Temple Grandin, Kinds of Minds and SETI

Feb 28, 2010 Alun Featured, Science 1 Comment Autism, Cognition, Evolution, SETI, TED

You’ll see me put up more TED videos over the next few months. I’ve had one in the drafts folder since Christ­mas, but I need some pho­tos to go with it, and haven’t had the chance to get them. The prod is that I’ve applied for a TED fel­low­ship. I don’t have a real­istic chance of get­ting one, but I thought it might help with organ­ising a TEDx event in Leicester. I’ll be vis­it­ing TEDx­War­wick to see how they do it next week.

Temple Grandin is an inter­est­ing per­son to post regard­less of any­thing else. I first heard of her after read­ing an inter­view in NewS­cient­ist. I put in an order for Anim­als in Trans­la­tion when it came out, that sadly has sat on my shelf since wait­ing for qual­ity free time for me to read it. Temple Grandin has a rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent view of aut­ism to the com­mon ste­reo­type pushed by the press. I hadn’t real­ised there were many people who see Aut­ism and Asperger’s as pos­it­ive aspects to their lives. In the video below Temple Grandin reframes the aut­istic spec­trum as a need for dif­fer­ent kinds of minds, which quite lit­er­ally requires a whole new way of think­ing about the mind.

If Grandin is right then this is a major span­ner in the works of Evol­u­tion­ary Psy­cho­logy. EP as it’s some­times not so affec­tion­ately known, is based on the idea that the human mind is more or less unchanged from the Pleis­to­cene era, so our actions and cog­ni­tion should be under­stood with ref­er­ence to a Palaeo­lithic world. The video above tor­pedoes that assump­tion. First we have to remove the idea that evol­u­tion is a lin­ear pro­gres­sion from there to here.

Evol­u­tion explained by Nick D. Kim at Strange Mat­ter

Instead we have three kinds of mind accord­ing to Temple Grandin, and a social and edu­ca­tional sys­tem set up to dis­crim­in­ate in favour of verbal minds. She’s also very clear about the idea of a spec­trum, so there could be people at the extremes of all three kinds of mind, and the rest of us in the middle with plastic minds. We get shaped to develop verbal minds because of the primacy of verbal com­mu­nic­a­tion and the out­come is a pop­u­la­tion that devel­ops verbal cog­ni­tion to the det­ri­ment of other forms of think­ing, and is unaware that it is doing so. Like she says, it’s nat­ural to assume every­one thinks the way you do. The abil­ity to digest milk is a rel­at­ively recent adapt­a­tion in humans, but it spread quickly. The advant­ages verbal cog­ni­tion could mean that the mod­ern mind is dif­fer­ent to non-literate minds. It opens up whole mine­field of edu­ca­tional policy that I’m com­pletely unqual­i­fied to talk about. It also has implic­a­tions for SETI because it seems we have been rub­bish so far at recog­nising a dif­fer­ent kind of mind in our own species.

The idea that aut­istic people might be more sen­su­ally aware than the aver­age per­son doesn’t fit the ste­reo­type, unless you think of cute sav­ants. Non­ethe­less it makes a ser­i­ous altern­at­ive cog­nit­ive model. A lot of what I’ve read in SETI is pretty inflex­ible. It’s still the default pos­i­tion that math­em­at­ics could be a uni­ver­sal lan­guage. It relies heav­ily on Pla­tonic ideals in math­em­at­ics, and the ques­tion of whether or not you need a Plato for a Pla­tonic philo­sophy. There is the ques­tion about the unreas­on­able effect­ive­ness of math­em­at­ics. Sundar Sarukkai has debunked this (PDF) (in my opin­ion) by show­ing math­em­at­ics is a lan­guage. Everything in the uni­verse can be described in Eng­lish, but no one would say Eng­lish is unreas­on­ably effect­ive. It’s pos­sible that math­em­at­ics appears to work because of an inher­ent struc­ture in our cog­ni­tion and not a struc­ture in the uni­verse, a span­drel of a verbal mind. If that’s the case then math­em­at­ics is a sign of a kind of mind and we will need to rad­ic­ally rethink what we look for in intel­li­gence to recog­nise intel­li­gent extra-terrestrial life.

That’s why I think Temple Grandin has an import­ant mes­sage for SETI, but equally she also has an import­ant mes­sage for Earth. It’s a topic which should be of interest to any­one who’s plan­ning to do some think­ing in the future.