I tuned in for the EToC. Aside from considerations of plausibility of the theory itself (and they are different for different levels of strength of its statement) I've found it fascinating and thought-provoking. And the research around it has been a joy to learn about.
I'd say keep taking me down interesting rabbit holes and unexpected directions and I'll be happy.
Podcasts are a format I haven't managed to consume at a regular rate. Reading I can squeeze in between responsibilities, but podcasts require alone time I don't generally have. But if they come with transcripts that's fine by me.
As for interviewees, I imagine they don't grow on trees. I guess the key question is what are you getting from getting the person on rather than just reporting on their work. I know of a couple of junior European scientists who do some interesting original work. How willing or suitable to do something like this I've no clue. In any case I'd imagine diversity is what would keep that sort of thing interesting? I don't know. Have I mentioned I don't do podcasts a lot?
I'm curious what you rank as most likely and most interesting/important.
For me the central claims are: 1) self-awareness was a discovery 2) made by women 3) details of which are preserved in creation myths
Then there's ancillary stuff like snakes being involved and the transition being marked by pronouns. Or that it explains the Holocene / Agricultural Revolution / Sapient Paradox / Y chromosome bottleneck / Paradox of Schizophrenia.
About the interesting part, it's the breadth of evidence you've sought, and the way bringing in additional constraints from creation myths doesn't immediately kill the theory through the sheer weight of the ensuing complexity. Usually by the time you started arguing about snake cults of consciousness you should be squarely in crackpot territory, yet somehow that doesn't seem to be the case.
I also find myself wondering if this is what it felt like to golden age physicists when Lemaître came up with the Big Bang, which had all the hallmarks of a crackpot Catholic conspiracy yet just refused to be refuted by observations. Probably not exactly (Lemaître's theory was much simpler in its essence) but probably not completely unlike it either!
P.S.: I also find it interesting to consider parallels with the question of whether scale really is all you need to get agentic AGI. The weakest form of the theory suggests agency is by no means a necessary consequence of intelligence, with obvious interesting consequences for that particular debate, if it could be proved.
It's interesting to me that our brains got *smaller* starting at about the time we see evidence for recursion. (The decrease has been larger in women, fwiw.) A possible explanation is pruning processes that could now be accomplished much more efficiently with recursive algorithms. Or, it could just be there was conflict between the two systems. If recursion was supremely fit and it was disrupted by some mechanism in the brain that is only slightly fit, perhaps the easiest solution is just get rid of the other mechanism.
Not exactly answering the question of "is scale all you need?", but interesting if agentic AGI has the effect of decreasing scale in human brains.
The going explanation, btw, is that we became more social and therefore used society rather than our brains. We no longer needed to remember as much because culture could teach us.
I'd argue the weakest (and therefore most likely) statement of the theory (whether you'd still call it EToC is another matter) is:
1) Humans first became self-aware about 10kya (here I use a physicist's "about") through some process whose spread was (at least partially) memetic rather than genetic.
Then in increasing order of strength/prior implausibility I'd add:
2) SNAKES!
3) Women leading the way.
Everything else I wouldn't classify as part of the theory so much as evidence (mostly) in its favour. I'd argue the Sapient Paradox, pronouns, the timeline of agriculture/religion, Y chromosome bottleneck and schizophrenia paradox are to the EToC like the perihelion of Mercury is to General Relativity - by no means a smoking gun, but the sort of explanation of known anomalies that can plausibly support a new paradigm (I have been meaning to write something about these types of evidence in discussions about scientific paradigms, incidentally, historically it's amazing how iconic both acceptance and rejection of these sorts of things can become).
The preservation through myths I'd still classify as weak evidence, but I'd accept it being included in the statement of the theory. I'd not include it because it's unnecessary for the mechanism itself, but it would be hard to find a possible world where anything beyond the weakest form of EToC is true and creation myths do not refer to it, and vice versa. Regardless, I more naturally see this as something the theory can explain rather than an additional cog in the theory's machinery.
I like this framing a lot! Though for me women leading the way is not a priori unlikely. I think it upsets the blank slate prior, which is held by like 2% of all humans (who happen to be well represented in academia), but it is basically in accord with folk psychology. Many experts point to gossip, sociality, and theory of mind as precursors to full human intelligence, and lay people usually think women have an advantage on those things.
A weak version of the claim would be something like: the distribution of the precursor trait to recursion had sex differences about like height today. The "tallest" people on that trait were women, and hence the first explorers of the interior. Myths record this variation categorically, even if there were many men who understood "I" before all women were self-aware.
The impression I was under was that the hypothesis here was that women led the way either by maintaining a monopoly on self-awareness or by gatekeeping the associated rituals for a few generations at least.
Either way there are several ways with a priori similar likelihoods (as far as I can see) this could have gone, most of which would involve a mixture of men and women coming into self-awareness roughly together. Some of these might involve assigning keeping the rituals to women because of primitive gender roles or whatever, but nothing like "it was the woman who made me do it".
In any case, I'd say the case for snakes is much stronger than the case for women. Their presence in myths and temples is much more conspicuous and harder to explain. And as far as I can see there are fewer workable alternatives to snake poison. Also the timelines for the Y chromosome stuff were slightly in tension with what you needed, right? So I'd definitely make snakes more central (I know Eve is in the name, but you can argue Eve is relevant first to fallen humanity, and then to women, so I think that's ok).
Opposite of gatekeeping! I think the separation was biological, men had a harder time looking inward. Theory of Mind deficits like autism still skew very male.
>Also the timelines for the Y chromosome stuff were slightly in tension with what you needed, right?
The part of this fascinating proposition I find most of a stretch is that convergent genetic evolution could have occurred in every population in every corner of the globe during a span of 5-10k years. The idea of recursion's memetic spread around the globe that quickly is enough of a stretch, but I can almost see it if I squint because the virality of memes is chronically underestimated.
Glad to see you mention Ruck and "The Road to Eleusis". When I read your bit about snake venom my first thought was that psychedelics could substitute for that, but maybe it's a case of both/and. Relevant point - the Eleusisian mysteries are centered on Goddesses Demeter and Persephone, again women leading the way.
Another book I suggest is Layne Redmond's "When the drummers were women". The matriarchy of Gimbutas is now mostly not taken seriously by academics, but Redmond's scholarship is excellent, and what's relevant to your theory is the connection of drums, rhythm and trance, led by women.
Not so relevant to your theory, but following up on Jaynes on brain lateralization, check out Iain McGilchrist "The Master and His Emissary", curious what you think of that.
Not so keen on podcasts myself, but yes with transcripts.
We are both drawing from the same well in our reading.
>The matriarchy of Gimbutas is now mostly not taken seriously by academics, but Redmond's scholarship is excellent, and what's relevant to your theory is the connection of drums, rhythm and trance, led by women.
Do you know why this is? I've read some of her work and want to use her statistic that 97% of Peleolithic depictions of the human form are female. It's an astounding statistic! I also, obviously, am playing around with the idea that we can take myths seriously, and the primordial matriarchy is incredibly widespread. Maybe it happened?
I don't have a good handle on McGilchrist but Malcolm Ocean has integrated his ideas and now mine into his philosophy and writes about that (mostly on twitter so far). Not sure if links to twitter work (twitter to substack do not), but here is one such thread: https://twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1680016095971876868
Re. Gimbutas, I wonder too. Would love to see a meta level essay/book about the history of the reception of her ideas. One possibility is that there was a reaction to the uncritical lionization of her by the new-age/pagan/wiccan community. I'm not an academic specialist in that field so I only have my opinion - I agree we can take myths seriously and think there is something there.
Re. those Paleolithic voluptuous Venus figurines, the cynical theory is "porn is really old".
Could you persuade Malcolm Ocean to switch from Twitter to Substack?
Just wanted to leave a comment that I love your work, and love that you are tackling one of the questions that's bugged me for awhile. Also, I personally don't mind what you do as long as you keep writing.
I like the mile posts as goal posts… (as someone who is mildly not-autistic… the neuro-divergence thang in overlap with drug use is not given enough space, but that might be a note to self). BTW I like Jerry Fodor's position (also an communal outie) and feel there can be too much/many just-so stories in this space, but I guess stories build community so there is no fix for that except going back under my bridge: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/giants-and-dwarves-designers-of-no
I tuned in for the EToC. Aside from considerations of plausibility of the theory itself (and they are different for different levels of strength of its statement) I've found it fascinating and thought-provoking. And the research around it has been a joy to learn about.
I'd say keep taking me down interesting rabbit holes and unexpected directions and I'll be happy.
Podcasts are a format I haven't managed to consume at a regular rate. Reading I can squeeze in between responsibilities, but podcasts require alone time I don't generally have. But if they come with transcripts that's fine by me.
As for interviewees, I imagine they don't grow on trees. I guess the key question is what are you getting from getting the person on rather than just reporting on their work. I know of a couple of junior European scientists who do some interesting original work. How willing or suitable to do something like this I've no clue. In any case I'd imagine diversity is what would keep that sort of thing interesting? I don't know. Have I mentioned I don't do podcasts a lot?
I'm curious what you rank as most likely and most interesting/important.
For me the central claims are: 1) self-awareness was a discovery 2) made by women 3) details of which are preserved in creation myths
Then there's ancillary stuff like snakes being involved and the transition being marked by pronouns. Or that it explains the Holocene / Agricultural Revolution / Sapient Paradox / Y chromosome bottleneck / Paradox of Schizophrenia.
About the interesting part, it's the breadth of evidence you've sought, and the way bringing in additional constraints from creation myths doesn't immediately kill the theory through the sheer weight of the ensuing complexity. Usually by the time you started arguing about snake cults of consciousness you should be squarely in crackpot territory, yet somehow that doesn't seem to be the case.
I also find myself wondering if this is what it felt like to golden age physicists when Lemaître came up with the Big Bang, which had all the hallmarks of a crackpot Catholic conspiracy yet just refused to be refuted by observations. Probably not exactly (Lemaître's theory was much simpler in its essence) but probably not completely unlike it either!
P.S.: I also find it interesting to consider parallels with the question of whether scale really is all you need to get agentic AGI. The weakest form of the theory suggests agency is by no means a necessary consequence of intelligence, with obvious interesting consequences for that particular debate, if it could be proved.
It's interesting to me that our brains got *smaller* starting at about the time we see evidence for recursion. (The decrease has been larger in women, fwiw.) A possible explanation is pruning processes that could now be accomplished much more efficiently with recursive algorithms. Or, it could just be there was conflict between the two systems. If recursion was supremely fit and it was disrupted by some mechanism in the brain that is only slightly fit, perhaps the easiest solution is just get rid of the other mechanism.
Not exactly answering the question of "is scale all you need?", but interesting if agentic AGI has the effect of decreasing scale in human brains.
The going explanation, btw, is that we became more social and therefore used society rather than our brains. We no longer needed to remember as much because culture could teach us.
Big uh oh for the age of the internet there! I don't want to outsource any of my brain functions to TikTok!
I'd argue the weakest (and therefore most likely) statement of the theory (whether you'd still call it EToC is another matter) is:
1) Humans first became self-aware about 10kya (here I use a physicist's "about") through some process whose spread was (at least partially) memetic rather than genetic.
Then in increasing order of strength/prior implausibility I'd add:
2) SNAKES!
3) Women leading the way.
Everything else I wouldn't classify as part of the theory so much as evidence (mostly) in its favour. I'd argue the Sapient Paradox, pronouns, the timeline of agriculture/religion, Y chromosome bottleneck and schizophrenia paradox are to the EToC like the perihelion of Mercury is to General Relativity - by no means a smoking gun, but the sort of explanation of known anomalies that can plausibly support a new paradigm (I have been meaning to write something about these types of evidence in discussions about scientific paradigms, incidentally, historically it's amazing how iconic both acceptance and rejection of these sorts of things can become).
The preservation through myths I'd still classify as weak evidence, but I'd accept it being included in the statement of the theory. I'd not include it because it's unnecessary for the mechanism itself, but it would be hard to find a possible world where anything beyond the weakest form of EToC is true and creation myths do not refer to it, and vice versa. Regardless, I more naturally see this as something the theory can explain rather than an additional cog in the theory's machinery.
I like this framing a lot! Though for me women leading the way is not a priori unlikely. I think it upsets the blank slate prior, which is held by like 2% of all humans (who happen to be well represented in academia), but it is basically in accord with folk psychology. Many experts point to gossip, sociality, and theory of mind as precursors to full human intelligence, and lay people usually think women have an advantage on those things.
A weak version of the claim would be something like: the distribution of the precursor trait to recursion had sex differences about like height today. The "tallest" people on that trait were women, and hence the first explorers of the interior. Myths record this variation categorically, even if there were many men who understood "I" before all women were self-aware.
Darwin actually made room for women reaching human intelligence first: https://substack.com/@vectors/note/c-16940916
The impression I was under was that the hypothesis here was that women led the way either by maintaining a monopoly on self-awareness or by gatekeeping the associated rituals for a few generations at least.
Either way there are several ways with a priori similar likelihoods (as far as I can see) this could have gone, most of which would involve a mixture of men and women coming into self-awareness roughly together. Some of these might involve assigning keeping the rituals to women because of primitive gender roles or whatever, but nothing like "it was the woman who made me do it".
In any case, I'd say the case for snakes is much stronger than the case for women. Their presence in myths and temples is much more conspicuous and harder to explain. And as far as I can see there are fewer workable alternatives to snake poison. Also the timelines for the Y chromosome stuff were slightly in tension with what you needed, right? So I'd definitely make snakes more central (I know Eve is in the name, but you can argue Eve is relevant first to fallen humanity, and then to women, so I think that's ok).
Opposite of gatekeeping! I think the separation was biological, men had a harder time looking inward. Theory of Mind deficits like autism still skew very male.
>Also the timelines for the Y chromosome stuff were slightly in tension with what you needed, right?
True!
The part of this fascinating proposition I find most of a stretch is that convergent genetic evolution could have occurred in every population in every corner of the globe during a span of 5-10k years. The idea of recursion's memetic spread around the globe that quickly is enough of a stretch, but I can almost see it if I squint because the virality of memes is chronically underestimated.
Have greatly enjoyed the blog so far and would listen to a podcast version for sure.
Glad to see you mention Ruck and "The Road to Eleusis". When I read your bit about snake venom my first thought was that psychedelics could substitute for that, but maybe it's a case of both/and. Relevant point - the Eleusisian mysteries are centered on Goddesses Demeter and Persephone, again women leading the way.
Another book I suggest is Layne Redmond's "When the drummers were women". The matriarchy of Gimbutas is now mostly not taken seriously by academics, but Redmond's scholarship is excellent, and what's relevant to your theory is the connection of drums, rhythm and trance, led by women.
Speaking of gossip and ancient human history - see Eric Hoel's "The gossip trap" - https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-gossip-trap
Not so relevant to your theory, but following up on Jaynes on brain lateralization, check out Iain McGilchrist "The Master and His Emissary", curious what you think of that.
Not so keen on podcasts myself, but yes with transcripts.
We are both drawing from the same well in our reading.
>The matriarchy of Gimbutas is now mostly not taken seriously by academics, but Redmond's scholarship is excellent, and what's relevant to your theory is the connection of drums, rhythm and trance, led by women.
Do you know why this is? I've read some of her work and want to use her statistic that 97% of Peleolithic depictions of the human form are female. It's an astounding statistic! I also, obviously, am playing around with the idea that we can take myths seriously, and the primordial matriarchy is incredibly widespread. Maybe it happened?
I don't have a good handle on McGilchrist but Malcolm Ocean has integrated his ideas and now mine into his philosophy and writes about that (mostly on twitter so far). Not sure if links to twitter work (twitter to substack do not), but here is one such thread: https://twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1680016095971876868
Re. Gimbutas, I wonder too. Would love to see a meta level essay/book about the history of the reception of her ideas. One possibility is that there was a reaction to the uncritical lionization of her by the new-age/pagan/wiccan community. I'm not an academic specialist in that field so I only have my opinion - I agree we can take myths seriously and think there is something there.
Re. those Paleolithic voluptuous Venus figurines, the cynical theory is "porn is really old".
Could you persuade Malcolm Ocean to switch from Twitter to Substack?
Just wanted to leave a comment that I love your work, and love that you are tackling one of the questions that's bugged me for awhile. Also, I personally don't mind what you do as long as you keep writing.
Thanks!
I like the mile posts as goal posts… (as someone who is mildly not-autistic… the neuro-divergence thang in overlap with drug use is not given enough space, but that might be a note to self). BTW I like Jerry Fodor's position (also an communal outie) and feel there can be too much/many just-so stories in this space, but I guess stories build community so there is no fix for that except going back under my bridge: https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/giants-and-dwarves-designers-of-no
(via https://nicholasgruen.substack.com/p/stan-grant-guy-rundles-brilliant )
for
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/jerry-fodors-enduring-critique-of-neo-darwinism
Very interested to see who you interview!