FAQ
Fielding the most common questions
What’s the best order to read the blog?
Snake Cult of Consciousness is the crowd-favorite.
The latest version of The Eve Theory of Consciousness is my most complete work.
From there, whatever strikes your fancy. If you want something about psychometrics, see:
If you want to know how I came up with the snake theory, read:
What’s the TLDR?
Recursive self-awareness evolved via gene-culture interaction in the last 50,000 years. From about 40,000-20,000 years ago, rituals related to second birth (spiritual or cultural birth) were developed, along with more complex culture (grammar, snake cults, shamanism). This package, where recursion was table stakes, spread around the end of the Ice Age. Stories about the beginning of time (Dreamtime, Eden, Prometheus) are about this transition and correspond with the start of the Holocene.
What’s the role of snake venom?
Snake venom is used recreationally and religiously as a hallucinogen. Some classicists even think it contributed to ritualized ego death in the Eleusinian Mysteries. I hypothesize it could have been a useful tool when first teaching ideas like “I am” or “I am a moral agent who will one day die.” Such practices could explain why snakes are so often connected to knowledge in creation stories. If such practices spread long ago, this could also explain why snakes appear in creation stories worldwide.
What’s the evidence that any of this spread?
Well, dogs did, for one. They were domesticated in Eurasia in the last 30,000 years and spread to the whole world (probably starting about 15,000 years ago). I go over other examples of cultural contact here and collect a century of scholarship on the diffusion of the bullroarer here. Many archeologists and anthropologists have argued that bullroarer mystery cults (what I would call the Snake Cult of Consciousness) diffused at an early stage of cultural development.
What do you think are the strongest points of the theory?
It’s strange how bereft human culture was before about 10,000 years ago, and then everywhere things changed all at once. Without diffusion explaining this, one ends up believing in something like the Ages of Man, where the whole world went through the Holocene transition, inventing bullroarers, shamanism, and agriculture independently. Diffusion is currently underrated.
Why is self-awareness / behavioral modernity inborn now?
Culture today (or even 5,000 years ago) is much more complex than in the Ice Age, so children are exposed to recursive structures (grammar, the pronoun “I,” mirrors) from a young age. There is surprising variation on when children pass the mirror test from one culture to another. So clearly, some aspects of self-awareness are quite plastic. But also, there has been selection for thousands of years for a seamless “I” to develop at a young age. If we adopted a newborn from 30,000 or 100,000 years ago and raised them now, they would likely have cognitive deficits.
Are you being real? You believe this?
Yeah, actually. I’ve now read a fair amount of other explanations for how we became human, and this seems the most likely to me. It’s a succinct answer to how recursion evolved, what makes humans unique, why some myths are worldwide, and why sapient behavior is only widespread starting about 10,000 years ago. I would be surprised if none of EToC holds up.
Are there any similar theories?
In the 20th century many anthropologists wrote that the foundations of culture spread. I cite them frequently when I discuss the bullroarer. The closest models are presented by Chris Knight, Julian Jaynes, Joseph Campbell, Jacques Cauvin, Benitez-Burraco, Terence McKenna, and Deon Liebenberg.
What about Neanderthal burial?
There are glimmers of symbolic thought long before the hypothesized snake cult. The question I’m trying to address is when sapience or symbolic thought were table stakes to participate in culture, which seems to be only in the last 10,000 years in many parts of the world. Why so late? In regards to Neanderthals, it does seem convenient that there is a flowering of culture soon after intermixing with them and that some of the genes we picked up from them affect cognition. I’m open to the possibility that some of the “hybrid” offspring had the best of both worlds and made the forays into symbolic thought that were eventually rolled up into the snake cult.
Women were self-aware first?
That’s what the social brain hypothesis suggests. And if our psychology evolved recently, then that could even be within the bounds of mythological memory.
When did we become cognitively modern?
The strictest version of EToC holds that the lack of diversity on the Y chromosome is due to selection for self-awareness. That would have male cognitive modernity in the mid-Holocene and the expansion of some male lineages as those being the first that really came to modern form. The relation of the Y chromosome to cognition is an empirical question. If the lack of diversity doesn’t have to do with selection for the Theory of Mind, then cognitive modernity could be much earlier and the transition more gradual.
How have experts responded to the theory?
It’s hard to get feedback on a primordial snake cult that made us human. I’m pretty confident that it doesn’t break any hard-and-fast rules. Many of my readers are scientists, particularly in psychology (though a couple in biology and anthropology). If you personally know a paleo-linguist, send it on to them.
What’s up with the mix of snake cults, machine learning, and psychometrics?
The blog started out as a place to discuss the intersection of natural language processing and psychometrics, which is my background. Then I fell down the evolution of consciousness rabbit hole and have been mostly writing about that for the last two years.