A Review of “Adaptive Thinking”, Part I

[“Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World”, Gerd Gigerenzer, Oxford University Press, 2000]

Professor Gigerenzer states in the introduction of Part I of his book (“Where Do New Ideas Come From?”):

Computers and statistics have both been used to fulfill the timeless longing to replace judgment by the application of content-blind, mechanical rules.” [page 1]

And he’s right about the timeless longing. Those are wrong who claim that this longing is modern. Wrongly developed, any philosophy can be turned into a mechanistic and reductionistic view of reality. This is not to deny the importance of a proper reductionism which gives us a vocabulary and concepts to discuss aspects of the whole. An egg can be reduced usefully to gain the language of “yolk and albumen and shell” but an actual egg can’t be reassembled from the actual or virtual pieces.

Gigerenzer speaks about the hypothesis of Herbert Simon that “a physical symbol system…has the necessary and sufficient means for general intelligent actions” [page 31] and tells us that this general line of thought over-threw the efforts of some to reduce the mind to a Turing machine. For those who don’t know about this line of thought, a Turing machine is a surprisingly simple computing machine that is capable of solving a wide class of problems solvable by a ‘recipe’. This includes, from most viewpoints, all the sorts of problems solvable by any computing machine, simple or complex. In fact, there’s a large class of problems which can’t be solved by a Turing machine though they’re theoretically solvable by a machine based on quantum mechanical principles. Anyone who’s realistic about, say, dealing with a rebellious teenager knows there are many other problems not solvable by either an electronic or a quantum computer.

Simon and his contemporaries and successors in this line of thought had returned to some sort of dualism using different language. As someone said about the Artificial Intelligent crowd: the soul has returned and now it’s called ‘software’. It’s this sort of view that’s opposed by scientists who are, roughly speaking, non-reductionistic materialists. The brain-scientist Gerald Edelman would be a good example, since he’s written clearly and powerfully on the philosophical implications of modern neurobiological discoveries and theories. (See “A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination”, co-authored by Giulio Tononi.) Edelman writes from a view which seems to be roughly that of a Jamesian pragmatism where all our higher knowledge comes from building upwards. I’ve argued against this way of thought because a world can’t simply be built from its parts though that same world wouldn’t exist without its parts, but this sort of a view is intellectually defensible and is also properly pious towards most aspects of the universe while failing to see that it is a universe. The possibilities of a world, a universe ordered to some greater purposes, is not even intelligible in Jamesian thought or any other form of pragmatism so far as I can see.

Gigerenzer isn’t really dealing with the implications of these sorts of changes in our view of the human mind so much as he’s dealing with the root causes of the changes. When our favorite, or perhaps newest, tool is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail at least until we grow bored slamming things. Gigerenzer doesn’t say this explicitly but certain implies the truth that the brain doesn’t make a very good hammer. Nor does it make a very good computer. Nor is it an organ moved by a soul of the sort which emerged from the literalizations of some very strange metaphors in pagan thought. Nor is it an intuitive statistician. Nor is it a battleground on which struggle either the reptilian brain against the mammalian brain or the ego against the id.

The human mind can be any of those, in some cases only by way of delusion, but it’s not any of those in a fundamental way. At the same time, our views of mind can reshape our own minds to some extent so far as I can see matters, and I see this as a very dangerous aspect of the flexibility of the human mind. These very discussions are possible only because of the human brain’s capability — in principle — to encapsulate the universe or even the world which is, in my writings, the universe seen in light of God’s purposes for Creation. In other words, the human mind doesn’t pre-exist as a well-formed entity, though the underlying brain has some well-formed abilities and limitations. The human mind can’t be separated from its relationships to external things, to living beings, and — most of all — to God. A truly well-formed human mind is capable of seeing a universe and then maybe a world and capable of forming a relationship with it as well as forming relationships with many things and living creatures and abstract ideas. The mind of that same human being could have been formed to mirror a computer or bureaucratic ways of thought. I’ll leave it to the reader to contemplate and fear other and still more horrible possibilities.

Nearly all scientists are well-trained to follow strictly the modern rules which separate theology and philosophy from empirical knowledge. Properly understood, this is a good rule, but it’s a methodological rule for 9-5 workhours and, taken too literalistically, prevents any truer understanding of either the world or the human mind. Any scientists who move on to a deeper, ‘philosophical’, understanding of their field will find it very hard to escape the boundaries of a pragmatism, Jamesian or otherwise. Even the universe, let alone God’s world, will not be seen because only the bottom-up ways of thought and analysis will be seen as legitimate. In my way of thinking, the human mind can’t be fully understood without some understanding of its potential to encompass or encapsulate the world. We must have some understanding of the world, of this phase of God’s Creation, to understand ourselves.

Gigerenzer follows the rules and speaks little in a philosophical mode and not at all in a theological or atheological mode. To be sure, he’s not trying to lead us to a deeper understanding of our mind. Rather does he have that more limited goal of seeing how some particular tools have given modern thinkers ways of describing the human mind. He also seems to be telling us those thinkers were not consciously aware of what they were doing and, in my words, unconsciously literalized some useful metaphors into strict definitions of the human mind. I would argue that not understanding the capabilities, in principle, of a well-formed human mind, he has also limited his views, though he hasn’t limited them so severely as those who literalize a metaphor of the human mind as a processor of ‘physical symbols’.

Gigerenzer also discusses the contradictions and misunderstandings embedded in the analytical techniques and basic assumptions of modern researchers in human thought. He shows that psychologists have been guilty of basic logical errors. For example, many researchers have assumed human beings should engage in bayesian thinking when dealing with uncertainty and then the researchers have analyzed the results by statistical techniques inconsistent with bayesian concepts.

Trained in statistics, some scientists saw the human mind as being some sort of statistical processing entity, confusing a potential skill of the entity for the entity itself. Others, such as Simon, were trained in operations research — generally, the use of algorithmic techniques to solve problems — and began to view the human brain as first a fancy calculator and then what we’d call a general-purpose computer.

It’s interesting in light of these academic struggles to establish an understanding of the human mind and to make one’s own definition the standard that Professor Gigerenzer speaks also of a scientist of integrity who seems to have had some good insights into the nature of the human mind and tells us of the ways in which this man and his thoughts were ignored, though he was allowed a comfortable way of living. The modern world has its own kinder and gentler ways of dealing with those who might disrupt the mainstream mindset and those sorts of rebels need a unique sort of moral character to stay the course during a life when they’re not even taken seriously, a sometimes more painful situation than the direct persecution that at least acknowledges the importance of the ‘heretic’.

Egon Brunswik began his professional life as a psychologist in the fertile intellectual turmoil of Vienna in the decades before WW II. In exile from Nazi-controlled Vienna, he was able to obtain and hold a respectable position at Berkeley, however he was never taken seriously for the rest of his life. Academics, including scientists, are capable of politics as bigoted as those of the average U.S. Senator. And we should remember what Polanyi once told us: Galileo’s second and more brutal inquisition was less a religious persecution and more a particularly nasty academic peer-review. It was scientists and philosophers, Aristotelians of a certain stripe, who tried him that second time because of the danger his ideas posed to the ideas which had formed their minds and made their careers. It was an historical oddity of sorts that those particular peer-reviewers were Catholic priests — only the Catholic Church had proper resources and had also retained enough respect for education to provide it widely.

That general situation hasn’t changed. Advanced degrees and even the possession of an endowed professorship is no sign of an open or flexible mind. We modern human beings aren’t really capable of distinguishing between an educated man and a well-trained man. Nor are we capable of even perceiving, let alone understanding, important ideas when they first arise unless they are proposed by those with fancy credentials and published in a currently fashionable journal.