Comment by patcon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patcon | Hacker News Reader

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I say this with utmost respect (and a little bit of devil's advocacy heh :) -- I might suggest your critique is a little too self-assured.

Disclaimer: Not a neuroscientist, but a biochemist *shrug*

We recognize faces easily due to deep wiring. Some linguistic behavior is deeply rooted as well, e.g., our ability to be immersed in written or visual narratives of experiences that are not our own ("aesthetic illusion") is an evolved extension of "play". Both of these are related to deep brain structures, not just culture. (Though HOW we play is certainly also in the realm of culture.)

Lots of conclusions about brains can be rooted in there being really foundational neural structures that can't simply be rewired by culture. Just because culture exists, it doesn't mean that conclusions rooted in biology are irrational. And assuming the effect was reproduced over many cultures (which perhaps it was not) then it would be fair to assume it was rooted in some deeper system.

tldr- I feel you are falling for hindsight bias. Respectfully, I suggest we're all best-served to navigate this world by cultivating a healthy dose of humility, and I say that more for all the self-assured readers upvoting you for making a dunk.

I'm guessing the truth is somewhere in between :)

except no such neural structure has ever been found. humans have been using tools for longer than we've been human -- without solid evidence that this tool is interpreted as a social actor, based on real neuroscience, this kind of claim rooted in an evolutionary argument is psuedoscience. people have been making arguments from evolution to say all kinds of nonsense things since Darwin (like justifying racial hierachies). which neural structure is posited to cause us to humanize our tools?

if anything, the historical evidence points in the opposite direction -- that people objectify far more than they humanize, even when the cost is measured in hundreds, thousands, or millions of lives. that's merely an observation, not a hypothesis or a claim about what people will do or about what they are capable of doing. we ought to humanize more often.

"We haven't yet found a specific neural structure for recognizing faces" is far from evidence that no such structure exists. Our understanding of the brain still has massive gaps in it, and I can testify from my own experience working for a psychology & neuroscience department (which includes one person particularly specializing in perception, from the very basic "light hitting the optic nerve" stage all the way to object categorization and recognition) that we still have a lot to learn in this area specifically.

It may very well be that there isn't a brain structure dedicated to this, and that would be fascinating, too! But to denigrate the people doing their best to understand this stuff 30 years ago as "pseudoscientific" just because they made an assumption about how plastic the brain was without our benefit of 20/20 hindsight is very much uncalled-for.

> "We haven't yet found a specific neural structure for recognizing faces" is far from evidence that no such structure exists.

proving a negative is, famously, quite hard. an unsolved problem, even. facial recognition has a plethora of evidence beyond an argument from evolution. the notion that we humanize tools is one that, as yet, lacks that evidence. I urge people to be more skeptical of arguments from evolution. we understand very little about our evolution and it's easy to insert our own worldviews and beliefs into such arguments, allowing them to state virtually anything we like in a plausible envelope with the shape of a scientific argument. I'm not just calling the argument about humanizing tools pseudoscience -- I'm applying it equally to every other argument from evolution that lacks other motivating evidence.

I understand your original point was about a neural structure involved in humanization, and not of facial recognition, but am responding to the point you let the interlocutor derail this to.

> > "We haven't yet found a specific neural structure for recognizing faces" is far from evidence that no such structure exists.

> proving a negative is, famously, quite hard.

Whether structure or not, we do have very strong evidence that a mechanism of facial recognition exists as there are people who lack this mechanism to various degrees.

This article posits that we have indeed discovered a specific neural structure involved in facial recognition: https://www.aipc.net.au/articles/the-neuroscience-of-facial-...

> The brain has even evolved a dedicated area in the neural landscape, the fusiform face area or FFA (Kanwisher et al, 1997), to specialise in facial recognition. This is part of a complex visual system that can determine a surprising number of things about another person.

thanks, I appreciate this

Your brain is a structure for learning structures.

It doesn't need to have a built-in module for recognizing faces; it wires up a face-recognition system on the fly, from visual data.

> Your brain is a structure for learning structures.

And it does so by having specialized structures.

> It doesn't need to have a built-in module for recognizing faces; it wires up a face-recognition system on the fly, from visual data.

Except it does appear to have such a special structure, the Fusiform Face Area. If it did not, people with prosopagnosia wouldn't just have problems with recognizing faces, but would have more general pattern recognition problems.

> humans have been using tools for longer than we've been human

It depends on how you define 'human'. Our line spit from chimpanzees 7 million years ago (mya); we walked upright 6 mya. Tool use began ~2.58 mya (possibly 3.3 mya, depending on some uncertain evidence).

I mean, lots of animals use tools, including chimps. those tools aren't nearly as sophisticated, so it depends on how you define tool use, but the point still stands. this is all besides the point.

https://neurosciencenews.com/empathy-human-robots-psychology...

> They performed electroencephalography (EEG) in 15 healthy adults who were observing pictures of either a human or robotic hand in painful or non-painful situations, such as a finger being cut by a knife. Event-related brain potentials for empathy toward humanoid robots in perceived pain were similar to those for empathy toward humans in pain. However, the beginning of the top-down process of empathy was weaker in empathy toward robots than toward humans.

So basically it seems we potentiate empathy toward similar kinds of beings and then maybe pattern-recognize that they are not similar to clamp down on the potentiated empathetic response?

I live in a space where I tend to talk with ppl about research every day or two (both academics and regular citizens). In case you value communication, know that you come across as way too unnecessarily confident to seem interesting to engage with. Take that as you'd like, coming from someone who learns from and shares with others regularly IRL

In case you're curious why: "pseudoscience" has a real meaning (not just an punchy and authoritative word to toss around to shut down discussion), and your mention of social darwinism comes across as a weirdly aggressive conversational closer

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