Book proposal
Evolution of Mind:
The affective roots of culture and cognition
Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture
Columbia College Chicago
http://www.colum.edu/mindscienceculture/
Stephen Asma, PhD, Professor of Philosophy sasma@colum.edu
Rami Gabriel, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology rgabriel@colum.edu
When Darwin wrote the Origin of Species, he famously closed the book with the provocative promise that “much light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” In his Descent of Man (1871) and his Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin began to throw some of that promised light –especially regarding the emotional and cognitive homologies of mammals. But shortly after this beacon, all went dark again. The early 20th century’s rise of positivism, the turn toward genetics, and the ascent of behaviorism effectively pulled the curtain on speculations about the minds of mammals –including our own minds. When researchers finally turned again toward the mind as a worthy subject, it was the computer that both sparked the cognitive sciences revolution and served as its exclusive investigative heuristic. For all the successes of artificial intelligence (and they are impressive), they have misdirected our understanding of biological minds –the only true minds. Algorithmic digital computation produces mind-­‐like problem solving machines, but such problem solving –currently referred to 1
confusedly as “intelligence” by the dominant paradigm –is neither motivated nor “processed” by the affective triggers of real animals. In fact, artificial intelligence and artificial life research has lost interest, unapologetically, in the biological creature altogether. And, more surprising, evolutionary psychology made its most popular strides in the 1990s by ignoring the brain and body in favor of computational modules, posited to explain human behavior in a largely mythical Pleistocene. Indeed, contemporary moral psychology often continues this modular approach as it assumes the existence of innate normative switches in the human mind. With much less fanfare, the 1990s saw the birth of affective science, especially in the pioneering work of Jaak Panksepp, Antonio Damasio, and Richard Davidson. Affective Neuroscience began, and continues, to isolate emotional brain systems (largely in subcortical regions) that undergird adaptive behaviors in vertebrates. We are beginning to appreciate how the ancestral mammal brain is alive and well inside our higher neocortical systems. Unlike the computational approach to mind, the affective turn is deeply rooted in empirical brain research. In the first decade of the new millennium, affective or emotional studies began to trickle into disciplines like ethology (see Frans De Waal), economics (Daniel Kahneman), therapy, and even pharmaceutics. But the time has finally come for a full-­‐scale exploration of the evolution of emotions and mind in man as a biological creature. For at least 200 million years (and that is a conservative figure based on the rise of mammals), the emotional brain has been under construction. By comparison, the big rational neo-­‐cortex, which is the focus of the cognitive sciences, is a latecomer on the scene (around 1.8 million years ago) and the development of our language symbol system is younger still. As a suite of adaptive tools, the emotions have been at work eons longer than rational cognition, so it makes little sense to think about the mind as an idealized cost-­‐benefit computer projected into deep time. A sufficient account of the evolution of mind will have to go deeper than our power of propositional thinking –our power to manipulate representations. We will have to understand a much older capacity –the power to feel. Our book, Evolution of 2
Mind: the affective roots of culture and cognition, will make an argument for the centrality of emotional systems in understanding the evolution of the human mind (and our primate cousins). In this book we triangulate insights and data from philosophy, biology and psychology to shape a new research program. Affective science can demonstrate the surprising relevance of feelings to perception, to thinking, decision-­‐making, and social behavior. The mind is saturated with feelings. Almost every perception and thought is valenced, or emotionally weighted with some attraction or repulsion quality. Moreover, those feelings, sculpted in the encounter between neuroplasticity and ecological setting, provide the true semantic contours of mind. Meaning is foundationally a product of embodiment, our relation to the immediate environment, and the emotional cues of social interaction, not abstract correspondence between sign and referent. The challenge then is to unpack this embodiment. How do emotions like care, rage, lust, and even playfulness create a successful social world for mammals, an information-­‐
rich niche for human learning, and a somatic marking system for higher-­‐level ideational salience? While impressive research has been emerging in disparate fields, like neuro-­‐
ethology, ecological psychology, evolution of culture, enactive psychology and philosophy of biology, no one has yet characterized an affective paradigm that draws together these data and projects a fruitful way forward. Our book hopes to provide such a conceptual roadmap. 3
Table of contents
Introduction I. The Philosophy of Affective Neuroscience 1. Why a New Paradigm? 2. Teleology and Intentionality in the Life Sciences II. The Evolution and Development of Social Intelligence 3. Social Intelligence from the ground up 4. Emotional Flexibility and the Evolution of Culture: A phylogenetic story 5. The Ontogeny of Social Intelligence III. The Affective Roots of Culture 6. Representations and Imagination 7. Affect in Cultural Evolution: The Social Structure of Civilization 8. Religion, Mythology, & Art IV. Consequences 9. Philosophy: The Self 10. Issues in Law 11. The Future of Psychology 4
Mission Statement of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture
The Research Group in Mind, Science, and Culture takes a holistic approach to the study of the human mind. Our research emphasizes the continuity across mammal brains by focusing on the integral role of emotion in social interaction and cognition. Our goal is to create bridges connecting Affective Neuroscience, Evolution, and Philosophy of Mind. We view the mind-­‐brain as a highly flexible epigenetic product of nature and culture, rather than a computational machine. Our practical purpose in establishing the Research Group is to create a fertile space for research, discussion, and exploration of the mind, from its biological roots to its cultural fruits. The Group emphasizes a cross-­‐disciplinary dialogue between psychology, philosophy, the biological sciences, history, and the humanities as a means of connecting the many levels of the human mind in this increasingly synergistic field of knowledge. Over the last four years, the Research Group has presented a series of formal panel discussions at the Chicago Cultural Center, including The Evolution of Social Intelligence (2013), The Naturalization of Morality (2010) and The soul and neuroscience (2009). The Group also presented a symposium, with Dr. Jaak Panksepp, called The Philosophy of Affective Neuroscience at the Cognitive Science Society in 2010. This symposium resulted in the publication The Philosophical implications of Affective Neuroscience in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 9, No. 3–4, 2012, pp. 6–48. In our capacity as public educators, our video on Neuroscience and the Soul has reached thousands of viewers. 5
Individual Bios
Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he is a founding Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture. Asma is the author of seven books, including Against Fairness (Univ. of Chicago Press), On Monsters: an Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford Univ. Press) and Following Form and Function: A Philosophical Archaeology of Life Science (Northwestern University Press). He has written for the New York Times, the Sunday Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Chicago Tribune, and academic journals like Biology and Philosophy, and American Philosophical Quarterly. His writing has been translated into German, Spanish, Hebrew, Czech, Romanian, Hindi, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese. In 2003, he was Visiting Professor at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia, and in 2007 he lived and studied in Shanghai China. Asma also researched Asian philosophies in Thailand, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Laos. And in 2013, he won a Fulbright award to teach in Beijing, PRC. Asma has been invited to lecture at Harvard, Brown University, the Field Museum, Fudan University, the Newberry Library, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, University of Macau, and many more. His website is: www.stephenasma.com
Rami Gabriel is Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia College Chicago, where he is a founding Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture, as well as Fellow at the Center for Black Music Research. Gabriel is the author of Why I Buy: Self, Taste, and Consumer Society in America (Intellect Press). His second book manuscript, The Uses of Psychology, presents an epistemological meta-­‐analysis of psychology through the lens of human nature. Trained as an cognitive and perceptual scientist, he has published empirical studies on memory, self, emotion, prosopagnosia, consciousness, and the philosophy of cognitive science in the academic journals Cognition & Emotion, Social Cognition, and Journal of Consciousness studies. He is a member of the following professional organizations: Society for Social and Affective Neuroscience, Cognitive Science Society, Southern Society of Philosophy and Psychology, Association for Scientific Study of Consciousness, American Psychological Association, and American Culture association. 6
Evolution on Mind: The affective roots of culture and cognition
Research Group in Mind, Science, and Culture, Columbia College Chicago
Chapter outline
Introduction
Dr. Jaak Panksepp, the father of affective neuroscience, will write the introduction
to the book. Dr. Panksepp is the Bailey Endowed Chair of Animal Well-Being Science at
Washington State University and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Bowling Green
State University. In this proposal we have included Jaak’s introductory essay from our
joint symposium “Philosophical Implications of Affective Neuroscience” (originally
published in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 19, No. 3–4, 2012, pp. 6–48). The book
introduction will be new, but we include the essay here (marked Appendix 1) because it
will give reviewers the style and substance of the coming book version.
The Introduction will give readers an outline of the homologous primary-process
affective systems of the subcortical level (including homeostatic affects), the secondary-
7
process systems of the limbic system (including fear, seeking, and the affective memories
involved in conditioning and learning), and the tertiary-level processes of the neocortex
(including the emotional processing of the medial frontal regions, and the cognitive
executive functions of the frontal cortex).
The Introduction will outline the experimental research that helped affective
sciences isolate and test the specific adaptive aspects of mammalian emotional systems.
This work complicates, in the best way possible, both the simplistic cognitive science
emphasis on strictly tertiary-level mind, and the behaviorist emphasis on associationist
stimulus/response aspects of “mind.”
I.
The Philosophy of Affective Neuroscience
1. Why a new paradigm?
This chapter charts an epistemological position on fundamental issues in the study
of the evolution of the mind. We describe a non-modular model of affective mechanisms
and its implications for an evolutionary approach to cognitive psychology. Most models
of value generation are based either on behaviorist conditioning paradigms or cognitive
rational cost/benefit decision-making. But the former mechanical associations are too
dumb, and the latter discursive and computational reasoning is too smart. In this chapter
we will argue that the neuroplastic brain generates and assigns affective values with
pushmi-pullyu representations and somatic markers long before propositional
manipulation of the external world. This new paradigm describes how intentions-inaction is possible and is buttressed by interpretation of experimental findings on attitudes
and unconscious reactions in a Prosopagnosic patient. Finally, we describe how future
empirical research on the relation between emotion and cognition will benefit from being
buttressed by this new paradigm.
2. Teleology in the life sciences: biological aboutness
This chapter charts our ontological positions with an emphasis upon key issues in
the philosophy of biology, including teleology, intentionality, and the causality of
developmental feedback processes. Our debt to Aristotle and Spinoza reveals our deeper
ontological position. Spinoza saw nature in fairly mechanical deterministic terms, but he
recognized that living things share a simple goal-oriented tendency; they strive to
survive. He called this animation principle of living systems “conatus” (striving), and
considered it the very essence of all biological creatures.
Biological systems are themselves intentional. Equipped with conatus, protorepresentational abilities, and homeostatic processes, creatures pursue “maximum grip”
on their environments. Conative aboutness in homeodynamic systems is a kind of
intentionality prior to decoupled representations; this line of thinking has been neglected
because earlier attempts were tangled in theology. Biological teleology, and emotional
intentionality in particular, need to be worked out before the representational theory of
mind, which is in turn derivative of those earlier forms of goal-directness. Cartesian and
digital notions of mind have failed to incorporate this aspect of embodiment.
8
In this chapter, we reconceptualize teleology in terms of a post-Darwinian
ontology. These ontological considerations will lay the foundation for those telic features
of mind, articulated nicely by William James in 1890: “Consciousness seems to itself be
a fighter for ends. Its powers of cognition are mainly subservient to those ends,
discerning which facts further them and which do not.”
II.
The evolution and development of social intelligence
In this section, we outline a model of social intelligence and the foundation it
provides for the phylogenetic and ontogenetic cultural accumulation of information. Our
approach to social intelligence is part of a greater project intended to understand human
abilities from a biological rather than computational perspective. This includes
emphasizing the features of mental life that are homologous with non-human primates.
Much of our understanding of primate ethology is gained through the work of
primatologists Frans de Waal, Craig Stanford, Robert Sapolsky, and Sarah Hrdy.
Drawing on the ecological psychology of researchers like Louise Barrett and the situated
cognition approach of Andy Clark, we describe the environmental contours of primate
emotional life. And we discuss a set of perceptual, emotional, and social processes as the
proximal causes that enable culture and cultural learning, as investigated by philosopher
Kim Sterelny and psychologist Darcia Narvaez et al. (2013).
The first chapter provides a theoretical model for the complexity of social
processes using the notion of affordances as a conceptual lever to transform the scope of
perception and the role of emotions therein. The second chapter delivers a phylogenetic
story of social intelligence through a comparative analysis of primate social behavior in
its ecological and emotional context. The final chapter suggests an ontogenetic narrative
in regards to the developmental psychology of social intelligence in humans.
3.
Social Intelligence, from the ground up
This chapter seeks to expand our tools for understanding non-representational
mental processes and behaviors. Taking a bottom-up approach based on basic
mammalian sensory-motor systems, homeostasis, and affective mechanisms, along with
communication abilities, a model is presented of how the embodied storing and
perception of information in body-world loops functions as a form of social intelligence.
The affordance theory, elements of Affective Neuroscience, the somatic marker
hypothesis, and Pushmi-Pullyu representations provide the functional foundations for
how perception and social interaction are forms of communicative social intelligence. In
addition to providing an evolutionary story for the existence and perpetuation of complex
social abilities, this model leaves room for the behavioral complexity of cultural learning.
4.
Emotional Flexibility and the Evolution of Culture: A phylogenetic story
Emotional evolution has failed to garner the scientific attention that it deserves.
Cognitive approaches have raced ahead, reading our modern minds back into deep time.
In this chapter, we sketch a bottom-up emotions-based research program for
understanding hominid and primate evolution. In particular, we show how mammalian
affective systems (SEEKING, LUST and CARE) are channeled by ecological demands
into sophisticated social traditions. Dedicated emotions can be decoupled from their
9
original target functions, and broadened into more plastic, open-ended suites of general
responses. We examine the transition of homologous affective foundations into diverse
primate cultures, looking in particular at chimps, bonobos and humans. In addition to the
physical environment niche and the cognitive niche of the hominids, we argue for an
emotional niche.
5.
The Ontogeny of Social Intelligence
In this chapter, we describe the ontogeny of social intelligence through the infantprimary caregiver relationship. Our argument draws from research on the developmental
impact of early experience along with the adaptive co-evolutionary nature of cultural
learning (Bowlby, 1951). The infant-primary caregiver relationship is a critical part of the
ontogeny of social intelligence in humans because it plays a constitutive role in defining
the capacities necessary for appropriate social interaction. Such capacities include the
accurate interpretation of emotional information transmitted through non-linguistic social
cues. In this way, the infant-primary caregiver relationship is a process of enculturation
and is an example of how emotional potentials of the brain are developed through
experience to serve socially adaptive ends. These same developmental processes can be
targeted by natural selection, as well as the “artificial selection” of cultural folkways, and
thereby become stable features of human social evolution.
Recent work by evolution of culture scholars, like Cecilia Heyes, has offered
proximate mechanisms of imitation-based cultural learning. Much of this work has
focused on “matching vertical associations” in early childhood development that help
humans form ways of reading and mimicking social skills and behaviors. But, in this
chapter, we will supply the missing links of emotional contagion, mimicry, and
communication to this leading-edge story of social evolution. Failures of prosocialization
will also be explored to help us understand the relevant mechanisms of filial
domestication, kin attachment, and antisocial affective disorders.
III.
The Affective roots of Culture
In this section, we trace affective systems through transformations that enabled
representational mental processes, social organization, religion, and art. Our key principle
is the notion of de-coupling: when an affective response, or a perceptual representation is
freed from necessity, and it attaches onto, and expands into, other functions. Put another
way (following philosopher Ruth Millikan), the human mind evolved the ability to
separate or disconnect the indicative from the imperative functions of an image, sound, or
memory. This provided enough distance from automatic action-responses that
representations could be manipulated (i.e. counterfactuals arose), and a “second universe”
slowly emerged inside the head of Homo.
Most contemporary work on the evolution of mind fails to address the way in
which intellectual representations originated in earlier animal abilities. In this section of
the book we will articulate an empirically-informed model of how primates transitioned
from bodily simulations (the beginnings of decoupling) to symbol systems, and how
those eventual symbolic systems still bear the mark of their affective roots.
6.
Representations and Imagination
10
In the last section we discussed the de-coupling of affective systems in the context
of social bonding and social intelligence, in an analogous fashion representational
abilities were decoupled from perceptual tasks and allowed an expansion of simulation
possibilities and agent-directed representational abilities. These representational
processes remain nested in the brain processes we described above but, through the
pressures of expanding social groups and cognitive tasks in response to macroscopic
weather shifts, acquired new possibilities. The key shift is in the de-coupling of
representations (in simulations that include valence tags) from here-and-now perceptual
and action demands onto more long-term tasks, which are generally related to social
needs and require inhibitory abilities. It is this set of abilities that presumably led to the
complex and infinitely iterative social processes of language and culture; a decoupling of
affect and cognition from immediate experience into the grounds of symbolic
communication systems.
We discuss how imagination mediates between perception, memory and judgment
unconsciously or preconsciously, and we trace the roots of these ideas from Aristotle,
Kant, and more recently Mark Johnson. Dreams and mind-wandering are examples of
detaching affect from agent-directed goals and here-and-now perceptual-motor tasks,
allowing synthetic mental processes for affect organization and representation. The
function of dream de-coupling, wherein subjects are assigned new emotional valence tags
or old ones are reinforced, is more appropriate or adaptive social behavior simulations for
use in waking life. We put forward a thesis concerning how these proto representations
also offer behavioral affordances. Careful consideration of dreaming (from
phenomenological and neuroscientific perspectives) furnishes us with an important casestudy of involuntary imagination –the predecessor to later conscious forms of decoupling
and manipulation.
7.
Affect in Cultural Evolution: The Social Structure of Civilization
In this chapter, we consider the role of affect in cultural evolution, and
specifically, social organization and the rise of civilization. We draw on archaeological
findings which suggest that human social organization has taken many shapes including
hunter-gatherer bands, the tribe, the chiefdom, the state, as well as complex variations
and hybrids of each.
The predominant interpretation of the archaeological evidence has emphasized
rational adaptation as the mechanism for changes in social organization. For example,
Bogucki (1999) states that “the overall sweep of prehistoric society was the cumulative
result of decisions made by self-interested individuals.” We argue that the challenging
findings of recent behavioral economics, including the work of Daniel Kahneman, Amos
Tversky, Richard Thaler and Ken Binmore, suggest rational choice models of decisionmaking are insufficient to account for human social behavior. While rational choice
surely plays a role, we must account for the fact that the social norms that define society
are the result of social behaviors that are largely underwritten by affective forces
originating well before the rise of propositional thinking. The role of affect in orienting
social behavior must be added to our understanding of the changes in social organization
during the rise of civilization.
11
The resource sharing, nomadic movement, and face-to-face social interaction of
hunter-gatherer groups reinforces cultural adaptations based on complex cooperative
strategies. Likewise, changing social and ecological factors—such as an increase in
population size, the establishment of defensible resources brought on by sedentism, and
the firm establishment of kin groups—are foundational to the rise of civilization in the
agrarian state. These changes suggest types of societies that tend to be stratified,
centralized, and often organized with abstract ideological norms like law.
We argue affective adaptation to the specific ecological and social topography of
human groups is a causal factor in the creation, maintenance, and eventual change of the
social norms that define culture and organization. For example, the “enforced sharing” in
hunter-gatherer groups that is thought to have limited the extent to which a single
individual exercised control of resources. The cultural and ecological factors of bandsized populations, face-to-face interaction, and continuous foraging play a role in
orienting our affective motivations, the bandwith of our empathic broadcast, and the
relations between emotion, action, and inhibition. This orientation created the cultural
adaptation of some versions of enforced sharing that take hold and serve as a structural
force that may contribute to the shape of social organization. If social and ecological
circumstances change, our motivations, feelings, and group affiliations will become
recalibrated, accordingly. The particular changes in the shift from hunter-gatherer band to
agrarian state in the upper paleolithic were influenced by what has been termed a “release
from proximity” (Gamble, 1998)—i.e., a loss of immediacy. Under these circumstances,
enforced sharing may be abandoned, empathy may take on new forms, and abstract
ideology may become decoupled from more immediate social norms to serve as a more
prominent source of social organization. In this chapter, our goal is to propose an
interpretation of the archaeological evidence of social organization (Johnson and Earle,
2000) that takes into account the role of affective bonds.
8.
Religion, Mythology & Art
In this chapter we argue for an affective bridge that not only explains ontogenetic
values generation, but also socio-cultural adaptations (and exaptations) like religion and
art. The pictorial and narrative faculty of imagination (under increasing voluntary control
during the upper paleolithic) furnishes a bridge between passive sensory memory and
associationism on the one hand, and active adaptive appraisal (or judgment), as well as
mimetic cultural codification of survival strategies, on the other hand.
From rather different perspectives, researchers like Scott Atran, Denis Dutton,
Arnold Modell, and Steve Mithen have all recently challenged Steven Pinker’s famous
suggestion that art is evolutionary “cheesecake” –a nonadaptive byproduct of big-brain
ingenuity. We position ourselves in this debate and make a series of arguments (based on
affective neuroscience and anthropology), revealing the emotionally therapeutic prosocial
aspects of religion, mythology, and art. In those rare cases where researchers
acknowledge an adaptive natural history of religion, for example, they tend to offer
cognitive interpretations (i.e., primitive religion is crude proto-science that helps early
man make predictions about and understand nature). But this is an incomplete picture and
rides atop the principal role of religion, which is to shape social solidarity through
ritualized affective sculpting.
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An affective approach to culture also helps us understand some stubborn
contemporary confusions. The New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, are
evaluating religion at the neocortical level—their criterion for assessing its claims is the
hypothetico-deductive method of verification. However, while religion may fail at the bar
of rational validity (explanans), it’s the wrong bar for evaluating religion. The limbic
brain, built by natural selection for solving survival challenges, was not built for
rationality. Systems that culturally manage our emotions were selected for because they
helped early mammals flourish. William James understood the tension between passional
and rational agendas long before we had a neurological way of framing it. James
recognized that faith is not knowledge in the strict sense, but since it is deeply meaningful
(in the affective domain) it is important to see how and why it might be warranted. He
also understood, long before Antonio Damasio, that secular reason is more feeling-laden
than we usually admit –there is a sentiment of rationality. The recent debate about
religion, like polarizing political rhetoric, lacks James’ refined understanding of the real
stakes involved. And it lacks the appreciation of the affective roots of religion, myth and
art that we present in this chapter.
IV.
Consequences
In this closing section of the book, we show how our affective paradigm seeds
fruitful research programs beyond the life sciences and into the humanities and social
sciences. We examine the implications of a bottom-up evolution of mind for philosophy,
law, and psychology. In recent decades, philosophy of mind, legal jurisprudence and
public policy, and psychology have all assumed a transparently rational agent at the
center of their respective models. Failure to factor in the prelinguistic realm of
meaning/action, arising from subcortical neural systems, has led to some overly naïve
theorizing about human agency, human action, and human nature. In this section we
provide both a corrective to these tendencies and suggestions for future research
programs in each field that emphasize interdisciplinary engagement.
9. Philosophy: The Self
In this chapter, we describe how the theory we have put forward has implications
for some perennial questions in philosophy, by demonstrating how the problem of the
Self is clarified by focusing on affect and body-based notions of agency.
Skeptics of the self, from the Buddha, to Hume, to the contemporary
computationists, have tried to piece the self together as a “center of narrative gravity” (to
use Dan Dennett’s terminology) or an “autobiographical self” (following Damasio). But
we will argue for a deeper notion of self, namely “mammalian agency.” Evolution
suggests a much earlier prelinguistic self –one that organizes real-time survival
challenges under a coherent identity. This chapter will explore how the self emerges in
stages of evolutionary development, but the older frames of agency (issuing from the
periaqueductal gray) remain foundational for the pursuant discursive self.
10. Issues in Law and Public policy
13
This chapter will assess the implications of mammalian agency for law by
bringing the affective foundations of motivation to bear on both the philosophy and
practice of law.
The “rational actor” has been a central character in the American legal tradition
and its common law predecessor. From Locke to Posner, rational action has been a
linchpin for evaluating human behavior in a formalized legal system, and is emblematic
in concepts such as the “reasonable person” standard of tort liability, as well as the
“objective theory of contracts.” However, these positions fail to take into account the
affect driven, context dependent, developmentally influenced factors that weight human
action in one direction or another. Taking into consideration the consistency that rational
standards for judging behavior provide to a formal legal system, we will suggest that core
assumptions about human behavior in the law can be de-rationalized without forfeiting
the integrity of formality by expanding already existing paradigms like equity.
The view presented in this book also has immediate implications for legal
practice. The paradigm of cognitive neuroscience is currently being used to evaluate the
legal relevance of neuroscience, and in particular brain imaging, in courts of law.
However, an affective neuroscience perspective would suggest that the conclusions being
drawn by applications of cognitive neuroscience to law are over-simplified. Recent
behavioral research suggests affective sub-cortical processes can motivate behavior
without deliberation. This calls into question the evidentiary value of localized neocortical mechanisms that are increasingly thought to play foundational roles in the actions
and mental states at issue in a legal proceeding.
11. The future of Psychology
Experimental psychology suffers from mistaken metaphors; the computational
and mechanistic metaphors do not leave room for developmental epigenetic processes
and affective systems. Furthermore, our confused notions of conscious and unconscious
behaviors vis-a-vis agency will benefit from an application of the theories adumbrated in
this book. We will focus on the case of unconscious emotions to demonstrate how affect
and body-based notions of agency clarify a range of behaviors thought paradoxical in
experimental psychology.
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