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Editor's Notes

• #2: Talk about Web Science and the Mind. Berners-Lee invented the Web. Socrates invented philosophy, and philosophy of mind
• #3: FromGlossogony to Google (Glossogony is the beginning of language) Evolution of Communication to the Cognitive Commons. We will talk more about what cognition is. For now, assume cognition means thinking. A “commons” is a grazing field that belongs to no individual but to everyone. Anyone’s sheep and cows can graze there.
• #4: Much of cognition is categorization, and acquiring new categories. To categorize is to do the right thing with the right KIND of thing, such as learning which mushrooms can be eaten and which cannot. We can categorize by eating vs not-eating, or by calling them edible ones mushrooms and the inedible ones toadstools.
• #5: Words are names of categories. Categories have members and non-members, and categories can themselves be members of categories, e.g., apples are fruits
• #6: We put things in the same category because they are more more similar, but it is not so simple: sometimes things more similar because we put them in the same category. Reds look more like reds, and yellows like yellows, but that’s because our brains make them look more alike. Really they are just continuous differences in the frequency of lightwaves.
• #7: In the lab, we have shown that if experimental subjects are trained, by trial and error, to categorize textures based on rules about their features that the subjects do not know, then if the category is hard to learn, the subjects that learn it show a “rainbow” effect of learning: Textures that are in the same category look more like one another than they did before the subject learned the category. This is called “categorical perception” and is related to the “Whorf Hypothesis” that the language influences our perceptions: The way we name and categorize things changes the way they look to us.
• #8: These changes in our perception when we acquire new categories are also reflected in changes in our brain activity. On the left we see the change emerging in the brain wave as the subjects learn the category the hard way by trial and error. On the right we see a similar effect when they are told the rule verbally. The difference is important, because trial and error is slow, uncertain and risky, whereas verbal description is fast, safe and reliable. We think that was the enormous adaptive advantage that led to the evolution of languagein our species.
• #9: In an artificial life computer simulation, little creatures had to learn about three different categories of mushrooms: The mushrooms that were edible had spots on their tops and those that were poisonous toadstools did not. The mushrooms that had to be marked were striped, those that did not had none. And the ones to which they had to return had both spots and stripes. All creatures vocalized what they were doing: EAT, MARK, RETURN. All the creatures had to learn the edible mushrooms and the markable mushrooms by trial and error, getting sick and going hungry if they made mistakes.. But the returnable mushrooms could be learned in two different ways, the same way as the rest, by trial and error, or by overhearing those creatures who had already learned that the returnable mushrooms were EAT and MARK. So they could learn it the hard, long, risky way, or they could learn it by “hearsay” from thpse who already knew that RETURN = EAT + MARK. Those who learned the easy way instead of the hard way survived and reproduced better, and in a few generations they were the only kind of creature left: Language is a revolutionary new way of learning new categories by fast reliable verbal instruction instead of long risky experience. Perhaps this is how and why language evolved.
• #10: If so, then the birth of language was also the birth of the “category commons” --- all the shared categories that we call knowledge, and that we pass on by word of mouth. For example, if I tell a child that toadstools are mushrooms with stripes. One sentence, and he has the new category, no time lost, no risk.
• #11: Language is reciprocal altruism. Leads to OA
• #12: But some words need to be grounded the old way: how many?
• #23: 4 revolutions: question of timing
• #29: Returns discourse to the speed of thought
• #31: No doubt this is collaborative and interactive cognition
• #35: `cognition is as cognition does: Explain the causal mechanism that generates our capacity to do what we can all do
• #36: Can cognition be wider than the head?