The mind is like a computer

The second tenet of SEP is that the human mind is like a computer. More specifically, the human mind is identical in principle to a classical computational device.47 I say “in principle” because, as evolutionary psychologists point out, there are many different computers in the world. According to SEP then, human minds operate much like those computers, but the differences are that they are slower and more complex (Pinker 1997, p 40). In these ways, the mind is not like everyday computers. The ways in which human minds areliterally like or identical to everyday computers are in the ways that many everyday computers instantiate specific principles of design and operation. I will address these features in turn.

Two important elements of computer design are hardware and software. Computer hardware is the set of physical elements that constitute the system. This set includes items like power supplies, hard drives, processing units, and circuitry. According to SEP, the brain is the design equivalent of a computer’s hardware (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992, p 7). Software is set of symbols and rules according to which those symbols are manipulated. These manipulations govern the operation of the hardware. For SEP, the mind is the design equivalent of computer’s software. In this way, SEP claims that the mind is like a computer. The computational theory of mind employed by SEP originated

47 _{A classical computational device is one which operates according to Turing computation as opposed to} connectionist computation (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988; Fodor 1989). Some researchers believe that connectionist systems do (or can) operate according to classical computation (Chalmers 1990, 1993; Clark 1993). But no consensus has been reached on this issue (Berkeley 1997).

in disciplines such as computer science, philosophy, and linguistics, among others (Pinker 1997, p 24). Theorists in the disciplines that espouse these views have now coalesced in the field of cognitive science (Adams 2003). Accordingly SEP integrates this interdisciplinary approach which holds that the mind is an information processing system, and that this system is functionally realized in the brain. To say that the mind is an

information processing system is to say that it receives information from the

environment; that this information is translated into a symbolic language; and that the rule-based manipulation of these symbols causally guides behaviour in virtue of its symbols representing environmental information (Ibid). To say that the mind is

functionally realized in the brain is to say that the symbolic language or software of the brain is spread out across many regions of the brain, and that it can be multiply realized in various parts of the brain. In sum, the brain is to hardware as the mind is to software. For SEP, the software of the mind is composed of many programs. It is composed of thousands of separate and specialized computational programs or mechanisms (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992, p 39). Each of these programs, also called modules, operates in relative isolation from the others by being responsive to only certain environmental information—modules are domain-specific. And what made them this way is our genes’ past exposure to the specific recurrent adaptive problems of Pleistocene life. Each module’s domain of information processing is restricted as a result of our ancestors having solved the same adaptive problems many times. Accordingly, each of the mind’s programs is selected for its function of causing adaptive behaviour in the environmental context of the Pleistocene. The properties of modules and their architectural arrangement in the mind are subjects of ongoing debate (Samuels 1998). What is important to

emphasize for the present purpose is that, according to this tenet of SEP, the mind is like a computer that runs many programs at the same time, and that these programs are isolated (informationally) from each other. And whereas the programs of everyday computers have been coded by programs and installed by users, SEP claims that the programs of the human mind are coded by our genes and installed by natural selection (Pinker 1997, p 23). Accordingly, the design and operation of our minds is specified by an innate and universal “genetic program” that was shaped by natural selection to cause

specific behaviours—namely, those behaviours that maximized reproductive success in the environment where all humans are either hunters or gatherers (Pinker 1997, p 21). As we shall see, this characterization of the Pleistocene’s environment as being populated by hunters and gathers will be relevant to SEP’s claims about essential sex differences in empathic capacity. It will turn out that because males were mostly hunters and females were mostly gatherers, their minds were, and continue to be different.

That the mind is like a computer is a central tenet of SEP. Evolutionary psychologists claim that the entire mind operates according to the principles of design and operation of a computer. Pinker goes so far as to state that:

Without the computational theory, it is impossible to make sense of the evolution of the mind… A program is an intricate recipe of logical and statistical operations directed by comparisons, tests, branches, loops, and subroutines embedded in subroutines… Human thought and behavior, no matter how subtle and flexible, could be the product of a very complicated program, and that program may have been our endowment from natural selection (Pinker 1997, p 27).

According to SEP, the program that is the mind has very specific properties. It is innately specified. Each human is born with a genetic code that causes the mechanisms of the mind to develop into a fixed state. And this fixed state is historically stable. The way the mind’s mechanisms operate and are arranged has remained the same ever since their selection during the Pleistocene. In section (5) of this paper, I will argue that this tenet of SEP should be enlarged to include recent developments in computer science. These developments shed new light on the possible operation on the mind, and they allow for new explanations of how it evolved. But first I will turn to the last theoretical tenet of SEP.