Thanks for an interesting read. You mention the possible importance of pregnancy and childbirth a few times and I suggest you focus a lot more attention there. Giving birth is a literal process of externalizing and becoming intimately acquainted with what was previously an internal presence/reality. When my daughter was born, there was a brief but significant period of time when it required effort for me to distinguish our realities. Was her hand resting on her cheek or my cheek? Or was it my hand on my cheek after all? I suspect that everything about pregnancy, birth, and infant care is ripe for the production of startling insights into consciousness.🌼
Thanks for your engagement with my comment. Now that you've encouraged me, I will say also that I am very skeptical of anything posed as a distinction that sets humanity apart from the rest of creation. One by one, I have watched them fall (language, tools, etc.) that were presented to me in childhood as proof that humanity was special. I was skeptical even then because it was evident to me that language exists and extends far beyond humanity. My point being that, even if, against my better judgement", I accept that thinking about thinking sets us apart somehow, I'm left confused and have taken to pondering the motives of those who find such exceptionalism necessary. I see it as the imperial mind at work. So, thinking about thinking is one of my favorite pastimes and I'm pretty sure there's a Buddha whale out there somewhere who far surpasses me in her observation. 🌼
I'm honestly a bit of a minority in this space painting a chasm between humans and animals. See for example the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness which says parrots exhibit "near human-like levels of consciousness". But many of these same people say recursion is necessary for consciousness. And it would be strange to me if recursion was so widespread in the animal kingdom given what kind of other behaviors it allows.
Many of the researchers themselves are vegetarian, so IMO if there is a bias it is probably to make animals more like us.
I suspect that parrots, like humans, have the capacity for recursion but can only realize it through learning language. Alex the parrot famously asked his trainer "What color am I?", setting him apart from every non-human primate that humans have tried to teach (sign) language as none of them have ever asked a question.
I suspect that the observation that children's brains are wired for language acquisition has a lot to do with it. The self is a central concept in our language, and while recursion specifically might not result from the language-acquiring brain structure in isolation, the fact that we then fit it into a self-shaped mold through language probably makes the development of the self an inevitability. Birds must also have similar brain structures that can be molded that way, given how they evolved with complex songs and vocalizations.
I think of language as an invention, like the bicycle. A very high intelligence is required to create it, but once it exists, using it is comparatively trivial, provided that you have the right predisposition; a brain to interpret complex communication, or a body that can hold the steering wheel and pedal the bike. It's somewhat counterintuitive that the more intelligent of the birds can 'ride our bicycle' towards self-awareness while other primates can't, but ride it they can.
Incidentally, parents appear to instinctively remove the self from communication with their children. "Mommy can't play right now, mommy needs to work" versus "I can't play right now, I need to work". Could you imagine a mother saying the latter to their four-year-old? Do they have an intuition for when a child understands the word 'I'?
Pallas, like yourself I've tried to train myself to recognize human exceptionalism baked into common worldviews or explanations. Not just the old mindset of "look how we're better/special" but also the more subtle ways in which we can tend to ascribe human-like attributes or destiny to the fundamental forces of the universe or the evolution of life on Earth.
That said, it is fair to highlight how a species differs from all the others in its family, and for our hominid lineage one must acknowledge the affinity and aptitude for culture as a (I would say 'the') main differentiator. And what seems to be unique about this differentiator is that it created the auto-catalytic cycle of culture-led gene/culture coevolution, amplifying that differentiating factor into our evolved form.
To me that does seem to qualify as a pretty exceptional dynamic (not implying the resulting homo sap. form is better of course). On those grounds I submit it would not necessarily be simple exceptionalism to expect that some fairly unique characteristics would have evolved into our psychology.
I've debated a bit with Andrew on other posts of his and don't necessarily buy the Vectors portrait of how our minds are different but my hubris-conscience is clear when it comes to accepting that whatever story is actually the right one, it must be pretty fantastical.
PS: you are teasing us with your substack :-). I went there looking forward to seeing more of your thoughts, but alas just a placeholder for now. I'll be patient.....
Yes. As I suggested elsewhere to Andrew, we have every right to take our own case seriously; to be in awe of the miracle that we are. I just want us to get very good at spotting all the subtle ways that empire operates to keep us locked inside its might makes right worldview.
Thanks so much for your engagement with my comment and your encouragement of my writing. I think I'm pretty close to having my first piece ready. These forays into other people's writing helps me find my courage.
I'm something like 80% with you on this. But there's still something to explain: Why are we so overwhelmingly dominant? If there were an all-out war between chimpanzees and humans, for instance, the chimps wouldn't stand a chance. Not even vaguely close.
Humans have long used this fact to pretend that we're BEYOND nature, which I agree is wrongheaded. A lot of our inclination to exploit nature as though we're not part of it comes from this glitch in thinking. But at the same time, there really super obviously IS a difference of SOME kind. It seems worth asking what causes that.
Are you panpsychist? That was my first inclination after when having the idea that self-awareness was a realization. It just seems a bit weird that there would be nothing and then something. I can go for a phase change but literally 0-1 seems a bit much.
Only very vague outlines so far. I hope that understanding what makes us human will also help us understand what nature has.
I THINK I'm panpsychist. I'm not sure what that whole view entails. But what bits I've been able to gather? Yeah. Basically it seems to me like the hard problem of consciousness is a framing problem, like "If everything is made out of 3rd-person stuff, how does the 1st-person perspective get constructed?" And I've mostly come to conclude there's something wrong with the premise.
I think asking what makes us human can give us a deeper understanding of nature so long as the motive for our question is not to set ourselves outside of nature.
Does it really make sense to call a species consciously hurling towards it's own extinction dominant?
I think our desire to be dominant comes from the might makes right worldview of our infancy. I also think our understanding of what makes us human and/or exceptional grows as we mature.
I'm not saying we shouldn't take our own case seriously. We are, after all, the ones having this conversation. I am saying that our survival might depend on us shedding our exceptionalism and stepping into a more humble and interdependent view of ourselves as members of the kinship of creation.
Yes, it absolutely does make sense to call such a species dominant. Dominant doesn't mean "wise" or "context aware". It means "has more power". We wouldn't be CAPABLE of consciously hurling towards our own extinction if we weren't so utterly overwhelmingly powerful.
It's like at some point roughly 12kya we suddenly stopped acting like a native Earth species and started acting like an INVASIVE species.
None of this is to say that humans are BETTER, or that we're separate from nature. Nor is it to say that humility isn't critical for our ongoing survival.
I'm saying that humility isn't a reason to ignore the fact that we are, in fact, really absurdly weird in a pretty critical way. That there's something to explain there. This isn't a matter of pride. It's a simple matter of fact.
"at some point roughly 12kya we suddenly stopped acting like a native Earth species and started acting like an INVASIVE species"
I would clarify that every species ever tries to be invasive. All are equally driven by the genetic imperative. What is called an invasive species today is just a species that, through some contingent events, landed in some other ecosystem lacking counter-balancing forces.
In that view, homo sap. are not more intrinsically motivated than any other species to spread / take over, we're just better at it than any other large animals.
Thanks for clarifying. We are dominant in the sense that we are making huge things happen. But, if the next virus wipes us out, will it then be dominant? I guess, I'm just not finding the distinction useful. Although, I do use it to talk about our "dominant" culture so maybe I'm being inconsistent.
I like your description of us as "really absurdly weird" and agree that humility is no reason not to wonder how we ended up behaving so invasively. In fact, humility gives us every reason to wonder exactly that.
May 10, 2023·edited May 10, 2023Liked by Andrew Cutler
Thinking like this is one of my major interests. I began a serialized bunch of posts on things related to this - although I cannot write as well as you do about the mythology. But please keep writing - this is really compelling.
From A Cross-Species Neuroimaging Study of Sex Chromosome Dosage Effects on Human and Mouse Brain Anatomy: "Total brain size was substantially altered by SCT in humans (significantly decreased by XXY and increased by XYY), but not in mice. Robust and spatially convergent effects of XXY and XYY on regional brain volume were observed in humans, but not mice, when controlling for global volume differences."
Or from Globally Divergent but Locally Convergent X- and Y-Chromosome Influences on Cortical Development: "The presence of a negative relationship between X dose and brain size—regardless of gonadal sex—is consistent with direct regulation of human brain size by X-chromosome-specific (i.e., non-PAR) genes that escape X-inactivation (Carrel and Willard 2005) although could potentially also arise through mechanisms that are independent of X-chromosome gene content."
I don't know what to make of the snake cult theory, but I think it's very plausible that women became self-reflective before men did. Anecdotally, they seem to engage in this behaviour more, and they are slightly more likely to report having an "inner voice" compared to men.
Any thoughts about how (if?) it relates to autism? I've stumbled upon a few years old comment thread on Reddit, with claims... well, I'll quote
> 1/ We're supposed to lack introspection? I'm literally in a constant state of trying to psychoanalyze myself lol.
> 2/ Direct self-insight. Cognition isn't impaired, which is exactly why you're in that constant state.
> 3/ Could you explain the difference between direct self-insight and introspection?
> 4/ There is a lot of evidence that autistic people have less ability to read others. It seems that this disability extends to the self as well, which is what the OP was trying to say: lacking direct ability to perceive your own state/motives, you end up in some kind of intellectual self-psychoanalysis loop which isn't what typically developed people need to do .
> In a twisted way, this is exactly why therapists say that autistic people lack introspection: they know that autistic people have difficulties understanding others and the self, so it stands to reason that despite their arguably greater efforts to introspection, whatever psychological conclusions they generate of themselves or others aren't necessarily any good.
The distinction between self-insight and introspection is interesting. One thing I've noticed about autistic people is if you ask them a preference (eg. want some water?) they have to think about it longer.
On the origins of Autism. If I had to guess Neanderthals were more autistic and those that left Africa were more Schizophrenic. Scott Alexander writes about the (speculative) case for an autism-schizophrenia spectrum. At any rate, those genes wouldn't have done the same thing before "I" was a constant feature as was the case 50 kya. But on some level the two populations were probably more "autistic" and "schizophrenic" even before "I". Some effects linger today. In the USA, for example, rates of schizophrenia are 3x as high among African Americans.
There's also the possibility that the downside of recursion is less for women than men. In a tribal context being the physically weaker sex would probably make it much less necessary for a schizophrenic woman to be expelled or killed than a man. Just speculating though, I have no idea if there are different reproductive rates among male and female schizophrenics in the modern day.
IIRC the modern fitness penalty mostly applies to males. It also makes sense that male schizophrenia would cause more problems, given that men are killing machines (especially in those days). It's significant to me that in some versions Herakles goes mad and kills his children *after* he accomplishes his tasks (which I see as a retelling of The Ritual).
You considered one aspect of the creation story in which you postulate that science agrees that eve achieved consciousness before Adam. How about the rest? From the dust of the earth made he them. Which dust and where? Just like all cultures have snakes they also have a flood reference. Is there just a possibility that man included individuals from every continent on earth? That has a greater probability of being true than some anti-biological position that dominant genes, like those of the Chinese, evolved from recessive ones. It would also explain differences in race, eye color, and other differences. Adam was created by God, the Bible does not say that he is the only one.
About 10,000-15,000 years ago ocean levels rose 100 meters. A few inches a year wouldn't be catastrophic, but it could have been if, for example, an ice sheet was holding back a lake near the Black Sea which then collapsed. So I'm sympathetic to some catastrophic flooding, which should leave marks and would definitely be preserved in myth. I also think that non-catastrophic flooding could produce these myths. It's an interesting line of research, IMO.
Another aspect that I'm open to Genesis being right on is Adam naming the animals while in the Garden. Even before humans were reflective or had recursive language they would have had an encyclopedic knowledge of plants and animals. This would have been a big use of language, especially for hunters like Adam.
Your question of where races comes from is part of the multi-regionalism vs Out of Africa debate (though in practice researchers really exist on a spectrum between the two). IIRC homo sapiens (and maybe other archaic homonims) in China have had shovel-shaped incisors for a tens of thousands of years (hundreds of thousands?). There is a lot of debate about how important that continuity is. EToC holds that the continuity is not incidental. Hope that answers "Is there just a possibility that man included individuals from every continent on earth?"
"... an ice sheet was holding back a lake near the Black Sea which then collapsed." This actually happened, but it was in Canada about 13,000 years ago. I have read speculation that this event is the source of world-wide flood mythology. See -
It's just "hey, we used to be a peninsula, and now we are an island." When Graham Hancock and crew talk about a "global flood" they tend to mix that in with their catastrophic flood in North America.
Thanks. Very interesting. Any one who’s observed children even at elementary age can see that girls brains are much given over to social positions and alliances. But that’s true in most social animals. Female dogs are judges of human competence whereas males are not!
What do you think of Elaine Morgan’s theory that children are evolutionary drivers of traits such as language (in her book Ascent of the Child)? Inter sibling competition is non negligible in survival to reproduction.
The preference for agonic display of intelligence from males (GSOH) had been made much of too in evopsych. Women making each other laugh is a big tool of friendship consolidation and same sex peer preference at most developmental stages suggests that’s not as simple as “big peacock tail energy”
One of my favorite studies has people estimate the heritability of different attributes. The group that does the best are mothers with 2 or more children. All these academics can make claims about nature vs nurture but nothing is as good as watching children grow.
Regarding human burial, this article makes a great case of it evolving biologically for the purposes of signalling to predator animals that we weren't food (by them never having a successful experience of eating one of us, even as an already-dead corpse). So it could have a much simpler mechanism than anything clearly spiritual.
Interesting! It seems a lot of this hinges on how far back burial goes. If it emerged in the last 100k years then odds are it was a spiritual/symbolic intuition. But if burial is millions of years old then it probably wasn't about abstractions and could have been ingrained the old-fashioned way, long, hard selection.
Overall I wish that archeologists had an equivalent of the IGM forum, which asks a bunch of economists topical questions so the public can understand the distribution of expert beliefs. (https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/us-economic-experts-panel/)
So I’m wondering where you think the mirror test for self awareness fits in here. To recognize “self” one needs a self symbol, thus recursion. Cetaceans, many primates and some birds easily pass the mirror test for recursion. If on the other hand, we are considering an audio “self” or name, then the list might change some. Recursion can occur different ways.
I'm thinking the mirror test is evidence of body awareness, which I suppose doesn't require having a self. As you say, many can pass the test. It would be strange to me if recursion were so widely distributed and yet none of the other recursive styles of thinking (eg. art, duality) are apparent. Could be there is lower and higher recursion, or even a gradient. Many people (at least implicitly) argue for something like this. I'm staking out the most naive, barbaric position of only humans having it.
In general, the self as understood by the mirror test incorporates the visual, proprioceptive, and tactile systems because part of the test is painting a spot on the test subject while they're asleep and seeing if they try to touch it or rub it off once they're awake and see it.
As for the fidelity of the self symbol and recognition system, sure, we sapiens are quite a bit more accurate in our internal representations. As for our songs, sculpture, stories, paintings, crafts, tools and whatnot, we're not unique, except for our propensity to do all of them, well, and talk about them, write about them, sculpt them, or paint them.
As for perceptive changes, and how language ties to these skills, Julian Jaynes made a case in his work starting with "The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind". He uses the color blue as an example, partly because of its absence in certain ancient texts. That time frame sort of fits with part of your thesis - that some aspects of feedback/recursion may have emerged more recently. This leaves me wondering if the case laid out is stronger with respect to language and our symbolic representations contained in it.
This mindwalk has me wondering if you might be considering the emergence of language that describes consciousness/self reference? That's a bit more meta. Maybe that's what you're getting at?
Andrew, I love how you pulled all of this together. Very profound, interesting and helpful. I guess we will have to see how these speculations hold out and whether it is possible to validate them—tricky given the nature of history.
This is not the first time I have heard of the concept of women achieving consciousness before men, though it is the first with a more solid backing of scientific reasoning. The first time I might have heard the concept was via Jordan Peterson in his Biblical series of lectures. In one of his lectures, he brings up one of your points, that of women needing consciousness to effectively take care of vulnerable infants. He also talks about the physical vulnerability of women (and therefore sexual vulnerability) due to the difference in strength between men and women. Both of these could be reasons women achieving consciousness earlier then men.
Anyway, what you have written is a more thorough investigation of the topic, and I found it very interesting and helpful.
If you are interested in what Peterson specifically said, the lecture is at this link, starting from where he is talking about the topic. (He goes all over the place, so it is worth going back a bit if you want more context): https://youtu.be/Ifi5KkXig3s?t=6394
And I have extracted the corresponding part of the transcript, below. Keep in mind that this is an unscripted lecture. I find listening more effective than reading his material.
"The snake’s eternally associated with the tree. We spent God only knows how many tens of millions of years as tree-dwelling primates, and we had three primary predators: snakes, birds, cats. And so the snake has been associated with the tree for a very, very long time. The lesson the snake tells people is, you bloody better well wake up, or something you don't like will get you. And who’s going to be most susceptible to paying attention to the snake? That’s going to be Eve. The reason for that is that Eve has offspring, and there’s nothing tastier to a snake than a child."
"Eve had every reason to be self-conscious and neurotic. Women are more self-conscious and neurotic by men than quite a substantial amount. That’s true cross-culturally, and it emerges at puberty, and part of the reason—as far as we can tell—is women are more sexually vulnerable. They’re also smaller. So that's a problem if you're engaged in any physical altercation. But most importantly is, why would you ever assume that a human female’s nervous system is adapted to her or her well-being? Why wouldn’t you assume, instead, that her nervous system is adapted to the female-infant dyad? Because if it isn’t, then the infants die. And so you might think, well, women are way more susceptible to depression and anxiety than men are. That's a hell of burden to bear, and that's also true cross-culturally, by the way, and it also kicks in at puberty."
"...there’s reasons for it, and it’s also at puberty that men and women start to become sexually dimorphic in terms of size. Men are way more powerful in their upper bodies. It’s incomparably more powerful, and so that makes them a lot more dangerous. The primary human defense mechanism is punching, like with kangaroos. There's some other animals that can punch. Chimps can punch, too, but human beings punch, and most of the force in that is upper body and shoulder, and so a woman is no match for a man in a fight. She has every reason to be nervous, especially when you add to that her additional sexual vulnerability and the fact that she has to take care of extraordinarily dependent infants, who are extremely fragile for a very long period of time. And women are more self-conscious than men. The empirical literature on that is clear. It’s associated with trait neuroticism, because self-consciousness is actually an unpleasant emotion. Who wants to be self-conscious? If I'm self-conscious on the stage while I’m talking to you, then all of a sudden I can't even talk to you. All I'm doing is thinking about me and all the things that are wrong with me, and I fall inside myself. Self-consciousness, although it’s a great gift, is nothing pleasant. It’s associated, primarily, with anxiety."
"6,000 years ago around 95% of all male lineages died out." such a proposed consciousness dimorphism may not be sex chromosome linked directly though, this would possibly confound falsification if not allowed for, it would answer the question that basically women choose men who did more than grunt
Where else does dimorphism come from? Are there some gestational differences? I understand it's a bit more of a lift to turn down the mother's immune system for a male child (given that it is more obviously not her). Just trying to get a ballbark of how much dimorphism is due to sex chromosomes.
yeah, true, but say it's on the X chromosone, but you need two copies for there to be a noticeable difference early on in the population/s where this arises, so males do not have the feature,even if they are a carrier, and the same with females who only have one copy, any advantage is thus a little confounded, especially if you want a mate to talk things through with, and we are humans mostly because we have meetings, ( we may have had meetings before we were internally recursive is my guess)(otherwise what is being recurved?) and so more chatty types will become more attractive (and more able to pass on worldbuilding cultural activities)(air-headed chatty pixies are more attractive even to introverted trolls like me), but they are going to be alone a lot of the time, at first, [[[[[much like women are now more educated (here in Australia women lawyers are in majority in some states) and they are in fact less likely to reproduce... until the men catch up???]]]] that's confounding, the advantage does not lead to reproductive success, I'm not talking about the strict logic of selfish genes as being confounding by the sex chromosomes so much, (…. it was just a badly thought out comment), but their reality in arising in the world (fitness landscapes as colonised/re-shaped by niche construction in cultural traditions). So there has to be a context where the advantage is not lonely. Ever so lonely. I could cry.
Thanks for an interesting read. You mention the possible importance of pregnancy and childbirth a few times and I suggest you focus a lot more attention there. Giving birth is a literal process of externalizing and becoming intimately acquainted with what was previously an internal presence/reality. When my daughter was born, there was a brief but significant period of time when it required effort for me to distinguish our realities. Was her hand resting on her cheek or my cheek? Or was it my hand on my cheek after all? I suspect that everything about pregnancy, birth, and infant care is ripe for the production of startling insights into consciousness.🌼
That is really fascinating! Very much in line with “we built models of other minds and consciousness is when the map became the territory”
Pregnancy is a period of brain reorganization, it’s interesting to see it described as consciousness expanding like you have
Thanks for your engagement with my comment. Now that you've encouraged me, I will say also that I am very skeptical of anything posed as a distinction that sets humanity apart from the rest of creation. One by one, I have watched them fall (language, tools, etc.) that were presented to me in childhood as proof that humanity was special. I was skeptical even then because it was evident to me that language exists and extends far beyond humanity. My point being that, even if, against my better judgement", I accept that thinking about thinking sets us apart somehow, I'm left confused and have taken to pondering the motives of those who find such exceptionalism necessary. I see it as the imperial mind at work. So, thinking about thinking is one of my favorite pastimes and I'm pretty sure there's a Buddha whale out there somewhere who far surpasses me in her observation. 🌼
I'm honestly a bit of a minority in this space painting a chasm between humans and animals. See for example the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness which says parrots exhibit "near human-like levels of consciousness". But many of these same people say recursion is necessary for consciousness. And it would be strange to me if recursion was so widespread in the animal kingdom given what kind of other behaviors it allows.
Many of the researchers themselves are vegetarian, so IMO if there is a bias it is probably to make animals more like us.
I suspect that parrots, like humans, have the capacity for recursion but can only realize it through learning language. Alex the parrot famously asked his trainer "What color am I?", setting him apart from every non-human primate that humans have tried to teach (sign) language as none of them have ever asked a question.
I suspect that the observation that children's brains are wired for language acquisition has a lot to do with it. The self is a central concept in our language, and while recursion specifically might not result from the language-acquiring brain structure in isolation, the fact that we then fit it into a self-shaped mold through language probably makes the development of the self an inevitability. Birds must also have similar brain structures that can be molded that way, given how they evolved with complex songs and vocalizations.
I think of language as an invention, like the bicycle. A very high intelligence is required to create it, but once it exists, using it is comparatively trivial, provided that you have the right predisposition; a brain to interpret complex communication, or a body that can hold the steering wheel and pedal the bike. It's somewhat counterintuitive that the more intelligent of the birds can 'ride our bicycle' towards self-awareness while other primates can't, but ride it they can.
Incidentally, parents appear to instinctively remove the self from communication with their children. "Mommy can't play right now, mommy needs to work" versus "I can't play right now, I need to work". Could you imagine a mother saying the latter to their four-year-old? Do they have an intuition for when a child understands the word 'I'?
Pallas, like yourself I've tried to train myself to recognize human exceptionalism baked into common worldviews or explanations. Not just the old mindset of "look how we're better/special" but also the more subtle ways in which we can tend to ascribe human-like attributes or destiny to the fundamental forces of the universe or the evolution of life on Earth.
That said, it is fair to highlight how a species differs from all the others in its family, and for our hominid lineage one must acknowledge the affinity and aptitude for culture as a (I would say 'the') main differentiator. And what seems to be unique about this differentiator is that it created the auto-catalytic cycle of culture-led gene/culture coevolution, amplifying that differentiating factor into our evolved form.
To me that does seem to qualify as a pretty exceptional dynamic (not implying the resulting homo sap. form is better of course). On those grounds I submit it would not necessarily be simple exceptionalism to expect that some fairly unique characteristics would have evolved into our psychology.
I've debated a bit with Andrew on other posts of his and don't necessarily buy the Vectors portrait of how our minds are different but my hubris-conscience is clear when it comes to accepting that whatever story is actually the right one, it must be pretty fantastical.
PS: you are teasing us with your substack :-). I went there looking forward to seeing more of your thoughts, but alas just a placeholder for now. I'll be patient.....
Yes. As I suggested elsewhere to Andrew, we have every right to take our own case seriously; to be in awe of the miracle that we are. I just want us to get very good at spotting all the subtle ways that empire operates to keep us locked inside its might makes right worldview.
Thanks so much for your engagement with my comment and your encouragement of my writing. I think I'm pretty close to having my first piece ready. These forays into other people's writing helps me find my courage.
I'm something like 80% with you on this. But there's still something to explain: Why are we so overwhelmingly dominant? If there were an all-out war between chimpanzees and humans, for instance, the chimps wouldn't stand a chance. Not even vaguely close.
Humans have long used this fact to pretend that we're BEYOND nature, which I agree is wrongheaded. A lot of our inclination to exploit nature as though we're not part of it comes from this glitch in thinking. But at the same time, there really super obviously IS a difference of SOME kind. It seems worth asking what causes that.
Are you panpsychist? That was my first inclination after when having the idea that self-awareness was a realization. It just seems a bit weird that there would be nothing and then something. I can go for a phase change but literally 0-1 seems a bit much.
Only very vague outlines so far. I hope that understanding what makes us human will also help us understand what nature has.
I THINK I'm panpsychist. I'm not sure what that whole view entails. But what bits I've been able to gather? Yeah. Basically it seems to me like the hard problem of consciousness is a framing problem, like "If everything is made out of 3rd-person stuff, how does the 1st-person perspective get constructed?" And I've mostly come to conclude there's something wrong with the premise.
But I'm more of an idontknowist.
"I might be a panpsychist. But I might be more of an idontknowist."
That's awesome. Permission to use that line the next time somebody asks me if I'm a panpsychist?
I think asking what makes us human can give us a deeper understanding of nature so long as the motive for our question is not to set ourselves outside of nature.
Does it really make sense to call a species consciously hurling towards it's own extinction dominant?
I think our desire to be dominant comes from the might makes right worldview of our infancy. I also think our understanding of what makes us human and/or exceptional grows as we mature.
I'm not saying we shouldn't take our own case seriously. We are, after all, the ones having this conversation. I am saying that our survival might depend on us shedding our exceptionalism and stepping into a more humble and interdependent view of ourselves as members of the kinship of creation.
Yes, it absolutely does make sense to call such a species dominant. Dominant doesn't mean "wise" or "context aware". It means "has more power". We wouldn't be CAPABLE of consciously hurling towards our own extinction if we weren't so utterly overwhelmingly powerful.
It's like at some point roughly 12kya we suddenly stopped acting like a native Earth species and started acting like an INVASIVE species.
None of this is to say that humans are BETTER, or that we're separate from nature. Nor is it to say that humility isn't critical for our ongoing survival.
I'm saying that humility isn't a reason to ignore the fact that we are, in fact, really absurdly weird in a pretty critical way. That there's something to explain there. This isn't a matter of pride. It's a simple matter of fact.
"at some point roughly 12kya we suddenly stopped acting like a native Earth species and started acting like an INVASIVE species"
I would clarify that every species ever tries to be invasive. All are equally driven by the genetic imperative. What is called an invasive species today is just a species that, through some contingent events, landed in some other ecosystem lacking counter-balancing forces.
In that view, homo sap. are not more intrinsically motivated than any other species to spread / take over, we're just better at it than any other large animals.
Thanks for clarifying. We are dominant in the sense that we are making huge things happen. But, if the next virus wipes us out, will it then be dominant? I guess, I'm just not finding the distinction useful. Although, I do use it to talk about our "dominant" culture so maybe I'm being inconsistent.
I like your description of us as "really absurdly weird" and agree that humility is no reason not to wonder how we ended up behaving so invasively. In fact, humility gives us every reason to wonder exactly that.
Thinking like this is one of my major interests. I began a serialized bunch of posts on things related to this - although I cannot write as well as you do about the mythology. But please keep writing - this is really compelling.
Thank you!
women don't get an extra x dosage due to inactivation https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/x-chromosome-x-inactivation-323/
From A Cross-Species Neuroimaging Study of Sex Chromosome Dosage Effects on Human and Mouse Brain Anatomy: "Total brain size was substantially altered by SCT in humans (significantly decreased by XXY and increased by XYY), but not in mice. Robust and spatially convergent effects of XXY and XYY on regional brain volume were observed in humans, but not mice, when controlling for global volume differences."
Or from Globally Divergent but Locally Convergent X- and Y-Chromosome Influences on Cortical Development: "The presence of a negative relationship between X dose and brain size—regardless of gonadal sex—is consistent with direct regulation of human brain size by X-chromosome-specific (i.e., non-PAR) genes that escape X-inactivation (Carrel and Willard 2005) although could potentially also arise through mechanisms that are independent of X-chromosome gene content."
I don't know what to make of the snake cult theory, but I think it's very plausible that women became self-reflective before men did. Anecdotally, they seem to engage in this behaviour more, and they are slightly more likely to report having an "inner voice" compared to men.
Any thoughts about how (if?) it relates to autism? I've stumbled upon a few years old comment thread on Reddit, with claims... well, I'll quote
> 1/ We're supposed to lack introspection? I'm literally in a constant state of trying to psychoanalyze myself lol.
> 2/ Direct self-insight. Cognition isn't impaired, which is exactly why you're in that constant state.
> 3/ Could you explain the difference between direct self-insight and introspection?
> 4/ There is a lot of evidence that autistic people have less ability to read others. It seems that this disability extends to the self as well, which is what the OP was trying to say: lacking direct ability to perceive your own state/motives, you end up in some kind of intellectual self-psychoanalysis loop which isn't what typically developed people need to do .
> In a twisted way, this is exactly why therapists say that autistic people lack introspection: they know that autistic people have difficulties understanding others and the self, so it stands to reason that despite their arguably greater efforts to introspection, whatever psychological conclusions they generate of themselves or others aren't necessarily any good.
The distinction between self-insight and introspection is interesting. One thing I've noticed about autistic people is if you ask them a preference (eg. want some water?) they have to think about it longer.
On the origins of Autism. If I had to guess Neanderthals were more autistic and those that left Africa were more Schizophrenic. Scott Alexander writes about the (speculative) case for an autism-schizophrenia spectrum. At any rate, those genes wouldn't have done the same thing before "I" was a constant feature as was the case 50 kya. But on some level the two populations were probably more "autistic" and "schizophrenic" even before "I". Some effects linger today. In the USA, for example, rates of schizophrenia are 3x as high among African Americans.
A bit of the cultural superconsciousness leaking out in the final moments of the Barbie movie. Kinda weird how appropriate it is given the Eve Theory: https://youtu.be/jxiGNRchawg?si=YLkeip89w_NUOuLV&t=184
Replace the horse with a snake, and you've got about half the world's creation myth.
Fascinating stuff. To adapt a line in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.....You just keep thinking Andrew!
There's also the possibility that the downside of recursion is less for women than men. In a tribal context being the physically weaker sex would probably make it much less necessary for a schizophrenic woman to be expelled or killed than a man. Just speculating though, I have no idea if there are different reproductive rates among male and female schizophrenics in the modern day.
IIRC the modern fitness penalty mostly applies to males. It also makes sense that male schizophrenia would cause more problems, given that men are killing machines (especially in those days). It's significant to me that in some versions Herakles goes mad and kills his children *after* he accomplishes his tasks (which I see as a retelling of The Ritual).
You considered one aspect of the creation story in which you postulate that science agrees that eve achieved consciousness before Adam. How about the rest? From the dust of the earth made he them. Which dust and where? Just like all cultures have snakes they also have a flood reference. Is there just a possibility that man included individuals from every continent on earth? That has a greater probability of being true than some anti-biological position that dominant genes, like those of the Chinese, evolved from recessive ones. It would also explain differences in race, eye color, and other differences. Adam was created by God, the Bible does not say that he is the only one.
About 10,000-15,000 years ago ocean levels rose 100 meters. A few inches a year wouldn't be catastrophic, but it could have been if, for example, an ice sheet was holding back a lake near the Black Sea which then collapsed. So I'm sympathetic to some catastrophic flooding, which should leave marks and would definitely be preserved in myth. I also think that non-catastrophic flooding could produce these myths. It's an interesting line of research, IMO.
Another aspect that I'm open to Genesis being right on is Adam naming the animals while in the Garden. Even before humans were reflective or had recursive language they would have had an encyclopedic knowledge of plants and animals. This would have been a big use of language, especially for hunters like Adam.
Your question of where races comes from is part of the multi-regionalism vs Out of Africa debate (though in practice researchers really exist on a spectrum between the two). IIRC homo sapiens (and maybe other archaic homonims) in China have had shovel-shaped incisors for a tens of thousands of years (hundreds of thousands?). There is a lot of debate about how important that continuity is. EToC holds that the continuity is not incidental. Hope that answers "Is there just a possibility that man included individuals from every continent on earth?"
"... an ice sheet was holding back a lake near the Black Sea which then collapsed." This actually happened, but it was in Canada about 13,000 years ago. I have read speculation that this event is the source of world-wide flood mythology. See -
https://www.livescience.com/31810-big-freeze-flood.html
There's no path for the Canada myth to get to, say, Australia. Could be multiple catastrophic floods inspiring separate stories. But it seems that many must be memories of non-catastrophic flood. Take for example these flood myths in Australia: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-sea-rise-tale-told-accurately-for-10-000-years/
It's just "hey, we used to be a peninsula, and now we are an island." When Graham Hancock and crew talk about a "global flood" they tend to mix that in with their catastrophic flood in North America.
Got the book title wrong “The Descent of the Child”
I used to always do this with Darwin as well. It seems like humans Ascended, but the title is looking back: The Descent of Man.
Lol yep
Thanks. Very interesting. Any one who’s observed children even at elementary age can see that girls brains are much given over to social positions and alliances. But that’s true in most social animals. Female dogs are judges of human competence whereas males are not!
What do you think of Elaine Morgan’s theory that children are evolutionary drivers of traits such as language (in her book Ascent of the Child)? Inter sibling competition is non negligible in survival to reproduction.
The preference for agonic display of intelligence from males (GSOH) had been made much of too in evopsych. Women making each other laugh is a big tool of friendship consolidation and same sex peer preference at most developmental stages suggests that’s not as simple as “big peacock tail energy”
One of my favorite studies has people estimate the heritability of different attributes. The group that does the best are mothers with 2 or more children. All these academics can make claims about nature vs nurture but nothing is as good as watching children grow.
I'm not familiar with Morgan's theory
Regarding human burial, this article makes a great case of it evolving biologically for the purposes of signalling to predator animals that we weren't food (by them never having a successful experience of eating one of us, even as an already-dead corpse). So it could have a much simpler mechanism than anything clearly spiritual.
https://meltingasphalt.com/music-in-human-evolution/
Interesting! It seems a lot of this hinges on how far back burial goes. If it emerged in the last 100k years then odds are it was a spiritual/symbolic intuition. But if burial is millions of years old then it probably wasn't about abstractions and could have been ingrained the old-fashioned way, long, hard selection.
Just learned that ants and termites bury their dead: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/animals-queen-ants-termites-bees-insects-undertakers-bury-dead#:~:text=Ants%2C%20bees%2C%20and%20termites%20all,a%20form%20of%20preventive%20medicine.
And some claim that Homo Naledi (brain 1/3 our size) was burying their dead and etching symbols into caves: https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/06/05/homo-naledi-burial/
Overall I wish that archeologists had an equivalent of the IGM forum, which asks a bunch of economists topical questions so the public can understand the distribution of expert beliefs. (https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/us-economic-experts-panel/)
So I’m wondering where you think the mirror test for self awareness fits in here. To recognize “self” one needs a self symbol, thus recursion. Cetaceans, many primates and some birds easily pass the mirror test for recursion. If on the other hand, we are considering an audio “self” or name, then the list might change some. Recursion can occur different ways.
I'm thinking the mirror test is evidence of body awareness, which I suppose doesn't require having a self. As you say, many can pass the test. It would be strange to me if recursion were so widely distributed and yet none of the other recursive styles of thinking (eg. art, duality) are apparent. Could be there is lower and higher recursion, or even a gradient. Many people (at least implicitly) argue for something like this. I'm staking out the most naive, barbaric position of only humans having it.
In general, the self as understood by the mirror test incorporates the visual, proprioceptive, and tactile systems because part of the test is painting a spot on the test subject while they're asleep and seeing if they try to touch it or rub it off once they're awake and see it.
As for the fidelity of the self symbol and recognition system, sure, we sapiens are quite a bit more accurate in our internal representations. As for our songs, sculpture, stories, paintings, crafts, tools and whatnot, we're not unique, except for our propensity to do all of them, well, and talk about them, write about them, sculpt them, or paint them.
As for perceptive changes, and how language ties to these skills, Julian Jaynes made a case in his work starting with "The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind". He uses the color blue as an example, partly because of its absence in certain ancient texts. That time frame sort of fits with part of your thesis - that some aspects of feedback/recursion may have emerged more recently. This leaves me wondering if the case laid out is stronger with respect to language and our symbolic representations contained in it.
This mindwalk has me wondering if you might be considering the emergence of language that describes consciousness/self reference? That's a bit more meta. Maybe that's what you're getting at?
also, nice big scary post
Andrew, I love how you pulled all of this together. Very profound, interesting and helpful. I guess we will have to see how these speculations hold out and whether it is possible to validate them—tricky given the nature of history.
This is not the first time I have heard of the concept of women achieving consciousness before men, though it is the first with a more solid backing of scientific reasoning. The first time I might have heard the concept was via Jordan Peterson in his Biblical series of lectures. In one of his lectures, he brings up one of your points, that of women needing consciousness to effectively take care of vulnerable infants. He also talks about the physical vulnerability of women (and therefore sexual vulnerability) due to the difference in strength between men and women. Both of these could be reasons women achieving consciousness earlier then men.
Anyway, what you have written is a more thorough investigation of the topic, and I found it very interesting and helpful.
If you are interested in what Peterson specifically said, the lecture is at this link, starting from where he is talking about the topic. (He goes all over the place, so it is worth going back a bit if you want more context): https://youtu.be/Ifi5KkXig3s?t=6394
And I have extracted the corresponding part of the transcript, below. Keep in mind that this is an unscripted lecture. I find listening more effective than reading his material.
"The snake’s eternally associated with the tree. We spent God only knows how many tens of millions of years as tree-dwelling primates, and we had three primary predators: snakes, birds, cats. And so the snake has been associated with the tree for a very, very long time. The lesson the snake tells people is, you bloody better well wake up, or something you don't like will get you. And who’s going to be most susceptible to paying attention to the snake? That’s going to be Eve. The reason for that is that Eve has offspring, and there’s nothing tastier to a snake than a child."
"Eve had every reason to be self-conscious and neurotic. Women are more self-conscious and neurotic by men than quite a substantial amount. That’s true cross-culturally, and it emerges at puberty, and part of the reason—as far as we can tell—is women are more sexually vulnerable. They’re also smaller. So that's a problem if you're engaged in any physical altercation. But most importantly is, why would you ever assume that a human female’s nervous system is adapted to her or her well-being? Why wouldn’t you assume, instead, that her nervous system is adapted to the female-infant dyad? Because if it isn’t, then the infants die. And so you might think, well, women are way more susceptible to depression and anxiety than men are. That's a hell of burden to bear, and that's also true cross-culturally, by the way, and it also kicks in at puberty."
"...there’s reasons for it, and it’s also at puberty that men and women start to become sexually dimorphic in terms of size. Men are way more powerful in their upper bodies. It’s incomparably more powerful, and so that makes them a lot more dangerous. The primary human defense mechanism is punching, like with kangaroos. There's some other animals that can punch. Chimps can punch, too, but human beings punch, and most of the force in that is upper body and shoulder, and so a woman is no match for a man in a fight. She has every reason to be nervous, especially when you add to that her additional sexual vulnerability and the fact that she has to take care of extraordinarily dependent infants, who are extremely fragile for a very long period of time. And women are more self-conscious than men. The empirical literature on that is clear. It’s associated with trait neuroticism, because self-consciousness is actually an unpleasant emotion. Who wants to be self-conscious? If I'm self-conscious on the stage while I’m talking to you, then all of a sudden I can't even talk to you. All I'm doing is thinking about me and all the things that are wrong with me, and I fall inside myself. Self-consciousness, although it’s a great gift, is nothing pleasant. It’s associated, primarily, with anxiety."
"6,000 years ago around 95% of all male lineages died out." such a proposed consciousness dimorphism may not be sex chromosome linked directly though, this would possibly confound falsification if not allowed for, it would answer the question that basically women choose men who did more than grunt
Where else does dimorphism come from? Are there some gestational differences? I understand it's a bit more of a lift to turn down the mother's immune system for a male child (given that it is more obviously not her). Just trying to get a ballbark of how much dimorphism is due to sex chromosomes.
yeah, true, but say it's on the X chromosone, but you need two copies for there to be a noticeable difference early on in the population/s where this arises, so males do not have the feature,even if they are a carrier, and the same with females who only have one copy, any advantage is thus a little confounded, especially if you want a mate to talk things through with, and we are humans mostly because we have meetings, ( we may have had meetings before we were internally recursive is my guess)(otherwise what is being recurved?) and so more chatty types will become more attractive (and more able to pass on worldbuilding cultural activities)(air-headed chatty pixies are more attractive even to introverted trolls like me), but they are going to be alone a lot of the time, at first, [[[[[much like women are now more educated (here in Australia women lawyers are in majority in some states) and they are in fact less likely to reproduce... until the men catch up???]]]] that's confounding, the advantage does not lead to reproductive success, I'm not talking about the strict logic of selfish genes as being confounding by the sex chromosomes so much, (…. it was just a badly thought out comment), but their reality in arising in the world (fitness landscapes as colonised/re-shaped by niche construction in cultural traditions). So there has to be a context where the advantage is not lonely. Ever so lonely. I could cry.
Well I’m operating under the assumption that recursion is coded on many genes. Dozens? Hundreds? Many of which are not in the X.
Yes, I do think it could have been a lonely time when men were still beasts
I think I just made it more sex linked