Rachell Powell

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762 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 26 Jan

Rachell Powell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 342 | Rachell Powell on Evolutionary Convergence, Morality, and Mind · 26 Jan 2026 podcast

So like, I, for example, think

and have argued that humans are sort of quintessentially normative creatures living under social rules that sort of regulate behavior in our communities and our groups, and it's critical to human cooperation.

And punishment of norm violations is critical to stabilizing cooperation in human groups, for example.

Now, when people ask, well, do other animals have social norms?

If you build complex cognitive features that humans use to follow social norms into our definition or delineation or specification of social norms,

No one else is gonna have them, right?

I mean, and so it's kind of like it's a fait accompli and you're just sort of going through the motions, but of course no other animals are gonna have what you have because you're just picking out the things that are unique to us, that are unique realizers of a social normative structure.

If you give up on that and you say forget about it, social normative structures are social structures that are multiply cognitively realizable, meaning many different cognitive forms could give rise to the same functional structure.

Then it sort of opens the door to start thinking about, well, where else might we see the same kind of functional structure?

And as you do that, you start to kind of, you revise your understanding of what that structure even looks like.

Because you're starting, so this was sort of going back to your early question about how do you get away from some of the anthropological thinking about some of the stuff, which I don't think anyone has great answers to.

But you start with something that looks like something that works in your theories, in your research programs, and then you start looking for it elsewhere, and you start realizing it takes on very different forms.

So then you go ahead and you revise the way you thought about the original structure.

And that's what I think happens when you, you know, think about these functional structures as being multiply realizable.

So like, I mean, to give you an example of like how silly it would be just to build human specific mechanisms into our understanding of these social configurations, like, you know, imagine like you're like, okay, look, and this goes back to the evolution of brains.

in, say, cephalopod mollusks.

They evolved independently, and they connected in a very important way with the evolution of vision, by the way, and I should have mentioned that earlier.

So arthropods, vertebrates, and cephalopods all have visual ecologies connected to brain processing and active bodies.

And imagine you're like, okay, let's define an eye or visual ecology in terms of human-specific mechanisms about what goes into what a human eye looks like precisely and what goes into the neural processing and how it works.

And then you say, oh, look, cephalopod mollusks, they don't have eyes.

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