Re: "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello

Arkalen <arkalen@proton.me> wrote:

On 06/04/2024 11:53, Burkhard wrote:

Arkalen wrote:
 

Hello all,

 
hello too! It's so nice to have you back!!

 
Thanks :)
 

Has anyone here read "The Evolution of Agency" by Michael Tomasello ?

 

I thought it was a really interesting (and very short) book that kind
of blew my mind, and months later I can confirm it still impacts how I
think about human consciousness and social living. I'm still not sure
though how much of that is just being dazzled, or reading things for
the first time that are actually already well-known, or if the book is
plain wrong and if so on what.

 
I haven't read this one (but on the reading list now), I knew his work
mainly from the debate he had with Chomsky, and his rejection of the
idea of an innate universal grammar in favour of a social learning
model. I thought at the time that while the idea of shared intentionality
was very appealing and plausible, and explains a lot, on its own
I could not see how it overcomes the "poverty of the stimulus problem"
(but this was ages ago that I read it tbh)
What I also found really interesting, for my day job,  was his discussion
on third-party punishment (which he claims is uniquely human)
 

 
Was that debate live/recorded or written ? I'd be interested in seeing
it. I'm honestly surprised to hear he was rejecting innate universal
grammar in favor of social learning because I'd have thought the first
is a more logical outgrowth from what he presents "The Evolution of
Agency". For example I'm pretty sure he presents aspects of human
cooperation like basic altruism, coordinating via eye movements and
pointing etc as specific adaptations we have and chimpanzees don't or
much less so. I'd have thought "innate universal grammar" fit
comfortably in there. But I'm also not familiar enough with the debate
to be sure all the terms mean what I think they mean.
 
 
That reminds me though, I was thinking about the issues of teaching
animals language shortly after reading the book and this hypothesis kind
of fits with that too. Plenty of animals seem fine associating symbols
with things and expressing themselves that way but the resulting speech
lacks pronouns ("Koko want birkin bag; jealousy professor" not "I want a
birkin bag; you're jealous") and differentiating things like actor/acted
upon (we know Koko wants the birkin bag because the opposite doesn't
make sense but she could have ordered those words any which way to
express that meaning, with no way of lifting the ambiguity if context
didn't allow us to guess who's doing what).
 
 
And those differences seem pretty critical to the task of *coordinating
roles within a collaboration*. There's really no way to disambiguate
[Sally/John/Timmy/Jane/get groceries/pick up/mow/pool/lawn] into "I'll
get the groceries & you'll pick up Timmy at the pool, Jane can mow the
lawn" without true grammar!
 

The book seems good enough so far. Got me interested in feedback control
systems and their complexification across taxa. He teased me with a shout
out to Piaget’s behavioral driven evolution, but kinda shifts from Papa
Jean’s favored Baldwin effect. Tomasello could have really fucked up for me
in how he addresses MacLean’s obsolete triune brain schema.

He says: “In terms of brain bases for these new motivational mechanisms,
classic views attribute to reptiles a completely nonemotional reptilian
brain that lacks a limbic system, which contrasts with the emotional brain
of mammals (P. MacLean, 1990). Modern research now downplays the
differences between reptilian and mammalian brains (e.g., Naumann et al.,
2015), but it is still the case that the “limbic system” (however that is
now conceptualized) seems to play a more important role in mammalian than
in reptilian behavior.” From The Evolution of Agency

He cites this interesting article that starts off showing a von Baerian
divergence from a shared Bauplan over the Haeckelian mode of MacLean’s
version of the “reptile brain”:
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(15)00218-3

The article cites Sagan rather than MacLean, starts off pretty good then
loses the plot for me. Is there still a so-called reptile brain then or a
basal amniote brain at least that mammals and great apes complexify a bit?

Above Tomasello puts “limbic system” in requisite square quotes. His book
seems more a look at behavioral systems than neuroanatomy and its function,
so I don’t know how much Tomasello is aware of Joe LeDoux’s arguments
against a coherent limbic system, which he kinda deconstructed out of
existence.  Limbic systems and triune brains belong in the dustbin.