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p.139 The mind, he [Hayek] explains, is "incessantly changing" (1984, p243) and its contents constitute an adaptive "capacity to respond to [its] environment with a pattern of actions that helps [it] to persist" (1973, p18).
p.139 Hayek maintains that knowledge is the product of trial-and-error learning and that our minds are characterized by gains in adaptive advantage due to the selective retention of useful representations of the physical world.
p.141 "What we perceive of the external world," explains Hayek, "are never all of the properties which a particular object can be said to possess objectively, not even only some of the properties which these objects do in fact possess physically, but always only certain 'aspects,' relations to other kinds of objects which we assign to all elements of the classes in which we place the perceived objects..."
p.141 Hayek's connectionist mind is not a strict catalogue of empirical data, but an extracted collection of similarities or analogies. As Anna Galeotti correctly summarizes his view, the mind does not know specific things, but kinds (1987, p170).
p.141 Hayek... asserts that "wherever we look, we discover evolutionary processes leading to... increasing complexity," and moreover, "we understand now that all enduring structures above the level of the simplest atoms, and up to the brain and society, are the results of, and can be explained only in terms of, processes of selective evolution" (1989, p92).
p.141 Hayek... As he explains it, the brain "first develops new potentialities for actions and that only afterwards does experience select... those which are useful as adaptations to typical characteristics of its environment" (ibid, [1978c] p42). In other words, the mind "simultaneously plays with a great many action patterns of which some are confirmed and retained as conducive to [its] preservation" (ibid., p43).
p.142 there will emerge from natural selection... patterns that conform to the requirements of survival.
p.142 natural selection is practical precisely because viable results cannot be precalculated. Instead, they are "discovered" (1984a, p255) through a trial-and-error procedure whereby unsuccessful solutions (or neural dispositions) are eliminated. What remains after the procedure, according to Hayek, is a form of "knowledge" (1984a, p257), a kind of residue of information on how to survive.
p.142 learning to meet the requirements of survival through natural selection... consist[s]... of "falsifying" unfit alternatives.
p.142 the "knowledge" generated by this natural selection process cannot be called intentional... it is passively acquired through the ordeal of trial and error.
p.142 says Hayek, the mind's evolution is "blind" (1988, p15). It depends not upon premeditated objectives or foresight, but upon a "process of exploration" (1984a, p263) or a "discovery procedure" (ibid., p255) that gropes through the space of what is possible and happens upon routines that fit the requirements of survival... each person's mind is made up of a blind accumulation of useful responses to the demands of survival
p.143 of the solutions available at a specific moment in time, the instrumental one(s) will survive, and at the same time, that any solution may diminish survivability in another context or future scenario.
p.143 'progress' in evolutionary terms merely means adaptation to a changing environmental context and what that entails... That solutions become more complex and better adjusted to generate survival, explains Hayek, happens ... because those prospered that happened to change in ways that made them increasingly adaptive. Indeed, "all evolution... is a process of continuous adaptation to unforeseeable events, to contingent circumstances which could not have been forecast" (ibid., [1988] p25).
p.143 "evolution [is] not linear, but result[s] from continual trial and error, constant 'experimentation' in arenas wherein different orders contend" (1988, p20).
p.143 Phylogenesis is not preprogrammed, but dependent upon the changing requirements of survival... a phylogenetic system is conditional; that is, it is reflective of the demands of the environment at that point in time.
p.143 The most significant implication of the blindness of natural selection, however, is that survival is based on chance, not foredesign... as has been pointed out by complexity theorists Gregoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine (1989) in their discussion of the adaptability of any colonies: "A permanent structure in an unpredictable environment may well compromise the ability of the colony and bring it to a suboptimal regime. A possible reaction toward such an environment is thus to maintain a high rate of exploration and the ability to rapidly develop temporary structures suitable for taking advantage of any favorable occasion that might arise. In other words, it would seem that randomness presents an adaptive value in the organization of the society" (ibid., p293). Similarly, for Hayek, random "mutations" (1973, p9) and "historical accidents" (1988, p20) are the raw material of the mind's evolution, and it is a capacity to generate and accumulate variations that makes possible the adaptive learning and innovations that are necessary to accommodate the open-ended problem of survival.
p.144 the "wrongheadedness" (ibid., p163) of early artificial intelligence research was its emphasis on preprogramming the best strategies for dealing with particular situations... "...if you have three or four ways of representing the thing, then it would be very hard to find an environmental change that would knock them all up" ...the 'trick' to productively interacting with the world, therefore, is to "accumulate different viewpoints" (ibid.) so that there are alternatives standing by when one fails...In short, we are never of only one mind.
p.144 Hayek conceives of the mind's successful neural patterns and combinations of patterns as "rules" (1967a, p67)... For Hayek, neural rules comprise instructions of an unarticulated sort. They consist, instead, of an implicit "capacity" (1984a, p257) to effectively survive in a given environment; a "knowing how" rather than a "knowing that," to borrow from Gilbert Ryle (1945-6). The rules that Hayek speaks of thus do not imply an awareness of purpose on the part of the mind but merely that it embodies "regularities of conduct" (1967a, p67) conducive to its maintenance
p.145 the mind does not consist primarily of insight into the relationship between resources and objectives, but of the blind selection of rules that enable it to endure. Indeed, says Hayek, trial-and-error learning "is a process not primarily of reasoning but of... the development of practices which have prevailed because they were successful... [and] the result of this development will... not be articulated knowledge but a knowledge which... cannot [be] stat[ed] in words but merely... honor[ed] in practice" (1973, p18).
p.145 the formation of a rule seems "never to be the outcome of a conscious process, not something at which the mind can deliberately aim, but always a discovery of something which already guides its operation" (ibid.).
p.145 unconscious cognitive activity is going on all the time - we simply cannot discern it through the medium of consciousness.
p.146 a polycentric order... emerges out of "the relation and mutual adjustments to each other of the elements of which it consists" (ibid.). A polycentric order... is a "self-organizing" (1984a, p259) system; a system that "dispenses with the necessity of first communicating all the information on which its several elements act to a common centre" (1967a, p74) and operates, instead, through the trial-and-error interaction of many parts.
p.149 if Hayek's epistemological insights hold for artificially intelligent machines, we can already recognize an imminent limitation on our ability to predict and/or plan their behavior. We shall see.
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