HAYEK: COGNITIVE SCIENTIST AVANT LA LETTRE

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HAYEK COGNITIVE SCIENTIST AVANT LA LETTRE
1899-1992
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The brain struggling to understand the brain is
society trying to explain itself.
(Colin Blakemore)The large brain, like
large government, may not be able to do simple
things in a simple way.
(Donald
Hebb)If the human brain were so simple that we
could understand it, we would be so simple that
we couldnt. (Pugh)
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• Target text
• The Sensory Order (TSO) 1952

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Its high time that the multidisciplinary hub
that is cognitive science admit Hayek into the
pantheon of non-Cartesian thinkers, taking his
place alongside 20th century titans such as
Heidegger, Vygotsky, and Merleau-Ponty.
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Hayeks abiding insight was to emphasize the
cybernetic loop of agent?environment ? agent ?
environment through a perennial and mutual
process of modification and conditioning, a
reciprocal relation between our conceptual
creativity and the environment, to intimate,
regulate and inform concepts and action.
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Hayeks paradox On the one hand, agents within
a rich (complex) social tapestry have their
conceptual and behavioral possibilities tempered
by the partial cognitive and epistemic access to
the (complex) manifold that informs the ambient
culture or social soup. On the other hand, mind
is itself constitutionally (and terminally)
constrained to fully understand its own (complex)
mechanics a mind that is significantly
constituted by its (complex) social environment.
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Perhaps the earliest substantive appreciation of
TSO came from computer scientist, Frank
Rosenblatt whose perceptron, an early version
of a feed-forward learning algorithm, was
influenced by the suggestiveness of Hayek and
Hebb. The future A.I. grandee, Marvin Minsky,
certainly knew of TSO. Thanks to a few within
current neuroscience Gerald Edelman and Joaquín
Fuster Hayek can no longer be dismissed as a
mere historical curiosity.
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Is Hayeks philosophy of mind anachronistic
because he was writing long before the relevant
options (i.e. the connectionist versus the
computational model) had been adequately
defined? and/or
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Have Hayeks defenders have been too charitable
since he doesnt offer anything precise enough to
fit any of the current models?
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Does Hayeks connectionist model of society
presuppose the connectionist theory of mind?
or,
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Does his connectionist theory of mind entail the
connectionist model of society?
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Section I presents TSO as a treatise on the
problem of mental representation. Section II -
Cognitive Exploitation - builds a case for Hayek
being taken as an externalist. Section III
Cognitive Closure examines the problem of the
self-referentiality of mind. Section IV -
Unexplained Residue - concerns the two orders
the sensory order and the extended order or in
current philosophy of mind jargon qualia and
intentionality. Section V - examines TSOs
Proto-ConnectionismSection VI - looks at the
role of mind in Hayeks social theory which
Ive entitled Social Connectionism.
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the connectionist paradigm
Hayek anticipated

• McGinns cognitive closure

• Jacksons Mary and qualia talk

• the connectionist paradigm

• distributed cognition

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Multi-agent modeling
Hayek inspired