A CREATIVE COGNITION 203ge ne tic se lection, will be committed to a specifi c, recurring environment.
It will be unable to cope with rapidly changing environments in current
time, such as the need for continuous development of novel rules. Th at
is why more intelligent systems had to evolve. But in the domain of cogni-
tion, there are other serious prob lems, anyway.
A major prob lem is specifi cation of what is deemed to be built in. It arises
because the environmental pressures said to shape such cognitive modules,
perhaps a million years ago, have only been imagined in superfi cial terms.
In fact, it has mostly been assumed that they have something to do with
broad factors, like climate change and general lifestyle, without making
the connection very clear. In his book, How the Mind Works, Steven
Pinker argues that a “module’s basic logic is specifi ed by our ge ne tic pro-
gram. Th eir operation was shaped by natu ral se lection to solve the prob-
lems of the hunting and gathering life led by our ancestors in most of our
evolutionary history.”^6 He does not say what, exactly, those prob lems are.
I argued in chapter 4 that, on the contrary, it was the increasing change-
ability of environments, on micro and macro scales, within, as well as
across, generations, that demanded and produced intelligent systems in
general and cognitive functions in par tic u lar. Such environments demand
frequently changing “programs” that have to be created de novo in the life-
time of individuals. So the nativist approach bears a logical error.
Associationism
In contrast, associationists, on the other hand, have described the basis
of cognition as a kind of continual learning of a par tic u lar sort. Th ey sim-
plify experience into variations in stimulus components such as sensory
qualities (color, shading) and features (lines or other geometric shapes).
Th ose that regularly co- occur in space or time are associated in the mind
and form the basic representations— symbols or concepts—of objects and
events.
For example, a regularly co- occurring set of features like fur, four legs,
ears, and so on, may form the concept of “dog.” Concepts with overlap-
ping sets of features form higher- level concepts, just as cats and dogs and
other species may form the concept of “animal.” Associations over time or
sequences can also form if- then or stimulus- response connections in
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