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Chapter 13
Theoretic Mind
We have now described many of the
components that go into generating a human self, and in Chapter 12 we tried
to draw together some ideas about what goes on in our narrative conscious minds.
Given the fact that our modern brains are essentially those of hunter gatherers
of 50,000--100,000 years ago, one could argue that any book on the biology
of mind should stop at this point. We need to consider, however, the fact that
modern conditions have generated new kinds of brains, even though their genetic
instructions haven't changed much. Consider the well-documented and baffling
fact that the IQ of the average citizen of advanced industrial countries has
increased by 25 percent in this century. Has
each generation of children, faced with an increasingly complex technological
environment, grown increasingly sophisticated brains? Consider the fact that
each of us constructs brain modules that specialize in handling such recent
inventions as reading and writing. Understanding these more recent developments
is as much a part of studying the biology of mind as knowing how a nerve cell
works. The development of reading and writing represent another chapter in
the story of humans increasingly becoming artifacts of their own artifacts
(earlier installments include the inventions of fire, tools, oral language,
and myth described in Chapters 5 and 11). The advent of writing has made what
is in our heads even more symbiotic with external tools and information stores---devices
that our culture uses to regulate our behaviors. We need now to bring ourselves
to the present, considering first the emergence of modern minds, then some
conflicts that have emerged between our Paleolithic and our modern selves,
and finally the issue of humankind's further evolution: our possible futures.
Emergence of the Modern Mind
In Chapters 4 and 5 we traced several
possible stages in the development of ape and hominid minds, following an outline
provided by the psychologist Merlin Donald, and
this section draws further on his writings. These earlier stages included the
episodic mind of chimpanzees, the mimetic intelligence of Homo erectus, and
the linguistic mythic mind of archaic Homo sapiens. The transitions to mimetic
and mythic minds occurred in biological hardware---adaptive changes in the
muscular and nervous systems that were complete no later than 50,000 years
ago. The last transition, to theoretic mind and culture, depends on equivalent
changes in external technological hardware---specifically, external memory
devices such as paintings on cave walls, scratches on clay tablets, and written
texts. These external tools have made us their tools, and the development of
our brains is shaped by them. The essential feature of this last transition
is that it no longer depends solely on oral tradition, spoken language, and
narrative styles of thought. Rather, cultural rules and procedures begin to
be stored outside of individual minds, as graphical tools are used to inscribe
symbolic memory representations on external storage devices.
The emergence of this theoretic
culture, however, encompassed much more than the development of written language
and the storage of written records in libraries. A substantial list of technological
innovations came before writing: astronomical records, organized agriculture,
ceramics and bricks made by heating, tailored clothing, simple maps, sailing
vessels, and the like. Analog devices such as water clocks, calendars, and
time sticks kept a record of time and astronomical events. These provided a
foundation on which visual symbolic record keeping could develop. It seems
likely that the first socially important theoretic development in human history
was the science of astronomy. Many different cultures independently invented
devices, such as the mounds of some Native American groups, for tracking the
movement of constellations and monitoring seasons.
Graphic Invention
The earliest artifacts with purposeful
graphical markings are from 200,000-year-old upper Paleolithic sites. By 60,000
years ago, sophisticated animal drawings appear. The
earliest writing dates to approximately 5--6 thousand years ago, when large
city-states with records of trade emerged. Possession of spoken language does
not automatically lead to graphical invention. Of the many thousands of languages
spoken at different places and times by humans, fewer than one in ten has evolved
an indigenous written form, and the number that has yielded a significant body
of literature barely exceeds a hundred. Writing was not only a late development
but also a rare one.
Three modes of visual symbolic
invention can be distinguished: pictorial, ideographic, and phonological. Pictorial
representation in Paleolithic cave art contained themes such as hunting and
fertility. This is consonant with oral mythic traditions of many cultures that
stress fertility rituals, animal power, and magical identifications. The next
development was ideographic representation. Cuneiform lists appeared about
5000 years ago and persisted until the early Roman period. These are similar
in principle to hieroglyphics (Egyptian) and ideographs (as in Chinese writing
or Japanese kanji). An ideographic written language permitted China to develop
an advanced bureaucratic, scientific, and literary culture in the absence of
any phonetic writing system.
The phonetic alphabet that we are
familiar with arose in the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin. Japanese
kana is a similar but separate system that records syllables instead of phonemes,
and the Korean alphabet is also distinct from ours. The alphabet, a simple
set of phonological and letter representations invented in the first millennium
b.c., represented an enormous increase in economy and speed. Written language
enhanced tremendously the rise of external symbolic storage systems (such as
written documents stored in libraries). Oral narrative could more easily be
embedded in a larger external structure (such as a manuscript of the Iliad
in the library). This period saw the development not only of language but also
of other symbol storage systems, such as musical notation and scientific graphing.
*******
DESIGN NOTE: IMPORTANT POINT
Users of the phonetic Greek alphabet
could become literate by familiarizing themselves with only about two dozen
letters, instead of having to remember hundreds of hieroglyphics or cuneiform
characters. Having to learn fewer visual symbols greatly reduced the memory
load on the brain.
**********
Early Theoretic Societies
Ancient Greece from around 700
b.c. is regarded as the birthplace of advanced theoretic civilization in the
West. The appearance of mathematics, geometry, biology, geography, and philosophy
was relatively sudden. (India
and China were going through cultural explosions at about the same time.) These
new disciplines were based on effective systems for numeration, geometrical
graphing, and phonetic writing. Such tools permitted ideas to be entered into
a public record so that they could be improved and refined. Central core ideas---the
memes we discussed in Chapter 5---became more accurate and long-lived replicators.
It is estimated that historical narratives can't last more than five hundred
years in oral traditions before they are completely distorted. In contrast,
today's libraries contain thousands of physical copies of the exact words of
Herodotus's histories, and many more translations, summaries, commentaries,
and so on, even though the original manuscripts turned to dust centuries ago.
The core ideas, or memes, have been subjected to very different "selection
pressures"---for logical coherence or explanatory power, for instance,
instead of rhyme or integration with tribal rituals.
*******
DESIGN NOTE: IMPORTANT POINT
Ideas have always been replicative
units, or memes, transmitted by gesture or speech from generation to generation,
but with the advent of theoretic intelligence their vehicles changed. They
began to be transmitted also by pictures, writing, and artifacts, instead of
just by speech.
**********
The transition from mimetic to
mythic culture put great demands on biological memory. Theoretic culture reduced
this load somewhat by shifting some storage tasks to the newly developed recording
media. Now the short-term memory of the frontal lobes could work with externally
stored information, and humans could engage in cognitive projects that were
just too large and complicated for the oral-mythic mind. The brain may not
have changed in its genetic makeup in going from mythic to theoretic culture,
but this new link to an accumulating external memory unquestionably expanded
its cognitive powers.
Merging of Individual Minds and
External Memory Stores
Each human brain becomes part of
a network when it operates in the context of an external symbolic storage system.
Its memory structures are expanded, and the location of cognitive control shifts.
Memory can reside at many locations in the network, as Figure 13-1 suggests.
In early cultures, only the elite (such as scribes) were trained to deal with
this system, while most of the population remained fundamentally oral-mythic,
dominated by ritual and tradition. In modern society this has changed; even
episodic event reporting is heavily dependent on electronic media (as when
we watched the first moon landing live on television).
Because of the limitations of our
consciousness, the connection between an individual's memory and external memory
stores is always brief, but it can be repeated frequently, and any truly creative
thought is an iterative process, where the thinker returns to the external
database again and again---verbalizing, sketching ideas, thinking internally
or aloud, referring to past outputs, revising, and cleaning up---until a satisfactory
resolution is reached. This is very different from having the working-memory
system of our frontal lobes be our only arena for performing complex mental
tasks. This memory is distractible and transient, and it cannot sustain the
cumulative building of the complex layers of knowledge needed to support theoretic
society.
Figure 13-1
Expansion of the power of the brain's
working memory is made possible by exchanging information back and forth with
local devices, such as personal computers and books, and also with more global
information stores, such as libraries and worldwide computer networks. Memory
and cognitive control comes to reside in the whole network.
When we connect to our external
memory networks---that is, when we read, write, draw, or calculate---we really
are like computers plugged into a network, and our skills and powers are determined
by both the network and our own biological inheritance. These networks can
be assembled from many different kinds of hardware, some of which we barely
recognize as technological: books, costumes, posters, traffic signs, vinyl
audio recordings, punched paper tape, knotted strings, CD-ROM. When we deal
with one of these objects or read a book, we enter a cognitive state in which
our biological minds can be brought temporarily under the dominance of an external
memory device: Our minds can literally be "played" by a book, moved
into a state crafted by the author. The same thing happens when we succumb
to the fascination of surfing the World Wide Web. (In this sense, cyberspace
is a few thousand years old and doesn't so much replace literary culture as
make it much more widely available.)
*******
DESIGN NOTE: IMPORTANT POINT
There is no difference in principle
between a cuneiform scratch on a rock and information held in the many computers
that constitute the Internet.
**********
Many ordering rules and search
functions that used to be entirely internal to our biological memory now reside
in external memory systems. Programs are designed to explore computer networks
for us, asking our questions and retrieving relevant answers. One challenge
facing cognitive scientists is to describe what happens to our individual minds
as we tie them to electronic media---media that are themselves becoming global
and active. Are the virtual selves that we can invent as personae in computer
networks going to become more real to us than our biological selves?
Parallel Expression of Ancient
and Modern Minds
The advent of our theoretic minds
has given us a final mode of representational thought, encapsulating the episodic,
mimetic, and mythic minds characteristic of earlier stages in our evolution
(see Figure 13-2). Each of these has been a way of representing the world,
a way that could support a certain level of culture, a survival strategy for
the human race then present. Each style of representation that we acquired
along the way has been retained, like the growth rings of a tree---only in
us the older rings are still alive. The result is a system of parallel representational
channels of mind that can process the world concurrently. As you look at a
television program, you marshal mimesis, narrative, and logic in parallel to
serve the common end of modeling ideas.
***************
DESIGN NOTE: SELF-EXPERIMENT
Does the idea that previous stages
in the development of our human intelligence persist in our modern minds make
sense to you in terms of your own experience? Pause for a moment and think
about distinguishing moments when your experience is mainly episodic (present-centered,
limited mainly to feeling sensations), mimetic (nonverbal social exchange,
body language), mythic (telling stories infused with meaning that define your
place in the world, rich in metaphor and analogy), or theoretic (analysis,
abstraction, dissection, generalizations that ignore mythic significance).
****************
Figure 13-2
Different varieties of human intelligence,
with later stages encapsulating earlier ones. The model is that the intelligences
that evolved earlier are under the governance of later-appearing capabilities
but that they also can have semi-independent exchanges with the environment
on their own (arrows) .
Conflict of Paleolithic and Modern
Minds
This book has now sketched out
two seemingly disparate threads. One is the evolutionary story that halts our
genetic evolution in the Paleolithic, leaving us with many psychological mechanisms
appropriate to that time, not to the present. The other is the advent of our
21st-century mind that knows itself to contain no "I," that knows
itself to be one of many possible generated selves---a mind that faces the
prospect of merging with computer networks that leave our obsolete bodies behind.
Can these two descriptions be integrated?
Paleolithic Adaptations
\co\Please replace {deg} with a
degree symbol in the next paragraph.
We can start by noting some of
the consequences of having theoretic minds in bodies whose psychology, physiology,
emotions are adapted to the Paleolithic, not the present. Our late-afternoon
drop in blood sugar probably derives from rhythms of hunter-gatherers on the
savannah 200,000 years ago, and our preferred temperature range, 60--85{deg}F,
reflects the climate then. We raise "gooseflesh" to erect fur that
disappeared long ago, and we have emotional response systems that can be a
complete mismatch for the modern world. Hormone cycles and mental alertness
that used to be tuned to the natural light-dark cycle are now compromised by
the use of electric lighting to shorten our periods of sleep. Our
bodies are designed for a more stable social environment than exists in the
modern world. We have to make do with a patched-together set of reactions to
constant change.
Our modern minds still work best
as detectors of abrupt changes, paying more attention to an isolated terrorist
event than to the gradual thinning of the ozone layer. Culture changes even
more slowly than the environment, and we haven't yet evolved institutions that
force us to consider the long-term consequences of our actions. The adaptability
that permitted our transition to modern culture may also contain the seeds
of its destruction. Just as frogs sitting is a pan of water that is slowly
heated will sit there, oblivious, until they die, we tolerate small, incremental
degradations in our environment that may ultimately lead to our extinction.
If the world's human population continues to double every 41 years, we will
reach the biological limit to growth and will start fighting each other, in
deadly earnest, for the decreasing slice of the pie. Over the geological time
scale, there have been at least seven major extinctions that wiped out 90 percent
of the species present. The rapidity of the current wave of extinction currently
under way is unprecedented. Are we about to become number eight?
*******
DESIGN NOTE: IMPORTANT POINT
The Paleolithic mind did not need
to react to changes that took place over years or decades, and it is through
such slow changes that we are destroying our own environment.
**********
Mythic Components of Modern Intelligence
In many archaic systems, social
order and coordination were modeled on the universe---the relationships among
the planets and stars---and their mythology posits a natural harmony between
humankind and the cosmos. Our modern secular world has lost this sense of unity,
and many people turn to science as the only field through which the dimension
of mythology can be again revealed. This may be one reason why science programs
on public TV are so popular; perhaps scientists are the closest equivalent
we have to a modern, global priesthood. Another reason, of course, is that
science programs appeal to our sense of excitement and of the marvelous. In
this sense we are taking scientists not as priests but as modern magicians.
Our natural mind, if we have one, is closer to the animism, immersion, and
symbiosis of mythic culture than to the kinds of intelligence required to survive
in a highly technological world. And it is the emotional, mythic mind that
determines so much of what happens in affairs of state, culture, and history.
Stories are the base of our behavioral
scripts, our unconscious self-images. This is why our behavior seems so resistant
to "rational" analysis. It seems as though different kinds of brains
are running in parallel. Our body physiology---its nervous and endocrine systems,
its hardwired pathways for generating emotions---is tied to our archaic mythic
mentality. Most of us probably feel robust only when these archaic functions
can be expressed (as in life events or stories that purge the emotions). The
overlap in our physiological, psychological, and social selves is brought home
very forcefully by the emerging field of psychoneuroimmunology mentioned in
Chapter 10, which describes how general health, immune status, neurotransmitter
chemistry, and social interactions are interrelated.
*******
DESIGN NOTE: IMPORTANT POINT
The mythic self remains a core
of our personality. Stories and myths came first and theoretic analysis appeared
much later.
**********
An evolutionary perspective that
links physiological wholeness with self-image and storyline suggests why positive
or negative personal scripts correlate so strongly with health. It suggests
an explanation for our hunger for stories that give some sense of purpose to
the modern world, from traditional religions, from science-as-religion, or
from cosmic evolution theories based on modern physics or Eastern mystical
traditions. We can see the consequences
of the absence of a storyline or myth that supports morality and social order
in the degraded environments that afflict many large cities. The developing
nervous systems of young humans are subjected to sometimes violent and contradictory
inputs that don't permit the pairing of somatic or emotional markers with different
experiences so that they can be designated as either good or bad. The tools
needed to construct criteria for appropriate behavior are wanting.
We might regard our mimetic and
mythic bodies as locked in a previous time, whereas our evolution is now proceeding
at the level of symbolic manipulation. One requirement for preserving the richness
of our lives might be to ensure that our symbolic evolution doesn't make our
robust physiology wither away. Computer addicts who live on junk food, caffeine,
and the Internet need to attend to their physical and emotional well-being
if they are to avoid becoming analogs of the emaciated Hindu or Buddhist ascetics
who have "transcended the body." We can allay fear of physical obsolescence
if we realize that our bodies are a central component of the mythic personality
that vitalizes our physiology. This mythic personality may underlie the enormous
interest the public shows in media accounts of our mythic origins: the overwhelming
reception of the PBS series by Bill Moyers on the work of Joseph Campbell,
interest in matriarchal societies, and fascination with man the hunter-warrior
described in John Bly's book Iron John. It may also explain the widespread
formation of support groups of both men and women in an effort to develop their
true archaic male or female selves. In
our mythic selves, there may be an evolutionary ultimate cause of our individual
need to have meaning---a story or script to fit into.
Addressing Pluralism
We reason much better than Paleolithic
humans, but our emotions, especially our social bonds, seem to have changed
very little since our mimetic and mythic brains were formed. The main driving
force in the evolution of modern humans was probably competition with other
groups of humans. The xenophobia
(fear or hatred of anything strange or foreign) and genocidal behavior exhibited
by groups of humans seems basic and constant, and it is similar to the behavior
we observe in our nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzees. Is it possible
that, just as a cat must still play at hunting when its belly is full, and
scratch its declawed paws against the wall, so the human brain's "threat" or "fear" agents
must have their exercise, regardless of whether there is, in the external environment,
an objective reason for this activity. Can we grasp this and override those
primitive instructions? The fact that the identity, rituals, and perceived
purpose of a human group must be enforced in order to maintain the social cohesion
of that group, but also that
the structures of different groups vary greatly, works against tolerance. To
tolerate is to admit the relativity of at least some of the values of one's
group, and such open-mindedness can threaten group cohesion. This is why different
religious traditions can have a history of bitter opposition.
*******
DESIGN NOTE: IMPORTANT POINT
The myths with which we maintain
our personal, tribal, and national stability can work both for and against
us, because one of their functions is to maintain the integrity of the group
by denying the validity of novel perceptions that clash with the world view
and traditions of the group.
**********
The social units and their associated
cohesion mechanisms that we discussed in the sections on mimetic and mythic
mind in Chapter 5 are what have evolved to become tribes or nations in the
modern world (as distinct from states, such as the United States, France, and
so on). There are about 5000 such units in the world today united by language,
culture, territorial base, political organization, or accepted history. Few
of these were given a choice when they were made part of one of the 190 states
of the world, the majority of which have been around only since World War II.
Examples include Catholics in Ireland or Ethnic Albanians in Serbia. Most of
the shooting wars in the world today are being fought between nations and the
states that claim to represent them, or between nations who come into conflict
over their territory and identity.
Ancient and Modern Minds in an
Electronic Age
The model we have been building
is that we all have episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic minds acting simultaneously
and in parallel; that control rests sometimes, but not always, with the higher
(that is, more recent) levels of encapsulation; and that our brains can spin
a very large number of possible selves. Our individual minds then link to worldwide
networks, most recently through electronic media. Such worldwide networks have
the potential of acting to counter the tribal mentalities that ensure conflict
between different groups as they scapegoat or demonize each other. These
networks increasingly bring knowledge of the diversity of humanity to all,
which may enhance tolerance for diversity. Certainly, they offer economic benefits
for participation. Greed isn't pretty, but it's usually better than hatred.
*******
DESIGN NOTE: IMPORTANT POINT
The World Wide Web now forms a
very thin veneer, or epidermis, covering the immense variety of peoples and
cultures, but it may eventually
become part of the backbone of a common world culture that offers an antidote
to the multiple territorial-kinesic (mimetic) or linguistic (mythic) systems
that underlie tribal cohesion and also are at the base of the many wars between
tribes currently in progress across the globe.
**********
The on-line community is not, at
present, really a community, because it is missing an essential ingredient
of our traditional meeting and work spaces: chance encounters where a flicker
of body language, a nod, or a glance communicates something very important.
We want to see what other human animals look like when we talk with them. No
one needs to look anyone else in the eye in cyberspace, and a sense of membership
in larger communities can be lost. Insults are easier to hurl. Studies suggest
that people who spend several hours a week on-line experience higher levels
of depression and loneliness than others. Isolated individuals can form isolated
communities that don't have to rub elbows with others, facilitating the growth
of hate groups. This can translate the xenophobia of traditional cultures to
virtual reality. On the other hand, the Internet has strengthened social support
for people who wish to share their personal stories of life, disease, and death
in a way that is not possible in regular day-to-day social contacts. There
is now an outpouring of books on the new cyber-reality, some warning of coming
doom and some wildly optimistic about the human transformations it might facilitate.
The history of society's reaction to the introduction of the telephone, radio,
and television suggests that it takes at least 20 years for the effects of
innovative technologies to sink in. Given that the World Wide Web is only about
3 years old at this writing, we can do little now but wait and see.
Future Mind
In thinking about directions in
which the human mind might develop in the future, we first ask whether we are
justified in taking lessons from the past or extrapolating from the present.
Unfortunately, the answer in both cases is no. A brief look at human history
since the Paleolithic dispels any underlying misconception that our present
economic and social arrangements are in some way optimal or are even reliably
heading in that direction. Evolution does not imply progress. In spite of evidence
that evolution has generated human brains that are predisposed to develop a
naive physics, an intuitive psychology, and language, there still is no "natural
human" to return to, apart from the current cultural artifacts that we
all appear to be. Notwithstanding the enthusiasm of New Age gurus and the deep
ecology movement advocating a return to our authentic mythic roots, there never
has been a golden age---only the clear propensity for humans at any time to
think things must have been better in "the good old days." The Greeks,
at the height of their civilization, described with nostalgia the golden age
from which they had fallen.
The unfortunate reality is that
since the Paleolithic era, human groups have engaged in genocide and environmental
destruction. The only reason
they weren't as good at it as we are is that their tools were more primitive.
The documented decimation of the flora and fauna of New Zealand, Tasmania,
small Pacific islands, and Madagascar by prehistoric human groups was confined
to limited areas. Now our arena is the whole globe. We have a long list of
examples of civilizations ruining their resource base. The
Middle East, center of the ancient world, used to be a lush area of wooded
hills and fertile valleys until thousands of years of deforestation, overgrazing,
erosion, siltation, and salinization converted the area to desert. The shift
of the center of civilization to Greece and then to Rome was accompanied by
similar ecocide.
*******
DESIGN NOTE: IMPORTANT POINT
Neither nostalgia for the past
nor extrapolation from the present offers us much help in thinking about what
human minds might be like in the future.
**********
Apart from the global scope of
modern human activity, another difference between us and the ancients is that
they couldn't read about ecological disasters of the past. We can, so our continuing
to hunt whales and clear tropical rain forests is based on willful blindness,
not ignorance. To quote the author Lionel Tiger, "Those who do not learn
from prehistory are condemned to repeat its successes." We could even
wonder whether there might be a "biology of illusion." Could the
insistent denial of hard reality by human groups be a universal trait that
evolved because, during past human history, it has proved to be adaptive to
be unrealistic and avoid facing what you don't want to know?
Our present industrial cultures,
which reflect the conception of humans as ascendant managers of a separate "nature," do
not contain the seeds of a sustainable future. Rather, they make it easy (if
no less chilling) to imagine our moving even further toward becoming a collection
of disembodied minds in a virtual reality defined by the holding of knowledge
in worldwide computer networks. The technocrats, bio- and otherwise, might
then rule with an arrogant pride that blocks real appreciation of the symbiosis
of humans and the rest of the biosphere. The
150th Anniversary issue of Scientific American, September 1995, has a number
of articles devoted to key technologies of the 21st century. The unspoken assumption
underlying the more than 30 contributions is that humans should manage and
manipulate the geosphere and biosphere to accommodate the ever-increasing numbers
of us on the planet.
A slightly more optimistic view
is that we are moving toward a neobiological civilization in which technology
adapts, learns, and evolves in biological ways and machines become more biological
in character. Organic life
would continue to be the prime infrastructure of human experience of the global
scale, and technological networks might make human culture even more ecologically
sound and evolutionary. Engineered biology and biotechnology would eclipse
the importance of mechanical technology. Our knowledge of the human genome
and mechanisms of brain development would allow us to begin to craft our brains
to the specification we desire. The old-fashioned kind of selection and adaptation
that have shaped most of human history would be tossed out the window.
Although more education and genetic
tinkering would help us address our maladaptive behaviors, any vision of being
able to manage our ecosystems has its detractors. A master plan for saving
the planet requires abstract purposes and central powers that cannot know---and
thus might destroy---the integrity of local nature and local communities. The
new movement of "ecopsychology" tries to soften the edges of the
technocratic approach by emphasizing and arguing for restoration of the bond
between species and the planet. This
movement invokes the biophilia hypothesis: that humans have a deep genetically
based emotional need to affiliate with the rest of the living world---a need
perhaps as important as forming close personal relationships.
Teleological Schemes
As we have seen, then, returning
to the past or extrapolating from the present doesn't give us a very clear
crystal ball. Another way of approaching possible futures has been to employ
teleology, the attribution of some final purpose or goal to natural processes.
Such schemes are offered by many of the world's religions and also in some
scientific forms. The religious options avoid uncertainty, but in some cases
they do so with a fundamentalism that can stifle, allowing little room to revise
and refine one's positions. Outside the traditional religions, some writers
try to claim the authority of science by spinning stories of the evolution
of mind that parallel the evolution of the universe, with a beginning and an
end. The end of the evolution
of mind is usually described as a dropping away of the ego, so that everyone,
not just a few of the wise, attains enlightenment, and in a brilliant flash
the minds of many become one; union with "larger mind" is made. These
writers sometimes suggest or make reference to an Anthropic Cosmological Principle:
that the universe exists and evolves so that it can know itself. Other writers
suggest the existence of long-range resonance or connection between physical
entities. Their scientific
trappings notwithstanding, these cosmic scenarios are essentially religious,
and for some advocates of new-age enlightenment, they have replaced the storylines
of conventional religions.
One version of the new-age creed
professes that if we could only break the fetters of our false selves and see
through our socially conditioned illusions, then a transcendent self would
emerge in its final glorious form. This faith in some sort of innate, benign
unfolding of wisdom or inner perfectibility to come is analogous to nostalgia
about a golden age long gone. Unfortunately, our minds are as likely to harbor
deceit, suspicion, paranoia, and aggression as parts of their intrinsic original
nature as they are to evince curiosity, generosity, and love. Many of our less
desirable features are a read-out of our Paleolithic minds; they enhanced our
survival then, even if they are less adaptive now.
It seems unlikely that human egos
have seen the last of the batterings they have undergone through history. Greek
science through Copernicus made all matter subject to the same laws, the Darwinian
revolution identified humans as derivative of animals, Freudian psychology
and modern neuroscience put humans under the domination of fundamental drives,
and now modern technology is increasingly subordinating humans to machines. There
are signs in many contexts that the coupling of humans and machines in a virtual
reality has begun to replace real life. Shopping
malls contain computer games that completely enclose us in a computer visual
world that we can manipulate with our head and hands, a very sophisticated
version of arcade games. In Tokyo, sensorama machines invite the overstressed
worker to crawl in and be transported into a soothing physical environment
with massage, sound, music, and smell---perhaps giving the body physiology
for a moment the Paleolithic social and endocrine environment it desires! The
extreme of this trend would be for the social body to be rendered obsolete,
as telecommunications replace physical contact and vastly diminish the sense
of community among humans.
*******
DESIGN NOTE: IMPORTANT POINT
The increasing integration of humans
and their machines can lead to the unsettling vision of completely merging
our individual identities into the virtual reality of technology and computer
networks.
**********
The Theme of Encapsulation
The theme of encapsulation of lower
by higher levels of organization that we have traced throughout this book,
continuing through the transitions of hominid evolution, can be carried on
to the description of larger and larger group "minds." Each new level
of integration reached by human culture has retained vestiges of its previous
forms. We might consider an emerging stage to be a planetary consciousness,
reflected by portable telephones that can be used anywhere on the earth's surface
to reach any telephone number in the world. Each small component of this total
ensemble thinks it has purpose and uses models of the past to structure its
activities, even while it is really performing in a new order that has emerged.
(Examples might include maintaining the form of nation-states, even though
political and economic control has passed to a worldwide network of corporations,
and maintaining the form of universities, even though an increasing fraction
of new ideas and techniques are being developed elsewhere). The outcome of
the whole is described only with statistics. This could be pictured as a return
to symbiotic unity, a confluence of humans with the environment like that which
prevailed at the beginning of human evolution---a cycling of human history.
We fantasize that we are in control of our human institutions, corporations,
and governments, just as Paleolithic humans thought their magic rituals appeased
and regulated the behavior of the gods.
The Evolution of Evolution
Are there useful rules for change?
Can we describe how a future human mind might be shaped, even if we can't specify
the outcome of the process? This is equivalent to asking whether our picture
of evolutionary processes is clear enough to be a real, operational model of
them. The description of many of these processes has been one thread running
through this book; to offer a brief summary is probably the best we can do
to suggest not the form a future human mind and its environment will take,
but rather how it may get there. Recall
how, in the first chapter, we saw that to make predictions, we need not just
general laws but also details about the circumstances under which those laws
are acting. The one idea that seems to unite all complex adaptive systems,
be they temperate forests, eyeballs, developing kangaroos, or tidal pools,
is that of the Darwin Machine, which can be applied to all levels of physical,
biological, and cultural organization. Stable entities that can reproduce themselves---whether
macromolecules, organisms, or cultures---are modified as new variations are
tested from generation to generation.
The study of complex adaptive systems
has revealed that they share a number of features. Many
are descriptions of how a Darwin Machine must work. Complex systems are distributed
over a multitude of smaller units, and control rises from the bottom-up interaction
of these units. Growth occurs by chunking, adding small new parts or changes
and testing them. Some of these innovations originally arise as errors, and
the small number that make the system work better are preserved. The survival
and reproduction of complex structures requires that they serve many goals.
Changes that serve one goal superbly may compromise the achievement of another,
so that the actual course taken is to satisfy a multitude of functions in a
way that seldom optimizes any one but serves all "well enough." Too
much constancy and too much change are both a bad thing. Systems that endure
are stable enough to hold together but also are poised so close to the edge
of instability that adaptive change can occur. Finally, the survival of a system
such as an animal species clearly can depend on accident and luck. If our species
had existed about 60 million years ago and had been confined to the Yucatan
peninsula, the asteroid impact that contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs
would surely have taken us too.
*******
DESIGN NOTE: IMPORTANT POINT
Perhaps the most heated debate
in current thinking about evolution is over the relative importance of adaptation
and Darwin Machines versus chance, accident, and the structural constraints
inherent in complicated systems.
**********
The least-understood aspect of
evolutionary theory, and the one perhaps most important to thinking about the
future of human minds, is how change changes itself---how change can enhance
the ability to adapt. We touched on this issue in Chapter 6, when we discussed
the evolution of plasticity in development of the nervous system. Animals that
have more options in their design space are more likely to hit on adaptive
tricks, so selection pressure favors genetic variation that permits even more
flexibility. This is one way of changing the rules for changing entities over
time. The speed of cultural evolution may have substantially reduced the importance
of this mechanism, such that there probably is no longer significant natural
selection for genetic differences in brain design. Are
we, however, about to enter another realm of changing how change occurs---using
our prowess in manipulating genes to direct the evolution of ourselves and
other organisms in the biosphere? Or will evolution proceed mainly at the level
of our complex symbolic artifacts, with computer networks and virtual realities
evolving to change how they change themselves?
Summary---The Mind's Biology
This brings us to the end of our
attempt to trace some linkages among brain, body, and world and to see how
our individual minds form through their confluence. We have now completed a
trek through many topics germane to an understanding of the biology of mind.
We started with the assertion that consciousness arises from the activity of
neurons, and then we outlined evolutionary arguments that suggest we understand,
in principle, how complicated brains may have evolved. After describing these
plausible stages in the evolution of animal and human minds, we arrived at
our own linguistic minds, whose plastic development and modular function we
examined in several chapters. We now have a clearer picture of our conscious
experience as a supra-individual biological phenomenon. This is because the
construction of our brains during development draws not only on genetic instructions
but also on programming from our physical and cultural environments. The fine
details of the nerve circuits and muscles we use depend on many cultural factors,
including the set of sounds emitted by our particular language and whether
we are a musician, a scholar, a farmer, or an athlete. We all manage the amazing
feat of growing brains and minds that can spin a story of the sort that has
unfolded in this book, a story of different encapsulated minds that weave selves
that strive for the certainty of a storyline or myth---a process aware of itself
that is unique in the natural world we know.
We have to be impressed by the
insatiable curiosity that our human species shows, by our desire to explain
things. We seem hungry in particular for mechanical explanations, for "theories
of everything" that protect us from having to admit the possibility that
much of the way we are is due to the chance and accident of our particular
history---that things might well have gone very differently. We strain to understand,
and write books with titles like Biology of Mind, Consciousness Explained,
and How the Mind Works, all of which promise more than they can deliver. The
accounts offered by all these books will seem quaint and primitive in just
a few years. In our rush to understand, we continually try to patch things
together by skipping important steps. Just as evolutionary psychology criticized
the sociobiology that preceded it for leapfrogging over evolved psychological
mechanisms to explain culture, it can itself be faulted for assuming a detailed
innate basis for evolved behavioral modules without considering fundamental
information about the evolution of neurophysiological and neuroendocrine systems
underlying face detection circuits, autonomic and emotional behaviors, pair
bonding, social interactions, and so on.
Our evolutionary history has provided
us with minds that quest for novelty and explanations, minds that invent myths,
religions, and science to help us understand our world and placate our hyperactive
imaginations. Our human purpose and conscious awareness are able to sample
only a fraction of that world. The insights of modern neuroscience, as well
as the mystical insights of the major religious traditions, point to an intelligence
much greater than the narrative chatter in our heads. As powerful as our analytic
mind has proved in probing the depths of our conscious experience, we don't
want to slight the larger mind that generates poetry, music, art, fantasy,
and an intuitive sense of wholeness. We are plunging, biotechnocratically,
into a brave new world, and we must ask what this world is worth if we lose
our sense of the whole of our human intelligence and compassion.
The best we can do as individuals
is strive for the sort of awareness that permits our minds to appreciate both
the selves that they generate and the relativity of those selves, and to feel
a resulting sympathy toward self and others. We can aspire to a poise, or process,
that presents a logical stance for addressing the sorts of questions raised
in this book on mind, as well as for dealing with larger social issues. It
permits us to face the dissonance between a psychology that, having evolved
under conditions that no longer prevail, can be xenophobic and genocidal and
the modern society of minds that we now know ourselves to be. This dissonance
mandates the evolution of new procedures for transcending our Paleolithic minds.
Let's end this book with a sentence
from its Preface: "Each of us is a society of minds that emerge from our
evolutionary history and from the way our brains form as we grow up in a particular
natural ecology and cultural setting." It is through understanding these
details, and their relativity, that we have some prospect for guiding our future
in an intelligent way.
Questions for Thought
1. A theme throughout this book
has been that growing brains adapt to their particular physical and social
environments, such that we might expect the brain of a preliterate Stone Age
tribesman to be physically different from that of a biblical scholar. What
functional areas would you expect to find in the latter that are not present
in the former?
2. Human working memory is extremely
limited in its capacity. How has its operation been influenced by the advent
of external memory stores, libraries, and databases?
3 This chapter presents the model
that in each of us, a series of semi-independent intelligences perform in parallel:
episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic, with more recent stages predominating
most of the time, but not always. An alternative view is that later stages
may have so thoroughly intruded on and patterned the earlier ones during development
that such a model is not useful. This perspective would deny the validity of
comparing our episodic intelligence, for example, to that of a chimpanzee.
What is your view of this?
4. We have physiologies and emotional
economies that are adaptations to conditions of the Paleolithic and that are
sometimes inappropriately engaged or excited in modern contexts. What techniques,
perspectives, or procedures would you suggest for dealing with this mismatch
between our ancient and modern selves?
\eql\
Suggestions for further reading
Donald, M.D. 1991. Origins of the
Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The discussion in this
chapter of the transition from mythic to theoretic intelligence follows Donald's
outline. More detailed critiques of Donald's ideas are aired in Donald, M.
1993. Multiple book review of Origins of the Modern Mind. Behavioral Brain
Science 16:737--791.
Diamond, J. 1992. The Third Chimpanzee.
New York: HarperCollins. This book gives an account of the ecological consequences
of the rapid spread of humans across the planet in the past 50,000 years.
Wilson, E.O. 1998. Consilience.
The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf. Wilson suggests that the integrative
insights that have unified science, from physics through evolutionary biology,
will be extended to include the humanities and social sciences.
Kelly, K. 1994. Out of Control:
The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. This
is a vision of the future in which the decentralized controls characteristic
of living organisms and brain processes become models for post--Industrial
Age global technologies.
Lifton, R.J. 1993. The Protean
Self---Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. New York: Basic Books.
One of several recent books that discuss the mental poise and flexibility necessary
to face the flux of modern life.
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