components through neural plasticity and a specialized embodiment capacity. We therefore advocate the investigation of visuospatial functions in past populations through the paleoneurological study of anatomical elements and archaeological analysis of visuospatial behaviors.

Bootstrapping Ordinal Thinking

In this chapter, the authors apply cognitive neuroscience, gene–culture co-evolution, and extended cognition to account for the evolution of an unusual neurologically grounded trait—the ability to arrange items in ordered sequences. Cognitive neuroscience strongly suggests that the human ability to conceive of and use ordinal sequences such as alphabets and calendars relies on dedicated neural resources, yet ordinal sequences such as these do not exist in nature. There is thus the provocative possibility that ordinal thinking evolved as a specific response to cultural phenomena. But which, and how? Applying the perspectives of extended cognition and gene–culture co-evolution (neuronal recycling in particular), the authors explore the likelihood that ordinal cognition arose through the manipulation of material artifacts, with stringing beads for thousands of generations being one possible scenario.