I think the time frame is way off (I think it is a slow grind in the paleolithic with a noticeable pay-off recently, I don’t think it is “I” arising however, more like “other-I” which magics why we should) but I like the story. It's Sunday and have more time, thanks for writing this.
More thoughts/comments/notes as reading, I jump around a bit:
①"native dualism"
my position is that this is an outcome of the Janus dance, when it doubles-down on it's naive power -- even the yinyang symbol does this, (might be an outcome of bilateral symmetry...? or vice versa??) https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/the-janus-ratio
②"The impulse to make art and search for meaning was not always found in our species. …."
religion/art/performance/rites/routine/plays/staging/fashion/bodypaint/painting are an outcome of the (moral) worlding urge, or if recursively doubled-down it becmes a culture’s passion project as a the “world-building”’reality’(aside: we double-down a lot --- in some French philosophies (Deleuze) this is called intensifying or re-intensifying) this turns a routine into rite, the ritual into a doctrine, and a doctrine into dogma -- the medium of intensification is the social/political space created by the success of the routine in the first place) (if we do this internally we get identitarian politics -- from socially created identities -- unless one is autistic like me of course)
—thus your "Rather, it’s a tic of whatever environments humans have been living in over the last 50,000 years." is correct, the social landscape rather than the terrain mostly (In Australian Aboriginal culture (e.g. tjukurrpa) these are not separated out, they are the world,
③"Time gobbles up evidence. " we have to create a taphonomy of our social landscapes and strip back the intensifications (social ontologies, dogma, identities, build worlds) and see how they fossilise themselves: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/divining-the-gap
(See also/ have you seen?) Ellen Dissanayake's stuff for an excellent frame on all this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Dissanayake More about special nurturing than feminine insight, in a negotiated multi-modal fitness landscape, raising empathically children into specialness and then breaking them with the reality principle without creating a psychopath/narcissists takes some doing... [[[[ much of the moral/worlding urge I go on about is geared to work policing non-empathic narcissists who break the cross-insurance of hunter-gatherer success paterns (Given Trump/Putin/Boris Johnson et al... we are currently not policing them very well) (multi-modal = where other animal species have one or two niches, humans exploit at least two and negotiate who does what, I suspect the crux you are pointing out has more to do with this being done more successfully allowing a quicker response time to change and so expansion into new geographic zones. Even before this doubles down into economies and stratified societies)
⑦ Epistemic status: me? about the same, I like to generate poetic rumination on the theme but...
⑧ I seemed to have missed Michael Corballis, will chase he is “certain” I suspect we are all wrong on these guesses, either way.
⑩ “But these arguments are scattered across posts,” LOL
⑪ My how we load (double-down) on some pronouns and not other at times (why are we dicussing the plural you more)
______________________
⑫ What makes us human?
ⓐ stories need no accuracy because their primary power lies in organising, and negotiating that organising, those groups (of I’s or not-I or we-s or us-I) who do not even try to organise themselves are less likely to survive, this is why we have no organ for truth (maybe one for lies but that is another story) we just do stuff and feel we should, because there can be no iteration (routine or learning) with out starting the journey with a single (mist-)step.
ⓑ Terrence Deacon is good on a non-Chomskyan non Steven-Pinker Language Acquisition Device (LAD) (black-box recursion). For what its worth I think this is the Janus dance of consciousness per se, so this power-up focussing on the “I” is great, but the “I” might be just an outcome of that doubling-down recursively (in a good way). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Deacon
Consciousness is a series of WTF moments that dance on the threshold…. — as I mentioned before
I’ve a side project on the seven sisters, excellent exhibition :
Neale, Margo and National Museum of Australia (Canberra). Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters : [Exhibition, Canberra, National Museum of Australia, 15 September 2017 - 25 February 2018 and Travelling, 2017.] ISBN 978-1-921953-29-3
This song line moves across Australia (the entire continent that is ) from West to East. Compare that to your Roman Empire maps at greatest extent. Across not just languages but language groups. Who needs a imperial government to generate a continental wide culture and negotiated world??
See Dissanyake for another frame on this discussion.
I am beginning to repeat myself so I’ll lay off for now on the point by point responses.
_________final thoughts________
It might be, at your inflection point ~59-60K years ago, cultures could maintain and create better ‘I’s because they became better parents, and not that the ‘I’s first appeared fully formed like Athena from her father’s thigh.
I.E. what the primatologists and evolutionary anthropologists put forward (like de Waals). I think they are on the money. With Dissanyake on how it is done.
That we finally should on others, and in this way we can better police the non-empathic narcissists and pscyhopaths, and this lead to greater organisation capabilites, recursively, in organising the world by way of rasing better ‘I’s, a legacy that stratified societies have begun frittering away by raising structures that reward and double-down on promoting narcissism. (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World)
Narcissists in a sense have no I, because they are the world, much more than just the center of it. They emotional toddlers for whom the reality principle (recognising there are other ‘I’s out there) has never been accessible (parental failure or biological impossibility --- e.g. psychopaths).
One can put it the other way too. Narcissists have no world, because they only have their I.
Being able to negotiated that I/world/I and world/I/World healthily is proabably more key than having as I per se.
The rest of us dance our consciousness like Janus on the threshld between inside me and outside me, between you and me, between us and them, between my body and the dirt, in a multi-modal range of movements (hunting/gathering/teching recursively) across a hyper-dimensional socially negotiated/constructed world united by the seven sisters above us. Between the I and the world we shouldily dream into place
First time I've ever (knowingly) talked to someone from Tasmania. Interesting place!
>I’ve a side project on the seven sisters
What do you think the function of the myth is in Australia? Have you tried to do a comparative study elsewhere?
>I don’t think it is “I” arising however, more like “other-I” which magics why we should)
Evidence for this would be that other animals pass the mirror test so there seems to be some sort of "I." Is that mostly just a body map? It makes sense to me that the "I" humans refer to came after the super-ego (what you call the other-I).
>religion/art/performance/rites/routine/plays/staging/fashion/bodypaint/painting are an outcome of the (moral) worlding urge
In some ways that is the EToC model. The force of the superego is what produced a recursive ego, aware of itself. But I think that the very first experience of "I" wasn't necessarily about morality. Someone thought "I am" before the "I am a moral agent who will one day die" we read about in Genesis.
>A nice coin too
Very cool! thanks for sharing
>It might be, at your inflection point ~59-60K years ago, cultures could maintain and create better ‘I’s because they became better parents, and not that the ‘I’s first appeared fully formed like Athena from her father’s thigh.
Thank you for interpreting the theory as "better parenting" rather than just glomming on to the bits about snake venom!
>narcissists
One thing that is interesting, is that men are way more likely to be narcissism. If one conceives of narcissism as "more I" than that would be evidence against women evolving "I" first. But, as you say, "more I" is not a good conception of narcissism.
Welcome to Tasmania, we are having a stupendous late summer season
Covert or victim narcissists are split 50/50.
Grandiose narcissists are split 80% male 20% female (psychopaths are a subset of grandiose, even more skewed to maleness apparently).
They all think they are special, but some are more careful of what others do, because they know what they can do. Some are so special they do not need to take care.
The moral agent thing, your causal chain is correct, but I use moral here not in terms of an agent, but for/in the way we body/live our lives/bodies in an 'extended phenotype' that is socially negotiated (often called the world), i.e. we have an urge (that is selected for) to do this 'worlding' this morallising, this talking, this partying, but most of its "transmission" is not done through a genetic bottleneck, in which case a moral agent is an outcome (of parenting) as much as the songs sung to convey and instruct. The I is a creative act.
There is an urge to world (-build), i.e. get organised with others, which in English is covered in the phrase '…something should be done!" — this feeling, this is an emotional drive to socialise (even if it is a "I am beholden to no man" SovCit thing).
Analogy: We have a basic drive we can call hunger, but hunger does not tell you how to bake a cake, so by analogy, the worlding urge does not tell you how to bake/moralise a cake/agent. Simply that you should., and should expect others to should to.
I am no transcendentalist seeking to find a single mutation to account for what is immanent in any increase of complexity in evolution. Recursive or otherwise.
Singular acts of creation are myths that makes us feel special. Its function can be to raise us up into personhood, like a birthday celebration cheers us, but where, eventually, hopefully, we mature in meeting the reality principle. Most of the year is not a birthday nor a nameday. You can label that a superego, but it is a moment of realisation carried forward not a separate thing in a head. (You can double-down on it into guilt or shame if you like though,)
The myth of the seven sisters is ancient as we know...
(we have an excellent view of the Pleiades in the southern hemisphere),
so its function depends on when and where someone is baking a mythic pie. On the mainland of Australia, the story arcs over a fast distance and each locality/people-on-country will have its own responsibilities with local functions.
I collect variations really on the usages, the side project has no intent besides "Look!"
What is its point as an ancient story?? What does it point to????? Yes, I have no idea.
Perhaps in a taphonomical point of view we could posit some crux material for ~60K ago, (first 'other-Is' are our sisters across the entire sky) but, this might be no better than Robert Graves' poetic methods in The White Goddess: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/writing-good-out-of-me-worlds-better?
"The force of the superego is what produced a recursive ego, aware of itself. "
Yes, and because it is a iterating mirror function, it would work just as well described the other way around: aware of my specialness, I see others not me, not me-mother, them-me-but-not-me and I see myself as if for the first time…. —maybe it is my birthday? I mean, what are there all these peope doing here?
And then again...
That empathy thing, remember the mother-child dyad in this process. This is why I like Ellen Dissanayake.
Really enjoyed this full essay, I have converted this whole post (minus the footnotes) into a multi voiced AI reading, I spent quite a bit of time pre-prepping and making sure it all converted properly, I am really happy with this full 3-hour output. I'd encourage anyone who wants to read this but reads more effectively with their ears to try it out.
Very interesting post. As you know, I think the insistence on hallucinogens being foundational to human consciousness is post-60s hippy claptrap (with a dark backstory that is not hippiesh at all). Nevertheless, the ambition of thinking at a grand scale about shared human symbolism is refreshing (and completely out of fashion in contemporary anthropology).
Snakes are obvious symbols of life-renewal (they shed their old wrinkly skins and are shiny and new underneath). Rescursive thought, whenever/ however it emerges, poses a questions animals don't think about: what happens to me when I die? What happens to the people I love when they die?
the special intelligence, sociability, and playfulness of humans is most closely analogized in aquatic sea mammals, the smartest of which live in matriarchal pods. they didn't need snake venom to develop this lifestyle :)
Thanks! I spend a lot of time on venom, but I don't think that it's necessary for the Snake Cult to be interesting. There's a version where it's "just" meditative/dance techniques of ecstasy that diffuse, along with explanations for what happens when we die, and the bullroarer.
I'm curious what you think separates humans from animals. If it's recursive self-awareness, I don't think the self must have been much more fractured in the beginning. The evolutionary timeline that makes most sense then becomes fairly recent. Any comment on that snake-free line or argument?
(1) a theory of mind: knowing that others think, from their perspectives, just as I think, from my perspective. children seem to acquire this at around 4? Tests are stuff like, "if you saw the ball being hidden behind the chair, but Billy was out of the room at the time, will Billy know the ball is behind the chair?". Very little kids think their own mind is The Mind, and assume Billy will know because they know. At a certain stage they grok that no--- Billy has a different perspective on things. our nearest primate relations don't develop this. It would be interesting to test if dolphins do (maybe someone has?).
and
(2) entirely semiotic thinking. Animals do all kinds of sophisticated communication but they aren't capable of agreeing "that tree over there is sacred" or "we all know what a unicorn is even though unicorns don't exist, and we can even agree which drawing of a unicorn is more "accurate" even though unicorns don't exist"
Both of these are collectively arrived at, not individually arrived at. I think the hallucinogen stuff is post-hippy both in terms of thinking "drugs are cool, man", but also in thinking "the start of the story is ME thinking deeply about ME". It's so unlikely that at the start of the human journey is a self-actualized groovy individual who is, like, really in touch with himself. That's a sort of lamentable recent byway, really.
The evolutionary timeline: I mean, I have no idea, I don't think anybody knows. My guess is sooner rather than later, and gradually rather than suddenly, but the range of possibility is anywhere between 2 mya and 50kya and the fossil and material evidence we have to go on is just really scanty -- and of course scantier the farther back it goes.
Circling back to "Rescursive thought, whenever/ however it emerges, poses a questions animals don't think about: what happens to me when I die? What happens to the people I love when they die?"
The questions are so obvious and fundamental that the first good answer would have every reason to spread. Some things that have surprised me is 1) that evidence of a good answer (eg. evidence of shamanism) is very late, emerging ~40 kya, and 2) cosmogonies and their attendant ceremonies have similarities that don't seem to be chance, and imply they are not independent developments. To say something nice about Anthropology, they uncovered the best evidence for this, and researched it for decades before getting bored. Bullroarers are much more compelling than the elements of cultural diffusion typically cited by Graham Hancock et al. Absolutely an unforced error that crowd has not picked up an anthropology book written anytime 1850-1950.
To the question of what makes us human, do you think either of those differences are phenomenologically important? One thing that psychedelics are good at is that they impose a vastly different phenomenological experience. There's a lot of woo surrounding this, but there are also lots of people like Sam Harris who don't become shroom heads. Instead it becomes an impetus to spend years meditating.
Living in Playa del Carmen, I'm surrounded by a lot of claims about Mayan traditions of psychedelic self-love. I usually ignore these, but will occasionally ask how it relates to human sacrifice. The hippie psychedelic tradition owes much more to John Lennon than any Mayan shaman. Still, there is evidence of some entheogens as a class. Eleusis, ancient peyote or cannibis use. And I think it's strange the extent to which snakes function in myth as a source of spiritual knowledge. And that the Hebrew etymology for snake has to deal with libations, and that various (hippie) classicists see evidence for the same in Eleusis. Given human ingenuity, it would also surprise me if psychedelic experiences weren't harnessed by religion. Even if more often than not it was more about casting spells on the neighboring tribe than meditating on the nature of life.
>2 mya and 50kya
Why would it be a finished product before 50 kya? We don't even see narrative art or shamanism at that point? Lieberman argued that the vocal tract couldn't produce human speech until 50 kya. There has been tons of genetic selection for language-related genes since then. etc etc
For me if there is a phase change, then it looks like it starts in earnest 50kya, and ends fairly recently. Or if there is no phase change then yes, it's 2mya - 50kya. But that does leave a lot of questions about the changes around 50kya. Why all of a sudden art and outcompeting all of our cousins? Seems like more recent timelines can't be discarded.
It could be that it starts 50kya, but it's just important to remember that stuff degrades over time so "no earlier stuff" is not a slam-dunk and discovering just one site with earlier stuff could be a game-changer. So that's why I am wishy-washy on that.
this line: >>Absolutely an unforced error that crowd has not picked up an anthropology book written anytime 1850-1950. >> lol, so much this.
What I find compelling is that the non-degradable stuff also takes off around 50kya. Stone tools really are very similar for long stretches of time up to about 50kya. Burials and beads are scattered before 50kya (maybe even going back very far), but are common afterwards. So on the things where preservation isn't as much an issue, there is also arguably a phase change.
But yes, I agree that it's ambiguous and it may be linear, or the figurative art from 200 kya was destroyed, or that beads/ochre 500 kya represent ritual or recursive self-awareness.
potentially circular trap here given the narrative surrounds, but I take your meaning, (even if 'narrative' beings the moment life lifts itself off a substrate and in that movement composes the body and the landscape it 'stories' over from the substrate of the terrain/medium, that a flow or gradient of protons allows when eddied into a membrane, or membrane into an eddy)
complexification is not a first appearance, just the most famous
Animals move around in physical-space. Language (and thought) can be thought of as another way of animals moving around: (1) in inner-mental-space (2) in social-space (shared interpersonal).
Human consciousness is less "hard" when you see it as just a part of animal inner-mental-space movement. "But why does it FEEL?" Because that is HOW animals implement life.
They're "missing" core features of language... Do they have snake cult myths? What about Y chromosome analysis, are they more isolated/drifted? Somewhere on the snake cult path?
They've had plenty of attention, but just at the language level for the Chomsky battle, and the depths of consciousness have only been loosely probed.
You're not going to believe this, but the Pirahã engage in only one ritual behavior. That behavior is dancing around a venomous snake.
I was once deep on some linguistics forum where they were debating whether they have a mythology, and the linguist *defending* the Pirahã shared a creation myth similar to other Native American "emergence" myths, where in different Ages man moves up through different worlds, finally arriving at this one. The only thing is that the Pirahã only made it to an intermediate world in the end. Everette never took any DNA because, and he said this explicitly, he didn't want to look racist and give a possible biological reason. (It would also go against his own cultural explanations, so...)
This tracks with the hypothesis that women were the og negotiators/deciders of primitive societies, teaching men how to compromise and be transactional starting with the sex act, which might also explain the origins of the 'oldest profession' and why women are still viewed as something to be won by men through their deeds and accomplishments.
Interestingly, the oldest profession appears in our oldest written story. The Epic of Gilgamesh starts with a priestess / prostitute civilizing a wild hunter-man, Enkidu. Sex appears to be an important ingredient in the domestication toolbox
Incredible analysis and immersive journey. Just offering a fun perspective. i’m working on some metaphysical analysis based on the work of Stan Tenen and the Meru foundation. I’ve been testing the notions of subject object monism and Avidja. From the perspective of the indefinite dyad it’s “The” (rather than I) the feminine prefix operationally of Ontos. The Fibonacci sequence from principle to being is fulfilled in the pentad. Coincidence, this is the Hebrew word ‘He’ the fifth letter in the alef/bet sequence. The’ is the objective component overcome through the via negativa methodology. Oh, my god, though, whatever we see, how the current cultural pantomime has propositioned us to confront either notion.<3. Nice work
This post was great. Admittedly, anthropology is way out of my expertise so I don't have any feedback on that part. But I believe this could have reached a wider audience if you had broken it down into a series of posts. It was too long to be read in one sitting (at least with my attention span) and dubstack is not very friendly for returning to an article in several sittings.
this is an amazing piece and brings together so many ideas i’ve been grappling with. i’ve read a lot of the source material prior to finding this post but struggled to build a unified theory that contextualizes each piece. This really helped with that.
I realized today that one piece of possible supporting evidence for the primordial matriarchy is the prevalence of the feminine plural (sie (she)/sie (they) in German, afti (she) / afti (masculine/mixed they) in Greek, etc). I don’t know if you’ve already addressed this somewhere.
- sound imitation as in “monkey see, monkey do” is an important development factor in humans today and probably was a part of original speech development, including imitation of other nature sounds
- “male pet” theory I have heard about. I.e. women had pets, men were good / useful pets
- shedding skin- feels like relevant process for enlightenment
I have never heard of male pet theory, but that actually works really well. Women self domesticated, and then domesticated men. In the interim stages relationships were probably quite strange. Imagine a partner who didn’t quite understand time. Imagine trying to explain that one could settle down and farm instead of following the herds.
I couldn’t find anything with a quick google search, where can I read about the pet theory?
I couldn’t remember where I got it from, so asked ChatGPT, sorry about being lazy, but here is ai response/
The idea that women might have “domesticated” men in early human societies comes from anthropologist Adrienne Zihlman and her work in the 1980s. Zihlman proposed that in hunter-gatherer societies, women played a crucial role in shaping human evolution by forming close social groups, gathering food, and selecting mates.
She argued that early women might have chosen men who were cooperative, nurturing, and shared resources rather than those who were purely aggressive or dominant. This selection pressure could have influenced the traits that became prominent in human males, creating a kind of “domestication” effect over generations.
Another related idea is expressed in Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work. Hrdy, an anthropologist and primatologist, proposed that cooperative child-rearing among women, and selecting mates who would help with that, played a significant role in human evolution, encouraging males to develop social traits that made them better companions and helpers rather than competitors.
This is an absolutely amazing article. I had been kicking around the idea of Genesis as being a sort of cultural deep memory of the origins of true sapience for years, and back when I was religious this actually convinced me more that the Bible was divinely inspired. Amazing to see someone really do the work and combine multiple discipline's worth of evidence to bolster that line of thinking.
Your thesis here is honestly worth of a book, and given that it clocks in at roughly 100 pages in 12pt font when copypasted into Word, it's almost book length already.
You should give the beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit a read. He shows one (speculative) path forward from raw sense data consciousness (only This exists) through multiple levels of contradiction giving rise to progressively complex conceptual scaffolding ultimately resulting in self-consciousness. It’s one alternative for how recursion could have evolved. Whether it’s gradual over generations or over a single trip is left for our imaginations, assuming we interpret his story as a historical account.
Please keep these going man. They’re always a great read
Thanks!
A Gday Andrew, from Tasmania
I think the time frame is way off (I think it is a slow grind in the paleolithic with a noticeable pay-off recently, I don’t think it is “I” arising however, more like “other-I” which magics why we should) but I like the story. It's Sunday and have more time, thanks for writing this.
My passion project on this theme started at https://www.academia.edu/40978261/Why_we_should_an_introduction_by_memoir_into_the_implications_of_the_Egalitarian_Revolution_of_the_Paleolithic_or_Anyone_for_cake
years later I started the blog here abouts at https://whyweshould.substack.com/
ⓐ also read thismorning c.f. https://www.razibkhan.com/p/the-longer-i-live-the-wronger-i-get
More thoughts/comments/notes as reading, I jump around a bit:
①"native dualism"
my position is that this is an outcome of the Janus dance, when it doubles-down on it's naive power -- even the yinyang symbol does this, (might be an outcome of bilateral symmetry...? or vice versa??) https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/the-janus-ratio
②"The impulse to make art and search for meaning was not always found in our species. …."
religion/art/performance/rites/routine/plays/staging/fashion/bodypaint/painting are an outcome of the (moral) worlding urge, or if recursively doubled-down it becmes a culture’s passion project as a the “world-building”’reality’(aside: we double-down a lot --- in some French philosophies (Deleuze) this is called intensifying or re-intensifying) this turns a routine into rite, the ritual into a doctrine, and a doctrine into dogma -- the medium of intensification is the social/political space created by the success of the routine in the first place) (if we do this internally we get identitarian politics -- from socially created identities -- unless one is autistic like me of course)
—thus your "Rather, it’s a tic of whatever environments humans have been living in over the last 50,000 years." is correct, the social landscape rather than the terrain mostly (In Australian Aboriginal culture (e.g. tjukurrpa) these are not separated out, they are the world,
③"Time gobbles up evidence. " we have to create a taphonomy of our social landscapes and strip back the intensifications (social ontologies, dogma, identities, build worlds) and see how they fossilise themselves: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/divining-the-gap
④ "soul" https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/reading-the-relativistic-brain-how
⑤ oral history, millennia http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_9966-1
⑥ "My thesis is that women discovered “I” first"
(See also/ have you seen?) Ellen Dissanayake's stuff for an excellent frame on all this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Dissanayake More about special nurturing than feminine insight, in a negotiated multi-modal fitness landscape, raising empathically children into specialness and then breaking them with the reality principle without creating a psychopath/narcissists takes some doing... [[[[ much of the moral/worlding urge I go on about is geared to work policing non-empathic narcissists who break the cross-insurance of hunter-gatherer success paterns (Given Trump/Putin/Boris Johnson et al... we are currently not policing them very well) (multi-modal = where other animal species have one or two niches, humans exploit at least two and negotiate who does what, I suspect the crux you are pointing out has more to do with this being done more successfully allowing a quicker response time to change and so expansion into new geographic zones. Even before this doubles down into economies and stratified societies)
⑦ Epistemic status: me? about the same, I like to generate poetic rumination on the theme but...
⑧ I seemed to have missed Michael Corballis, will chase he is “certain” I suspect we are all wrong on these guesses, either way.
⑨ I’ve begun interrogating the I/we assumptions in ‘teh’ west at https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/games-in-the-hide-of-our-names (I’ll add here that ‘We’ is not prior to ‘I’).
⑩ “But these arguments are scattered across posts,” LOL
⑪ My how we load (double-down) on some pronouns and not other at times (why are we dicussing the plural you more)
______________________
⑫ What makes us human?
ⓐ stories need no accuracy because their primary power lies in organising, and negotiating that organising, those groups (of I’s or not-I or we-s or us-I) who do not even try to organise themselves are less likely to survive, this is why we have no organ for truth (maybe one for lies but that is another story) we just do stuff and feel we should, because there can be no iteration (routine or learning) with out starting the journey with a single (mist-)step.
Perhaps the I is a mistep.
⑬ Recursion is useful
yes
ⓐ “But Humans aren’t computers” again see https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/reading-the-relativistic-brain-how at least as a re-framer [ power of the first (mis-)step??] (I mention “I am in a strange loop” in introducing their book)
ⓑ Terrence Deacon is good on a non-Chomskyan non Steven-Pinker Language Acquisition Device (LAD) (black-box recursion). For what its worth I think this is the Janus dance of consciousness per se, so this power-up focussing on the “I” is great, but the “I” might be just an outcome of that doubling-down recursively (in a good way). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Deacon
© I had a blog for a while riffing on the monomyth, using the Hans Christian Anderson story of Thumbelina as a contra-myth. The monomyth is just a hunter’s story, (there and back again, successfully connecting three vectors of movmeent, and retuning into balance) leaving out the other side of the paleolithic negotiating side, the gathering movement, which we see in Thumbelina as one damn WTF moment and circumstance after another.
Consciousness is a series of WTF moments that dance on the threshold…. — as I mentioned before
I’ve a side project on the seven sisters, excellent exhibition :
Neale, Margo and National Museum of Australia (Canberra). Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters : [Exhibition, Canberra, National Museum of Australia, 15 September 2017 - 25 February 2018 and Travelling, 2017.] ISBN 978-1-921953-29-3
This song line moves across Australia (the entire continent that is ) from West to East. Compare that to your Roman Empire maps at greatest extent. Across not just languages but language groups. Who needs a imperial government to generate a continental wide culture and negotiated world??
A nice coin too https://www.ramint.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020/Media_Release/2020-1-coloured-fine-silver-star-dreaming_the-seven-sisters-uncirculated-coin_rev.jpg
Weak EToC
See Dissanyake for another frame on this discussion.
I am beginning to repeat myself so I’ll lay off for now on the point by point responses.
_________final thoughts________
It might be, at your inflection point ~59-60K years ago, cultures could maintain and create better ‘I’s because they became better parents, and not that the ‘I’s first appeared fully formed like Athena from her father’s thigh.
I.E. what the primatologists and evolutionary anthropologists put forward (like de Waals). I think they are on the money. With Dissanyake on how it is done.
That we finally should on others, and in this way we can better police the non-empathic narcissists and pscyhopaths, and this lead to greater organisation capabilites, recursively, in organising the world by way of rasing better ‘I’s, a legacy that stratified societies have begun frittering away by raising structures that reward and double-down on promoting narcissism. (Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World)
Narcissists in a sense have no I, because they are the world, much more than just the center of it. They emotional toddlers for whom the reality principle (recognising there are other ‘I’s out there) has never been accessible (parental failure or biological impossibility --- e.g. psychopaths).
One can put it the other way too. Narcissists have no world, because they only have their I.
Being able to negotiated that I/world/I and world/I/World healthily is proabably more key than having as I per se.
The rest of us dance our consciousness like Janus on the threshld between inside me and outside me, between you and me, between us and them, between my body and the dirt, in a multi-modal range of movements (hunting/gathering/teching recursively) across a hyper-dimensional socially negotiated/constructed world united by the seven sisters above us. Between the I and the world we shouldily dream into place
First time I've ever (knowingly) talked to someone from Tasmania. Interesting place!
>I’ve a side project on the seven sisters
What do you think the function of the myth is in Australia? Have you tried to do a comparative study elsewhere?
>I don’t think it is “I” arising however, more like “other-I” which magics why we should)
Evidence for this would be that other animals pass the mirror test so there seems to be some sort of "I." Is that mostly just a body map? It makes sense to me that the "I" humans refer to came after the super-ego (what you call the other-I).
>religion/art/performance/rites/routine/plays/staging/fashion/bodypaint/painting are an outcome of the (moral) worlding urge
In some ways that is the EToC model. The force of the superego is what produced a recursive ego, aware of itself. But I think that the very first experience of "I" wasn't necessarily about morality. Someone thought "I am" before the "I am a moral agent who will one day die" we read about in Genesis.
>A nice coin too
Very cool! thanks for sharing
>It might be, at your inflection point ~59-60K years ago, cultures could maintain and create better ‘I’s because they became better parents, and not that the ‘I’s first appeared fully formed like Athena from her father’s thigh.
Thank you for interpreting the theory as "better parenting" rather than just glomming on to the bits about snake venom!
>narcissists
One thing that is interesting, is that men are way more likely to be narcissism. If one conceives of narcissism as "more I" than that would be evidence against women evolving "I" first. But, as you say, "more I" is not a good conception of narcissism.
Welcome to Tasmania, we are having a stupendous late summer season
Covert or victim narcissists are split 50/50.
Grandiose narcissists are split 80% male 20% female (psychopaths are a subset of grandiose, even more skewed to maleness apparently).
They all think they are special, but some are more careful of what others do, because they know what they can do. Some are so special they do not need to take care.
The moral agent thing, your causal chain is correct, but I use moral here not in terms of an agent, but for/in the way we body/live our lives/bodies in an 'extended phenotype' that is socially negotiated (often called the world), i.e. we have an urge (that is selected for) to do this 'worlding' this morallising, this talking, this partying, but most of its "transmission" is not done through a genetic bottleneck, in which case a moral agent is an outcome (of parenting) as much as the songs sung to convey and instruct. The I is a creative act.
There is an urge to world (-build), i.e. get organised with others, which in English is covered in the phrase '…something should be done!" — this feeling, this is an emotional drive to socialise (even if it is a "I am beholden to no man" SovCit thing).
Analogy: We have a basic drive we can call hunger, but hunger does not tell you how to bake a cake, so by analogy, the worlding urge does not tell you how to bake/moralise a cake/agent. Simply that you should., and should expect others to should to.
I am no transcendentalist seeking to find a single mutation to account for what is immanent in any increase of complexity in evolution. Recursive or otherwise.
Singular acts of creation are myths that makes us feel special. Its function can be to raise us up into personhood, like a birthday celebration cheers us, but where, eventually, hopefully, we mature in meeting the reality principle. Most of the year is not a birthday nor a nameday. You can label that a superego, but it is a moment of realisation carried forward not a separate thing in a head. (You can double-down on it into guilt or shame if you like though,)
The myth of the seven sisters is ancient as we know...
<<check wikipedia for a bit .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades
oh Look it has its own page: FAB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_astronomy#Seven_Sisters >>
(we have an excellent view of the Pleiades in the southern hemisphere),
so its function depends on when and where someone is baking a mythic pie. On the mainland of Australia, the story arcs over a fast distance and each locality/people-on-country will have its own responsibilities with local functions.
I collect variations really on the usages, the side project has no intent besides "Look!"
What is its point as an ancient story?? What does it point to????? Yes, I have no idea.
Perhaps in a taphonomical point of view we could posit some crux material for ~60K ago, (first 'other-Is' are our sisters across the entire sky) but, this might be no better than Robert Graves' poetic methods in The White Goddess: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/writing-good-out-of-me-worlds-better?
"The force of the superego is what produced a recursive ego, aware of itself. "
Yes, and because it is a iterating mirror function, it would work just as well described the other way around: aware of my specialness, I see others not me, not me-mother, them-me-but-not-me and I see myself as if for the first time…. —maybe it is my birthday? I mean, what are there all these peope doing here?
And then again...
That empathy thing, remember the mother-child dyad in this process. This is why I like Ellen Dissanayake.
Really enjoyed this full essay, I have converted this whole post (minus the footnotes) into a multi voiced AI reading, I spent quite a bit of time pre-prepping and making sure it all converted properly, I am really happy with this full 3-hour output. I'd encourage anyone who wants to read this but reads more effectively with their ears to try it out.
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/eve-theory-of-consciousness-v30-by
Thanks! Just edited this essay to included a link to the narration in the intro
Very interesting post. As you know, I think the insistence on hallucinogens being foundational to human consciousness is post-60s hippy claptrap (with a dark backstory that is not hippiesh at all). Nevertheless, the ambition of thinking at a grand scale about shared human symbolism is refreshing (and completely out of fashion in contemporary anthropology).
Snakes are obvious symbols of life-renewal (they shed their old wrinkly skins and are shiny and new underneath). Rescursive thought, whenever/ however it emerges, poses a questions animals don't think about: what happens to me when I die? What happens to the people I love when they die?
the special intelligence, sociability, and playfulness of humans is most closely analogized in aquatic sea mammals, the smartest of which live in matriarchal pods. they didn't need snake venom to develop this lifestyle :)
Thanks! I spend a lot of time on venom, but I don't think that it's necessary for the Snake Cult to be interesting. There's a version where it's "just" meditative/dance techniques of ecstasy that diffuse, along with explanations for what happens when we die, and the bullroarer.
I'm curious what you think separates humans from animals. If it's recursive self-awareness, I don't think the self must have been much more fractured in the beginning. The evolutionary timeline that makes most sense then becomes fairly recent. Any comment on that snake-free line or argument?
The two most important things seem to be:
(1) a theory of mind: knowing that others think, from their perspectives, just as I think, from my perspective. children seem to acquire this at around 4? Tests are stuff like, "if you saw the ball being hidden behind the chair, but Billy was out of the room at the time, will Billy know the ball is behind the chair?". Very little kids think their own mind is The Mind, and assume Billy will know because they know. At a certain stage they grok that no--- Billy has a different perspective on things. our nearest primate relations don't develop this. It would be interesting to test if dolphins do (maybe someone has?).
and
(2) entirely semiotic thinking. Animals do all kinds of sophisticated communication but they aren't capable of agreeing "that tree over there is sacred" or "we all know what a unicorn is even though unicorns don't exist, and we can even agree which drawing of a unicorn is more "accurate" even though unicorns don't exist"
Both of these are collectively arrived at, not individually arrived at. I think the hallucinogen stuff is post-hippy both in terms of thinking "drugs are cool, man", but also in thinking "the start of the story is ME thinking deeply about ME". It's so unlikely that at the start of the human journey is a self-actualized groovy individual who is, like, really in touch with himself. That's a sort of lamentable recent byway, really.
The evolutionary timeline: I mean, I have no idea, I don't think anybody knows. My guess is sooner rather than later, and gradually rather than suddenly, but the range of possibility is anywhere between 2 mya and 50kya and the fossil and material evidence we have to go on is just really scanty -- and of course scantier the farther back it goes.
Circling back to "Rescursive thought, whenever/ however it emerges, poses a questions animals don't think about: what happens to me when I die? What happens to the people I love when they die?"
The questions are so obvious and fundamental that the first good answer would have every reason to spread. Some things that have surprised me is 1) that evidence of a good answer (eg. evidence of shamanism) is very late, emerging ~40 kya, and 2) cosmogonies and their attendant ceremonies have similarities that don't seem to be chance, and imply they are not independent developments. To say something nice about Anthropology, they uncovered the best evidence for this, and researched it for decades before getting bored. Bullroarers are much more compelling than the elements of cultural diffusion typically cited by Graham Hancock et al. Absolutely an unforced error that crowd has not picked up an anthropology book written anytime 1850-1950.
To the question of what makes us human, do you think either of those differences are phenomenologically important? One thing that psychedelics are good at is that they impose a vastly different phenomenological experience. There's a lot of woo surrounding this, but there are also lots of people like Sam Harris who don't become shroom heads. Instead it becomes an impetus to spend years meditating.
Living in Playa del Carmen, I'm surrounded by a lot of claims about Mayan traditions of psychedelic self-love. I usually ignore these, but will occasionally ask how it relates to human sacrifice. The hippie psychedelic tradition owes much more to John Lennon than any Mayan shaman. Still, there is evidence of some entheogens as a class. Eleusis, ancient peyote or cannibis use. And I think it's strange the extent to which snakes function in myth as a source of spiritual knowledge. And that the Hebrew etymology for snake has to deal with libations, and that various (hippie) classicists see evidence for the same in Eleusis. Given human ingenuity, it would also surprise me if psychedelic experiences weren't harnessed by religion. Even if more often than not it was more about casting spells on the neighboring tribe than meditating on the nature of life.
>2 mya and 50kya
Why would it be a finished product before 50 kya? We don't even see narrative art or shamanism at that point? Lieberman argued that the vocal tract couldn't produce human speech until 50 kya. There has been tons of genetic selection for language-related genes since then. etc etc
For me if there is a phase change, then it looks like it starts in earnest 50kya, and ends fairly recently. Or if there is no phase change then yes, it's 2mya - 50kya. But that does leave a lot of questions about the changes around 50kya. Why all of a sudden art and outcompeting all of our cousins? Seems like more recent timelines can't be discarded.
It could be that it starts 50kya, but it's just important to remember that stuff degrades over time so "no earlier stuff" is not a slam-dunk and discovering just one site with earlier stuff could be a game-changer. So that's why I am wishy-washy on that.
this line: >>Absolutely an unforced error that crowd has not picked up an anthropology book written anytime 1850-1950. >> lol, so much this.
What I find compelling is that the non-degradable stuff also takes off around 50kya. Stone tools really are very similar for long stretches of time up to about 50kya. Burials and beads are scattered before 50kya (maybe even going back very far), but are common afterwards. So on the things where preservation isn't as much an issue, there is also arguably a phase change.
But yes, I agree that it's ambiguous and it may be linear, or the figurative art from 200 kya was destroyed, or that beads/ochre 500 kya represent ritual or recursive self-awareness.
(Big post) (not all read but I had to pause at):
"meaningful traits"
potentially circular trap here given the narrative surrounds, but I take your meaning, (even if 'narrative' beings the moment life lifts itself off a substrate and in that movement composes the body and the landscape it 'stories' over from the substrate of the terrain/medium, that a flow or gradient of protons allows when eddied into a membrane, or membrane into an eddy)
complexification is not a first appearance, just the most famous
Wait for the section "What makes us human?" where I go into more detail
Animals move around in physical-space. Language (and thought) can be thought of as another way of animals moving around: (1) in inner-mental-space (2) in social-space (shared interpersonal).
Human consciousness is less "hard" when you see it as just a part of animal inner-mental-space movement. "But why does it FEEL?" Because that is HOW animals implement life.
I wonder how some of the isolated Amazon tribes could fit into this? Like say the Pirahã from this article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interpreter-2
They're "missing" core features of language... Do they have snake cult myths? What about Y chromosome analysis, are they more isolated/drifted? Somewhere on the snake cult path?
They've had plenty of attention, but just at the language level for the Chomsky battle, and the depths of consciousness have only been loosely probed.
You're not going to believe this, but the Pirahã engage in only one ritual behavior. That behavior is dancing around a venomous snake.
I was once deep on some linguistics forum where they were debating whether they have a mythology, and the linguist *defending* the Pirahã shared a creation myth similar to other Native American "emergence" myths, where in different Ages man moves up through different worlds, finally arriving at this one. The only thing is that the Pirahã only made it to an intermediate world in the end. Everette never took any DNA because, and he said this explicitly, he didn't want to look racist and give a possible biological reason. (It would also go against his own cultural explanations, so...)
Anyway, in my headcanon, the Pirahã are Snake Cult dropouts: https://www.kvetch.au/p/dont-sleep-there-are-snakes/comments
Wow. Of course it's a snake! Amazing how even an "exception" fits right into the overall picture...
This tracks with the hypothesis that women were the og negotiators/deciders of primitive societies, teaching men how to compromise and be transactional starting with the sex act, which might also explain the origins of the 'oldest profession' and why women are still viewed as something to be won by men through their deeds and accomplishments.
Interestingly, the oldest profession appears in our oldest written story. The Epic of Gilgamesh starts with a priestess / prostitute civilizing a wild hunter-man, Enkidu. Sex appears to be an important ingredient in the domestication toolbox
Well I guess that makes a lot of sense!
Incredible analysis and immersive journey. Just offering a fun perspective. i’m working on some metaphysical analysis based on the work of Stan Tenen and the Meru foundation. I’ve been testing the notions of subject object monism and Avidja. From the perspective of the indefinite dyad it’s “The” (rather than I) the feminine prefix operationally of Ontos. The Fibonacci sequence from principle to being is fulfilled in the pentad. Coincidence, this is the Hebrew word ‘He’ the fifth letter in the alef/bet sequence. The’ is the objective component overcome through the via negativa methodology. Oh, my god, though, whatever we see, how the current cultural pantomime has propositioned us to confront either notion.<3. Nice work
This post was great. Admittedly, anthropology is way out of my expertise so I don't have any feedback on that part. But I believe this could have reached a wider audience if you had broken it down into a series of posts. It was too long to be read in one sitting (at least with my attention span) and dubstack is not very friendly for returning to an article in several sittings.
Yeah, it's a weird thing to fit in a blog post. If it does get wider traction, eventually I'll put it in a book which is really what it asks for
this is an amazing piece and brings together so many ideas i’ve been grappling with. i’ve read a lot of the source material prior to finding this post but struggled to build a unified theory that contextualizes each piece. This really helped with that.
So good to get comments like this! How did you find the essay?
I realized today that one piece of possible supporting evidence for the primordial matriarchy is the prevalence of the feminine plural (sie (she)/sie (they) in German, afti (she) / afti (masculine/mixed they) in Greek, etc). I don’t know if you’ve already addressed this somewhere.
Never occurred to me!
How does this support the theory?
Thank you very much for an amazing post
Please make it a book!
May I offer couple of extra ideas:
- sound imitation as in “monkey see, monkey do” is an important development factor in humans today and probably was a part of original speech development, including imitation of other nature sounds
- “male pet” theory I have heard about. I.e. women had pets, men were good / useful pets
- shedding skin- feels like relevant process for enlightenment
And one more thing:
- shame, specifically shame for others, is an absolutely unique human trait
And I believe that what separates humans from animals and normal humans from sociopaths
I believe it should fit nicely into your narrative
I have never heard of male pet theory, but that actually works really well. Women self domesticated, and then domesticated men. In the interim stages relationships were probably quite strange. Imagine a partner who didn’t quite understand time. Imagine trying to explain that one could settle down and farm instead of following the herds.
I couldn’t find anything with a quick google search, where can I read about the pet theory?
Re shame, that’s pretty close to the path that led me to this idea: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/consequences-of-conscience?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I couldn’t remember where I got it from, so asked ChatGPT, sorry about being lazy, but here is ai response/
The idea that women might have “domesticated” men in early human societies comes from anthropologist Adrienne Zihlman and her work in the 1980s. Zihlman proposed that in hunter-gatherer societies, women played a crucial role in shaping human evolution by forming close social groups, gathering food, and selecting mates.
She argued that early women might have chosen men who were cooperative, nurturing, and shared resources rather than those who were purely aggressive or dominant. This selection pressure could have influenced the traits that became prominent in human males, creating a kind of “domestication” effect over generations.
Another related idea is expressed in Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work. Hrdy, an anthropologist and primatologist, proposed that cooperative child-rearing among women, and selecting mates who would help with that, played a significant role in human evolution, encouraging males to develop social traits that made them better companions and helpers rather than competitors.
Thanks! I’ve been meaning to read Hrdy
This is an absolutely amazing article. I had been kicking around the idea of Genesis as being a sort of cultural deep memory of the origins of true sapience for years, and back when I was religious this actually convinced me more that the Bible was divinely inspired. Amazing to see someone really do the work and combine multiple discipline's worth of evidence to bolster that line of thinking.
Thank you! One of the great things about publishing is that you end up finding like minds who made the same leaps
Your thesis here is honestly worth of a book, and given that it clocks in at roughly 100 pages in 12pt font when copypasted into Word, it's almost book length already.
Are you familar with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in_the_Breakdown_of_the_Bicameral_Mind#:~:text=It%20explores%20the%20nature%20of,from%20sensory%20awareness%20and%20cognition.? It seems a good descrption of a "pre-I" state
You may enjoy: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
You should give the beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit a read. He shows one (speculative) path forward from raw sense data consciousness (only This exists) through multiple levels of contradiction giving rise to progressively complex conceptual scaffolding ultimately resulting in self-consciousness. It’s one alternative for how recursion could have evolved. Whether it’s gradual over generations or over a single trip is left for our imaginations, assuming we interpret his story as a historical account.
Great reco