I think it may have been in "When did recursion evolve Part 1" where you challenged why our brains would have evolved a capability like recursion 200-400kya that was just going to lie latent, apparently not providing any immediate evolutionary advantage. Right, biological evolution wouldn't do that. But culturally mediated sexual selection would have been a wild card. During the million year buildup of Cultural Evolution, any number of psychological traits may have been selected for, semi-independently of the impacts on evolutionary fitness they may have had in the lives of pre-cultural hominids.
I float the hypothesis that cultural evolutionary pressures did indeed select for the capabilities underlying behavioral modernity such as recursion, along with other traits. I picture how cultural prestige in Botswana 400kya would have accrued to those who demonstrated the ability to reliably cognate through the unexpected (a challenge which occurs a lot in a lineage like ours evolved to inhabit a socio-cognitive niche in the ecosystem).
I speculate that a few thousand generations of that pressure could have resulted in brains that had tremendous latent capabilities for things that had to do with the collective human mind of their tribe. Just waiting for memes of some future millennia to come along and excite them in this direction or that. Maybe the self-awareness meme spread like lightning round the world via cultural exchange 10-20kya because it found fertile ground in the brains it touched? It didn't have to wait for the wheels of culture-led gene-culture coevolution to grind along.
What do you do with the lack of art? For me it's strange that the entire recursion package comes at once. Pronouns are very similar worldwide, which I take as at least suggestive of their being invented *after* Out of Africa. And there are no self-portraits, counting, or narrative art before 40 kya. What would prestigious cognition look like 400 kya if it did not include any of that?
There could be latent periods, but I prefer a theory that doesn't rely on them. Or at least I'm happy being the one doing the work trying to put together such a theory, as it seems most others rely on latent periods.
I think you said in a previous article that the largest part of culture plays itself out entirely within the social realm. Not technology. And I say, not necessarily art either. Maybe culture was more focused on iterating toward self-domestication and out-group cooperation for all those millennia.
Evidence of trade, including long-distance trade, starts to appear 200kya. I know it's easy to look around at us now and decry nationalism and the many other forms of in-group bias, but I look at that glass as half-full and say the fact we have global supply chains, leagues of nations, charitable giving across continents, etc. that represents just as amazing of a journey for our lineage as the things we build.
Wow this series of articles on recursion has been an exciting ride. Is there more, or is this terminus? I want to see what you can construe for how convergent biological evolution could have possibly occurred all over the globe, in a span of just 10-15k years, amongst so many geographically isolated populations? That's the conundrum that's always stopped me from letting myself believe, regardless of how well it answers the Sapient Paradox.
More coming! Briefly I think that we left Africa and recursion wasn't 100% there. Naturally the fitness landscape would be in this direction in separate populations even after dispersal. Really hard to say how fast the "phase change" could have been for full recursion. Chomsky says in a single generation, which I find unreasonable. Corballis says it took hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe!
Not unique to me, but I think that ritual and psychedelics could have been involved. If there was some way to elicit a the epiphany of self-awareness, then that would have spread very quickly. Turns out snake venom works as a psychedelic. Perhaps related, snakes are part of creation myths worldwide. Using venom as the hallucinogen does not even have to last very long. Surely other drugs could have replaced it. But snake venom tends to find us and gets the job done. Maybe it was version 1.0. And maybe this could have gotten selected for recursion in a few thousand years. The lessons about self "stick" for some initiates, who have more kids. Rinse and repeat.
Still not sold (see the other comment I just posted moments ago) but regardless of whether there was genetic change and/or hallucinogens were involved, can you imagine how fervent those early discoverers of self-awareness must have been in their proselytizing fever? No religious movement of recorded history could have been anywhere close in terms of how passionately transformed they would have been. Every social interaction would be approached from a completely new perspective, jabbering incomprehensibly to those who hadn't had their third eye opened. That makes me believe that cultural wildfire could have spread across tribes, regions, continents in a short span. Were they persecuted at first? Were there great religious wars? I imagine the greatest human dramas we could ever imagine occurred then.
I'm not sold either! Seems like a good thing to develop even if it has a 5% chance of being true though.
Totally agree on the missionary stuff. I was actually a Mormon missionary in another life and when I mentioned the "missionaries of consciousness" angle my friends laughed and said old habits die hard. Glad your mind went there too :)
"Homo Sapiens outcompeted … " also each population might have been outcompeted for completely different reasons in different ocntexts , including Steven Bradbury's OF I've won— the 1,000 m event at the 2002 Winter Olympics after all of his opponents were involved in a last-corner pile-up
"Homo Sapiens outcompeted Denisovans, Neanderthals, Homo Erectus, Homo Florensis, Homo Longi, and Homo Luzonensis all at about the same time. If we all had the special sauce, why is there only one lineage standing? " to be clear there is a recursive confangulation here too — its the "hybrids" that outcompeted the "purebreds" -- possibly excluded southern Africa, but then there's that recent Okavango Delta maternal line stuff, and its the nurturing of children by a band of Homo ("making special" after Dissanyake) that world-builds culture in bodies walking forward and out of ... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/cradle-of-modern-human-life-found-in-botswana-maybe — the "purebreds" here are also not really completely isolated populations of course, but compared to population with the "thing" that happened they are — —- processes of nurture leave little fossil evidence, all we have are the washed out ruins of a stone church built against the wooden church now rotting away, in which the whispered echos were sung — yep
I think it may have been in "When did recursion evolve Part 1" where you challenged why our brains would have evolved a capability like recursion 200-400kya that was just going to lie latent, apparently not providing any immediate evolutionary advantage. Right, biological evolution wouldn't do that. But culturally mediated sexual selection would have been a wild card. During the million year buildup of Cultural Evolution, any number of psychological traits may have been selected for, semi-independently of the impacts on evolutionary fitness they may have had in the lives of pre-cultural hominids.
I float the hypothesis that cultural evolutionary pressures did indeed select for the capabilities underlying behavioral modernity such as recursion, along with other traits. I picture how cultural prestige in Botswana 400kya would have accrued to those who demonstrated the ability to reliably cognate through the unexpected (a challenge which occurs a lot in a lineage like ours evolved to inhabit a socio-cognitive niche in the ecosystem).
I speculate that a few thousand generations of that pressure could have resulted in brains that had tremendous latent capabilities for things that had to do with the collective human mind of their tribe. Just waiting for memes of some future millennia to come along and excite them in this direction or that. Maybe the self-awareness meme spread like lightning round the world via cultural exchange 10-20kya because it found fertile ground in the brains it touched? It didn't have to wait for the wheels of culture-led gene-culture coevolution to grind along.
What do you do with the lack of art? For me it's strange that the entire recursion package comes at once. Pronouns are very similar worldwide, which I take as at least suggestive of their being invented *after* Out of Africa. And there are no self-portraits, counting, or narrative art before 40 kya. What would prestigious cognition look like 400 kya if it did not include any of that?
There could be latent periods, but I prefer a theory that doesn't rely on them. Or at least I'm happy being the one doing the work trying to put together such a theory, as it seems most others rely on latent periods.
I think you said in a previous article that the largest part of culture plays itself out entirely within the social realm. Not technology. And I say, not necessarily art either. Maybe culture was more focused on iterating toward self-domestication and out-group cooperation for all those millennia.
Evidence of trade, including long-distance trade, starts to appear 200kya. I know it's easy to look around at us now and decry nationalism and the many other forms of in-group bias, but I look at that glass as half-full and say the fact we have global supply chains, leagues of nations, charitable giving across continents, etc. that represents just as amazing of a journey for our lineage as the things we build.
Wow this series of articles on recursion has been an exciting ride. Is there more, or is this terminus? I want to see what you can construe for how convergent biological evolution could have possibly occurred all over the globe, in a span of just 10-15k years, amongst so many geographically isolated populations? That's the conundrum that's always stopped me from letting myself believe, regardless of how well it answers the Sapient Paradox.
More coming! Briefly I think that we left Africa and recursion wasn't 100% there. Naturally the fitness landscape would be in this direction in separate populations even after dispersal. Really hard to say how fast the "phase change" could have been for full recursion. Chomsky says in a single generation, which I find unreasonable. Corballis says it took hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe!
Not unique to me, but I think that ritual and psychedelics could have been involved. If there was some way to elicit a the epiphany of self-awareness, then that would have spread very quickly. Turns out snake venom works as a psychedelic. Perhaps related, snakes are part of creation myths worldwide. Using venom as the hallucinogen does not even have to last very long. Surely other drugs could have replaced it. But snake venom tends to find us and gets the job done. Maybe it was version 1.0. And maybe this could have gotten selected for recursion in a few thousand years. The lessons about self "stick" for some initiates, who have more kids. Rinse and repeat.
Still not sold (see the other comment I just posted moments ago) but regardless of whether there was genetic change and/or hallucinogens were involved, can you imagine how fervent those early discoverers of self-awareness must have been in their proselytizing fever? No religious movement of recorded history could have been anywhere close in terms of how passionately transformed they would have been. Every social interaction would be approached from a completely new perspective, jabbering incomprehensibly to those who hadn't had their third eye opened. That makes me believe that cultural wildfire could have spread across tribes, regions, continents in a short span. Were they persecuted at first? Were there great religious wars? I imagine the greatest human dramas we could ever imagine occurred then.
I'm not sold either! Seems like a good thing to develop even if it has a 5% chance of being true though.
Totally agree on the missionary stuff. I was actually a Mormon missionary in another life and when I mentioned the "missionaries of consciousness" angle my friends laughed and said old habits die hard. Glad your mind went there too :)
>>"I was actually a Mormon missionary..."
Of the top 10,000 things I might have predicted you would have said in this reply, that was not one of them!
"Homo Sapiens outcompeted … " also each population might have been outcompeted for completely different reasons in different ocntexts , including Steven Bradbury's OF I've won— the 1,000 m event at the 2002 Winter Olympics after all of his opponents were involved in a last-corner pile-up
"Homo Sapiens outcompeted Denisovans, Neanderthals, Homo Erectus, Homo Florensis, Homo Longi, and Homo Luzonensis all at about the same time. If we all had the special sauce, why is there only one lineage standing? " to be clear there is a recursive confangulation here too — its the "hybrids" that outcompeted the "purebreds" -- possibly excluded southern Africa, but then there's that recent Okavango Delta maternal line stuff, and its the nurturing of children by a band of Homo ("making special" after Dissanyake) that world-builds culture in bodies walking forward and out of ... https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/cradle-of-modern-human-life-found-in-botswana-maybe — the "purebreds" here are also not really completely isolated populations of course, but compared to population with the "thing" that happened they are — —- processes of nurture leave little fossil evidence, all we have are the washed out ruins of a stone church built against the wooden church now rotting away, in which the whispered echos were sung — yep