If you've been following this blog you'll already have seen a couple of short articles about this: I've reviewed Where Mathematics Comes From and blathered on about the cognitive science of narratives. All these ideas funnel into my subconscious and pop up again to influence my work--especially the current novel, which deals among other things with distributed cognition. Although I've been writing about this particular idea for a while, I've only just discovered other people's writings about it--typical, really. So I'm reading as much as I can on the subject; so far, one of the best books I've found is Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins. I'm not far enough into it to provide a review here, but meanwhile, I've been enjoying another book that rounds out my dabbling in the area of the cognitive science of science. It is The Cognitive Basis of Science, a study done for Sheffield University, edited by Peter Carruthers, Stephen Stich and Michael Siegal.

This book is all about studying science as a particular class of human behaviour, with an eye to demystifying it. If you're not a fan of academic writing this stuff will bore you; but the topics are fascinating, for instance the current debate over the "baby as scientist" idea--where infants are thought of as perfect models of the scientific mind, theorizing, experimenting, and elaborating on their ideas about the world.

It's been an illuminating read. For instance, attempts to define science strikingly resemble attempts to define science fiction--they mostly involve key defining qualities such as "in order to be classified as SF, a story must be set in the future" or "must introduce some new scientific idea or technology". The problem with such definitions in SF is that you can easily find stories that are obviously SF, but do not include a given defining quality. It seems that the same is true for science. However, one article in The Cognitive Basis of Science proposes a solution for both science and SF: the notion that we define science to ourselves the way we define things like vehicles, or food. For instance, in the movie "Die Another Day" James Bond escapes at one point by ripping the hood off of an ice-sailing craft and riding it like a surfboard. He's created a vehicle for himself--and the key point is that we recognize it as such, even if it has no wheels, no method of steering, no seat etc. We define "vehicle" very loosely--but we know one when we see it. It appears that we recognize science, and science fiction, the same way.

Another article treats science as an example of the aforementioned distributed cognition. Science is thought, but not thought that takes place solely in the human mind. The instruments we invent and use are actually part of the cognitive process, and understanding this goes a long way to explaining why science is a comparatively recent historical invention: scientific thinking is distributed thinking--distributed between humans, their instruments, and the social mechanisms of publication, fact-checking, collaboration and trust developed over centuries.

This is a marvelously rich concept; it doesn't limit science to some defining quality, such as "falsifiability". It accommodates the sociological side of science, but is absolutely concrete in doing so: the book Cognition in the Wild is about navigation in the age of sail as an example of distributed cognition. This idea lets us discard such fuzzy notions as "paradigms" and replace them with a study of exactly how humans in conjunction with instruments, collaborative mechanisms etc., actually reason.

This all points towards some interesting subjects for SF. Elsewhere I've talked about Lem's "The Mask" as an example of visionary SF that takes on the subject of human identity. Understanding how we think, and particularly how the very highest cognitive activities such as mathematics and science emerge from the basic human repertoire of metaphors, bodily states etc., may lead us into an SF that directly addresses human nature, in a way that, to be blunt, it's rarely done before. Most human transformations in SF (man into machine, man merging with alien etc.) are disguised myths--they provide no more insight into human nature than fantasy notions of humans transormed into faeries or swine. When you read a story like "The Mask" or, more currently, some of Greg Egan's stories about brain-taping and "downloading", you acutely feel the lack of insight in everything else you read.

So these are my new frontiers: distributed cognition, the embodied mind, along with emergent systems, open-source government and, in the ultimate vision of the current novel-in-progress, open-source reality.

It'll be fun to see how far these ideas go.

Post Reply