HAYEK: COGNITIVE SCIENTIST AVANT LA LETTRE 1899-1992
The brain struggling to understand the brain is society trying to explain itself. (Colin Blakemore) The large brain, like large government, may not be able to do simple things in a simple way. (Donald Hebb) If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t. (Pugh)
The Sensory Order (TSO) 1952 Target text The Sensory Order (TSO) 1952
It’s high time that the multidisciplinary hub that is cognitive science admit Hayek into the pantheon of non-Cartesian thinkers, taking his place alongside 20th century titans such as Heidegger, Vygotsky, and Merleau-Ponty.
Hayek’s abiding insight was to emphasize the cybernetic loop of agentenvironment agent environment through a perennial and mutual process of modification and conditioning, a reciprocal relation between our conceptual creativity and the environment, to intimate, regulate and inform concepts and action.
Hayek’s paradox On the one hand, agents within a rich (complex) social tapestry have their conceptual and behavioral possibilities tempered by the partial cognitive and epistemic access to the (complex) manifold that informs the ambient culture or social soup. On the other hand, mind is itself constitutionally (and terminally) constrained to fully understand its own (complex) mechanics – a mind that is significantly constituted by its (complex) social environment.
Perhaps the earliest substantive appreciation of TSO came from computer scientist, Frank Rosenblatt whose “perceptron,” an early version of a feed-forward learning algorithm, was influenced by the suggestiveness of Hayek and Hebb. The future A.I. grandee, Marvin Minsky, certainly knew of TSO. Thanks to a few within current neuroscience – Gerald Edelman and Joaquín Fuster – Hayek can no longer be dismissed as a mere historical curiosity.
Is Hayek’s philosophy of mind anachronistic because he was writing long before the relevant options (i.e. the connectionist versus the computational model) had been adequately defined?; and/or
Have Hayek’s defenders have been too charitable since he doesn’t offer anything precise enough to fit any of the current models?
Does Hayek’s connectionist model of society presuppose the connectionist theory of mind?; or,
Does his connectionist theory of mind entail the connectionist model of society?
Section I presents TSO as a treatise on the problem of mental representation. Section II - Cognitive Exploitation - builds a case for Hayek being taken as an externalist. Section III – Cognitive Closure – examines the problem of the self-referentiality of mind. Section IV - “Unexplained Residue” - concerns the two orders – the sensory order and the extended order – or in current philosophy of mind jargon – qualia and intentionality. Section V - examines TSO’s Proto-Connectionism Section VI - looks at the role of mind in Hayek’s social theory – which I’ve entitled Social Connectionism.
the connectionist paradigm Hayek anticipated the connectionist paradigm McGinn’s “cognitive closure” Jackson’s “Mary” and qualia talk the connectionist paradigm distributed cognition
Hayek inspired Multi-agent modeling