Psychology 3228 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Probability Theory, Reciprocal Altruism, Reference Class Problem

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3228
• Professor: Scott Mac Dougall- Shackleton

Document Summary

Evolutionary view is that the mind is an adaptation or set of adaptations! Cognitive functions are solutions to problems related to survival and reproduction. One of the tenets of evolutionary psychology is the that mind is modular. Rather than an all-purpose general machine, it is more like a swiss-army knife. One of the fundamental assumptions of evolutionary psychology is that the human mind is modular. There are different domain-specific psychological modules to deal with adaptive problems in distinct areas of life. There are no domain-general psychological modules, bc there are no domain-general adaptive problems. Dualism: the idea of the mind & the brain as two separate entities. Descartes was a main supporter of dualism he thought of the brain as made of the same stuff as the physical body & the mind as something that thinks. Materialism: philosophical position that sees mental events as fundamentally reducible to physical events in the brain; form of monism.