Two more interesting snake-related bits of mythology:
* The notion of Kundalini ("coiled snake") [1] in Hinduism. It sits at the base of the spine, travels up the spine in a serpentine movement (energetic vibrations) and travels up to the head, leading to liberation/enlightenment/etc. Carl Jung also observed the kundalini phenomenon in his patients (e.g. a woman who claimed she felt a snake crawl up from her belly and out her mouth).
* The caduceus [2], an ancient symbol which today is mostly associated with medicine. It has two snakes crawling up a staff in sine-wave form.
Here's my take: the "snake" so worshipped is a sensory experience of sinusoidal energy moving up the spinal column. You can experience it yourself by practicing Kundalini yoga, and it's very easy to see how people would analogize its movement to the movement of a snake.
Best line: "Show me a culture and I’ll show you the snakes" <— in terms of how the story is built, that should have been the starting point, in my opinion.
I'm definitely learning on the writing, as everything I wrote before was formulaic technical stuff. Part of why I'm putting this thing out piecemeal so I can get feedback like this.
I was talking with my partner about this theory and related ones and she was worried I was going to run off in some unfalsifiable direction and I pointed at how the article specifically claims that the existence of creation myths with no snakes would be evidence against the theory. plus other possibilities. it seems like a better sketch than anyone else has, even if it turns out to be wrong in major ways (similar to how afaict Jaynes was 100% correct THAT the brain hemispheres are relevant, even if he had it backwards from McGilchrist's later perspective about how/why).
I neglected to mention in my other comment: I love this. This is really impacting my thinking. It's my new favorite possibility. It makes SO much sense. Jury is still out on specifically "snake venom as psychedelic" but the basic thrust of "We got how we are because ~15ky ago we stumbled across memetic psychotechnology that granted a conscious sense of self" seems impressively compelling. Thank you for writing all this up!
One bit you keep mentioning that I'm really interested in hearing more about:
> I’ll write more about the gender aspect in future posts. For a bit more see the Eve Theory of Consciousness (or read Genesis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.).
I'd super duper love to hear more about your take on this gender thing. You mention women became sapient first. That fits the legends, and I can come up with some just-so stories about why that might have happened (e.g. women have always had more evolutionary & cultural pressure to practice social recursive thinking)… but my thoughts aren't as compelling as what you've written here. I feel like the explanation is going the other way: "Why would there be legends of female figures lifting men out of being animals and/or into being alive at all?"
But… gosh, that last framing seems like that's what being a mother is? Giving birth is creating new life. Go far enough back & people might not have noticed it had anything at all to do with sex! So ANY kind of (re)birth experience might be thought of as fundamentally from a feminine force.
But I get the sense that you have some kind of woven evidence to suggest that women were sapient (maybe for a while? like generations?) before men were and then figured out how to onboard men to sapience. That it's not just a metaphor.
I'd super duper love to hear you say more about this. If you'd be up for giving the one-paragraph version in comments here I'd very much enjoy it! But if not, just know that I'm looking forward to when you share the article about this.
It's fine to comment but keep it under 20 a day. If you want to learn more about people getting high on snake venom, I linked a review of the literature in my essay as well as two Vice documentaries. If that is not enough, I would love it if you could track down a primary source of Nero's doctor claiming that the mystery cults in Egypt kept live poisonous snakes.
> In humans the concept of self was extended to an invisible agent with an impossible task. The self is defined by tension between id and superego. There is no rest for the wicked, nor the righteous. Such is life.
Would you mind saying more about why you see this as impossible? Never-ending, sure, because id and superego aren't static and might well adapt in response to the ego's solution at each stage. But why IMPOSSIBLE?
Yeah, impossible may be a bit much. The self as a moving target or river may be more apropos, and some may indeed resolve the tension. Still, even the super-ego is not consistent. We are told not to kill then drafted to war. To provide for our children and also to be honest in our dealings. On top of this the id wants to stay alive and sleep around. I don't have a deep understanding of "enlightenment" but it seems that it usually involves abdicating some mundane responsibilities (like raising progeny or protecting the tribe). For most their ego will be pulled between many conflicting (and changing) goals. I'm saying it evolved to mediate those goals as they became more abstract.
Andrew, thanks for writing up such an interesting theory, and I especially enjoyed the selection of art used throughout.
Forgive me if this was linked elsewhere and I missed it, but this essay dovetails nicely: https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2022-08-24-planetary-scale-vibe-collapse.html. In this essay, the author discusses two models of consciousness, “liminal vs. supraliminal awareness, or preconquest vs. postconquest consciousness.”
It’s worth reading for anybody who enjoyed Andrew’s article here, and theorizes a mechanism for memetic transmission of “knowledge of good and evil” between groups of people.
Thanks! A friend sent that to me after it was linked on SSC. Really interesting piece! The part that seems most fantastic to me are the quotes about child-rearing. That indigenous babies just go off vibes from their parents, and mostly stay out of trouble. The child-mortality rates disagree!
I present a pretty strong version of the Holocene psychological change here. It seems like nobody now lives like people did 20k years ago. But I'm also open to most of the changes being environmental, and the shift being closer to the world-view collapse that happened in indigenous cultures during initial contact. The next posts will make some genetic predictions, which if they turn out true would the change was more than just environmental.
Makes sense. I really appreciate your project: acknowledging this is fun while also seeking to put forward testable predictions. I enjoyed reading, for example, The Immortality Key, but it has very strong “I’m just asking questions” vibes.
Yeah, I actually just finished that. Fascinating stuff. Way too long though! Spare me the details about coffee or the academic's pedigree. Believe him that the mystery cults were about psychedelics and extend back to Gobekli Tepe. But the drug was...snake venom.
One of the most relevant aspects of this, from my perspective, is how the preconquest mode of consciousness seems profoundly honest—not just not lying, but being very transparent with feeling. Not masking. Which seems like precisely the sort of thing that would shift once the ego feels in charge of itself.
Mmmm! Can you spell out more how that fits here? Basically that Pandora's box is another allegory for this shift, and has this lying quality similar to Adam & Eve hiding from God?
Like you mentioned, pre vs post conquest (or bicameral breakdown, or fall) would have huge differences in how one is expected to arrange one's communication with one's inner life. White lies (and lies at all) had not been invented, and now they are table stakes. I bring up Hesiod because maybe he wasn't *just* being sexist when he said the curse of women is that their face didn't match their inner life. Maybe women's head start on that front was one of the striking things about the world when men came online.
Other places I make the point that Adam is very bad at lying to god in the Garden. "Who told you that you were naked?" to which Adam immediately rats out Eve.
All of which is to say I agree with your assessment about profound honesty. And this is very opposed to most Evo-psych, which emphasizes our Machiavellian nature.
I'm thinking there was a phase change in human's ability to think about the future ~15k years ago. Animals (and humans 100k years ago) do change behavior, but in brittle ways. Ant farming probably evolved piecemeal over tens of thousands of generations. It's instinctual. Humans, on the other hand, can be deliberate about how to survive next winter.
One of the big things people point to in our evolution is the rate of technological/lifestyle change, rather than the absolute level. Agriculture could have developed even before people ruminated and deliberated. It seems that would take a long time though, and the transition we observe was quite fast. Not only that, but it happened at roughly the same time in Mexico, Peru, the Fertile Crescent, India, and China.
What I'm pointing out is that a change in our ability to think about the future could explain the rapid and worldwide transition.
Wikipedia's article on the neolithic revolution thinks the Fertile Crescent had it more than twice as long ago as much of the New World:
"Map of the world showing approximate centers of origin of agriculture and its spread in prehistory: the Fertile Crescent (11,000 BP), the Yangtze and Yellow River basins (9,000 BP) and the Papua New Guinea Highlands (9,000–6,000 BP), Central Mexico (5,000–4,000 BP), Northern South America (5,000–4,000 BP), sub-Saharan Africa (5,000–4,000 BP, exact location unknown), eastern North America (4,000–3,000 BP)."
+ The Khoisan separated from the main branch of Homo Sapiens around ~250k years ago, which suggests language is at least that old.
+ Existence of Williams Syndrome (look up kids with WS, they're quite dumb but perfectly capable of speech) suggests language is not that special.
+ Dating language, consciousness, self-awareness, or any cognitive affordance universal to all Homo Sapiens, to after the Out of Africa event [which is itself dubious (looks like there were multiple back and out migrations), but whatever] is not parsimonious. The simplest explanation is that the last common ancestor already had it.
+ In my opinion, the self-model is a quite elementary structure that any control model of the contents of current attention must quickly discover (or evolve to discover) in order to generate a world model that is sufficiently rich to allow effective regulation of the self and its actions in the world. It is true that language might be a prerequisite to achieve the expressive density necessary to represent concepts that rely on a tower of abstractions. E.g. I can't imagine a speechless mind capable of representing the following thought: "the current thought process that is representing its own action of thinking". But that kind of capability should hardly be the criterion for self-awareness; it's just a richer, higher resolution kind of self-awareness imo.
Interesting! Mal'ta boy is still a pretty clear case of cultural diffusion even without (recently related to Europeans, the presence of Venus statues). Does make it a bit less cool if there are snakes there as well as it doesn't provide evidence of staying power. Also kind of hard to say what was living there during the Ice Age
>The Khoisan separated from the main branch of Homo Sapiens around ~250k years ago, which suggests language is at least that old...The simplest explanation is that the last common ancestor already had it [language, self-awareness, etc].
This is similar to Chomsky's argument back when not so much was known about genetics. He just chose the last time humans were all in one continent. Does this mean we have to go back 750k years to the last common ancestor with Denisovans? There was significant mixing between those two homonim branches. Even if some group gets language first, they can still mix with quite distant cousins. This also holds for closer branches. With the 250k date there is the real question of why not much culture was produced. I have a hard time believing that recursion existed for 235k years before there is evidence for abstract thought. That is an opinion about how apparent things should be in the archeological record, of course. Plenty disagree.
>In my opinion, the self-model is a quite elementary structure
Animals must have a map of their body, but I think that our self-awareness is recursive which is quite different and not needed to control a body. I don't think they have a "mind-palace" to play with hypotheticals. It seems like there is a chasm between a beast and a being that can imagine and draw, ruminate on death, question god, etc. My guess is the difference has to do with self-awareness, bringing the mind under perception. It's a whole new sense, a land of symbols.
>Existence of Williams Syndrome (look up kids with WS, they're quite dumb but perfectly capable of speech) suggests language is not that special
What do you think makes humans special? Also, given you have thought about this stuff before, where do you think all the art is 40k or 100k years back? Where we modern but art just isn't a necessary part of the package? Why were inventions so rare?
Yeah, there is quite a bit of research on recursion in non-humans. Crows do the best, but even that is not cut and dry. For example, Scientific American covers the recent crow paper: "Scientists demonstrate that crows are capable of recursion—a key feature in grammar. Not everyone is convinced"
The recursion task is to select parenthesis in the correct order. So if the display contains {]}[ then rearrange that to be either [{}] or {[]}. To do this correctly requires the idea that one pattern [] is embedded in another {}. Crows do about as well as a 3 year old kid, which is pretty cool.
I guess this gets at the question of whether recursion is a gradient where you can have a little bit of recursion. My argument in Snake Cult is that there was a phase change in recursive ability brought on by self-awareness (which requires recursion). The node for social processes became recursive, perhaps even overnight through the course of a ritual. Chomsky's argument is that we went from 0-1 because of a mutation. No room at all for gradualism. It's also a strange idea because once you get recursion that opens up a whole new fitness landscape and you would get a bunch of evolution since then, which he rejects. It's a really strange view of our origins!
I think the easiest way to keep track of symmetry is a hierarchical model, which requires recursion.
Agree that it is weird how many recursions are thrown together. Self-reference seems different than closing parenthesis or counting or language. I'm going off Corballis's book The Recursive Mind. Also from the archeological record a lot of those pop up at the same time (eg. counting sticks, self-portraits, maybe recursive language, I say self-awareness).
> I think the easiest way to keep track of symmetry is a hierarchical model, which requires recursion
Very simple plants & animals already grow symmetrically. This involves some amount of hierarchy of the cells, perhaps, but probably not recursion, or if it does then it's yet another kind of recursion that is everywhere and therefore not that relevant. Meanwhile, symmetry is associated with beauty and this is probably not just a human thing (or a flower thing) but probably also a good signal that most animals use to discern which prospective mates are healthiest.
At any rate, count me among "Not everyone is convinced" for now, unless there's more evidence in the original 😉
I mean tbh I could believe crows get rudimentary recursion, based on their intelligence & problem-solving ability, I just don't see the {[]} thing as evidence for that.
This is great... now I'm going to comb early cultures for snake references. I think it absolutely stands that what snakes represented in antiquity doesn't necessarily follow from instinctual fear of dying to a snake!
If I remember correctly there is a relationship between the words snake and magic in Semitic/Aramaic? scripts which, due to not having vowel, become the same word, while there is ambiguity as to the role of venom as poison or cure (pharmakon). The healing power of the snake is referred to as the serpent of Moses in the desert as well as Christ nailed to a cross, and the Ophite traditions, as well as astrological ophiuchus, related to precession, rediscovered by Hipparchus in 1st century bce and represented in the Mithras cult...which fuses with gnostic pro-serpent perspectives as divine wisdom as the cure for ignorance/suffering and the dissolution of this reality. Similar to Narby’s psychological/physiological/phenomenological cosmic serpent interpretation of ayahuasca bringing us to cellular consciousness where DNA is made conscious and represented through resemblances of snakes with double helix.
Also, would be curious how Chomsky’s theory stacks up against others (Sapir whorf, mcghilchrist) these days. Regardless, fun essay!
>If I remember correctly there is a relationship between the words snake and magic in Semitic/Aramaic?
Yes! nhs is "serpent" or "divination," particularly divination related to libations. Going back thousands of years there are all sorts of libation cups from Egypt to Persia to Sumeria to Greece with serpents. It's a very common design. That's in the literature, I've found some examples going back 12,000 years at Kortik Tepe (though it's not clear if they are specifically libation cups...they do seem ritual though).
>Similar to Narby’s psychological/physiological/phenomenological cosmic serpent interpretation of ayahuasca bringing us to cellular consciousness where DNA is made conscious and represented through resemblances of snakes with double helix.
Yeah, he argues that the answer is outside the scientific method. IMO the similarities can be explained by a deep phylogeny and the original use can be explained as a libation. No need to reject science.
Loved the episode! There were lots of moments where you guys would say "I think Andrew would say..." and you were right every time. Great mental model of the essay. Will include it in my next "Links" post
Thanks for that! This was an absolute delight to read and an awesome idea to entertain. This post (and Eneasz’s enthusiasm) has encouraged me to dive deeper into your blog - I’m looking forward to it! :)
Hi Andrew. I just did a podcast (The Bayesian Conspiracy,) episode about this idea (it comes out tomorrow), prompting AskWho's audio (thank you AskWho!!!). Would it be OK with you if I put the full audio of this post on the podcast feed, as an accompaniment to the episode?
I was intrigued by your mention of rutin as an anti-venom. Much like ayahuasca is a mixture of two ingredients, could we be talking about a psychedelic mixture of capers and snake venom? I say capers because it seems it has a much higher rutin concentration, and it grows in and around the Fertile Crescent.
Excellent point! Turns out Greeks at least did use capers to treat snake bites:
"Pedanius Dioscorides, an ancient Greek physician, pharmacologist and botanist who wrote an encyclopedia on herbal medicine published in 50 AD, was the first to analyze in detail the health benefits of capers. This analysis has actually even been referenced in many recent studies. Folk Greek medicine has inherited a great deal from ancient wisdom, and also uses the caper plant to treat wasp and snake bites." From: https://culinarybackstreets.com/cities-category/athens/2022/building-blocks-43/
Greece is also where there is the best evidence of ritual use of snake venom as part of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Wonderful read, thanks for sharing this content! I know I am a bit late to the game, but I would love to read your thoughts about what happens with mind during (and as a consequence of) insignt meditation events (good rationalist depiction here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mf2MCkYgSZSJRz5nM/a-non-mystical-explanation-of-insight-meditation-and-the ) within the context of the meme theory of self-awareness. Any relevant resources recommendations would be much appreciated.
Slow reply in part because I don't know that much about meditation. I really came to the idea through psychometrics and myth.
I do follow rat-adjacent meditators like Nick Cammarata who say things like the self being a knot that you can learn to untie. Having only experienced that with psychedelics, I feel I'm flying somewhat blind in engaging with that. I would tentatively say that my theory is about how that knot came to be. 20,000 years ago the self may have been an altered state of consciousness. Rituals helped people develop a self more consistently, and this was useful for other reasons. An inner self allows some obvious social advantages, such as the ability to lie. People like Corballis argue there is a tightly bound recursive package of abilities that includes: language, counting, and thinking about the future. At any rate, there has been selection for a recursive self, and it now develops without any intervention (though we do still use religion to instruct how it should relate to the material world + society).
If you know about meditation I'd love your take on it. (Or if you have any meditator friends who would be willing to review these ideas; I'm definitely interested in these implications of the theory.)
Thanks for taking the time to reply! I am barely a meditation toddler so to speak so I am not it the position to speak form authority on this subject. My best guess at this point is that meditation-induced insight experiences somehow disembed self from motivation systems (Buddhists would probably talk about craving), effectively making it less of a center of narrative gravity. I am not sure about the rest though. What sparked my interest is that it is supposed to lead to non-dualistic experience of reality, but somehow it does not seem right to equate this experience with the state before we developed self (according to your theory). In any case, I will report back once I find out more! :)
Yeah, I think once we get recursion, it's hard to model the pre-recursive mindset, because recursion has been integrated into so many of our mental processes. I have big error bars on how tightly knit the whole recursive package is. For example, you can experience ego death via psychedelics, but still produce recursive language. There is probably some recursive semantic processing in our visual system that, likewise, has some independence from self and language.
>What sparked my interest is that it is supposed to lead to non-dualistic experience of reality, but somehow it does not seem right to equate this experience with the state before we developed self
Jaynes used schizophrenia as an analog for a step in the direction of a bicameral (what I call non-recursive) mindset. Likewise, there are problems in using a modern disruption of self to model archaic versions of self. Everything now is built up on a system which has evolved. The phylogenetic root will not be recovered via meditation or preserved in common variation (schizophrenia).
Two more interesting snake-related bits of mythology:
* The notion of Kundalini ("coiled snake") [1] in Hinduism. It sits at the base of the spine, travels up the spine in a serpentine movement (energetic vibrations) and travels up to the head, leading to liberation/enlightenment/etc. Carl Jung also observed the kundalini phenomenon in his patients (e.g. a woman who claimed she felt a snake crawl up from her belly and out her mouth).
* The caduceus [2], an ancient symbol which today is mostly associated with medicine. It has two snakes crawling up a staff in sine-wave form.
Here's my take: the "snake" so worshipped is a sensory experience of sinusoidal energy moving up the spinal column. You can experience it yourself by practicing Kundalini yoga, and it's very easy to see how people would analogize its movement to the movement of a snake.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kundalini
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caduceus
Fascinating read. Great pitch of a wild idea!
Best line: "Show me a culture and I’ll show you the snakes" <— in terms of how the story is built, that should have been the starting point, in my opinion.
But anyway, great writing. Thank you!
Thanks!
I'm definitely learning on the writing, as everything I wrote before was formulaic technical stuff. Part of why I'm putting this thing out piecemeal so I can get feedback like this.
yeah this was a helpful line
I was talking with my partner about this theory and related ones and she was worried I was going to run off in some unfalsifiable direction and I pointed at how the article specifically claims that the existence of creation myths with no snakes would be evidence against the theory. plus other possibilities. it seems like a better sketch than anyone else has, even if it turns out to be wrong in major ways (similar to how afaict Jaynes was 100% correct THAT the brain hemispheres are relevant, even if he had it backwards from McGilchrist's later perspective about how/why).
I neglected to mention in my other comment: I love this. This is really impacting my thinking. It's my new favorite possibility. It makes SO much sense. Jury is still out on specifically "snake venom as psychedelic" but the basic thrust of "We got how we are because ~15ky ago we stumbled across memetic psychotechnology that granted a conscious sense of self" seems impressively compelling. Thank you for writing all this up!
One bit you keep mentioning that I'm really interested in hearing more about:
> I’ll write more about the gender aspect in future posts. For a bit more see the Eve Theory of Consciousness (or read Genesis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.).
I'd super duper love to hear more about your take on this gender thing. You mention women became sapient first. That fits the legends, and I can come up with some just-so stories about why that might have happened (e.g. women have always had more evolutionary & cultural pressure to practice social recursive thinking)… but my thoughts aren't as compelling as what you've written here. I feel like the explanation is going the other way: "Why would there be legends of female figures lifting men out of being animals and/or into being alive at all?"
But… gosh, that last framing seems like that's what being a mother is? Giving birth is creating new life. Go far enough back & people might not have noticed it had anything at all to do with sex! So ANY kind of (re)birth experience might be thought of as fundamentally from a feminine force.
But I get the sense that you have some kind of woven evidence to suggest that women were sapient (maybe for a while? like generations?) before men were and then figured out how to onboard men to sapience. That it's not just a metaphor.
I'd super duper love to hear you say more about this. If you'd be up for giving the one-paragraph version in comments here I'd very much enjoy it! But if not, just know that I'm looking forward to when you share the article about this.
It's fine to comment but keep it under 20 a day. If you want to learn more about people getting high on snake venom, I linked a review of the literature in my essay as well as two Vice documentaries. If that is not enough, I would love it if you could track down a primary source of Nero's doctor claiming that the mystery cults in Egypt kept live poisonous snakes.
> In humans the concept of self was extended to an invisible agent with an impossible task. The self is defined by tension between id and superego. There is no rest for the wicked, nor the righteous. Such is life.
Would you mind saying more about why you see this as impossible? Never-ending, sure, because id and superego aren't static and might well adapt in response to the ego's solution at each stage. But why IMPOSSIBLE?
Yeah, impossible may be a bit much. The self as a moving target or river may be more apropos, and some may indeed resolve the tension. Still, even the super-ego is not consistent. We are told not to kill then drafted to war. To provide for our children and also to be honest in our dealings. On top of this the id wants to stay alive and sleep around. I don't have a deep understanding of "enlightenment" but it seems that it usually involves abdicating some mundane responsibilities (like raising progeny or protecting the tribe). For most their ego will be pulled between many conflicting (and changing) goals. I'm saying it evolved to mediate those goals as they became more abstract.
Andrew, thanks for writing up such an interesting theory, and I especially enjoyed the selection of art used throughout.
Forgive me if this was linked elsewhere and I missed it, but this essay dovetails nicely: https://smoothbrains.net/posts/2022-08-24-planetary-scale-vibe-collapse.html. In this essay, the author discusses two models of consciousness, “liminal vs. supraliminal awareness, or preconquest vs. postconquest consciousness.”
It’s worth reading for anybody who enjoyed Andrew’s article here, and theorizes a mechanism for memetic transmission of “knowledge of good and evil” between groups of people.
Thanks! A friend sent that to me after it was linked on SSC. Really interesting piece! The part that seems most fantastic to me are the quotes about child-rearing. That indigenous babies just go off vibes from their parents, and mostly stay out of trouble. The child-mortality rates disagree!
I present a pretty strong version of the Holocene psychological change here. It seems like nobody now lives like people did 20k years ago. But I'm also open to most of the changes being environmental, and the shift being closer to the world-view collapse that happened in indigenous cultures during initial contact. The next posts will make some genetic predictions, which if they turn out true would the change was more than just environmental.
Makes sense. I really appreciate your project: acknowledging this is fun while also seeking to put forward testable predictions. I enjoyed reading, for example, The Immortality Key, but it has very strong “I’m just asking questions” vibes.
Yeah, I actually just finished that. Fascinating stuff. Way too long though! Spare me the details about coffee or the academic's pedigree. Believe him that the mystery cults were about psychedelics and extend back to Gobekli Tepe. But the drug was...snake venom.
One of the most relevant aspects of this, from my perspective, is how the preconquest mode of consciousness seems profoundly honest—not just not lying, but being very transparent with feeling. Not masking. Which seems like precisely the sort of thing that would shift once the ego feels in charge of itself.
Hesiod brings up Pandora's lying face twice in his account of her opening the box.
Mmmm! Can you spell out more how that fits here? Basically that Pandora's box is another allegory for this shift, and has this lying quality similar to Adam & Eve hiding from God?
Missed this!
Like you mentioned, pre vs post conquest (or bicameral breakdown, or fall) would have huge differences in how one is expected to arrange one's communication with one's inner life. White lies (and lies at all) had not been invented, and now they are table stakes. I bring up Hesiod because maybe he wasn't *just* being sexist when he said the curse of women is that their face didn't match their inner life. Maybe women's head start on that front was one of the striking things about the world when men came online.
Other places I make the point that Adam is very bad at lying to god in the Garden. "Who told you that you were naked?" to which Adam immediately rats out Eve.
All of which is to say I agree with your assessment about profound honesty. And this is very opposed to most Evo-psych, which emphasizes our Machiavellian nature.
> religion produced agriculture, for without initiation abstract thought and the ability to plan would not have been present.
How do you reconcile that with ants practicing agriculture but not, apparently, religion?
I'm thinking there was a phase change in human's ability to think about the future ~15k years ago. Animals (and humans 100k years ago) do change behavior, but in brittle ways. Ant farming probably evolved piecemeal over tens of thousands of generations. It's instinctual. Humans, on the other hand, can be deliberate about how to survive next winter.
But couldn't humans develop agriculture even before that?
One of the big things people point to in our evolution is the rate of technological/lifestyle change, rather than the absolute level. Agriculture could have developed even before people ruminated and deliberated. It seems that would take a long time though, and the transition we observe was quite fast. Not only that, but it happened at roughly the same time in Mexico, Peru, the Fertile Crescent, India, and China.
What I'm pointing out is that a change in our ability to think about the future could explain the rapid and worldwide transition.
Wikipedia's article on the neolithic revolution thinks the Fertile Crescent had it more than twice as long ago as much of the New World:
"Map of the world showing approximate centers of origin of agriculture and its spread in prehistory: the Fertile Crescent (11,000 BP), the Yangtze and Yellow River basins (9,000 BP) and the Papua New Guinea Highlands (9,000–6,000 BP), Central Mexico (5,000–4,000 BP), Northern South America (5,000–4,000 BP), sub-Saharan Africa (5,000–4,000 BP, exact location unknown), eastern North America (4,000–3,000 BP)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution#/media/File:Centres_of_origin_and_spread_of_agriculture.svg
Check out figure 1 of Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1323964111
(Tried to link scihub but it didn't let me. full article available there)
+ There are a few snake species in Siberia.
+ The Khoisan separated from the main branch of Homo Sapiens around ~250k years ago, which suggests language is at least that old.
+ Existence of Williams Syndrome (look up kids with WS, they're quite dumb but perfectly capable of speech) suggests language is not that special.
+ Dating language, consciousness, self-awareness, or any cognitive affordance universal to all Homo Sapiens, to after the Out of Africa event [which is itself dubious (looks like there were multiple back and out migrations), but whatever] is not parsimonious. The simplest explanation is that the last common ancestor already had it.
+ In my opinion, the self-model is a quite elementary structure that any control model of the contents of current attention must quickly discover (or evolve to discover) in order to generate a world model that is sufficiently rich to allow effective regulation of the self and its actions in the world. It is true that language might be a prerequisite to achieve the expressive density necessary to represent concepts that rely on a tower of abstractions. E.g. I can't imagine a speechless mind capable of representing the following thought: "the current thought process that is representing its own action of thinking". But that kind of capability should hardly be the criterion for self-awareness; it's just a richer, higher resolution kind of self-awareness imo.
> There are a few snake species in Siberia.
Interesting! Mal'ta boy is still a pretty clear case of cultural diffusion even without (recently related to Europeans, the presence of Venus statues). Does make it a bit less cool if there are snakes there as well as it doesn't provide evidence of staying power. Also kind of hard to say what was living there during the Ice Age
>The Khoisan separated from the main branch of Homo Sapiens around ~250k years ago, which suggests language is at least that old...The simplest explanation is that the last common ancestor already had it [language, self-awareness, etc].
This is similar to Chomsky's argument back when not so much was known about genetics. He just chose the last time humans were all in one continent. Does this mean we have to go back 750k years to the last common ancestor with Denisovans? There was significant mixing between those two homonim branches. Even if some group gets language first, they can still mix with quite distant cousins. This also holds for closer branches. With the 250k date there is the real question of why not much culture was produced. I have a hard time believing that recursion existed for 235k years before there is evidence for abstract thought. That is an opinion about how apparent things should be in the archeological record, of course. Plenty disagree.
>In my opinion, the self-model is a quite elementary structure
Animals must have a map of their body, but I think that our self-awareness is recursive which is quite different and not needed to control a body. I don't think they have a "mind-palace" to play with hypotheticals. It seems like there is a chasm between a beast and a being that can imagine and draw, ruminate on death, question god, etc. My guess is the difference has to do with self-awareness, bringing the mind under perception. It's a whole new sense, a land of symbols.
>Existence of Williams Syndrome (look up kids with WS, they're quite dumb but perfectly capable of speech) suggests language is not that special
What do you think makes humans special? Also, given you have thought about this stuff before, where do you think all the art is 40k or 100k years back? Where we modern but art just isn't a necessary part of the package? Why were inventions so rare?
"I have a hard time believing that recursion existed for 235k years before there is evidence for abstract thought."
Don't corvids demonstrate recursion-enabled cognition?
Yeah, there is quite a bit of research on recursion in non-humans. Crows do the best, but even that is not cut and dry. For example, Scientific American covers the recent crow paper: "Scientists demonstrate that crows are capable of recursion—a key feature in grammar. Not everyone is convinced"
The recursion task is to select parenthesis in the correct order. So if the display contains {]}[ then rearrange that to be either [{}] or {[]}. To do this correctly requires the idea that one pattern [] is embedded in another {}. Crows do about as well as a 3 year old kid, which is pretty cool.
I guess this gets at the question of whether recursion is a gradient where you can have a little bit of recursion. My argument in Snake Cult is that there was a phase change in recursive ability brought on by self-awareness (which requires recursion). The node for social processes became recursive, perhaps even overnight through the course of a ritual. Chomsky's argument is that we went from 0-1 because of a mutation. No room at all for gradualism. It's also a strange idea because once you get recursion that opens up a whole new fitness landscape and you would get a bunch of evolution since then, which he rejects. It's a really strange view of our origins!
> {]}[ then rearrange that to be either [{}] or {[]}
can't you just do that by aiming for symmetry???
also in any case SELF-reflectiveness seems to me to be different from being able to look at a system from outside and see that it's doing something
eg watching a dog chase its own tail
I think the easiest way to keep track of symmetry is a hierarchical model, which requires recursion.
Agree that it is weird how many recursions are thrown together. Self-reference seems different than closing parenthesis or counting or language. I'm going off Corballis's book The Recursive Mind. Also from the archeological record a lot of those pop up at the same time (eg. counting sticks, self-portraits, maybe recursive language, I say self-awareness).
> I think the easiest way to keep track of symmetry is a hierarchical model, which requires recursion
Very simple plants & animals already grow symmetrically. This involves some amount of hierarchy of the cells, perhaps, but probably not recursion, or if it does then it's yet another kind of recursion that is everywhere and therefore not that relevant. Meanwhile, symmetry is associated with beauty and this is probably not just a human thing (or a flower thing) but probably also a good signal that most animals use to discern which prospective mates are healthiest.
At any rate, count me among "Not everyone is convinced" for now, unless there's more evidence in the original 😉
I mean tbh I could believe crows get rudimentary recursion, based on their intelligence & problem-solving ability, I just don't see the {[]} thing as evidence for that.
This is great... now I'm going to comb early cultures for snake references. I think it absolutely stands that what snakes represented in antiquity doesn't necessarily follow from instinctual fear of dying to a snake!
Once the idea got in my head I was constantly hounded by ancient snakes
If I remember correctly there is a relationship between the words snake and magic in Semitic/Aramaic? scripts which, due to not having vowel, become the same word, while there is ambiguity as to the role of venom as poison or cure (pharmakon). The healing power of the snake is referred to as the serpent of Moses in the desert as well as Christ nailed to a cross, and the Ophite traditions, as well as astrological ophiuchus, related to precession, rediscovered by Hipparchus in 1st century bce and represented in the Mithras cult...which fuses with gnostic pro-serpent perspectives as divine wisdom as the cure for ignorance/suffering and the dissolution of this reality. Similar to Narby’s psychological/physiological/phenomenological cosmic serpent interpretation of ayahuasca bringing us to cellular consciousness where DNA is made conscious and represented through resemblances of snakes with double helix.
Also, would be curious how Chomsky’s theory stacks up against others (Sapir whorf, mcghilchrist) these days. Regardless, fun essay!
>If I remember correctly there is a relationship between the words snake and magic in Semitic/Aramaic?
Yes! nhs is "serpent" or "divination," particularly divination related to libations. Going back thousands of years there are all sorts of libation cups from Egypt to Persia to Sumeria to Greece with serpents. It's a very common design. That's in the literature, I've found some examples going back 12,000 years at Kortik Tepe (though it's not clear if they are specifically libation cups...they do seem ritual though).
>Similar to Narby’s psychological/physiological/phenomenological cosmic serpent interpretation of ayahuasca bringing us to cellular consciousness where DNA is made conscious and represented through resemblances of snakes with double helix.
Yeah, he argues that the answer is outside the scientific method. IMO the similarities can be explained by a deep phylogeny and the original use can be explained as a libation. No need to reject science.
Also, if you like archeoastronomy check out: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/herakles-adam-and-krishna-were-initiated
Are you aware of Jaynes' theory on the etiology of consciousness? https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/
Yeah, it's very similar, right! I think he should have went looking for signs of consciousness spreading: pronouns, initiation rituals, creation myths, etc. I've written about those extensively, see for example The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns (https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of) or Evidence for Global Cultural Diffusion (https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/evidence-for-global-cultural-diffusion).
As requested, the TBC episode where we discuss this post. ty again for the insightful write-up and many follow-ups :)
We have some chat and feedback about prior episode at the top, we get into this post at 13 minutes in.
https://www.thebayesianconspiracy.com/2024/02/205-the-snake-cult-of-consciousness/
Loved the episode! There were lots of moments where you guys would say "I think Andrew would say..." and you were right every time. Great mental model of the essay. Will include it in my next "Links" post
Thanks for that! This was an absolute delight to read and an awesome idea to entertain. This post (and Eneasz’s enthusiasm) has encouraged me to dive deeper into your blog - I’m looking forward to it! :)
I enlist to the applauding crowd for the well thought research and presented understandings of so many interconnected esoteric themes.
From my simple POV as double decade practitioner of both meditations and shamanic rituals, the conclusions aligns.
For those like me that read better with my ears, I've narrated this post with ElevenLabs. Let me know if you are OK with this or want me to remove it.
https://askwhocastsai.substack.com/p/the-snake-cult-of-consciousness-by
Extremely listenable voice. Thanks!
Hi Andrew. I just did a podcast (The Bayesian Conspiracy,) episode about this idea (it comes out tomorrow), prompting AskWho's audio (thank you AskWho!!!). Would it be OK with you if I put the full audio of this post on the podcast feed, as an accompaniment to the episode?
Sure thing! And put he link here tomorrow if you would be so kind
Thank you!
I was intrigued by your mention of rutin as an anti-venom. Much like ayahuasca is a mixture of two ingredients, could we be talking about a psychedelic mixture of capers and snake venom? I say capers because it seems it has a much higher rutin concentration, and it grows in and around the Fertile Crescent.
Pure speculation of course. Love the article!
Excellent point! Turns out Greeks at least did use capers to treat snake bites:
"Pedanius Dioscorides, an ancient Greek physician, pharmacologist and botanist who wrote an encyclopedia on herbal medicine published in 50 AD, was the first to analyze in detail the health benefits of capers. This analysis has actually even been referenced in many recent studies. Folk Greek medicine has inherited a great deal from ancient wisdom, and also uses the caper plant to treat wasp and snake bites." From: https://culinarybackstreets.com/cities-category/athens/2022/building-blocks-43/
Greece is also where there is the best evidence of ritual use of snake venom as part of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Bravo sir. Fantastic article
Thanks!
Wonderful read, thanks for sharing this content! I know I am a bit late to the game, but I would love to read your thoughts about what happens with mind during (and as a consequence of) insignt meditation events (good rationalist depiction here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mf2MCkYgSZSJRz5nM/a-non-mystical-explanation-of-insight-meditation-and-the ) within the context of the meme theory of self-awareness. Any relevant resources recommendations would be much appreciated.
Slow reply in part because I don't know that much about meditation. I really came to the idea through psychometrics and myth.
I do follow rat-adjacent meditators like Nick Cammarata who say things like the self being a knot that you can learn to untie. Having only experienced that with psychedelics, I feel I'm flying somewhat blind in engaging with that. I would tentatively say that my theory is about how that knot came to be. 20,000 years ago the self may have been an altered state of consciousness. Rituals helped people develop a self more consistently, and this was useful for other reasons. An inner self allows some obvious social advantages, such as the ability to lie. People like Corballis argue there is a tightly bound recursive package of abilities that includes: language, counting, and thinking about the future. At any rate, there has been selection for a recursive self, and it now develops without any intervention (though we do still use religion to instruct how it should relate to the material world + society).
If you know about meditation I'd love your take on it. (Or if you have any meditator friends who would be willing to review these ideas; I'm definitely interested in these implications of the theory.)
Thanks for taking the time to reply! I am barely a meditation toddler so to speak so I am not it the position to speak form authority on this subject. My best guess at this point is that meditation-induced insight experiences somehow disembed self from motivation systems (Buddhists would probably talk about craving), effectively making it less of a center of narrative gravity. I am not sure about the rest though. What sparked my interest is that it is supposed to lead to non-dualistic experience of reality, but somehow it does not seem right to equate this experience with the state before we developed self (according to your theory). In any case, I will report back once I find out more! :)
I await the report :)
Yeah, I think once we get recursion, it's hard to model the pre-recursive mindset, because recursion has been integrated into so many of our mental processes. I have big error bars on how tightly knit the whole recursive package is. For example, you can experience ego death via psychedelics, but still produce recursive language. There is probably some recursive semantic processing in our visual system that, likewise, has some independence from self and language.
>What sparked my interest is that it is supposed to lead to non-dualistic experience of reality, but somehow it does not seem right to equate this experience with the state before we developed self
Jaynes used schizophrenia as an analog for a step in the direction of a bicameral (what I call non-recursive) mindset. Likewise, there are problems in using a modern disruption of self to model archaic versions of self. Everything now is built up on a system which has evolved. The phylogenetic root will not be recovered via meditation or preserved in common variation (schizophrenia).