A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  148. Thomas D. Parsons et al., “Sex Differences in Mental Rotation and Spatial Rotation in a Virtual Environment,” Neuropsychologia 42 (2004): 555–62.

  149. See Aljosha C. Neubauer, Sabine Bergner, and Martina Schatz, “Two vs. Three-Dimensional Presentation of Mental Rotation Tasks: Sex Differences and Effects of Training on Performance and Brain Activation,” Intelligence 38, no. 5 (2010): 529–39.

  150. Tim Koscik et al., “Sex Differences in Parietal Lobe Morphology: Relationship to Mental Rotation Performance,” Brain and Cognition 69, no. 3 (2009): 451–59.

  151. J. Feng, J. Spence, and J. Pratt, “Playing an Action Video Game Reduces Gender Differences in Spatial Cognition,” Psychological Science 10 (2007): 850–55.

  152. U. Debamo et al., “Mental Rotation: Effects of Gender, Training and Sleep Consolidation,” PLoS One 8, no. 3 (2013), doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060296.

  153. Moshe Hoffman, Uri Gneezy, and John A. List, “Nurture Affects Gender Differences in Spatial Abilities,” PNAS 108, no. 36 (2011): 14786–88. Drew Bailey, Richard A. Lippa, Marco Del Guidice, Raymond Hames, and Dave C. Geary all signed a letter to PNAS criticizing the methods used by Hoffman and his colleagues: “Sex Differences in Spatial Abilities: Methodological Problems in Hoffman et al.,” PNAS 109, no. 10 (2012), doi: 10.1073/pnas.1114679109.

  154. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, in The Penguin Complete Lewis Carroll (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), 65.

  155. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 345.

  156. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2011), 46.

  157. E. O. Wilson, “Human Decency Is Animal,” The New York Times Magazine, October 12, 1975.

  158. David Barash, The Whisperings Within (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 14.

  159. Stanislas Dehaene, Loren Cohen, and José Morais Régine Kolinsky, “Illiterate to Literate: Behavioral and Cerebral Changes Induced by Reading Acquisition,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16 (2015): 234–44.

  160. Allen Newell and Herbert S. Simon, “Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 19, no. 3 (1976): 113–26.

  161. Ibid., 113.

  162. Karl J. Fink, Goethe’s History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21–25.

  163. Arthur Zajonc, “Goethe and the Phenomenological Investigation of Consciousness,” Proceedings from the 1998 Conference Toward a Science of Consciousness III, ed. S. Hameroff, A. Kasniak, and D. Chalmers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 417-28.

  164. Michael Ruse, Defining Darwin: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology (New York: Prometheus Books, 2009), 57.

  165. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 37.

  166. Paul E. Griffiths and Eva M. Neumann-Held, “The Many Faces of the Gene,” BioScience 49, no. 8 (1999): 661.

  167. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 19.

  168. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1958), 511.

  169. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 1 (1871) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 36.

  170. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18 ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958), 46.

  171. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis (1916–17), Standard Edition, vol. 16, 284.

  172. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis (1933), Standard Edition, vol. 22, 95.

  173. Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (New York: Other Press, 2002); Georg Northoff, Neuropsychoanalysis in Practice: Brain, Self, and Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); R. L. Cathart-Harris and Karl Friston, “The Default Mode, Ego-Functions and Free-Energy: A Neurobiological Account of Freudian Ideas,” Brain 133, no. 4 (2010): 1265–83. Although Solms, Northoff, and Friston all subscribe to what might loosely be called a Freudian model, each of their approaches is different.

  174. Mark Solms and Jaak Panksepp, “The Id Knows More than the Ego Admits: Neuropsychoanalytic and Primal Consciousness Perspectives on the Interface Between Affective and Cognitive Neuroscience,” Brain Sciences 2 (2012): 145–75.

  175. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 17.

  176. Ibid., 148.

  177. Grosz is further informed by the panpsychist naturalism of Gilles Deleuze, who was influenced by Leibniz, Spinoza, Bergson, and Whitehead. Although most poststructuralist thought is opposed to the idea of the natural, Deleuze took a different view. His perspective resists the very idea of things, essences, and subjects as unified beings and instead champions a radical form of process philosophy. Ideas affect prose, and the language of Deleuze mirrors the dynamism of the thought, in which stable definition is itself a problem. Grosz’s prose is similarly elusive. See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Irigaray’s prose is often ironic, playful, wild, and opaque, an echo of her desire to subvert the Western philosophical tradition. See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

  178. For a history of how sexual difference has been understood, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

  179. The literature is vast. For a “constructivist” answer to the problem of material bodies, see Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993). For diverse views, see Feminist Theory and the Body, ed. Janet Price and Margit Schildrick (New York: Routledge, 1999).

  180. Grosz, 149.

  181. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ix.

  182. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), 112.

  183. Steven Pinker, “Deep Commonalities Between Life and Mind,” in Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, ed. Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 133.

  184. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 53–54.

  185. George Boole, quoted in Keith Devlin, Goodbye Descartes: The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of Mind (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 72.

  186. Devlin, 77.

  187. Whitehead, 22.

  188. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1950), 102.

  189. Ibid., 104.

  190. A. M. Schrader, “In Search of a Name: Information Science and Its Conceptual Antecedents,” Library and Information Science Research 6 (1984): 227–71.

  191. Tom Stonier, Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe (London: Springer, 1990), 21.

  192. Rom Harré, “The Rediscovery of the Human Mind,” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 2, no. 1 (1999): 43–62.

  193. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer,” Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer/html.

  194. C. R. Hallpike, On Primitive Society and Other Forbidden Topics (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2011), 221.

  195. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 21.

  196. Jerry Fodor, The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). In his introduction, Fodor remarks that although he has written favorably about computational theory of mind, “it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could suppose that it’s a very large part of the truth; still less that it’s within miles of being th
e whole story about how the mind works.”

  197. Steven Pinker, Twitter post, October 16, 2012, 4:36 p.m., http://twitter.com/sapinker.

  198. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–50.

  199. Ibid., 449.

  200. See Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

  201. Georg Northoff, Minding the Brain: A Guide to Philosophy and Neuroscience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 176.

  202. Ladan Shams and Robyn Kim, “Crossmodal Influences on Visual Perception,” Physics of Life Reviews (2010), doi: 10.1016/j.plrev.2010.04.006.

  203. For a short encapsulation see L. E. Bahrick and R. Lickliter, “Perceptual Development: Intermodal Perception,” in Encyclopedia of Perception, ed. E. Goldstein (Los Angeles: Sage, 2010), 754–57. For an overview, see David J. Lewkowicz and Robert Lickliter, The Development of Intersensory Perception (New York: Psychology Press, 2013). For synesthesia in infancy, see Daphne Mauer, Laura C. Gibson, and Ferrinne Spector, “Synesthesia in Infants and Very Young Children,” in The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia, ed. Julia Simner and Edward M. Hubbord (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 46–63.

  204. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1951), no. 1130, line 3, p. 507; no. 1593, line 3, p. 660; and no. 785, lines 1 and 2, p. 382.

  205. For a clearly written paper on brain development and plasticity, see Bryan Kolb and Robbin Gibb, “Brain Plasticity and Behavior in the Developing Brain,” Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 20, no. 4 (2011): 265–76.

  206. K. Sathian and Randall Stilla, “Cross Modal Plasticity of Tactile Perception in Blindness,” Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience 28, no. 2 (2010): 271–81.

  207. M. Bedny et al., “Language Processing in the Occipital Cortex of Congenitally Blind Adults,” PNAS 108, no. 11 (2011): 4429–34.

  208. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 90. Pinker does not deny plasticity or learning, but he resists articulating what had become a commonplace among most neuroscientists at the time he wrote the book, which is that learning, especially during critical periods of development, does alter or “shape” the brain through synaptic connectivity. Learning and memory also appear to affect nonsynaptic plasticity, modifications in the ion channel in a neuron’s axon, dentrites, and cell body. This by no means suggests that genetic factors aren’t also at work. It seems clear that the problem is one of degree. Too much plasticity in the human cortex in relation to a person’s learning threatens to dismantle the innate modules hypothesis of evolutionary psychology.

  209. Jaak Panksepp and Jules Panksepp, “The Seven Sins of Evolutionary Psychology,” Evolution and Cognition 6, no. 2 (2000): 111.

  210. Ibid.

  211. For recent views in interaction linguistics, see New Adventures in Language and Interaction, ed. Jürgen Streeck (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010).

  212. Michael Tomasello, “Language Is Not an Instinct,” review of Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, Cognitive Development 10 (1995): 131–56.

  213. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 137.

  214. Ibid.

  215. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 59 (1950): 460.

  216. A. M. Turing, “Intelligent Machinery,” in Alan Turing: His Work and Impact, ed. S. Barry Cooper and Jan van Leeuwen (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2013), 511.

  217. Ibid.

  218. Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Standard Edition, vol. 1, 295.

  219. Walter Pitts and Warren McCulloch, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,” The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5 (1943): 115–33.

  220. Ibid., 115.

  221. Warren McCulloch, quoted in Gualtiero Piccinini, “The First Computational Theory of Mind and Brain: A Close Look at McCulloch and Pitts ‘Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity,’ ” Synthese 141 (2004): 181.

  222. James A. Anderson, An Introduction to Neural Networks (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 51.

  223. Walter J. Freeman and Rafael Núñez, “Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of Action, Intention, and Emotion,” introduction to a special issue, Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 11–12 (1999): xvi.

  224. Piccinini, 206.

  225. Karl Friston has proposed a new computational model of the brain based on a free energy principle (which he views as parallel to Freud’s dynamics of energy in his model of mind) and Bayesian inference, via Helmholtz’s unconscious inference. The brain in this model is a predictive and conservative (energy-saving) organ. It functions according to “priors”—earlier perceptions. Some have greeted this model with enthusiasm because it has a completeness few other models have and has the rigor that only mathematical calculation can offer. Whether this will lead to a new “logical calculus” for the brain or not is unknown. See Peter Freed, “Research Digest,” Neuropsychoanalysis 12, no. 1 (2010): 103–4.

  226. Karl H. Pribram, “A Century of Progress?” in Neuroscience of the Mind: On the Centennial of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology, ed. Robert M. Bilder and F. Frank Le Fever; Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 843 (1998): 11–19.

  227. I ran across the following statement at the end of a blog on Karl Friston’s ideas and their debt to Freud. It is just one person’s view, of course, but it provides a possible insight into the lasting fury about Freud’s thought: “Would it not be better to allow Freud’s terrible theory to just fade away? Do we really need to have people struggle with the myth that they have a sex crazed monster living in the cellar of their minds?” Janet Kwasniak, Thoughts on Thought: A Blog on Consciousness, September 10, 2010.

  228. Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 198.

  229. John von Neumann, “The General and Logical Theory of Automata,” in Cerebral Mechanisms of Behavior: The Hixon Symposium, ed. Lloyd A. Jeffress (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1951), 1–14.

  230. Robert Herrick, “Upon Prue, His Maid,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry: Shorter Edition, ed. Arthur M. Eastman (New York: Norton, 1970), 116.

  231. Peter beim Graben and James Wright, “From McCulloch-Pitts Neurons Toward Biology,” Bulletin of Mathematical Biology 73, iss. 2 (2011): 263.

  232. Walter Pitts, quoted in Elizabeth Wilson, Affect & Artificial Intelligence (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010), 118.

  233. There is a lot written about cybernetics, systems theory, and chaos theory in complex systems in books, papers, and websites, with subjects ranging from corporations to psychology to tourism. For a clear brief description, see Vladimir G. Ivancevic and Tijana T. Ivancevic, ed., Computational Mind: A Complex Dynamics Perspective (Berlin: Springer, 2007), 115–18.

  234. Keith Franklin and William M. Ramsey, ed., The Cambridge Book of Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 336–37.

  235. Hubert L. Dreyfus, introduction to the MIT edition, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), ix.

  236. David Deutsch, “Creative Blocks: The Very Laws of Physics Imply that Artificial Intelligence Must Be Possible. What’s Holding Us Up?” Aeon: Creative Blocks, October 3, 2012, aeon.co/magazine/technology/david-deutsch-artificial-intelligence/.

  237. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” 450.

  238. Deutsch, “Creative Blocks.”

  239. John Searle, “Is the Brain a Digital Computer?” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 64, no. 3 (1990): 21–37. Please note that I have avoided retelling Searle’s Chinese room argument. I have read it so many times, have read objections to it so many times, that I am tired of it. I am more impressed with his critique in this essay.

  240. Dreyfus, xi
–xii.

  241. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 264.

  242. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 146.

  243. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 248.

  244. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 45.

  245. Ibid.

  246. Leonid Perlovsky, Ross Deming, and Roman Ilin, Emotional Cognitive Neural Algorithms with Engineering Applications: Dynamic Logic; From Vague to Crisp (Berlin: Springer, 2011), 4–5. There are a growing number of scientists and philosophers who do not regard emotion as a “cognitive” function. Emotion as cognitive is founded on the appraisal theory of emotion. For a lucid refutation of the appraisal theory, see Jesse Prinz, Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind (New York: Norton, 2012), 242–47.

  247. Craig Delancey, Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal About the Mind and Artificial Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 207.

  248. Rodney Brooks, “Intelligence Without Reason,” prepared for Computers and Thought, IJCAI-91, research for MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1991), 15. Brooks argues, “Only through a physical grounding can any internal symbolic system find a place to bottom out, and give meaning to the processing going on within the system.”

  249. Ibid., 17.

  250. Rodney Brooks, “Intelligence Without Representation,” Artificial Intelligence 47, iss. 1–3 (1991): 139–59.

  251. Rodney Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003), 159.

  252. Brooks, quoted in Joseph Guinto, “Machine Man: Rodney Brooks,” Boston Magazine, November 2014, www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/10/18/rodney-brooks-robotics.

  253. Brooks, Flesh and Machines, 158.

  254. Ibid., 156.

  255. Ibid., 5.

  256. Cynthia L. Breazeal, Designing Sociable Robots (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 27–37.

  257. Ibid., xiii.

  258. Breazeal subscribes to the appraisal theory of emotions. She admits that Kismet is not conscious and has no subjective feelings and no pattern of physiological activity. It does have “a parameter that maps to arousal level,” which she calls a simple “correlate to autonomic nervous system activity” (Ibid., 112). The correlate remains startlingly distant from a human autonomic nervous system, however.