The Recursive Mind (Review) – 4


Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

3. Theory of Mind

Now, I know that you’re thinking. All this stuff about recursion and Julian Janes is a little bit tedious. I’m not interested at all. Why does he keep talking about this stuff, anyway? Jayne’s ideas are clearly preposterous–only an idiot would even consider them. I should quit reading, or maybe head over to Slate Star Codex or Ran Prieur, or maybe Reddit or Ecosophia or Cassandra’s Legacy or…

How do I know what you’re thinking (correctly or not)? It’s because I have a Theory of Mind (ToM), which allows me to imagine and anticipate what other people are thinking. So do you most likely, which is why you can detect a degree of self-deprecation in my statements above.

Theory of mind is the ability to infer the mental states of other people. It’s often referred to a a sort of “mind-reading.” Daniel Dennett called it the “intentional stance,” meaning that we understand that other people have intentions and motivations that are different from our own. It evolved because we have lived in complex societies that require cooperation and intelligence for millions of years. “According to the intentional stance, we interact with people according to what we think is going on in their minds, rather than in terms of their physical attributes…” (p 137)

The lack of understanding of other people’s perspectives is what Jean Piaget noticed most in children. Central to many of his notions is the idea that children are egocentric, where their own needs and desires are all that exists: “During the earliest stages the child perceives things like a solipsist who is unaware of himself as subject and is familiar only with his own actions.” In other words, the child is unable to recognize that other people have thoughts or feeling different from (or even in conflict with) their own. They are also unaware that others cannot see the same thing that they do. One way to test theory of mind in children is called the Sally-Anne test:

Click to enlarge. Then hit “back”

Theory of mind is also something that helps teach and learn. In order for me to effectively teach you, I need to have some idea of what you’re thinking so I can present the material in a way you can understand it. And, or course, you need to have some idea of what’s going on in my mind to understand what I’m trying to teach you. Theory of mind, therefore, is related to cultural transmission (or, more precisely, memetics). Human culture plays such an outsize role in our behavior partly because of our theory of mind. Theory of mind is a also a recursive operation which involves embedding your consciousness into someone else’s conscious mind:

From the point of view of this book, the important aspect of theory of mind is that it is recursive. This is captured by the different orders of intentionality… Zero-order intentionality refers to actions or behaviors that imply no subjective state, as in reflex or automatic acts. First-order intentionality involves a single subjective term, as in Alice wants Fred to go away. Second-order intentionality would involve two such terms, as in Ted thinks Alice wants Fred to go away. It is at this level that theory of mind begins.

And so on to third order: Alice believes that Fred thinks she wants him to go away. Recursion kicks in once we get beyond the first order, and our social life is replete with such examples. There seems to be some reason to believe, though, that we lose track at about the fifth or sixth order, perhaps because of limited working memory capacity rather than any intrinsic limit on recursion itself. We can perhaps just wrap our minds around propositions like: Ted suspects that Alice believes that he does indeed suspect that Fred thinks that she wants him (Fred) to go away. That’s fifth order, as you can tell by counting the words in bold type. You could make it sixth order by adding ‘George imagines that…’ at the beginning. p. 137

Clearly, higher orders of intentionality have been driven by the demands of the social environment one finds oneself in. I will later argue that these higher-order intentionalities developed when we moved to environments where the challenges we faced were predominantly natural (finding food, escaping predators, etc.), to one where the challenges were primarily social (managing workers, finding mates, leading armies, long-distance trading, negotiating debts, etc.). This change resulted in a fundamental remodeling of the human brain after settled civilization which allowed us to function in such social environments, probably by affecting the action of our serotonin receptors. We’ll get to that later.

Do you see what she sees?

Its not only one’s mental perspective, but even one’s physical perspective that ToM can let us take:

Whether instinctive or learned, the human ability to infer the mental states of others goes well beyond the detection of emotion. To take another simple and seemingly obvious example, we can understand what another individual can see. This is again an example of recursion, since we can insert that individual’s experience into our own. It is by no means a trivial feat, since it requires the mental rotation and transformation of visual scenes to match what the other person can see, and the construction of visual scenes that are not immediately visible.

For example, if you are talking to someone face-to-face, you know that she can see what is behind you, though you can’t. Someone standing in a different location necessarily see the world from a different angle, and to understand that person’s view requires and act of mental rotation and translation. pp. 134-135

I suspect this ability has something to do with out-of-body experiences, where we “see” ourselves from the perspective of somewhere outside our bodies. Recall Jaynes’s point that the “self” is not truly located in anywhere in physical space–including behind the eyes. Thus our “self” can theoretically locate itself anywhere, including the ceiling of our hospital room when we are dying.

Not everyone has theory of mind, though, at least not to the same degree. One of the defining characteristics of the autism spectrum is difficulty with ToM. Autistic people tend to not be able to infer what others are thinking, and this leads to certain social handicaps. Corballis makes a common distinction between “people-people” (as in, I’m a “people-person”–avoid anyone who describes themselves this way), and “things-people”, exemplified by engineers, doctors, scientists, programmers, professors, and such-like. “People-people” typically have a highly-developed ToM, which facilitates their feral social cunning. Technically-minded people, by contrast, often (though not always) have a less-developed theory of mind, as exemplified by this quote from the fictional Alan Turing in The Imitation Game: “When people talk to each other, they never say what they mean. They say something else and you’re expected to just know what they mean.”

Research has found autistic people who ace intelligence tests may still have trouble navigating public transportation or preparing a meal. Scoring low on a measure of social ability predicts an incongruity between IQ and adaptive skills. (Reddit)

One fascinating theory of autism that Corballis describes is based on a conflict between the mother’s and the father’s genes imprinting on the developing fetus in the womb:

In mammalian species, the only obligatory contribution of the male to the offspring is the sperm, and the father relies primarily on his genes to influence the offspring to behave in ways that support his biological interest.

Paternal genes should therefore favor self-interested behavior in the offspring, drawing on the mother’s resources and preventing her from using resources on offspring that might have been sired by other fathers. The mother, on the other hand, has continuing investment in the child both before birth…and after birth…Maternal genes should therefore operate to conserve her resources, favoring sociability and educability—nice kids who go to school and do what they’re told.

Maternal genes are expressed most strongly in the cortex, representing theory of mind, language, and social competence, whereas paternal genes tend to be expressed more in the limbic system, which deals with resource-demanding basic drives, such as aggression, appetites, and emotion. Autism, then, can be regarded as the extreme expression of paternal genes, schizophrenia as the extreme expression of maternal genes.

Many of the characteristics linked to the autistic and psychotic spectra are physical, and can be readily understood in terms of the struggle for maternal resources. The autistic spectrum is associated with overgrowth of the placenta, larger brain size, higher levels of growth factors, and the psychotic spectrum with placental undergrowth, smaller brain size, and slow growth…

Imprinting may have played a major role in human evolution. One suggestion is that evolution of the human brain was driven by the progressive influence of maternal genes, leading to expansion of the neocortex and the emergence of recursive cognition, including language and theory of mind. The persisting influence of paternal genes, though, may have preserved the overall balance between people people and things people, while also permitting a degree of difference.

Simon Baron-Cohen has suggested that the dimension can also be understood along an axis of empathizers versus systemizers. People people tend to empathize with others, through adopting the intentional stance and the ability to take the perspective of others. Things people may excel at synthesizing, through obsessive attention to detail and compulsive extraction of rules… pp. 141-142

I think this partly explains the popularity of libertarian economics among a certain set of the population, especially in Silicon Valley where people high on the autism spectrum tend to congregate. They tend to treat people as objects for their money-making schemes. They are unable to understand that people are not rational robots, and thus completely buy into the myth of Homo economocus. Their systemizing brains tend to see the Market as a perfect, frictionless, clockwork operating system (if only government “interference” would get out of the way, that is). It also explains why they feel nothing toward the victims of their “creative destruction.” It’s notable that most self-described libertarians tend to be males (who are often more interested in “things” and have a less developed theory of mind in general). In addition, research has shown that people who elect to study economics professionally have lower levels of empathy than the general population (who then shape economic theory to conform to their beliefs). This should be somewhat concerning, since economics, unlike physics or chemistry or meteorology, concerns people.

This sort of calculating self-centered hyper-rationality also lays behind the capitalist ethos.

The dark side of theory of mind is, of course, the ability to manipulate others. This has been referred to as Machiavellian intelligence, after Niccolo Machiavelli, the Italian diplomat who wrote about how rulers can manipulate the ruled to keep them in awe and obedience. It is certain that Machiavelli had a well-developed theory of mind, because he wrote stuff like this: “Now, in order to execute a political commission well, it is necessary to know the character of the prince and those who sway his counsels; … but it is above all things necessary to make himself esteemed, which he will do if he so regulates his actions and conversation that he shall be thought a man of honour, liberal, and sincere…It is undoubtedly necessary for the ambassador occasionally to mask his game; but it should be done so as not to awaken suspicion and he ought also to be prepared with an answer in case of discovery.” (Wikiquote) . In fact, CEO’s and middle-managers tend to be consummate social manipulators—it’s been shown using psychological tests that successful CEO’s and politicians consistently score higher on traits of sociopathy than the general population.

There may be a dark side to social intelligence, though, since some unscrupulous individuals may take advantage of the cooperative efforts of others, without themselves contributing. These individuals are known as freeloaders. In order to counteract their behavior, we have evolved ways of detecting them. Evolutionary psychologists refer to a “cheater-detection module” in the brain that enables us to detect these imposters, but they in turn have developed more sophisticated techniques to escape detection.

This recursive sequence of cheater detection and cheater detection-detection has led to what has been called a “cognitive arms race,” perhaps first identified by the British evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers, and later amplified by other evolutionary psychologists. The ability to take advantage of others through such recursive thinking has been termed Machiavellian intelligence, whereby we use social strategies not merely to cooperate with our fellows, but also to outwit and deceive them…p. 136

It’s been argued (by me, for instance) that a hyperactive “cheater detection module,” often allied with lower levels of empathy, is what lays behind politically conservative beliefs. I would posit, too, that it also underlies many of the misogynistic attitudes among the so-called “Alt-Right”, since their theory of mind is too poorly developed to understand women’s thinking well enough to have positive interactions with them (instead preferring submission and obedience). A tendency toward poor ToM, in my opinion, explains a lot of seemingly unrelated characteristics of the Alt-right (economic libertarianism, misogyny, racism, technophilia, narcissism, atheism, hyper-rationality, ultra-hereditarianism, “political incorrectness” etc.)

Theory of mind appears to be more developed among women than men, probably because of their childrearing role. Many men can relate to the hyperactive tendency of their wives or girlfriends to “mind read” (“What are you thinking right now?”) and claim that they are correct in their inferences (“I know you’re thinking about your ex..!”).

Theory of Mind has long been seen as fundamental to the neuroscience of religious belief. The ability to attribute mental states to other people leads to attributing human-like attributes and consciousness to other creatures, and even things. I’ve you’ve ever hit your computer for “misbehaving” or kicked your car for breaking down on you, then you know what I’m talking about. The tendency to anthropomorphize is behind the misattribution of human traits and behaviors to non-human animals, viz:

According to Robin Dunbar, it is through Theory of Mind that people may have come to know God, as it were. The notion of a God who is kind, who watches over is, who punishes, who admits us to Heaven if we are suitably virtuous, depends on the underlying understanding that other beings—in this case a supposedly supernatural one—can have human-like thoughts and emotions.

Indeed Dunbar argues that several orders of intentionality may be required, since religion is a social activity, dependent on shared beliefs. The recursive loops that are necessary run something like this: I suppose that you think that I believe there are gods who intend to influence our futures because they understand our desires. This is fifth-order intentionality. Dunbar himself must have achieved sixth-order intentionality if he supposes all of this, and if you suppose that he does then you have reached seventh-order…

If God depends on theory of mind, so too, perhaps, does the concept of the self. This returns us to the opening paragraph of this book, and Descartes famous syllogism “I think , therefore I am.” since he was appealing to his own thought about thinking, this is second-order intentionality. Of course, we also understand the self to continue through time, which requires the (recursive) understanding that our consciousness also transcends the present. pp. 137-138 (emphasis mine)

Thus, higher-order gods tend to emerge at a certain point of socio-political complexity, where higher-order states of mind are achieved by a majority of people. A recent paper attempted to determine whether so-called “Moralizing High Gods” (MHG) and “Broad Supernatural Punishers” (BSP) is what allowed larger societies to form, or were rather the result of larger societies and the need to hold them together. The authors concluded the latter:

Do “Big Societies” Need “Big Gods”? (Cliodynamica)

Moralizing Gods as Effect, Not Cause (Marmalade)


Here’s evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar explaining why humans appear to be the only primates with the higher-order intentionality necessary to form Moralizing High Gods and Broad Supernatural Punishers:

We know from neuroimaging experiments that mentalizing competencies correlate with the volume of the mentalizing network in the brain, and especially with the volume of the orbitofrontal cortex, and this provides important support for the claim that, across primates, mentalizing competencies correlate with frontal lobe volume. Given this, we can…estimate the mentalizing competencies of fossil hominins, since they must, by definition, be strung out between the great apes and modern humans…As a group, the australopithecenes cluster nicely around second-order intentionality, along with other great apes; early Homo populations all sit at third-order intentionality, while archaic humans and Neanderthals can just about manage fourth order; only fossil [Anatomically Modern Humans] (like their living descendants) achieve fifth order. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior by Robin Dunbar, p. 242

… The sophistication of one’s religion ultimately depends on the level of intentionality one is capable of. While one can certainly have religion of some kind with third or fourth order intentionality, there seems to be a real phase shift in the quality of religion that can be maintained once one achieves fifth order intentionality. Given that archaic humans, including Neanderthals, don’t appear to have been more than fourth order intentional, it seems unlikely that they would have had religions of very great complexity. Quite what that means remains to be determined, but the limited archaeological evidence for an active religious life among archaics suggests that, at best, it wasn’t very sophisticated. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior by Robin Dunbar, pp. 285-286

A hyperactive Theory of Mind has long been suspected as playing a role in religious belief, as well as in schizophrenia, in which intentionality has run amok, leading to paranoia and hallucinations (objects talking to you, etc.):

One of the most basic insights of the cognitive science of religion is that religions the world over and throughout human history have reliably evolved so as to involve representations that engage humans’ mental machinery for dealing with the social world. After all, such matters enthrall human minds. The gods and, even more fundamentally, the ancestors are social agents too! On the basis of knowing that the gods are social actors, religious participants know straightaway that they have beliefs, intentions, feelings, preferences, loyalties, motivations, and all of the other states of mind that we recognize in ourselves and others.

What this means is, first, that religious participants are instantly entitled to all of the inferences about social relations, which come as defaults with the development of theory of mind, and, second, that even the most naïve participants can reason about them effortlessly. Such knowledge need not be taught. We deploy the same folk psychology that we utilize in human commerce to understand, explain, and predict the gods’ states of mind and behaviors.

How Religions Captivate Human Minds (Psychology Today)

What Religion is Really All About (Psychology Today)

Most potently for our discussion of Julian Jaynes’s theories is the fact that fMRI scans have shown that auditory hallucinations—of the type the Jaynes described as the basis of ancient belief in gods—activate brain regions associated with Theory of Mind. Here’s psychologist Charles Fernyhough:

…When my colleagues and I scanned people’s brains while they were doing dialogic inner speech, we found activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus, a region typically implicated in inner speech. But we also found right hemisphere activation close to a region known as the temporoparietal junction (TPJ)…that’s an area that is associated with thinking about other people’ minds, and it wasn’t activated when people were thinking monologically…Two established networks are harnessed for the purpose of responding to the mind’s responses in an interaction that is neatly cost-effective in terms of processing resources. Instead of speaking endlessly without expectation of an answer, the brain’s work blooms into dialogue… The Voices Within by Charles Fernyhough; pp. 107-108 (emphasis mine)

Theory of mind is also involved with the brain’s Default mode network (DMN), a pattern of neural activity that takes place during mind-wandering, and seems to be largely responsible for the creation of the “unitary self.” It’s quite likely that the perception of the inner-voice as belonging to another being with it’s own personality traits, as Jaynes described, activates our inbuilt ToM module, as do feelings of an “invisible presence” also reported by non-clinical voice hearers. This is from Michael Pollan’s book on psychedelic research:

The default mode network stands in a kind of seesaw relationship with the attentional networks that wake up whenever the outside world demands our attention; when one is active, the other goes quiet, and vice versa. But as any person can tell you, quite a lot happens in the mind when nothing much is going on outside us. (In fact, the DMN consumes a disproportionate share of the brain’s energy.) Working at a remove from our sensory processing of the outside world, the default mode is most active when we are engaged in higher-level “metacognitive” processes such as self-reflection, mental time travel, mental constructions (such as the self or ego), moral reasoning, and “theory of mind”—the ability to attribute mental states to others, as when we try to imagine “what it is like” to be someone else. All these functions belong exclusively to humans, and specifically to adult humans, for the default mode network isn’t operational until late in a child’s development. How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan; pp. 301-303

Theory of mind is also critical for signed and spoken language. After all, I need to have some idea what’s going on in your mind in order to get my point across. The more I can insert myself into your worldview, the more effectively I can tailor my language to communicate with you, dear reader. Hopefully, I’ve done a decent job, (if you didn’t leave after the first paragraph, that is!) It also encourages language construction and development. In our earlier example, one would hope that the understanding of metaphor is sufficient that we implicitly understand that inosculation does not literally involve things kissing each other!

There is evidence to believe that the development of theory of mind is closely intertwined with language development in humans. One meta-analysis showed a moderate to strong correlation (r = 0.43) between performance on theory of mind and language tasks. One might argue that this relationship is due solely to the fact that both language and theory of mind seem to begin to develop substantially around the same time in children (between ages 2–5). However, many other abilities develop during this same time period as well, and do not produce such high correlations with one another nor with theory of mind. There must be something else going on to explain the relationship between theory of mind and language.

Pragmatic theories of communication assume that infants must possess an understanding of beliefs and mental states of others to infer the communicative content that proficient language users intend to convey. Since a verbal utterance is often underdetermined, and therefore, it can have different meanings depending on the actual context. Theory of mind abilities can play a crucial role in understanding the communicative and informative intentions of others and inferring the meaning of words. Some empirical results suggest that even 13-month-old infants have an early capacity for communicative mind-reading that enables them to infer what relevant information is transferred between communicative partners, which implies that human language relies at least partially on theory of mind skills….

Theory of Mind (Wikipedia)

Irony, metaphor, humor, and sarcasm are all examples of how language and theory of mind are related. Irony involves a knowing contrast between what is said and what is meant, meaning that you need to be able to infer what another person was thinking. “Irony depends on theory of mind, the secure knowledge that the listener understands one’s true intent. It is perhaps most commonly used among friends, who share common attitudes and threads of thought; indeed it has been estimated that irony is used in some 8 percent of conversational exchanges between friends.” (pp. 159-160) Sarcasm also relies on understanding the difference between what someone said and what they meant. I’m sure you’ve experienced an instance when someone writes some over-the-top comment on an online forum intended to sarcastically parody a spurious point of view, and some reader takes it at face value and loses their shit. It might be because we can’t hear the tone of voice or see the body language of the other person, but I suspect it also has something to do with the high percentage of high-spectrum individuals who frequent such message boards.

Metaphor, too relies on a non-literal understanding of language. If the captain calls for “all hands on deck,” it is understood that he wants more than just our hands, and that we aren’t supposed to place our hands down on the deck. If it’s “raining cats and dogs,” most of us know that animals are not falling out of the sky. And if I advise you to “watch your head,” you know to look out for low obstructions and not have an out-of-body experience. Which reminds me, humor also relies on ToM.

Theory of mind allows for normal individuals to use language in a loose way that tends not to be understood by those with autism. Most of us, if asked the question “Would you mind telling me the time?” would probably answer with the time, but an autistic individual would be more inclined to give a literal answer, which might be something like “No, I don’t mind.” Or if you ask someone whether she can reach a certain book, you might expect her to reach for the book and hand it to you, but an autistic person might simply respond yes or no. This reminds me that I once made the mistake of asking a philosopher, “Is it raining or snowing outside?”–wanting to know whether I should grab an umbrella or a warm coat. He said, “Yes.” Theory of mind allows is to use our language flexible and loosely precisely because we share unspoken thoughts, which serve to clarify or amplify the actual spoken message. pp. 160-161

If you do happen to be autistic, and all the stuff I just said goes over your head, don’t fret. I have enough theory of mind to sympathize with your plight. Although, if you are, you might more easily get this old programmer joke:

A programmer is at work when his wife calls and asks him to go to the store. She says she needs a gallon of milk, and if they have fresh eggs, buy a dozen. He comes home with 12 gallons of milk.

The relationship between creativity, mechanical aptitude, genius, and mental illness is complex and poorly understood, but has been a source of fascination for centuries. Often times creative people were thought to be “possessed” by something outside of their own normal consciousness or abilities:

Recent evidence suggests that a particular polymorphism on a gene known to be related to the risk of psychosis is also related to creativity in people with high intellectual achievement.

The tendency to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder may underlie creativity in the arts, as exemplified by musicans such as Bela Bartok, Ludwig van Beethoven, Maurice Ravel, or Peter Warlock, artists such as Amedeo Clemente Modigliani, Maurice Utrillo, or Vincent van Gogh, and writers such as Jack Kerouac, D. H. Lawrence, Eugene O’Neill, or Marcel Proust. The esteemed mathematician John Forbes Nash, subject of the Hollywood movie A Beautiful Mind, is another example. The late David Horrobin went so far as to argue that people with schizophrenia were regarded as the visionaries who shaped human destiny itself, and it was only with the Industrial Revolution, and a change m diet, that schizophrenics were seen as mentally ill. p. 143

Horrobin’s speculations are indeed fascinating, and only briefly alluded to in the text above:

Horrobin…argues that the changes which propelled humanity to its current global ascendancy were the same as those which have left us vulnerable to mental disease.

‘We became human because of small genetic changes in the chemistry of the fat in our skulls,’ he says. ‘These changes injected into our ancestors both the seeds of the illness of schizophrenia and the extraordinary minds which made us human.’

Horrobin’s theory also provides support for observations that have linked the most intelligent, imaginative members of our species with mental disease, in particular schizophrenia – an association supported by studies in Iceland, Finland, New York and London. These show that ‘families with schizophrenic members seem to have a greater variety of skills and abilities, and a greater likelihood of producing high achievers,’ he states. As examples, Horrobin points out that Einstein had a son who was schizophrenic, as was James Joyce’s daughter and Carl Jung’s mother.

In addition, Horrobin points to a long list of geniuses whose personalities and temperaments have be-trayed schizoid tendencies or signs of mental instability. These include Schumann, Strindberg, Poe, Kafka, Wittgenstein and Newton. Controversially, Horrobin also includes individuals such as Darwin and Faraday, generally thought to have displayed mental stability.

Nevertheless, psychologists agree that it is possible to make a link between mental illness and creativity. ‘Great minds are marked by their ability to make connections between unexpected events or trends,’ said Professor Til Wykes, of the Institute of Psychiatry, London. ‘By the same token, those suffering from mental illness often make unexpected or inappropriate connections between day-to-day events.’

According to Horrobin, schizophrenia and human genius began to manifest themselves as a result of evolutionary pressures that triggered genetic changes in our brain cells, allowing us to make unexpected links with different events, an ability that lifted our species to a new intellectual plane. Early manifestations of this creative change include the 30,000-year-old cave paintings found in France and Spain…

Schizophrenia ‘helped the ascent of man’ (The Guardian)

Writers May Be More Likely to Have Schizophrenia (PsychCentral)

The link between mental illness and diet is intriguing. For example, the popular ketogenic diet was originally developed not to lose weight, but to treat epilepsy! And, remarkably, a recent study has show that a ketogenic diet has caused remission of long-standing schizophrenia in certain patients. Recall that voice-hearing is a key symptom of schizophrenia (as well as some types of epilepsy). Was a change in diet partially responsible for what Jaynes referred to as bicameralism?

The medical version of the ketogenic diet is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate, moderate-protein diet proven to work for epilepsy. …While referred to as a “diet,” make no mistake: this is a powerful medical intervention. Studies show that over 50 percent of children with epilepsy who do not respond to medications experience significant reductions in the frequency and severity of their seizures, with some becoming completely seizure-free.

Using epilepsy treatments in psychiatry is nothing new. Anticonvulsant medications are often used to treat psychiatric disorders. Depakote, Lamictal, Tegretol, Neurontin, Topamax, and all of the benzodiazepines (medications like Valium and Ativan, commonly prescribed for anxiety) are all examples of anticonvulsant medications routinely prescribed in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. Therefore, it’s not unreasonable to think that a proven anticonvulsant dietary intervention might also help some people with psychiatric symptoms.

Interestingly, the effects of this diet on the brain have been studied for decades because neurologists have been trying to figure out how it works in epilepsy. This diet is known to produce ketones which are used as a fuel source in place of glucose. This may help to provide fuel to insulin resistant brain cells. This diet is also known to affect a number of neurotransmitters and ion channels in the brain, improve metabolism, and decrease inflammation. So there is existing science to support why this diet might help schizophrenia.

Chronic Schizophrenia Put Into Remission Without Medication (Psychology Today)

4. Kinship

The Sierpinski triangle provides a good model for human social organization

Although not discussed by Corballis, kinship structures are also inherently recursive. Given that kinship structures form the primordial organizational structure for humans, this is another important feature of human cognition that appears to derive from our recursive abilities. For a description of this, we’ll turn once again to Robin Dunbar’s book on Human Evolution. Dunbar (of Dunbar’s number fame) makes the case that the ability to supply names of kin members may be the very basis for spoken language itself!

There is one important aspect of language that some have argued constitutes the origin of language itself – the naming of kin.

There is no particular reason to assume that ability to name kin relationships was in any way ancestral, although it may well be the case that naming individuals appeared very early. One the other hand, labeling kinship categories (brother, sister, grandfather, aunt, cousin) is quite sophisticated: it requires us to make generalizations and create linguistic categories. And it probably requires us to be able to handle embeddedness, since kinship pedigrees are naturally embedded structures.

Kinship labels allow is to sum in a single word the exact relationship between two individuals. The consensus among anthropologists is that there are only about six major types of kinship naming systems – usually referred to as Hawaiian, Eskimo, Sudanese, Crow, Omaha and Iroquois after the eponymous tribes that have these different kinship naming systems. They differ mainly in terms of whether they distinguish parallel from cross cousins and whether descent is reconed unilaterally or bilaterally.

The reasons why these naming systems differ have yet to be explained satisfactorally. Nonetheless, given that one of their important functions is to specify who can marry whom, it is likley that they reflect local variations in mating and inheritance patterns. The Crow and Omaha kinship naming systems, for example, are mirror images of each and seem to be a consequence of differing levels of paternity certainty (as a result, one society is patrilineal, the other matrilineal). Some of these may be accidents of cultural history, while others may be due to the exigencies of the local ecology. Kinship naming systems are especially important, for example, when there are monpolizable resources like land that can be passed on from one generation to the next and it becomes crucial to know just who is entitled, by descent, to inherit. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior, by Robin Dunbar; pp. 272-273

Systems of kinship appear to be largely based around the means of subsistance and rules of inheritance. Herders, for example, tend to be patriarchal, and hence patrilineal. The same goes for agrarian societies where inheritance of arable land is important. Horticultural societies, by contrast, are often more matrilineal, reflecting women’s important role in food production. Hunter-gatherers, where passing down property is rare, are often bilateral. These are, of course, just rules of thumb. Sometimes tribes are divided into two groups, which anthropolgists call moieties (from the French for “half”), which are designed to prevent inbreeding (brides are exchanged exclusively across moieties).

Anthropologists have sometimes claimed that biology cannot explain human kinship naming systems because many societies classify biologically unrelated individuals as kin. This is a specious argument for two separate reasons. One is that the claim is based on a naive understanding of what biological kinship is all about.

This is well illustrated by how we treat in-laws. In English, we classify in-laws (who are biologically unrelated to us) using the same kin terms that we use for real biological relatives (father-in-law, sister-in-law, etc.). However…we actually treat them, in emotional terms, as though they were real biological kin, and we do so for a very good biological reason: they share with us a common genetic interest in the next generation.

We tend to think of genetic relatedness as reflecting past history (i.e. how two people are related in a pedigree that plots descent from some common ancestor back in time). But in fact, biologically speaking, this isn’t really the issue, although it is a convenient approximation for deciding who is related to whom. In an exceptionally insightful but rarely appreciated book (mainly because it is very heavy on maths), Austen Hughes showed that the real issue in kinship is not relatedness back in time but relatedness to future offspring. In-laws have just as much stake in the offspring of a marriage as any other relative, and hence should be treated as though they are biological relatives. Hughes showed that this more sophisticated interpretation of biological relatedness readily explains a large number of ethnographic examples of kinship naming and co-residence that anthropologists have viewed as biologically inexplicable. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior, by Robin Dunbar; pp. 273-277

As a sort of proof of this, many of the algorithms that have been developed to determine genetic relatedness between individuals (whether they carry the same genes) are recursive! It’s also notable that the Pirahã, whose language allegedly does not use recursion, also do not have extended kinship groups (or ancestor worship or higher-order gods for that matter. In fact, they are said to live entirely in the present, meaning no mental time travel either).

Piraha Indians, Recursion, Phonemic Inventory Size and the Evolutionary Significance of Simplicity (Anthropogenesis)

The second point is that in traditional small-scale societies everyone in the community is kin, whether by descent or by marriage; those fewwho aren’t soon become so by marrying someone or by being given some appropriate status as fictive or adoptive kin. The fact that some people are misclassified as kin or a few strangers are granted fictional kinship status is not evidence that kinship naming systems do not follow biological principles: a handful of exceptions won’t negate the underlying evolutionary processes associated with biological kinship, not least because everything in biology is statistical rather than absolute. One would need to show that a significant proportion of naming categories cross meaningful biological boundaries, but in fact they never do. Adopted children can come to see their adoptive parents as their real parents, but adoption itself is quite rare; moreover, when it does occur in traditional societies it typically involves adoption by relatives (as anthropological studies have demonstrated). A real sense of bonding usually happens only when the child is very young (and even then the effect is much stronger for the child than for the parents – who, after all, know the child is not theirs).

Given that kinship naming systems seem to broadly follow biological categories of relatedness, a natural assumption is that they arise from biological kin selection theory… It seems we have a gut response to help relatives preferentially, presumably as a consequence of kin selection…Some of the more distant categories of kin (second and third cousins, and cousins once removed, as well as great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents) attract almost as strong a response from us as close kin. Yet these distant relationships are purely linguistic categories that someone has labelled for us (‘Jack is your second cousin -you share a great-grandmother’). The moment you are told that somebody is related to you, albeit distantly, it seems to place them in a very different category from mere friends, even if you have never met them before…You only need to know one thing about kin- that they are related to us ( and maybe exactly how closely they are related) whereas with a friend we have to track back through all the past interactions to decide how they actually behaved on different occasions. Because less processing has to be done, decisions about kin should be done faster and at less cognitive cost than decisions about unrelated individuals. This would imply that, psychologically, kinship is an implicit process (i.e. it is automated), whereas friendship is an explicit process (we have to think about it)…

It may be no coincidence that 150 individuals is almost exactly the number of living descendants (i.e. members of the three currently living generations: grandparents, parents and children) of a single ancestral pair two generations back (i.e. the great-great-grandparents) in a society with exogamy (mates of one sex come from outside the community, while the other sex remains for life in the community into which it was born). This is about as far back as anyone in the community can have personal knowledge about who is whose offspring so as to be able to vouch for how everyone is related to each other. It is striking that no kinship naming system identifies kin beyond this extended pedigree with its natural boundary at the community of 150 individuals. It seems as though our kinship naming systems may be explicitly designed to keep track of and maintain knowledge about the members of natural human communities. Human Evolution: Our Brains and Behavior, by Robin Dunbar; pp. 273-277

Corballis concludes:

Recursion, then, is not the exclusive preserve of social interaction. Our mechanical world is as recursively complex as is the social world. There are wheels within wheels, engines within engines, computers within computers. Cities are containers built of containers within containers, going right down, I suppose, to handbags and pockets within our clothing. Recursive routines are a commonplace in computer programming, and it is mathematics that gives us the clearest idea of what recursion is all about. But recursion may well have stemmed from runaway theory of mind, and been later released into the mechanical world. p. 144

In the final section of The Recursive Mind, Corballis takes a quick tour through human evolution to see when these abilities may have first emerged. That’s what we’ll take a look at in our last installment of this series.

5 thoughts on “The Recursive Mind (Review) – 4

  1. The following made me chuckle:
    Theory of mind allows for normal individuals to use language in a loose way that tends not to be understood by those with autism. Most of us, if asked the question “Would you mind telling me the time?” would probably answer with the time, but an autistic individual would be more inclined to give a literal answer, which might be something like “No, I don’t mind.” Or if you ask someone whether she can reach a certain book, you might expect her to reach for the book and hand it to you, but an autistic person might simply respond yes or no.

    These exchanges sound like typical New England Yankee responses — as in:

    “Do you know how to get to Poultney from here?”
    “Ah, yup.”
    “Can you tell me?”
    “Ah, yup.”
    “How do I get there?”
    “Take route 4 heeyah west, until you get to route 30. Then go south.”
    “Thank you!”
    “Ah, yup.”

    Maybe we’re all autistic…

    1. I used to reply to things that way, even though I knew what they really wanted. That was long time ago in my foolish youth. Now that I’m older, I just think it and reply the usual way, LoL.

  2. I’ve done a couple of online Asperger’s tests and I generally score well into the sub-clinical range. 🙂 But there’s lots of subtlety here. I feel others’ pain acutely but I generally have no idea what to do about it. I like machines because when they do odd things it is in principle possible to work out why. With people, not so much.

    As for religion: if you believe in some Force that brings the Universe into being and sustains it, you’re a Deist. Consciousness then has to arise through some process of Emergence. If it makes more sense that we are conscious because consciousness is present at the most fundamental level of existence, then you’re a Theist, and that’s a rather different ball game.

    1. Afterthought: Christian theology especially is ALL about kinship! Heavenly father; the son of God, begotten not created…

  3. I noticed you linked to my blog. And I’m glad I came over for a visit. This is a thorough piece of writing. I’m impressed and that comes from someone who is fond of writing lengthy posts, often with lots of quotes and references. Theory of mind is a fun topic. But I hadn’t thought about it in terms of recursion. I skimmed through all the parts in this series. I already knew about the recursion issue, largely though not entirely because of the debate between Chomsky and Everett. I must admit that I still struggle with what recursion means and, going by your views, I can see that it goes deep with your bringing in Jaynes.

    About theory of mind, I was amused by your comment on “people-people” (avoiding people who self-identify as such), as opposed to “things-people”. I’m definitely not a things-person, although neither a people-person in the sense you’re using it, but I’m strongly inclined toward empathy and obsession with understanding what makes people tick. I don’t only see and interact with people for I have a tendency to feel people and imaginatively enter into their minds, worldviews, and experience. I may deceive myself about actually understanding others, but at times it can feel like peering into someone’s soul.

    I wasn’t always that way. When younger, I was socially oblivious and maybe mildly autistic, that is to say I had plenty of affective empathy but not so much cognitive empathy. I just didn’t understand people while being quite emotional in reaction, and interestingly I was often asking deep questions about God and such. My mother has this same cognitive empathy deficit. But my mother took a psychology class in college and it left its mark. From childhood on, my mother and I would constantly analyze the minds and motivations of family members. I ended up over-compensating with a highly developed theory of mind that has more than a few levels of recursion. So, I had early intervention, even though I never got an official diagnosis or professional help for autism (as has my niece).

    I know you’ve been to my Marmalade blog at least on two occasions, since you’ve twice linked to it. I presume because of our shared interests you’ve likely read other posts of mine. I have written about theory of mind on many occasions. I’ll link to a couple of posts that bring up a point that has interested me, that theory of mind involves relationship and that would touch upon recursion, as our forming a theory of mind of others loops back into forming a theory of mind about ourselves, and this looping can continue to form ever more complex varieties of theory of mind:

    Bundle Theory: Embodied Mind, Social Nature
    from Marmalade blog

    “Our experience is social at the most fundamental level, a social phenomenon within each person’s body and social connection to the bodies of others. Our embodied selves are shifting realities with blurred boundaries, out of which forms patterns of social order and social identities. As others have argued, we develop a theory of mind within ourselves by first sussing out a theory of mind about others. So, our sense of self is built on our sense of others, which is to say we understand the relationships between experiences within own embodied minds as an inseparable understanding of our relationships with the larger world.”

    “…consciousness is itself the result of learning.”
    from Marmalade blog

    The social roots of consciousness
    by Axel Cleeremans

    “Based on these observations, one provocative claim about the relationships between self-awareness and one’s ability to represent the mental states of other agents (“theory of mind”, as it is called) is thus that theory of mind comes first, as the philosopher Peter Caruthers has defended. That is, it is in virtue of my learning to correctly anticipate the consequences of the actions that dIirect towards other agents that I end up developing models of the internal states of such agents, and it is in virtue of the existence of such models that I become able to gain insight about myself (more specifically: about my self). Thus, by this view, self-awareness, and perhaps subjective experience itself, is a consequence of theory of mind as it develops over extended periods of social intercourse.”

    As with myself, everyone who has theory of mind had to learn it at some point. But people can get along just fine without cognitive empathy. It isn’t a requirement for being human. And one does have to wonder if entire societies could have existed without it this ability. In a small tribe of close kin living a simple existence, I’m not sure that having a complex model of psychology would have immense advantages, maybe instead having disadvantages. Even the early city-states weren’t that far beyond tribes. I don’t have a lot of thoughts about this at the moment, but I enjoyed reading your perspective.

    I was also happy to see you mention, in relation to Jaynes, the dietary angle and specifically bring up ketosis. I’ve written about this in relationship to what I called the “agricultural mind”. The specific period of late Bronze Age and into the Axial Age saw immense changes in larger scale agriculture and increased amount of agricultural foods. In a post, I discuss this along with autism, schizophrenia, and much else:

    The Agricultural Mind
    from Marmalade blog

    “What stands out to me about autism is how isolating it is. The repetitive behavior and focus on objects resonates with extreme addiction. Both conditions block normal human relating and create an obsessive mindset that, in the most most extreme forms, blocks out all else. I wonder if all of us moderns are simply expressing milder varieties of this biological and neurological phenomenon. And this might be the underpinning of our hyper-individualistic society, with the earliest precursors showing up in the Axial Age following what Julian Jaynes hypothesized as the breakdown of the much more other-oriented bicameral mind. What if our egoic individuality is the result of our food system, as part of the civilizational project of mass agriculture?”

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