意識のイブ理論

From Vectors of Mind - images at original.

Note: a more recent version of this theory appears here.

O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless rememberings and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all一 what is it?

And where did it come from?

And why?

~ Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Origin merits such an opening salvo, for in the subsequent pages Jaynes argues that consciousness emerged just 3,200 years ago. Prior to that fateful moment humans had a cognitive arrangement he calls the bicameral mind for its divided functions. Analogous to a “two-chamber” system of government¹, one half of the brain produced commands as auditory hallucinations. These would have been in the voice of authorities (ie. parents, the chief), or the gods. The other half executed these commands. There was no ruminative space between hearing and doing. There was no self. For Jaynes the soldiers of the Trojan war were “…not at all like us. They were noble automatons who knew not what they did”.

Jaynes spends the first chapter defining consciousness. Briefly, this can be summed up by what is implicated in “I think therefore I am”. Remove from your psyche whatever is introspectable and you are bicameral, give or take the odd hallucination of your disembodied taskmasters. Sapient may have been a better word, for what he is describing is the type of thinking that makes us human; Homo Sapiens is literally Thinking Man. But perhaps dating the delineating factor of our species to this side of literacy was a bridge too far, even for Jaynes. Whatever the case, in this article, I will follow suit and use conscious in the sense of cogito, ergo sum. Are plants conscious? Sure. But none has, to my knowledge, obtained the level of Descarte. That is the level I mean by conscious.

In small groups these hallucinated gods could be shared: “Enki told you to wash the dishes? Me too!”. As society became more complex people realized not everyone heard the same voices nor did they make the same commands. Imagine the confusion of the people of Ur trading in foreign lands with people who swore on foreign gods. In finding their Ur gods were not ur-gods their worldview was shattered. Consciousness emerged from this wreckage. They began to identify with a single voice, their own self. A jealous entity, it displaced all other voices. The main evidence that Jaynes brings to support his conclusion is that there are differences between the Iliad and Odyssey with respect to cognition verbs, which are notably absent in the earlier Iliad.

“The characters of the Iliad do not sit down and think out what to do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspections. It is impossible for us with our subjectivity to appreciate what it was like. When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon (I :197ff.). It is a god who then rises out of the gray sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menelaus, a god who tells Glaucus to take bronze for gold (6:234ff.), a god who leads the armies into battle, who speaks to each soldier at the turning points, who debates and teaches Hector what he must do, who urges the soldiers on or defeats them by casting them in spells or drawing mists over their visual fields.” ~Julian Jaynes, Origin

From this ancient verbiage he concludes consciousness began circa 1,200 BC. This seems wild but the 1970s were a wild time. Richard Dawkins didn’t pan it outright: “It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I’m hedging my bets.” In a tribute one philosopher wrote: " The weight of original thought in it is so great that it makes me uneasy for the author’s well-being: the human mind is not built to support such a burden. I would not be Julian Jaynes if they paid me a thousand dollars an hour."

Origins has garnered 5,000 citations. Despite this, a retrospective summarized the acceptance: “Although book sales soared, followed by invited talks, lectures, conferences on his ideas, and great respect from his peers, Jaynes’s theory lived at the margins of academic validation. In part, this was because his component theories were so broad that very few people felt competent to engage all the issues.” (Retrospective: Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind)

Nobody had the breadth to refute the ideas? In my estimation, a far bigger problem is that the thesis is obviously wrong. Consciousness (or, if you prefer, Sapience) is a once-in-a-solar-system event. Jaynes asks us to believe that it does not grant categorically different mental abilities. That all of the things we use conscious thought for now—planning, inventing, writing—were accomplished subconsciously until 1,200 BC. That there was no material lifestyle change after the event, nor evidence of its diffusion. He claims the breakdown occurred to literate people. The experience would be the topic of epic poems, and not obliquely! Why can he muster no more evidence than verb shifts from a moment that should be the Big Bang for culture? It is a theory of everything, but also a theory of nothing. Indeed, applied to history it has essentially zero predictive power. If you say it affected language, then show me the language family it founded. He waxes eloquent about the “analog I” which ostensibly would have followed breakdown. And yet the first person singular is well attested 10,000 years ago. The theory does not fare well in the real world. Consider his explication of the conquistadors’ success:

While it is possible that the sixteenth-century Inca and his hereditary aristocracy were walking through bicameral roles established in a much earlier truly bicameral kingdom, even as perhaps the Emperor Hirohito, the divine sun god of Japan, does to this day, the evidence suggests that it was much more than this. The closer an individual was to the Inca, the more it seems his mentality was bicameral. Even the gold and jeweled spools which the top of the hierarchy, including the Inca, wore in their ears, sometimes with images of the sun on them, may have indicated that those same ears were hearing the voice of the sun.

But perhaps most suggestive of all is the manner in which this huge empire was conquered. The unsuspicious meekness of the surrender has long been the most fascinating problem of the European invasions of America. The fact that it occurred is clear, but the record as to why is grimy with supposition, even in the superstitious Conquistadors who later recorded it. How could an empire whose armies had triumphed over the civilizations of half a continent be captured by a small band of 150 Spaniards in the early evening of November 16, 1532?

You’ve heard of the Noble Savage? To Jaynes the gulf is wider still: the Noble Automaton. One would think the Catholic missionaries would have noticed. Or that La Malinche would have trouble picking up Spanish in a few months. More broadly, there is no getting around Jaynes’s automatons persisting into the last few centuries. If not in the Americas, try Australia.

Jaynes attributed his idea to a voice from nowhere. Like many prophets before him, he predicted the end of the (bicameral) world. Failing fireworks, he asks us to believe the world did indeed end, it’s just that nobody noticed.

Okay, now that that is out of my system. The truth is, the idea has staying power because it contains compelling philosophy and neuroscience. Why is language, this new skill, built into the bedrock of that which we can introspect? Where did my inner voice come from? And why? As something of a romantic, I think I can save bicameral breakdown.

The fatal flaw is Jaynes’s date. It simply has to be more distant and aligned with the documented psychological revolution of our species. Consciousness, taken seriously, would have extraordinary ramifications. We would see a phase change in creativity, planning, and searching for meaning. We would see minds blown. Surely not everyone would be copasetic after being dropped from nowhere into a mind palace. Coincidentally, did you know that 10% of all Neolithic skulls have been trepanned? Seriously, it’s a worldwide phenomenon, commonly a treatment for epilepsy or possession. This is the type of stranger-than-fiction archeology that a historical theory of consciousness needs to be able to explain: mankind, in the frenzy of incipient self-awareness, inventing agriculture and boring holes in their skulls to let the demons out. Instead Jaynes asks adherents to believe that Aztec metaphysics were developed by philosophical zombies.

(This is quite a short summary of a big idea. For more depth, wikipedia and this psychology wiki both have good articles; there is an active community of the persuaded. Scott Alexander also has a review.)

Eve Theory of Consciousness#

“Myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul.” ~Carl Jung

[Image: Visual content from original post]The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens

I believe Jaynes is right about the first function of our inner voice. That it used to be experienced as the voice of the gods (or at least one’s mother). A kind of truncated internal dialogue where there was no self to respond. Jaynes’s path to the idea involved “autistically pondering…how we can know anything at all” until a voice intervened: “Include the knower in the known!”. My path was more pedestrian. I let the Vectors of Mind point the way.

My dissertation was on the personality structure implied by natural language. Very briefly, I studied how people are described in books and comments online. If a character is extroverted, what can we say about their neuroticism? Basically, I was a gossip cartographer. Because we are social creatures, this is also a fitness landscape. A map of what society would like us to be. In the words of Darwin: “After the power of language had been acquired, and the wishes of the community could be expressed, the common opinion of how each member ought to act for the public good, would naturally become in a paramount degree the guide to action”.

In line with his understanding I found that, according to the whole of English literature, by far the most important thing about someone is whether they follow the golden rule: Do unto others what you would have them do unto you. This single trait explains most of the variance in the data. Putting yourself in others shoes is also just the sort of substitution that would have pushed our Theory of Mind to new limits.

In a previous post I argued that our inner voice could have first been a mechanism to live the golden rule, a proto-conscience. The commands would have been fit when life was simple: “share your food” or “protect the sacred cow!”. Only later did we identify with a single voice and carve out a space to reason about which voice to follow. This would have coincided with language becoming the substrate of our thoughts and is our subject today. We imagined minds, and then joined them. We built a map which then became the territory.

This project is much more than an attempt to save Jaynes’s idea. Saving a theory usually involves lopping off exotic features as they present surface area to attack. I add them in spades. I present bicameral breakdown taken to the logical conclusion, back to the beginning when we walked with god.

Eve first creates ruminative space between hearing and doing—a self with which to wrestle hypotheticals, a land of symbols. She becomes like god, able to judge between good and evil. Above the gods, even, for she can reject those familiar voices. This opens Pandora’s Box of self-knowledge, and is the birth of emotional derivatives that define our species. Fear festers into anxiety. Lust and an imagined future blossom as romance. She is the mother of what we now call living.

This birth also brought death. Lions do not envision their demise as they lay sated. Or even when hungry, for the pang does not carry existential weight. Sapient beings are not only capable of considering their end, but of planning to prevent it. Further, an interior self paves the way for private property. These three forces—death anxiety, planning, and private property—set the stage for the invention of agriculture the world over.

Judging from cultural artifacts—myths, megaliths and the analog “I”—our genesis was not so long ago, perhaps as recent as the end of the Ice Age. Women first tasted self-knowledge. Seeing it was desirable, they initiated men with mind-rending rites of passage. Man henceforth lived separated from nature and from god. This consciousness meme, like wildfire, spread to the whole of humanity; a Great Awakening recorded in creation myths worldwide.

Today the self is acquired trivially as a child, for the self is integral to our culture. Not only that, for thousands of years there has been strong genetic selection for brains amenable to the seamless construction of ego. Like the Wooly Mammoth and Giant Sloth, Bicameral Man could not compete with the power of abstractions.

Bicameral breakdown is unique among theories of consciousness in that it is historical. From a truth-finding perspective this is a great advantage for it opens the theory to falsification from a whole slew of fields. It is harder to build a castle in the sky if it makes contact with archeology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, population genetics, developmental psychology, comparative mythology, and anthropology.

The hardest part to believe is that consciousness could have initially spread memetically yet now be our genetic inheritance. I’ll address that at length in a future post, but it does not make sense to develop that idea until the explanatory power of Eve Theory of Consciousness (EToC) has been established. Showing that is necessarily involved. It will take some time. In the next several posts I hope to demonstrate this version of genesis fits well-attested facts, and accepting it resolves many seemingly unrelated mysteries.

[Image: Visual content from original post]Eve, Mother of All Living, eyes open

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The Sapient Paradox#

There are a few strategies to date the origin of our species: genetics, anatomy, or the production of “cognitively modern” cultural artifacts. The first two methods give dates on the order of 200,000 years ago. It may seem strange to essentially use phrenology skull shape to date the beginning of the modern mind (ego is stored in the Occipital Bun, I hear), but that’s pretty standard fare. To my knowledge, nobody wholly commits to using evidence of creativity. There is always the constraint that the date must be no later than 50,000 years ago and the location must be in Africa in order to accommodate a purely genetic model of consciousness.

Strictly speaking, genetic transfer doesn’t require this constraint. According to population geneticists all humans share a common ancestor who lived more recently than the Ice Age. Consider the impassioned position of one population geneticist claiming that if Cheddar Man (who died in Britain ~10,000 years ago) has any descendants, then everyone on earth is his descendent.

*[Image: Visual content from original post]*Dr Adam Rutherford @AdamRutherfordPlease don’t make me do this again. If Cheddar Man has any single living descendant then he is the ancestor of LITERALLY EVERYONE ON EARTH. Not metaphorically, or conceptually, but actually mathematically. All humans. Everyone. みんな. Tout le monde. 每个人. katoa. हर कोई. https://t.co/HC60c4n6oF[12:10 PM ∙ Oct 18, 2022

10,289Likes1,150Retweets](https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/status/1582343327311024128)

If that sounds like bluster, it’s at least peer reviewed bluster. Here is another geneticist backing him up, literature in hand. Still, even if not required by genetics, the constraint that we left Africa with a modern mind is usually accepted. This commitment leads to some weird places.

The great leap forward that wasn’t#

For Chomsky language is far more than communication. It is our mode of thought², and the only thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. When he says that recursive language is the result of a single mutation in Africa 60,000-100,000 years ago, he means that is the beginning of thinking or what I have been calling consciousness. According to Chomsky: " We know by now that human language does not postdate about sixty thousand years ago. And the way you know that is that’s when the trek from Africa started."

This constraint is presented in conjunction with evidence of creativity: “The archeological-anthropological record suggests similar conclusions. As mentioned before, there is what is sometimes called a “great leap forward” in human evolution in a period roughly 50,000-100,000 years ago, when the archeological record suddenly changes radically.”

Now, if there is anything I have learned from the communists it’s that a Great Leap Forward may not live up to its name. Anthropologists appear to be collaborators on this front. Consider the level of art being produced at the time.

[Image: Visual content from original post]Etched rock from Blombos Cave, South Africa. Dated to 75k BP

I’ll bet we could train a crow to do that. It is only tens of thousands of years later that we see cave art of any sophistication

[Image: Visual content from original post]Replica of paintings in the Chauvet Cave, dated ~30,000 years ago, though there is some disagreement

Chomsky believes there was a single mutation in Africa that allowed for modern language (and abstract thought). If so, why didn’t that group paint anything interesting? Something that would impress us if a child drew it. Why does symbolic art emerge ten (or fifty!) thousand years later on another continent? And perhaps more importantly, why was that cultural development regional and not global?

The technical name for this question is the Sapient Paradox. First posed by archeologist Colin Renfrow, it deals with the unexplained gap between the emergence of modern humans 50,000-300,000 years ago, and the start of civilization ~12,000 years ago. There are fundamental aspects of the human condition (eg. the existence of commodities and religion) that aren’t present, or are only regionally present, up to about that point. To give an idea why this gap is so problematic, consider if you, dear reader, were transported back to the upper paleolithic, brain wiped. Would you make a better spear? Doodle a self-portrait? Invent pronouns³? What if we performed this exercise 40 million times? With a generation length of 25 years and population size 1 million, that is how many brains there were devoted to such problems over 1,000 years. And there were millennia where the spears stayed the same. Why do we observe relative stasis until, like a light switch, things take off globally? Introducing his paradox, Renfrow says “From a distance and to the non-specialist anthropologist, the Sedentary Revolution looks like the true Human Revolution.”

The beauty of bicameral breakdown is that it is a memetic path to cognitive modernity. It allows us to relax the genetic constraint on the question of humanness and fully commit to using cultural artifacts. If anthropologists see a Human Revolution, then let’s use that as the date for bicameral breakdown. This also solves the conundrum of why it took so long for humans to get going. Renfrew mentions 12,000 years ago as a start date for the revolution, when agriculture was first adopted as a way of life. Elsewhere he uses 10,000 years. His object is the nature of the gap—whether it even exists—not the precise end. We seek more granularity.

EToC contends that the development of self-awareness caused the agricultural revolution. Domesticating plants takes thousands of years, so we hope to find a change of around 15,000 years ago. The paper Archaeological evidence for modern intelligence provides exactly that.

Anthropologist Thomas Wynn goes through the archeological record looking for evidence of abstract thought⁴. Specifically, he would like to show how Homo Sapiens outcompeted our archaic ancestors (ie, Neanderthals, Denisovans, whoever else). As such the most convenient date for him would be near the establishment of our species. Failing that, it would be compelling to show a transition about the time Neanderthals went extinct, 40,000 years ago. Instead, the earliest possible example of abstract thought he finds is just 16,000 years ago. Even that relies on a controversial interpretation of cave art, which posits that animals are grouped by gender.

地形的な区分から、男性の人間像、馬、アイベックス、シカが、女性の人間像、バイソン、ウシ、マンモスとは異なるグループを形成していると推測できる。図像のレパートリーを「男性」グループと「女性」グループに分けることは、非常に可能性が高い事実であるように思われる。

…ラスコーでは、各パネルの最も重要な部分がウシと馬によって占められている—これは一度だけでなく、洞窟の入口から奥まで、すべての部屋で少なくとも6回発生している。ペシュ・メルルでは、明確に区切られた構成が、バイソン/馬とバイソン/マンモスのテーマを少なくとも6、7回繰り返している。

…基本的な原則はペアリングである。「結合」とは言わないでおこう、なぜなら旧石器時代の芸術には交尾の場面がないからだ。ペアになった図像の表現の背後にはおそらく繁殖の考えがあるかもしれないが、後に見ることになるものはこれを絶対的に確立するものではない。最初の図像から始めて、時間の経過とともに磨かれたシステムに直面している印象を受ける—それは、古代の宗教に似ており、そこには男性と女性の神々がいて、その行動は性的繁殖を明示的に示唆していないが、男性と女性の特質が不可欠に補完的である。~ アンドレ・ルロワ＝グーラン、先史時代の芸術の宝物

人類学は非常に興味深い。知性の始まりを探求することは、「彼らはマンモスを女性と考えているようだ」という議論に至ることがある。新しい文化的ダイナミクスには十分な内容があり、ある論文はこのテーマに400ページを費やしている（Gender in the making: Late Magdalenian social relations of production in the French Midi-Pyrenees）。より複雑な文化とともに性別が現れることは、意識のイブ理論にとって良い兆候である。さらに、芸術が性別の補完的な性質についてであったならば。ウィンは、この組織化が抽象的な思考を必要とすると主張している。

残念ながら、この評価[シカ/マンモスが男性/女性を表している]が真実であったとしても、我々はマグダレニアン時代、約16,000年前にのみ形式的操作知能[抽象的推論]を記録しており、これは現在に非常に近く、特筆すべきことではない。

注目すべきは、この人類学者が16,000年前以前の考古学的記録全体で抽象的思考の証拠を見つけられなかったことである。（これを読む前に、あなたはどの日付を予想していただろうか？）実際、彼はさらに遡るために論争のある解釈に頼らざるを得なかった。レンフローは「内在的価値」（例：金を評価すること）と「神聖の力」を驚くほど最近の基本的な人間の特性として特定している。おそらくこれに抽象的推論も加えることができるだろう。

これを追加することは、ただ一つの論文⁵や一つの洞窟システムに依存しているわけではないことを強調したい。間違いなく、最初の抽象的思考は痕跡を残さなかった。しかし、一つの思考は多くの他の思考を生む傾向があり、その合計は見つけるのが難しくないと思う。ジェインズが言ったように：「すべての生命がある点まで進化し、そして私たち自身の中で直角に曲がり、単に異なる方向に爆発したかのようだ。」 人間の状態はユニークであり、その始まりを大きな生活様式の変化に基づいて特定できるはずだ。

明白な知性の仮説： 認知的適応は必然的に生活様式を変える。知性は大きな変化であり、明白な生活様式の違いを生み出す。

つまり、意識のような大規模な移行は、「距離から、そして専門家でない人類学者」（あるいはエンジニアにさえ）にとっても明らかであるべきである。私たちは特定の洞窟画家がどの動物を女性的と象徴したかを理解する必要はない。大きく一歩引いて、すべてを一緒に見て、私たちの種が経験した最大の生活様式の変化は何かを問うことができる。これは知性への移行の良い候補である。私の知る限り、この最も単純なアプローチを取った人はいない。だからこそレンフローはその証拠をパラドックスとして紹介している。

これはもちろん単なる仮説であり、主張に過ぎない。しかし、現代の心が行く先々で重要な生活様式の変化を生み出さないというよりも、より可能性が高いように思える。この見解は、ジェインズやチョムスキーと対立しており、彼らは知性が急激であったと主張するが、それを急激な変化のない時期に日付けている。

ジェインズ派は、二分心の崩壊が後期青銅器時代の崩壊と関連していると抗議するかもしれない。それは確かに重要だ！読者よ、それがどのような物語をインスパイアしたかを調べずに一つ挙げてみてほしい。通りで誰かを捕まえて同じことを尋ねてみてほしい。さて、農業革命を試してみてほしい。彼らはアダムとイブが知識を味わった後に土地を耕さなければならない部分を覚えているだろうか？

ゴシップの罠#

ACX書評コンテストの優勝者は知性のパラドックスに取り組んだ。私と同様に、エリック・ホエルは「私たちの種のゆりかごと文明のゆりかごの間の中間期における生活がどのようなものであったかについての物語」を紡いでいる。彼の解決策はゴシップの罠である。この始まりのバージョンでは、癌のような人間が発明者をバケツの中に引き戻す。人気者と不人気者がいて、クールでありたいという欲望が皆をコンフォーミストに保った。人口がダンバー数を超えるほど大きくなると、人間は関係を抽象化し、ある程度の匿名性を得ることができた。これにより、罠から逃れ、神、幾何学、その他を発明することができた。

高校のランチテーブルの権力政治が、世界中で革新を妨げるほど強力な現象とは思えない。また、同時に緩むほど普遍的でもない。多くの文化は、道化師や二精神のような非コンフォーミストのための余地を作っている。文化の枠を超えて、このアナグマとコヨーテのような奇妙なペアさえ存在する。自然界も社会界もそれほど予測可能に一様ではない。

ホエルが指摘したように、人間の起源は政治的である。そして、知性のパラドックスの意味は陰鬱である。それは私たちの基本状態が岩に斜めの線を引き、千年ごとに発明をかろうじて生み出すことを意味する。私たちのすべての高い野心と神聖との格闘、すべての悪魔、芸術とメタファー：すべて非必須であり、オプションのチェリーである。私たちの魂がどれほど消えやすいものであるか！

EToCでは、私たちの物語は人間革命から始まる。時間の夜明けから—自己が存在する前には時間はなかった—私たちはシンボルの地に住み、世界と互いを操作していた。神話と伝説の素材は私たちの自然の生息地である。

ミームか遺伝子か？#

もし誰かが知性の最低限の指標（例：象徴的な芸術、抽象的思考）が過去に地域的であったことを受け入れるなら、それは遺伝子と環境の相互作用が知性を生み出したことを意味する。つまり、適切な訓練や状況があれば、人間は象徴的な生活を送ることができたが、それは自動的な基本状態ではなかった。おそらく瞑想者によって達成される特別な精神状態に類似しているかもしれない。パラドックスの事実を受け入れるなら、唯一の他の方法は、最近の遺伝子変異が人間性を付与したと言うことだ。それを楽しんで！

意識が相互作用効果であるなら、関連する遺伝子はゆっくりと、そして地球全体で蓄積することができる。EToCの説明では、私たちの属—ネアンデルタール人やデニソワ人を含む—は、より良い心の理論を持つように選択されており、多くの遺伝子が小さなプラスの効果を持っていた。ある時点で、おそらく混合の結果として、この能力は十分に発展し、知性的な状態に入ることができた—言葉に基づく思考の創始者として自分を認識するトランス状態。イブのような一部の天才はこの状態に留まり、他の人にその方法を教えた。15,000年前に「儀式」として一貫した教育法が体系化された。この認知的「技術」は世界中に広がった。それ以来、この見えないエージェントに対する強い選択が行われており、儀式がなくても、限られた混乱で99％の確率で発展している。

もちろん、異常な主張には異常な証拠が必要である。しかし、地上の事実が説明を異常にする必要があることも強調したい。抽象的思考の能力が（少なくとも最初は）自然と育成であったと信じる良い理由がある。人間革命を「通常のビジネス」として扱う理論は、それを説明することができない、なぜならそれは今日観察されるものとはまったく異なるからだ。これは、ホエルが、本物の神経科学者で意識を研究している彼が、ゴシップの罠を使って、ソーシャルメディアの存在的脅威について警鐘を鳴らすために説明しようとしたものである。知性のパラドックスは賢い人々によって真剣に受け止められている。現代の世界をどのように組織すべきかの証拠として十分に真剣に。

私はこの変化が私たちの内なる声との関係に関係していると思う。チョムスキーの言葉を借りれば「[言語の]特徴的な使用は何か？おそらくその使用の99.9％は心の中にある。」ある時点で、言語はコミュニケーションの手段から思考の手段へと変わった。チョムスキーはこれが遺伝的であると仮定し、またこれがアフリカからの移出前に起こったに違いないと仮定している。これは、私たちの創造的な遺産が休眠している—数万年後に世界の半ばで実を結ぶだけ—という複雑な物語を必要とするが、メカニズムは純粋に遺伝的である。

私には、メカニズムを絞り込む前に抽象的思考を探す方が理にかなっているように思える。この証拠は、私たちの種が経験した最大の生活様式革命に先立っている。私たちが初めて世界中で自然に意志を押し付けていた時。

結論#

スミソニアンの人間の起源イニシアティブは、ユーザーに人間であることの意味を定義するよう求めている。多くの回答はエマのようなものである：「過去から学び、現在を生き、未来を夢見ること。」他の回答は創世記を引用している。もしEToCが真実であるなら、それらの引用は未来を想像することが可能になった瞬間からの記憶である。私たちの世界が言語の布から切り取られたときのメッセージである。あるいは、聖ヨハネが言ったように、「初めに言葉があった。そして言葉は神と共にあった。そして言葉は神であった。」

EToCは、いくつかの命題をつなぎ合わせている。すなわち：

1. 女性が男性よりも先に自己認識を持った

2. その能力は最初はミーム的に伝達された

3. 知性への移行

4. 創世神話に記録されている、創世記を含む

5. 文化的な遺物だけを使って日付を特定できる（頭蓋学や遺伝学を使用する必要はない）

6. 意識は氷河期の終わり頃に世界中に広がった

これらのアイデアは新しいものではない（おそらく最後のものを除いて）。しかし、その組み合わせはユニークであり、いくつかの支持する証拠もユニークである。その点で、今後の投稿では以下を議論する予定である：

1. 神話がどれだけ長く生き残れるか

2. 世界中で同期した農業の発展

3. 心の理論における性差

4. 儀式

5. 自己認識の言語的マーカーとしての代名詞

意識を理解することは愚かな試みである。しかし、私はその虫に感染し、これまでのすべての理論の死骸に目を向けて進んでいる。幸運を祈ってほしい！そして、EToCが真実である可能性があると思うなら、それを広く共有してほしい。私たちはサブスタックで異なる方法でピアレビューを行っている✌️

共有

[画像：元の投稿からの視覚コンテンツ]パンドラ、目を開けて。あるいは、正しくは：人間の精神を照らす科学、マルコ・アンジェロ・デル・モロに帰属、1557年。