The Cupola of Logic in the Unity of Sciences

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The Cupola of Logic in the Unity of Sciences
towards an Evolutionary Epistemology

• Luís Moniz Pereira
• Universidade Nova de Lisboa
• Doctor rerum naturalium honoris causa ceremony
• T.U. Dresden, 4 December 2006
• Full text at http//centria.di.fct.unl.pt/lmp/p
  ublications/online-papers/EvPsyUniSci.pdf

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Abstract

• - We examine a non-traditional approach to unity
  of sciences, a challenging articulation of views
  proceeding from Evolutionary Psychology, Logic
  and Artificial Intelligence.
• - This amalgam sets forth a consilience stance,
  wherefore the unity of sciences is heuristically
  presupposed on grounds of pragmatic and
  productive default assumptions.
• - Thus scientific inquiry is conducted,
  consilience arising from a presumed unity of
  objective reality, in itself a heuristic and
  pragmatic conception.
• - The attending hinges to Artificial
  Intelligence suggest the emergence of an
  innovative symbiotic form of evolutionary
  epistemology.

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Consilience

• Arguments in favour of the unity of knowledge
  consilience have been strongly put by Edward O.
  Wilson, author of Consilience The Unity of
  Knowledge (1998). He postulates there is a single
  physical nature, one not persuadable through
  argumentation, whatever deconstructionists may
  think. Science is not mere convention.
• Consilience, according to him, is the result of a
  co-evolution, involving genes and memes (of which
  more later).
• Our cultural memes have a genetic support and
  cannot, in the long run, stand against the genes
  who guarantee their survival, though such
  attempts may exist, viz. through genetic
  manipulation.

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Evolution and the Brain

• The first bipedal primates established the
  separation between human and other simian. To
  fathom the abilities of the human brain, it is
  essential to understand what exactly were the
  problems our primate ancestors were solving that
  led them to develop an extraordinarily intricate
  brain.
• One cannot look at the modern human brain, with
  its ability to create science, as if the millions
  of evolution-years that attuned it had never
  taken place.
• Among the problems being solved one spots those
  of status, territorialism, mating,
  gregariousness, altruism versus opportunism, the
  building of artefacts, and the mapping of the
  external world.

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Evolutionary Pscychology

• Evolutionary Psychology is a consummate example
  of successful scientific unification, engendered
  by a deeply significant combination of
  Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology,
  Linguistics, Evolutionary Biology, Neurosciences,
  and Artificial Intelligence (David Buss, 2005).
• Evolutionary Psychology has been studying
  behaviour and brain from an integrated
  evolutionary perspective, thereby originating
  some extremely relevant contributions.
• It has been strongly supported by Anthropological
  Archaeology, with its empirical studies in the
  cultural evolution of mankind (Stephen Shennan,
  2002).

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Genes and Memes

• Humans exhibit two reproductive mechanisms one
  is sexual reproduction, the other mental
  reproduction.
• Authors from Evolutionary Psychology have
  construed the notion of meme, in complement and
  contrast to that of gene. Memes substantiate the
  reproductive system executed in the brain. They
  are mental units that complement the sexually
  transmitted genes.
• Memes gather in assemblies, in patterns, like
  genes gather in chromosomes. Memes are patterned
  by, say, ideologies, religions, and common sense
  ideas.
• Certain memes work together, mutually reinforcing
  each other. Others not so. Hence correcting (and
  correctional) mechanisms may be triggered.

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Science Memes

• In this view, scientific thought emerges from
  distributed memetic interaction, albeit it at a
  spacial and temporal distance, never in an
  isolated way.
• It is erected by confluences, not constructed
  autonomously. It is engendered by networks,
  processed in appropriate environments. One,
  apropos, is Education where we carry out
  memetic proliferation.
• Language is the instrument allowing us to
  fabricate knowledge together. We may go so far as
  to state there is no isolated consciousness, that
  it is distributed by language. Thus one should
  envisage it out of the single brain and spread
  throughout culture.

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Archaeology

• Archaeologists, cf. Steven Mithen in The
  Prehistory of Mind (1996), are amassing evidence
  that our ancestors began with a generic
  intelligence, such as we find in apes today.
• There is a broad discussion reproduced in the
  Artificial Intelligence community whether
  intelligence is a general functionality or best
  seen divided into specific ability modules.
• Mithen argues humans went from a first phase of
  simple general intelligence, to a second phase of
  3 specialized major modules
• one for natural history and naïve physics
  Knowledge of Nature
• one for Knowledge and Manufacture of Instruments
• one for Cultural Artefacts the rules of living
  in society

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Specialized Modules and General Cupola

• The specialized intelligences were separately
  developed and uncommunicating.
• Only later in Homo Sapiens with the appearance
  of spoken language a cupola module became
  indispensable to articulate the specific ones.
• How else can specialized modules globally and
  synergetically connect, and people as module
  envelopes communicate among themselves?
• This need originated the generic cupola module, a
  much more sophisticated form of general
  intelligence, the cognitive glue bringing the
  specialized modules, and people, to communicate
  and cooperate.

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The Evolution of Reason Logic

• The formal systems of logic have ordinarily been
  regarded as independent from biology, but recent
  developments in evolutionary theory suggest that
  biology and logic are intimately interrelated.
• William S. Cooper (2001) outlines a theory of
  rationality in which logic law emerges as an
  intrinsic aspect of evolutionary biology. This
  perspective, though unorthodox at present, could
  change traditional ideas about the reasoning
  processes.
• The foundational laws of decision theory, utility
  theory, induction, and deduction can be
  reinterpreted as natural consequences of
  evolutionary processes, ultimately resulting in a
  unified foundation of an evolutionary science of
  reason.

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Behaviour, Rational Decision, and Games

• Decision theory is the branch of logic that comes
  into most immediate contact with the concerns of
  evolutionary biology. It addresses the rational
  choices regarding the most reasonable courses of
  action and behavioural patterns.
• This makes behaviour an interdisciplinary bridge
  approachable from both the biological and the
  logical sides. It is the fulcrum over which
  evolutionary forces extend their leverage into
  the realm of logic.
• On the heels of rational group behaviour, there
  emerged abstract rule-following social games.
  Game rules encapsulate concrete situation
  defining patterns, and concrete causal
  situation-action-situation sequencing, akin to
  causality-obeying physical reality.

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Games, Logic, and Communication

• From games further abstraction ensued. There
  emerged the notions of situation-defining
  concepts or predications of general rules of
  thought chaining and of legitimate argument and
  counter-argument game moves (John Holland, 1998).
• The pervasiveness of informal logic for capturing
  knowledge and for reasoning, a lingua franca
  across cultures, rests on its ability to actually
  foster rational understanding and common
  objectivity.
• Objective knowledge evolution dynamics, whether
  individual or plural, follows ratiocination
  patterns and laws too.

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The Cupola of Logic

• The human capacity for understanding logical
  reasoning was developed in the course of brain
  evolution. Its most powerful expression today is
  science itself, the ultimate reward for our
  mastery of language.
• Indeed, logic provides the overall conceptual
  cupola that articulates the specific modules
  identified by evolutionary psychology.
• It is mirrored by the computational universality
  of computing machines. These can execute any
  program, compute any computable function.
• Hence philosophical functionalism logic can be
  implemented on top of a symbol processing system,
  independently of its physical substrate.
• Once universality is achieved, abstract
  creativity bootstraps itself free of its
  evolutionary roots, to enable arbitrary symbol
  erector sets with which to model reality.

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Our Stance on the Unity of Sciences

• It appears a materialist heuristic to believe, so
  to say by default, that the unifying consilience
  of body and mind will be found.
• One is entitled to presuppose that the brains we
  have in common, and received via evolution, are
  capable of ever extendable joint agreement
  regarding the scientific view of our shared
  reality, especially in view of those brains
  universal plasticity in communication and
  modelling.
• This said, one may therefore pragmatically assume
  that it is the very unity of mind-independent
  Reality a presumed given which is conducive
  to the unity of the sciences, viz. when Reality
  is examined in the light of our joint cerebral
  abilities.

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Epistemic Status

• What is at stake is ultimately a principle of
  action practice, and of thought practice. The
  justification for our presuppositions is not
  evidential. It is practical and instrumentalistic
  pragmatic, in short. Procedural or functional
  efficacy is its crux.
• Hence, our unity of sciences epistemic status is
  not that of an empirical discovery, but that of
  an encompassing presupposition.
• Its ultimate justification is a transcendental
  argument from the very possibility of
  communication and inquiry, as we typically
  conduct them.

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Epistemic Toolkit

• In some cases, the cognitive tools and
  instruments of rationality will be found hardware
  independent.
• Though there is no universal one-size-fits-all
  epistemological recipe, agreement can be had on
  the relative success of any given tool kit.
• Understanding can be sought by building
  intelligent machines, functionalism coming to the
  rescue in positing that the material substrate is
  often not of the essence.
• The symbiotic entwining of human and machine
  being, therefore, the most recent and foreboding
  step in evolutionary epistemology.

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Artificial Epistemology

• Epistemology will acquire the ability to be
  shared with robots, aliens or any other entity
  that needs cognition to survive and program its
  future.
• Creating situated robots means carrying out our
  own cognitive evolution by new means, thereby
  engendering symbiotic, co-evolving, and
  self-accelerating loops.
• Computers can reify our scientific theories,
  making them objective, repeatable, and part of a
  commonly constructed extended reality, built upon
  multi-disciplinary unified science.
• Artificial Intelligence and the Cognitive
  Sciences provide highly stimulating steps towards
  furthering Sciences Unity, through the very
  effort of that construction.

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References

• David M. Buss, editor (2005), The Handbook of
  Evolutionary Psychology
• John Wiley, 2005.
• William S. Cooper (2001), The Evolution of
  Reason Logic as a Branch of Biology
  Cambridge U.P., 2001.
• John Holland (1998), Emergence From Chaos to
  Order, Addison-Wesley, 1998.
• Steven Mithen (1996), The Prehistory of Mind,
  Thames Hudson, 1996.
• Stephen Shennan (2002), Genes, Memes and Human
  History Darwinian Archaeology and Cultural
  Evolution, Thames Hudson, 2002.
• Edward O. Wilson (1998), Consilience The Unity
  of Knowledge Alfred A. Knopf,
  1998.

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The End and thank you for your attention