A proposal that the basic mental models used to structure social interaction result from self-organization in brain activity. In
The Self-Organizing Social Mind, John Bolender proposes a new explanation for the forms of social relations. He argues that the core of social-relational cognition exhibits beauty--in the physicist's sense of the word, associated with symmetry. Bolender describes a fundamental set of patterns in interpersonal cognition, which account for the resulting structures of social life in terms of their symmetries and the breaking of those symmetries. He further describes the symmetries of the four fundamental social relations as ordered in a nested series akin to what one finds in the formation of a snowflake or spiral galaxy. Symmetry breaking organizes the neural activity generating the cognitive models that structure our social relationships.
Bolender's primary claim is that there exists a social pattern generator analogous to the central pattern generators associated with locomotion in many animal species. Spontaneous symmetry breaking structures the activity of the social pattern generator just as it does in central pattern generators.
Bolender's hypothesis that relational cognition results from self-organization is entirely novel, distinct from other theories that describe sociality in terms of evolution or environment. It presents a picture of social-relational cognition as resembling something inorganic. In doing so it reveals deep connections among cognition, biology, and the inorganic world. One can go too far, he acknowledges, in taking a solely dynamical view of the mind; the mind's innate functional complexity must be due to natural selection. But this does not mean that every simple mental feature is the result of natural selection. By noting a descending symmetry subgroup chain at the core of relational cognition, Bolender takes the first step in an important investigation.
Bradford Books imprint
一項提議認為，用於結構社會互動的基本心理模型源自於大腦活動的自我組織。在《自我組織的社會心智》中，約翰·博倫德提出了一種新的解釋，來說明社會關係的形式。他主張，社會關係認知的核心展現出美感——在物理學家的意義上，與對稱性相關。博倫德描述了一組基本的模式，這些模式在個人之間的認知中，解釋了社會生活中結構的形成，並涉及其對稱性及對稱性的破壞。他進一步描述了四種基本社會關係的對稱性，這些對稱性以類似於雪花或螺旋星系形成的嵌套系列排列。對稱性破壞組織了產生結構我們社會關係的認知模型的神經活動。
博倫德的主要主張是，存在一種社會模式生成器，類似於許多動物物種中與運動相關的中央模式生成器。自發的對稱性破壞結構了社會模式生成器的活動，就像它在中央模式生成器中所做的那樣。
博倫德的假設，即關係認知源自自我組織，完全是新穎的，與其他將社會性描述為進化或環境的理論有所不同。它呈現出社會關係認知的圖景，似乎類似於某種無機物。在這樣做的過程中，它揭示了認知、生物學和無機世界之間的深刻聯繫。他承認，將心智僅僅視為動態的觀點可能會走得太遠；心智的內在功能複雜性必須是自然選擇的結果。但這並不意味著每一個簡單的心理特徵都是自然選擇的結果。通過注意到關係認知核心的下降對稱子群鏈，博倫德在一項重要的研究中邁出了第一步。
John Bolender is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, and Visiting Fellow in Philosophy at Princeton University.
