Thanks again for keeping me honest, Chase!

“If a behavior strikes me as weird, given certain background assumptions about what someone should do given what they believe, etc., I sanction. Sure it’s risky, but that’s why, as Mason points out, PA-ascription for the purposes of mindshaping is inherently social.”

Chase sez:

The trouble is that there seems not to be any way of making sense of those “background assumptions.” Any behavior is rationally compatible with any less than comprehensive set of such assumptions. The trouble here isn’t just a problem of fallible normative judgments. The trouble is that, on the mindshaping proposal outlined so far, there are no possible grounds for even a *prima facie* judgment that a person’s behavior is rationally appropriate or not. There is no way to get the challenge/response process going, because the problem of deciding whether or not to make the initial challenge is intractable.

Tad also sed:

A bunch of stuff about norms being such as to encourage people to behave in ways that make them easy to coordinate with.

Chase wonderz:

What makes behavior easy to coordinate with, especially if “easy to coordinate” does not entail “easy to predict”? Or is the point here that mindreading is parasitic on mindshaping?

Chase also sez:

The stuff in the last paragraph sounds really neat. Is it right to compare mindshaping’s role in making people predictable to Universal Grammar’s role in making language learnable?

Thanks for the nice, clear statement of where I want to go. I’m definitely into the challenge-and-response model. Why do I need a complicated story about how I decide to sanction? If a behavior strikes me as weird, given certain background assumptions about what someone should do given what they believe, etc., I sanction. Sure it’s risky, but that’s why, as Mason points out, PA-ascription for the purposes of mindshaping is inherently social. The object of my sanctions can set me aright - I use others as a resource to tune my dispositions to sanction. In fact, I guess there’s a kind of meta-sanctioning involved - unjustified sanctioning is itself sanctioned. As Mason puts it in a paper draft of his I’ve been reading, not only are there norms of behavior, there are norms of ascribing PAs and corresponding behavioral proprieties.

The hand-wavy idea I have is that this challenge-and-response practice, much of it implicit, has as a side-effect regulation of behavior such that it is easier to coordinate with. We become so attuned to potential challenges, and so adept at responding, that the result is fairly stereotyped behavior (easily rationalizable behavior relative to a given community) that can be easily predicted using lower-level, non-PA-ascription-involving Theory of Mind, e.g., sophisticated connectionist-style behavioral pattern recognition, and ascription of lower level mental states with a more direct connection to behavior.

Another idea I had, incidentally, is that the kind of mindshaping that we see in development - the sort of social expectancies that Mameli identifies in the case of gender stereotyping of infants, and interpretation of infant vocalizations as intentional communicative acts - restricts the kinds of constellations of PAs and associated behaviors that, as adults, we’re likely to produce. So mindshaping during infancy and childhood, involving both PA ascription and other mechanisms (imitation, gender and other trait stereotyping, etc.), leads to socialization that largely mitigates the hedging problem. This, of course, allows for predictive PA-ascription, as well as prescriptive PA-ascription, to become tractable. But that’s something I allow for in the paper. Traffic laws are very efficient predictors of driver behavior, but they aren’t in the first instance a preditive theory. They can be used to predict because of a more fundamental shaping role. I want to say the same about PA ascriptions and associated norms. To the extent that the hedging problem can be mitigated, it is due to a prior mindshaping use of PA ascriptions.

I think the important issue is Morton’s. No proper subset of a person’s PA’s is sufficient to determine how she ought to behave. So, it seems, to know on the basis of a person’s PAs what she ought to do, you must know what all of her PA’s are. According to the mindshaping hypothesis, we use PA ascriptions to figure out what people ought to do, and we use our assessments of what people ought to do to solve coordination problems. So, if Mindshaping is correct, the problem of figuring out what a person ought to do on the basis of her PA’s needs to be tractable. But it isn’t tractable, and that looks like a problem for Mindshaping.

Your response is extremely interesting: We can solve coordination problems even if we are WRONG about what people ought to do. So, the problem of (correctly) figuring out what people ought to do on the basis of their PA’s doesn’t have to be tractable for the mindshaping hypothesis to work.

I’m not sure your response is wrong, but I’m not sure it’s right either. I think it could be argued that many of the best solutions we have arrived at for coordination problems are designed to do two things. First, they exploit the pre-existing and independent tendency of people to understand the world and one another in terms of agents, beliefs, and desires. Second, they are designed to be robust against the occasional misapplication of norms to people who are not bound by them. If this is so, then it’s not the fact that we attribute PAs and normative commitments to people that explains our good solutions to coordination problems. Instead, one thing that helps a solution to succeed is that it exploits our tendency to attribute PAs and normative commitments, and it has mechanisms built in to counteract and correct the occasional mistaken attribution.

Here’s another way of coming at the problem. If Mindshaping is correct, then people need to be able to decide whether or not sanction one another’s behavior, and they need to make those decisions on the basis of PA ascriptions. Given that no proper subset of a person’s PAs determines whether or not she is subject to sanctions, how is another person to decide whether to sanction her behavior or not, without making assumptions concerning the totality of the first person’s PAs?

You seem to invoke a sort of challenge-and-response model of sanctions, where I try to sanction you, and then you respond by demonstrating the rationality of what you did after all. But how did I decide to sanction you in the first place?

-C

Excelent point. I was waiting for someone to bring that up. You are indeed correct that so-called rational norms have to be hedged. Believing that it is raining and desiring that you stay dry only rationally obligates umbrella opening provided that one doesn’t more strongly desire to conceal one’s umbrella, one doesn’t believe that one’s umbrella is broken, etc. However I don’t think this is a serious problem for two reasons.

First, I don’t think that the hedging problem is as bad for norms as for predictive/descriptive laws. The reason is that norms are the kinds of things we can fail to live up to. Sometimes when we fail it’s because we’re living up to another conflicting normative requirement. E.g., we fail to act as we should on our belief that it is raining and our desire to stay dry because we are acting as we should on our desire to conceal our umbrella, or our belief that it is broken. But other times we just fail to live up to the norms for no rational reason. We may be akratic, or have a lapse of memory, or otherwise lapse from rationality. Such lapses do not excuse us from the norms. We are still subject to them, but we fail to live up to them, and as a result are often tacitly sanctioned, if just through embarassment. So, in such cases, we’re bound by the norms without hedges.

The whole point of norms is that we are bound by them even when, through our own fault, we flout them. It’s not like you ought to act according to the norms of rationality except when you forget, or your will is weak… These are not excuses, hence do not hedge rational norms. But the corresponding laws, if taken descriptively, with the goal of prediction, would have to be hedged in cases of memory failure, akrasia, etc. If the point of a PA ascription is prediction, then lapses of rationality constitute exceptions that must be encoded in cp clauses. If the point of it is prescription, then such lapses are not exceptions; they’re failures to live up to the norm.

Ok, so the hedging problem is not as bad for PA ascriptions taken as shapers, as it is when they are taken as describers. But there still is a serious problem - and it’s precisely for the same reason that Morton doubts the descriptive efficacy of PA ascriptions - holism. Any behavior is both causally *and rationally* compatible with a finite set of PAs, assuming appropriate modifications to background PAs.

Here’s how I want to address this issue. It may be very hard to figure out what we’re actually obligated to. But this isn’t as pressing an issue as the corresponding difficulty of figuring out what we will do. Here’s why. Incorrect assumptions about what we ought to do can contribute to solving coordination problems while incorrect predictions cannot. The idea is that if someone accuses you of flouting some norm given the PAs you’ve given reason for ascribers to ascribe, you must accept sanction or else explain why you were ascribed the wrong PAs or claim you had other PAs that explain the deviant behavior. This puts us in the following situation. As I mentioned in another reply, we are constantly floating candidate rationalization for things we do, in order to be able to respond to potential challenges, etc. The fact that everyone does this, and tries to insure that their behavior is easily rationalizable, has as a side-effect better regulated, more stereotyped, more tractable behavior, with which it is easier to coordinate.

So there are coordination benefits even if we’re often wrong about what we ought to do. As long as we’re all obsessed with acting in a defensible manner, coordination is served. The point of the paper is not to identify the correct rational norms relating PAs to behavior, but rather to claim that PA ascriptions are typically used with normative force, and this helps solve coordination problems, whether or not correct norms are ever identified.

Note that this possibility is precluded if PA ascription is only used for prediction. If coordination depends on correct prediction of behavior, and predictions are often wrong, then coordination suffers. The key difference in the mindshaping alternative is that even mistaken claims of normative commitment can have positive effects on coordination because it forces potential ascribees to have rationalizations in hand, and engage in behavior that is easily rationalizable. This narrows the range of behavior they’re likely to engage in, thus helping coordination. Incidentally, this nicely explains an oft-noted feature of explicit, linguistic PA ascription - it is more often used for retrodictive rationalization than for prediction.

I don’t think the claim that PAs are constituted by norms is obvious either. I haven’t been convinced by any of the attempted refutations I’ve seen in the literature, but my claim is not that there is some kind of logical connection between PAs and norms of rationality (though there may be). My claim is purely empirical. Given that PA ascriptions can’t help us through facilitating prediction of behavior, maybe their role is to help shape behavior so as to make it easier to coordinate with. This is supposed to be a contingnet, empirical claim about the role that most everyday PA ascriptions play in our everyday lives.

Thanks for the stimulating objection, Chase! Your schooling is always welcome.

Sorry I haven’t learned to match you concision!

Maybe I’ve missed something along the way here, Tad, but why isn’t it the case that holism is a problem for the mindshaping view no less than it is for the mindreading view?

Here’s my worry: Just as holism causes problems for determining what a person WILL do, given some proper subset of her mental states, it causes problems for determining what she SHOULD do, given some proper subset of her mental states. Just as “laws” of folk psychology are massively hedged ceterus paribus laws, the “norms” that seem to take their place on the mindshaping view are massively hedged pro tanto norms.

Suppose the mindreading view suffers because prediction on the basis of FP is intractable. Doesn’t a parallel argument show that the mindshaping view suffers because prescribing on the basis of FP is equally intractable?

[I should also mention my misgivings about the view that propositional attitudes are constitutively governed by norms at all. That's a substantive view that is far from obvious, and there are some good reasons for rejecting it, I think. There's a nice paper on the issue in the current PQ on the case of belief (it's by Asbjorn Steglich-Petersen).]

Thanks for the comments. I thought you might be sympathetic. On to your questions:

I think there is a lot of prediction, involving Trevarthanian intersubjectivity, sensitivity to low-level cues, assumption of shared goals, etc., that does not necessarily involve mindshaping. I think all non-human primate social cognition is like this. As I acknowledge in my reply to Robert, I think even some mental state ascription might be exclusively for predictive purposes, w/o relying on prior mindshaping for efficacy. My main claim is that specifically PA ascription, where PAs are the full-blooded attitudes that are subject to holism, and therefore have a very complex relation to behavior, must in the first instance involve mindshaping. Any predictive use of such PA ascription relies for its efficacy on prior mindshaping.

In fact, part of my argument is that we are relatively good predictors, of unshaped behavior, without PA ascription. So if PA ascription’s main goal is prediction based on accurate mindreading, it must somehow improve on the predictive ability made available without it, e.g., using Trevarthen’s intersubjectivity. But given the problems with PA holism, it’s very unlikely that it can improve upon PA-ascription-independent prediction. So PA ascription must have some other use - mindshaping.

I don’t think all predictions have normative force, though I know what you mean by the trivial reading. Perhaps this can be cleared up with Anscombe’s distinction b/w world tracking and world changing direction of fit (not her words). A linguistic act is world tracking if a disappointed expectation ought to lead to a revision of the linguistic act. A linguistic act is world changing if a disappointed expectation ought to lead to a revision of the world. So, paradigmatically, assertions are world tracking while commands are world changing. I think that PA ascriptions have a kind of dual use - they’re ‘Pushmepullyous’ in Millikan’s terms. Just as one says to a child ‘You will eat your peas’ - meaning to predict as well as to prescribe, a PA ascription implicitly predicts and prescribes as well. This is what its normative force consists in. Normal predictions only have a world tracking direction of fit, so if they’re disappointed, they must be revised. My claim is that PA’s world chaning direction of fit is primary: if someone’s behavior is incompatible with an ascribed PA, it could be, and in the case of children often is, that their behavior is at fault.

I completely agree with you and Eric that we predict behavior on the basis of generalization from the past, and on the basis of personality trait - or mood-ascriptions. Sterelny has also suggested social roles as a non-mentalistic basis for prediction. My claim concerns only PA ascription, which I maintain aims in the first instance at shaping, and any predictive use is derivative of this. I suspect that predictions based on behavioral generalizations are almost entirely predictive, with little shaping role, while mood and trait ascriptions are an interesting intermediate case. My intuition is that ascriptions of moods, emotions, etc., are primarily there for the purpose of prediction, though cultural variation in emotion ascription may suggest a shaping role as well. Some times if you’re told you’re agressive and angry enough, you become that, I suppose (that’s kind of like Mameli’s point about gender-specific mindshaping). Traits are even more normatively loaded. So it’s an interesting issue how much they function to shape, and how much to predict based on representation of shaping-independent facts.

I guess the really interesting thing is that, when it comes to our fellow humans, mindreading is never entirely ‘innocent’ (for lack of a better word). Because of our intense, automatic, subtle, and powerful constant influence on each other, any attempt to describe or predict is also, potentially, an attempt to mold so as to make easier to predict. This is significantly disanalogous to our relation to other parts of the environment, where the act of describing/predicting does not have such immediate effects on the domain described/predicted, and thus, the direction of fit is, in the first instance, almost always world tracking.

As far as predicting immoral behavior - moral norms are a subset of the norms we institute through mindshaping. My paper focuses more on the rational norms implicit in PA ascription, and on which most other norms are based, arguably. The only way to flout these norms is by being irrational, e.g., the insane. And here I go with Dennett - when the norms I’m interested are flouted the behavior can’t be made sense of in intentional terms. It can be predicted, but by descending to a non-intentional stance. As for immoral behavior, that might not flout rational norms (at least if you’re not a certain variety of Kantian). So the mindshaping associated with PA ascription should support predictability of immoral acts, since only rational norms are at issue in such ascriptions, and immoral acts can be rational. Torturing the innocent is morally wrong, but one can predict that certain people will defend the practice, given the desires and beliefs that are ascribable to them, and the fact that they’ve been shaped to pursue their desires in light of their beliefs.

I think, following Dunbar, that all primate species are distinguished from other mammals by their extreme sociality. Dunbar has a very nice chart relating certain measures of social complexity (group size, sexual relations, etc. - I don’t remember all of them) to relative size of prefrontal cortex - the correlation is impressive. I think most primate intelligence is the result of dealing with complex social environments - the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis. However I think, following many evolutionary psychologists, that human socio-ecology is hyper-complex, and this led to the evolution of precocity at social cognition unmatched by other primate species. Where I depart from evolutionary psychologists is in how I characterize the socio-cognitive innovations that distinguish humans from their socially adept cousins. It’s not that humans evolved a more sophisticated ToM. It’s that they figured out how to shape each other in order to make each other’s behavior more tractable - easier to coordinate with. I think the higher primates are excellent natural psychologists - almost as good as us w/o mindshaping. Our innovation, of which true PA-ascription is a part, is to learn how to tame the intractable complexity of our social environment through mindshaping. I suppose the evolutionary story I want to tell is the following - at some point, for contingent reasons, perhaps increased group size, or pair bonding, or whatever, conspecific behavior gets too hard to predict using the mindreading capacities we share with other primates (which does not include, on my view, true PA ascription). Mindshaping is selected as a way of taming or rendering more tractable this increasingly complex socio-ecology.

Hope this gives you some idea of what a thorough and proper response to your worries might look like…

Thanks for the reference!

Thanks for the interesting paper, and thanks to everyone for the interesting discussion. As you might expect, I am pretty sympathetic to your position (especially the critique). I do, however, have a couple of questions. One is whether you think we can account for all our predictive behaviors through the norms of mindshaping rules, or what kind of force it has to say that our predictions are normative. (In some sense, you might think that anything that is a prediction is a claim about how a thing ought to behave, but that seems to be too trivial to be your point here.) As Eric mentioned, humans (perhaps including people with autism who fail FB tasks) may make predictions and coordinate behavior using a varity of methods; we can use personality traits or mood attributions to make predictions of behaviors, we can make generalizations on a person’s past behavior (no matter whether we think it’s how the person ought to behave according to social norms). We do, of course, make lots of predictions from social norms too. One thing I’ve been interested in is predicting immoral behavior. How do you account for our ability to make those predictions on the mind-shaping view?

One other small point. I’m not sure if it’s true that “Human beings are distinguished from other mammals by their extreme sociality.” There are many other highly social species. Maybe you have something more specific in mind by “extreme sociality”? If humans and other species are both highly social, and animals are able to coordinate behavior and make predictions, what should we conclude about the mechanisms that allow for those abilities?

And to Robert and others interested in work on early ToM, I have a colleague, Maria Legerstee, who claims to find such evidence. She has a lot of her work on her website:
http://www.psych.yorku.ca/legerstee/index.html

Thanks for enjoying the fray! And thanks especially for the link to the Fodor paper. Very useful!

Robert -

I forgot to address your question about the time line of exposure to narrative and FBT performance. You’re right that most fairy tales, etc., involve mistaken identities, false beliefs and the rest of it. I find that very interesting, and congenial to my conclusion. I’m not quite sure why failure at the classic FBT before age 4 is somehow puzzling given all the exposure to narrative.

First, it’s hard to control for it - different children are exposed to different amounts and types of narrative at different times. I think there’s a piece by Gopnik somewhere, suggesting evidence that appropriate input can actually accelerate the time-course of FBT competence. Anyways, exposure to narrative can play a causal role in acquisition of FBT competence, even if it takes several years of it.

It could be a question of short-term memory or attention limitations, as nativists about ToM like Fodor believe. Perhaps kids just can’t keep all the info necessary to making an FB judgment in mind at once prior to certain maturational milestones. So though hearing narratives motivates and helps scaffold FB competence, it’s not sufficient or something.

Another possibility is the one proposed by the de Villiers - syntactic competence with embedded clauses in verbalized thought and utterance ascriptions is a precondition on FBT competence. If so, the role of narrative might be exposing children to sentences, like ‘Godilocks did not know that bears lived there’, which, coupled with appropriate maturation in syntactic processing areas, yields an appreciation for false belief.

I didn’t mean to come off as half-cocked - a Blueberry Hill criticism deserves a Blueberry Hill response! You raise some really potent challenges. I knew you were going to be my nemesis that day you stole my watch!

With regard to the syntax analogy - I don’t think it’s helpful. Here’s why: it’s very hard to identify on the fly communicative situations where bad syntax has some communicative cost. Most actual, concrete, context bound linguistic communication routinely flouts rules of syntax. There are plenty of examples of perfectly successful communication among today’s populations that resemble ‘proto-linguistic’ structure - not just pidgins, but ‘the basic variety’ used by immigrants, and merchant marines, and in general whenever people who don’t share a language, but have a few words common, must communicate. What does this mean? That knowing the syntax of language has little effect on survival value in most communicatve contexts. That’s why I favor an exaptationist account of the evolution of syntax. The situation I want to claim is different for laws of FP b/c there you really need to know all the complex laws in order to get anything useful out of PA ascription.

I’m glad that you find entanglement a real and challenging phenomenon for mindreading theories to explain. However, I think it’s just a species of complexity/holism. The point about entanglement is that in the kinds of sophisticated social interactions that you see among adult humans, the desires of one party often refer to the mental state of the other. But this mental state changes as soon as the other tries to figure out the desires of the first. And this might change the desires, and so on. What this shows is that ‘other things are never equal’. Desires are ascribable except when they involve the ascribee’s best estimate of the ascriber’s mental state, which leads ascribee to change desires. Basically, in many situations involving adult human social cognition, the act of trying to ascribe a mental state violates ceteris paribus clauses governing the ascription b/c it involves altering an environmental variable with important effects on the ascribee’s desires.

I don’t know much about the heuristic/biases or steretyping traditions - I didn’t realize that they were primarily concerned with social cognition, as opposed to problem solving in general. Can anyone help with a reference here?

I need to look over the Stich & Nichols model in more detail to see if it can address my worries. As I recall, default ascription that ignores cp clauses, for S&N, is essentially simulation - the ascriber uses their own decision-making system to come up with hypotheses about what the ascribee will decide. I don’t think such simulation is plausible b/c I don’t think our decision-making systems are that alike, at least independently of significant mind shaping. I think Dangerous D might have a paper out on this - I guess I’m inclined to the view that successful simulation presupposes a lot of theoretical knowledge, in order to adjust inputs so as to model differences b/w ascriber and ascribee. Insofar as such theory-based adjustment is not necessary among adult humans, I want to argue that it’s b/c of a common history of mind shaping.

I need to look at the infant and primate stuff you cite. Here’s my worry about that - maybe you can actually put this worry to rest. Exactly what kind of evidence, in the primate case, rules out the hypothesis that primates are sophisticated behaviorists? What we call deception could just as easily arise, as far as I can tell, from a sophisticated sensitivity to subtle patterns of behavior. E.g., if no one’s around or looking at me when I find the food, then no one will take it. Now I realize that the kind of flexibility that some primates display in using information about what their conspecifics have and have not seen makes a cognitivist explanation more tempting. And perhaps there is something to that - perhaps they are attributing some kind of internal cognitive state. But I fail to see why you’d call the state they’re attributing a belief, or any other PA.

Here is why. I take it as definitive of what most philosophers are talking about when they talk about belief and other PAs, that ascription of these states is inevitably holistic, in the sense that no behavior by itself suffices for a warranted belief ascription. Or, in other words, any behavior is compatible with an indefinite number of non-equivalent PA ascriptions. But I find it very implausible that, if primates attribute unobservable cognitive states, these attributions are subject to holism. Can a chimp somehow represent the possibility that a conspecific might engage in exactly the same behavior as that which triggered the 1st chimp’s attribution of a PA at one time, w/o tokening the PA? Suppose a chimp sees that a conspecific wasn’t looking when it found some food, and attributes what you would call the false belief that there is no food there. Does the chimp have the resources to envision circumstances where the precise same behavior would not warrant such an attribution? Can the chimp for example wonder whether the other sneaked a peak while it wasn’t looking, and then test for this hypothesis? Or is the attribution of false belief automatically triggered by certain observed behaviors, like the attributee’s not looking in a certain direction?

It seems to me that to be able to attribute the full-blown concept of belief, an attributor needs to be sensitive to the fact that any behavioral evidence is defeasible. This is a consequence of holism: the thesis that any belief is compatible with any behavior given appropriate adjustments to background PAs. I don’t think that chimps or infants deploy this concept of PAs. And this is precisely the concept of PAs that I’m interested in - b/c it’s only with such PAs that the connection to prediction is too tenuous to explain the role of their attribution in solving coordination problems.

I don’t doubt that chimps and pre-linguistic infants are great mindreaders, nor even that they can attribute some kind of internal cognitive state (though I’m less sure of the latter). My only point is that their mindreading does not involve PA attribution. Rather, it involves tracking of behavioral tendencies based on certain non-obvious, low-level cues, assumptpions about shared goals, etc. Now this admission is somewhat in tension with one of my evolutionary claims, namely the claim that all mindreading of brains as complex as those of primates, is too ‘evolutionarily expensive’, and that mindshaping is a cheaper alternative. That claim is too strong. There are reliable enough links b/w overt behavior and motivational states to support efficient mindreading in primates and infants. In fact, it’s arguable that some such reliable links actually evolved to make primates more interpretable to each other (mindshaping on a phylogenetic scale?). But, in my judgment, such mindreading typically exploits either sophisticated connectionist-style behavioral pattern recognition, or the attribution of very low-level cognitive/motivational states that have an ‘encapsulated’ relation to overt behavior, such that automatic attributions triggered by overt behavior have a good chance of being correct and affording useful predicitons.

Such mindreading, though very powerful in some contexts, is still of limited value, given the complexities of the primate brain. From my cursory observation of primates in zoos, on films, etc., their social dynamics seem fairly chaotic, especially compared to the relatively orderly dynamics seen in most human settings (I’ve been riding the metro to work and back since taking my new job, and it never ceases to amaze me how you can stuff hundreds of primates in small metal cylinders underground and have them remain in complete silence without attempting any physical contact with each other). The reason for the difference is that their complex brains *are* near chaotic, especially given the constant provocative and confusing stimulation they get from their conspecifics, while our brains have been tamed by mindshaping.

So, the gist of my argument remains, I think. Even granting that critters that haven’t been subject to mindshaping can be good mindreaders in some contexts, and attribute cognitive/motivational states, the cognitive/motivational states they attribute aren’t what most philosophers mean by PAs because their relation to behavior has to be more direct, and therefore not holistically-mediated. Furthermore, such mindreading that they have is of limited effectiveness in solving coordination problems and otherwise anticipating and controlling conspecific behavior, when compared with populations, such as human ones, where mindshaping has regulated the social realm to make it more predictable and controllable.

That’s a long post - but you raise some really excellent points that deserved detailed consideration. Thanks again for the thought provocation, and all the interesting references (you don’t happen to know where the Bermudez appeared, do you?)

Best, Tad.