Christopher de la Torre

Gary Marcus, Kluge: the Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

Evolutionary psychologist Gary Marcus was one of a number of this year’s Singularity Summit speakers whose work ‘struck a chord,’ so to speak. The idea of reconstructing the human mind in order to grow current computer-based technologies is, well, a no-brainer. The latest scientific attempts to quantify what lies behind the human skull might seem like science fiction, but landmark programs like Switzerland’s Blue Brain Project show how our innate inquisitiveness along with some good old fashioned pragmatism can open up a whole new world of research relevant to our own preservation.

“What makes the human mind a kluge is not the fact that we have two systems per se but the way in which the two systems interact… What we have instead is only partly responsive to the overall goals of the organism, and a deliberative system (built from in appropriate old parts, such as contextual memory) that can act in genuinely independent fashion only with great difficulty” (93).

“…We tend to pay more attention to stuff that fits in with our beliefs than stuff that might challenge them. Psychologists call this ‘confirmation bias.’ When we have embraced a theory, large or small, we tend to be better at noticing evidence that supports it than evidence that might run counter to it” (53).

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