The Abstraction Engine: Extracting Patterns in Language, Mind and Brain

200 Pages·2017·9.26 MB·English

by  Michael Fortescue

The Abstraction
Engine
Extracting patterns in language,
mind and brain
Michael Fortescue
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94
John Benjamins Publishing Company
The Abstraction Engine
Advances in Consciousness Research (AiCR)
issn 1381-589X
Provides a forum for scholars from different scientific disciplines and fields of knowl-
edge who study consciousness in its multifaceted aspects. Thus the Series includes (but
is not limited to) the various areas of cognitive science, including cognitive psychology,
brain science, philosophy and linguistics. The orientation of the series is toward devel-
oping new interdisciplinary and integrative approaches for the investigation, descrip-
tion and theory of consciousness, as well as the practical consequences of this research
for the individual in society.
From 1999 the Series consists of two subseries that cover the most important types of
contributions to consciousness studies:
Series A: Theory and Method. Contributions to the development of theory and method
in the study of consciousness; Series B: Research in Progress. Experimental, descriptive
and clinical research in consciousness.
This book is a contribution to Series A.
For an overview of all books published in this series, please see
http://benjamins.com/catalog/aicr
Editor
Maxim I. Stamenov
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Editorial Board
David J. Chalmers Steven Laureys
Australian National University University of Liège
Axel Cleeremans George Mandler †
Université Libre de Bruxelles University of California at San Diego
Gordon G. Globus John R. Searle
University of California Irvine University of California at Berkeley
Christof Koch Petra Stoerig
Allen Institute for Brain Science Universität Düsseldorf
Stephen M. Kosslyn
Harvard University
Volume 94
The Abstraction Engine. Extracting patterns in language, mind and brain
by Michael Fortescue
The Abstraction Engine
Extracting patterns in language, mind and brain
Michael Fortescue
University of Copenhagen and St Hugh’s College, Oxford
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
doi 10.1075/aicr.94
Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress.
isbn 978 90 272 1361 7 (Hb)
isbn 978 90 272 6584 5 (e-book)
© 2017 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com
Table of contents
Chapter 1
Introduction: Abstraction all the way down 1
Chapter 2
Language, abstract and less abstract 7
Chapter 3
Cognitive linguistics: Language embodied 29
Chapter 4
Abstraction, metaphor and cultural context 39
Chapter 5
The abstraction of events in narrative and memory 53
Chapter 6
Pre-linguistic abstraction and projection: Perception and imagination 73
Chapter 7
The feel of things: Abstract emotion 85
Chapter 8
Neurological underpinnings: The world seen through hidden layers 95
Chapter 9
Abstraction at work: It’s child’s play 111
Chapter 10
The philosophical approach 123
vi Table of contents
Chapter 11
Abstraction all the way up: Its evolutionary purpose 149
References 175
Name index 185
Subject index 189
Chapter 1
Introduction
Abstraction all the way down
A principal claim of this book is that the brain is not so much an organ of compu-
tation – the currently prevailing view – as one of abstraction, which in turn pro-
vides the basis for all forms of subsequent projection. This is so, I shall argue, not
just as regards language – the most obvious manifestation of abstract cognition in
human beings – but also as regards sensory perception, memory, emotional and
aesthetic experience, and the social scenarios on which most action and planning
is based. Abstraction can moreover be layered: abstractions over abstractions are
possible at successively higher levels, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.
The function of abstraction – according to the definition with which I shall fi-
nally provide it – is one shared by all creatures with brains, however primitive.
The main thrust of the book will be a search for the deepest roots of abstraction,
specifically in the activities of the human brain. It will draw upon many areas in
which processes of abstraction can be seen, in effect presenting a tapestry of ideas
woven from many different threads. Sometimes the coverage will be quite superfi-
cial, sometimes quite detailed, the purpose being essentially to present a coherent
synoptic overview of a far-reaching subject that will lead up to a novel conclusion.
I shall at times be using the word ‘abstract’ (literally ‘drawn out from’) in a more
dynamic and general sense than normal in daily usage, one close to Whitehead’s
notion of ‘transmutation’, of which I shall have a good deal to say later. It has in
fact at least two different senses that have often been confused. On the one hand
there is the more traditional sense of ‘disembodied from specific sensory features’
(let us call this ‘abstract ’), and on the other there is the sense of ‘simplified or
1
generalized across instances’ (let us call this ‘abstract ’). A typical dictionary en-
2
try, corresponding to our everyday use of the word, such as the following from
Chamber’s 10th edition (2006), does not resolve the confusion: “Apart from actual
material instances, existing only as a mental concept, opposite of concrete, away
from practice, theoretical, denoting a quality of a thing apart from the thing, e.g.
‘redness’.” A point that such definitions miss is that ‘abstract’ words in the tradi-
tional dictionary sense usually have more complex meanings than concrete ones
in so far as they refer to complex contexts of a social or moral nature that require
elaborate definitions, and this, as we shall see, is reflected in the way in which they
2 The abstraction engine
are distributed in the mental lexicon. Such words are only ‘simpler’ in the sense of
applying holistically to less easily visualized meanings whereas concrete ones are
‘simpler’ in being more easily grasped through discrete sensory images. Another
misleading use of ‘abstract’ is in contrasts made between ‘abstract’ – i.e. arbitrary –
symbols and more sensorially motivated ‘icons’ and ‘indices’ (I shall return to this
Peircean distinction between types of sign in what follows). It remains to be seen
whether anything at all can be salvaged of the vague distinction between ‘abstract’
and ‘concrete’. More importantly, I shall attempt in what follows to disentangle
the various senses of the word ‘abstract’ and to see if some broader perspective on
abstraction can be revealed that will cover them all.
Intimately linked to the concept of ‘abstraction’ is that of ‘projection’, which
is dependent on preceding abstraction. It is close to the notion of ‘mapping’ in
cognitive science, but again I take the term in a broader procedural sense than
when cognitive linguists discuss the relationship between schemas in one domain
‘mapping’ onto another. As I use the term it is operative on multiple levels of per-
ception and action, including acts of linguistic ‘referring’. It corresponds better
to Whitehead’s use of the term to refer to the projection of sensory input in the
mode of ‘presentational immediacy’, in other words to the creation of a perceived
world through the combination of an inner past abstracted from experience and
the present given to the senses. This is very different from the Humean input-
output view of perception still shared by adherents of the digital computer model
of the brain. Perhaps the analogy of a movie ‘projected’ through a complex, hidden
apparatus onto a screen is not entirely out of place here (although the notion of an
observing homunculus certainly is). However, ‘projection’ should not be under-
stood as confined to perceptual experience and bodily actions based on them – it
also covers the products of imagination and the deployment of language both in-
ternally and externally. The externalized results of projection on the environment
will in turn need to be abstracted in order to be assessed as successful or not.
Another way of looking at the overall functioning of the brain is in terms of
prediction, of the statistical calculation of probabilities: it is continually concerned
with perceptual expectations and appropriate reactions based on accumulated ex-
perience. The title of the present book could in fact have been “The prediction en-
gine”, but I prefer the one I have chosen since it suggests an active process pointing
both forward and backward in time.1 It better captures the extent of this fundamen-
tal process beyond purely logical calculation, extending into the more fluid realms
of perceptual and emotional experience. Abstraction and prediction are in fact two
sides of the same coin since any prediction affecting future behaviour must per-
force be based on abstraction from previous experience, just as what is abstracted
1. See Clark (2013) for a related notion of the “prediction machine”.
Chapter 1. Introduction: Abstraction all the way down 3
from on-going experience is determined by whatever is predicted to be relevant by
the experiencer, consciously or otherwise. I use the word ‘engine’ in a somewhat
tongue-in-cheek reference to Charles Babbage’s ‘difference engine’, the precursor
to the modern computer, designed but never completed in the early 19th century.2
What I have in mind is more of a ‘similarity engine’. Pattern recognition, gener-
alization, analogy, intuitive leaps to probabilistic conclusions as well as the learnt
patterns of logical inference, all of these rely upon abstraction in its broadest sense.
Throughout the book I shall attempt to stay as close as possible to what con-
temporary neuroscience tells us of the functioning of the human brain in terms
of the continual updating of connections between neural assemblies in networks
of neural associations. At the same time I shall maintain a bird’s eye view over the
purposes for the individual that the fundamental process of abstraction serves. I
shall take as starting point that quintessential realm of abstraction, language, then
proceed downwards through successively more basic layers of cognition towards
its neural underpinnings. Finally I shall pull back to the broader picture and what
is perhaps the most complex level of abstraction of which the human brain is ca-
pable – the level at which it becomes possible for the brain to enquire reflexively
into the roots of its own capacity for abstraction.
Of course the brain does other things beside derive abstractions, it also ma-
nipulates them in various ways in different sensory-based modalities. These may
cross over, be correlated and linked to produce still further abstractions, hierarchi-
cally or sequentially organized in higher centres of the cortex. It performs remark-
able feats of ‘cognitive integration’ of information from multiple sensory sources. It
may deconstruct and reassemble sensory experience, synthesizing new combina-
tions in the ‘seemingly seamless’ products of imagination, but the ‘stuff’ worked
upon must itself have been abstracted from experience with the help of the innate
biological machinery with which we are all born. The endpoint of abstractive pro-
cesses is often further concrete or mental action, but such actions are themselves
the projection of stored abstractions – plans and routines that subserve goals. In
realizing them, cascades of neural activity will flow from high level intentions (po-
tentially conscious) to lower level implementations far too rapidly for conscious
experience of the distinct role of the chained processes to be possible.
In Chapter 2 I shall deal with language as an integrated higher level abstrac-
tion-projection function, operating largely at the level of recognizing or generating
abstractions from more basic sensory patterns, themselves abstracted from envi-
ronmental experience. The abstractions we will be concerned with here cover the
2. Occasionally one may meet the term ‘abstraction engine’ used for search programs in the
context of Information Technology – I should stress that ‘abstraction’ in the present title is to be
taken in a much broader sense than this.