I was reading Lowery's "Softwar" recently and he spells out something that resonated with me and relates to this conversation: that one of the distinguishing characteristics of the early humans who beat out all of the rest, which is dependent on self/recursion, may be "belief" itself.
The capacity to believe in someone or something that you can't see (due to distance, non-existence, w/e), have it transmitted via language/storytelling, and trust that it is real. That alone would be enough to forge armies and civilization, and any who couldn't share or wield that same power of belief would be bred or killed out of the lineage pretty quickly. Even today...those that can't believe in what majority of society believes (be it capitalism, religion, etc.) have the hardest time fitting in and reproducing.
Our imaginations (which we can then eventually turn into realities) are unbound by any constraints of the natural world. The compounding recursion available to human brains (and our digital tools) seems quite extraordinary to me. How to put this in perspective?
I've been wondering if there are instances of recursive process in physics or biochemistry. Not recursion in the sense of fractalization where effects disperse the further it goes, but rather in the sense of processes that can compound (autocatalytically? autopoietically?), unbound by the usual constraints of their environment. As a layperson I don't know if my failure to find anything means there aren't any or I'm just not able to map to their relevant terminologies.
Jumping around in these comments here (but no more than y'all just did on your video call :-)
I think it was Michael who mentioned an intuition that it feels like something about self-referential identity did not get fully evolved into our psychology. This is consistent with my position that, while some memes arising in Africa 1mya to 100-150kya certainly did generate coev (such as your idea that respect for The Golden Rule is innate now), our global dispersion then cut that off.
I feel that, for better or worse, visions of a better future like gen3 consciousness have no choice but to depend on some key memes that have no innate basis.
>I feel that, for better or worse, visions of a better future like gen3 consciousness have no choice but to depend on some key memes that have no innate basis.
That is an interesting proposition for Malcolm and Michael to address
It was interesting hearing the three of you tease apart recursion from self-referencing identity. CogSci talks about "symbolic representation"; sorry I don't remember if you have done a compare and contrast between recursion and symbolic representation?
I land on the supposition that our brains had evolved the hardware to go recursive, and do symbolic representation (maybe they're part and parcel of the same set of gadgets?) as part of modern H. sapiens. The use of that capability for exaptations like recognizing the "I" was latent until the right conditions were in place, until culture had the developed just the enabling suite of psychosocial techniques would lead a mind to want to try running off in a recursive direction.
It's been noted that the great apes seem to have a lot of the cognitive pieces in place to use symbols, but they don't (even if some individuals, when trained, can fake it pretty well). I say, that is not so different from the state of affairs of our lineages say 500-1000 kya. Some kind of minimum processing capability is the biggest pre-requisite, and evolutionary pressure can lead to a species reaching that threshold just by virtue of purely ecological forces, no cumulative culture required.
So I land on thinking that self-referentiality was just one of probably a few memes that we developed using this hardware capability. (Are there others, possibly even more substantive, that we didn't and haven't thought of yet?)
I don't have a great handle on the definition of symbolic representation. Partly my shortcoming, but partly due to different definitions. I'd love if someone else chimed in with a good explanation of how symbolic or abstract thought require recursion or self-reference.
>I land on the supposition that our brains had evolved the hardware to go recursive, and do symbolic representation (maybe they're part and parcel of the same set of gadgets?) as part of modern H. sapiens. The use of that capability for exaptations like recognizing the "I" was latent until the right conditions were in place
My gut tells me that the development of "I" is a tractable and understudied question. I also like the idea of "I" being the first recursive thought. But you also bring up the possibility that it was actually quite a late recursive thought. Gets at the question of how tight the recursive package was. Did some parts develop tens or hundreds of thousands of years before others? Tens seems likely to me, hundreds no.
>It's been noted that the great apes seem to have a lot of the cognitive pieces in place to use symbols, but they don't (even if some individuals, when trained, can fake it pretty well)
I'm glad you bring this up! Koko was maybe the smartest gorilla ever. Like trying to learn about the modal human from Napoleon. It's informative, but his exceptionalism is glossed over too often.
Aha, Malcolm and Michael were wanting to chip away at one element of EToC, same as me: its supposition that (rapid, globally convergent) biological evolution was a big component of the development of self-reference/recursion since out of Africa. And I heard one of them say, as I've been suggesting, that EToC doesn't appear to need there to have been bio evo for the theory to hold water -- it seems to them (and me) that this development can be nicely explained entirely within the frame of cultural evolution's standard processes.
As you no doubt know, there are whole wings of study articulating the ways in which socioculturally mediated practices and cognitive (or psychosocial, as Vervaeke calls them) techniques are subtly socialized into the young; its very believable to me that memes with themes of self-referential minds would turn into stories where the characters evinced self-referential capability, influencing an impressionable listener to assume "well of course a mind like mine should implement this self-referencing technique, that's what normal people do here".
The good news is this is a fairly empirical question. They'll do more and more research on selection that was happening recently. How much have schizophrenia/language-implicated genes changed in frequency in the last 10 or 50 kya? Does the lack of diversity on the Y chromosome have to do with selection?
Theoretically, why I think selection must have been important is that you can't select for symbolic/recursive thought until you have symbolic/recursive ideas in the culture. There is a lot of variation in how well individuals learn recursive ideas now (studied w/ proxies like "vocabulary size"), and this is substantially genetic. Therefore, in the past, when symbolic ideas started to become important to survival, there must have been a selection gradient. Even if recursive thinking ability was only correlated with fitness by r = 0.1, over 10,000 years that is a huge change in psychological disposition. So I think at some point genetic selection was important. And to me the most likely time frame is the last 50,000 years, with significant changes even in the last 10,000 years.
I was reading Lowery's "Softwar" recently and he spells out something that resonated with me and relates to this conversation: that one of the distinguishing characteristics of the early humans who beat out all of the rest, which is dependent on self/recursion, may be "belief" itself.
The capacity to believe in someone or something that you can't see (due to distance, non-existence, w/e), have it transmitted via language/storytelling, and trust that it is real. That alone would be enough to forge armies and civilization, and any who couldn't share or wield that same power of belief would be bred or killed out of the lineage pretty quickly. Even today...those that can't believe in what majority of society believes (be it capitalism, religion, etc.) have the hardest time fitting in and reproducing.
Our imaginations (which we can then eventually turn into realities) are unbound by any constraints of the natural world. The compounding recursion available to human brains (and our digital tools) seems quite extraordinary to me. How to put this in perspective?
I've been wondering if there are instances of recursive process in physics or biochemistry. Not recursion in the sense of fractalization where effects disperse the further it goes, but rather in the sense of processes that can compound (autocatalytically? autopoietically?), unbound by the usual constraints of their environment. As a layperson I don't know if my failure to find anything means there aren't any or I'm just not able to map to their relevant terminologies.
Does DNA count? It contains instructions to make more of itself, which spins off into myriad other subprocesses.
Dawkins made a point like this when he said there were two great moments in evolution, the birth of genes, and the birth of memes.
Jumping around in these comments here (but no more than y'all just did on your video call :-)
I think it was Michael who mentioned an intuition that it feels like something about self-referential identity did not get fully evolved into our psychology. This is consistent with my position that, while some memes arising in Africa 1mya to 100-150kya certainly did generate coev (such as your idea that respect for The Golden Rule is innate now), our global dispersion then cut that off.
I feel that, for better or worse, visions of a better future like gen3 consciousness have no choice but to depend on some key memes that have no innate basis.
>I feel that, for better or worse, visions of a better future like gen3 consciousness have no choice but to depend on some key memes that have no innate basis.
That is an interesting proposition for Malcolm and Michael to address
It was interesting hearing the three of you tease apart recursion from self-referencing identity. CogSci talks about "symbolic representation"; sorry I don't remember if you have done a compare and contrast between recursion and symbolic representation?
I land on the supposition that our brains had evolved the hardware to go recursive, and do symbolic representation (maybe they're part and parcel of the same set of gadgets?) as part of modern H. sapiens. The use of that capability for exaptations like recognizing the "I" was latent until the right conditions were in place, until culture had the developed just the enabling suite of psychosocial techniques would lead a mind to want to try running off in a recursive direction.
It's been noted that the great apes seem to have a lot of the cognitive pieces in place to use symbols, but they don't (even if some individuals, when trained, can fake it pretty well). I say, that is not so different from the state of affairs of our lineages say 500-1000 kya. Some kind of minimum processing capability is the biggest pre-requisite, and evolutionary pressure can lead to a species reaching that threshold just by virtue of purely ecological forces, no cumulative culture required.
So I land on thinking that self-referentiality was just one of probably a few memes that we developed using this hardware capability. (Are there others, possibly even more substantive, that we didn't and haven't thought of yet?)
I don't have a great handle on the definition of symbolic representation. Partly my shortcoming, but partly due to different definitions. I'd love if someone else chimed in with a good explanation of how symbolic or abstract thought require recursion or self-reference.
>I land on the supposition that our brains had evolved the hardware to go recursive, and do symbolic representation (maybe they're part and parcel of the same set of gadgets?) as part of modern H. sapiens. The use of that capability for exaptations like recognizing the "I" was latent until the right conditions were in place
My gut tells me that the development of "I" is a tractable and understudied question. I also like the idea of "I" being the first recursive thought. But you also bring up the possibility that it was actually quite a late recursive thought. Gets at the question of how tight the recursive package was. Did some parts develop tens or hundreds of thousands of years before others? Tens seems likely to me, hundreds no.
>It's been noted that the great apes seem to have a lot of the cognitive pieces in place to use symbols, but they don't (even if some individuals, when trained, can fake it pretty well)
I'm glad you bring this up! Koko was maybe the smartest gorilla ever. Like trying to learn about the modal human from Napoleon. It's informative, but his exceptionalism is glossed over too often.
Aha, Malcolm and Michael were wanting to chip away at one element of EToC, same as me: its supposition that (rapid, globally convergent) biological evolution was a big component of the development of self-reference/recursion since out of Africa. And I heard one of them say, as I've been suggesting, that EToC doesn't appear to need there to have been bio evo for the theory to hold water -- it seems to them (and me) that this development can be nicely explained entirely within the frame of cultural evolution's standard processes.
As you no doubt know, there are whole wings of study articulating the ways in which socioculturally mediated practices and cognitive (or psychosocial, as Vervaeke calls them) techniques are subtly socialized into the young; its very believable to me that memes with themes of self-referential minds would turn into stories where the characters evinced self-referential capability, influencing an impressionable listener to assume "well of course a mind like mine should implement this self-referencing technique, that's what normal people do here".
The good news is this is a fairly empirical question. They'll do more and more research on selection that was happening recently. How much have schizophrenia/language-implicated genes changed in frequency in the last 10 or 50 kya? Does the lack of diversity on the Y chromosome have to do with selection?
Theoretically, why I think selection must have been important is that you can't select for symbolic/recursive thought until you have symbolic/recursive ideas in the culture. There is a lot of variation in how well individuals learn recursive ideas now (studied w/ proxies like "vocabulary size"), and this is substantially genetic. Therefore, in the past, when symbolic ideas started to become important to survival, there must have been a selection gradient. Even if recursive thinking ability was only correlated with fitness by r = 0.1, over 10,000 years that is a huge change in psychological disposition. So I think at some point genetic selection was important. And to me the most likely time frame is the last 50,000 years, with significant changes even in the last 10,000 years.